3

Mouse was depressed, sad, he was little more than a ghost crawling through the tunnels, his refuge was no longer safe, if someone knew where he had left Rabbit it meant that anyone could steal the few things he had, even if it was just the bowl he used to get his food.

He was walking through one of the tunnels on his way back from cleaning his assigned area when he heard a group of boys talking around a corner, they were probably a year or two older than him at most, he knew them from the dining room.

"What I told you, that pig was coughing and shaking, you could hear the noise from the upper tunnels..."

"You're a real bastard, Dogface, reporting another pooper scooper isn't right..."

"You won't survive long with that mentality Worm, nothing matters here except survival, and one extra plate of food is the difference between going hungry or being able to lie down one day to rest. Weak people must be eliminated or denounced, and what would have happened if he had infected us all?

Anger boiled in Mouse's mind, his friend had been denounced by that boy without any remorse. It was a shitty world, but he didn't plan to stay still, he didn't plan to stay still, he would get revenge.

Mouse followed Dogface from afar in the following days, he didn't mind using filthy tunnels to be able to follow him, in the end he managed to see where his refuge was, a side pigsty, it looked like an old warehouse from when the sewage system of the space station was built.

He wrapped the piece of pipe in the rags that were his shirt and tied it to his fist, the hold was precarious, but the other boy was older than him, bigger, and better fed.

Dogface woke up, the life of a G-class pooper was to sleep, work, eat and start again, his shelter was big compared to many others, he had really made it after following a pooper who was about to turn ten years old. The older boy seemed to be sick, he had been eating only half rations for a year and his poor diet was taking its toll on him. When Dogface hit him from behind, the other boy couldn't defend himself, although he tried to protect his head, Dogface smashed his head with a rock.

There were no laws among the poopers, it didn't matter if they stole or killed each other, no one would investigate, no one would blame anyone, no one really cared. That's how Dogface got that shelter and the piece of wide round pipe that the other boy used as a plate for food. Later he would discover that there were many more benefits in reporting sick children than in killing them, everything was learned with experience.

When he left his shelter that day in the dim lights of the sewer system, he felt nothing special, nothing strange in that darkness that smelled like shit. However, when he went to advance to the side collector, he could hear the splashing behind him.

Caraperro turned and hit the darkness, instinctively, with the strength that a child could have, but his blow hit the target, Mouse did not know how to fight, he had simply thrown himself forward without caring what would happen.

The blow hit him in the arm but with how weak he was it was enough to unbalance him, he fell on his left leg, Caraperro's kick hit him in the belly. If he had had something in his stomach, he would have vomited it right there.

Another clumsy blow with Dogface's fist hit him in the temple, Mouse thought he would lose consciousness, however Dogface was screaming, he had hit with all his strength, but he had hit bone, his hand broken with a finger turned at a strange angle.

Wake up Mouse, wake up, you have to react, you have to get revenge, he managed to focus his eyes, Dogface was holding his injured hand, he wasn't paying attention to the little shit he had just hit. That was his mistake, the hook punch from Mouse hit him in the body. He wasn't very strong, but the blow with the pipe tied to his hand took the air out of his lungs, and almost broke a rib.

The next blow did hit Dogface's head, opening a small gap in the boy's eyebrow that started to bleed. But Dogface was no novice in fights, although his right-hand hurt, he had one hand left, more than enough to destroy that idiot who threw weak and weak punches.

His left fist hit Mouse in the nose, he was a child, they didn't have the strength to break his nose with one blow, but Mouse felt like dying and dizzy, the other boy continued to hit him in the body while immobilizing his weak body with his right arm against the wall.

One blow, two, five, little Mouse thought he was going to fall from the pain, but he had to hold on, he had to get revenge. His fist rose and as if it were a hammer he let it fall against the other boy's collarbone, the sharp edge of the broken pipe made an ugly cut on Dogface that loosened his grip for a moment.

Mouse didn't think twice and hit the snitch who had taken his only family from him for a mere plate of food again. This time the blow hit him in the mouth, several teeth bent backwards. Dogface was spitting blood, but Mouse didn't stop. Another blow knocked the other boy onto his back. The blow to the jaw hadn't been strong, but they were poop cleaners with weak class G bodies, none of those bodies were prepared to take a beating.

Mouse tried to throw himself on top of the other boy, but he was bigger, and by pushing from below and grabbing the boy's legs he managed to knock him onto his back. He tried to hit him from that position, but the hand tied with the piece of pipe got in the way, hitting him in the mouth again. Mouse got the boy off of him and with another blow to the face knocked him onto his back.

He kept hitting, he couldn't feel the hand he was hitting him with anymore, he didn't think he had broken any bones, but it must have been swollen and sore, but he didn't stop. He didn't even stop when the other boy stopped trying to defend himself. Not even when he stopped breathing under his legs, he hit him for minutes in the darkness of the sewer tunnels.

When Mouse calmed down he did what any pooper scooper would have done, he took off Dogface's shabby clothes and the food bowl, it was much better than his own, and his piece of pipe had been deformed by the blows, he wouldn't throw it away, who knew if some friend of Dogface would come looking for revenge in turn?

He threw the boy's body down a drain, and returned to the latter's shelter, it was really a good shelter, large, but hidden and secluded, he put on the boy's ragged shirt, used the remains of his own to bandage his hand.

He arrived in the dining room scared, as if someone was going to reproach him for something, but nothing happened, he was able to eat sitting in a corner. If someone recognized Caraperro's bowl, they didn't say anything or acted as if they hadn't seen it, these things happened among the children of class G.

Some older boys, they must have been around nine years old, were talking a few meters away from the boy, they were talking among themselves.

"Toothpick, you should start eating half rations, otherwise by the time they throw you out of here you won't even have enough to buy the cheapest skill..."

"But how much does a skill cost, Deformed?"

"From what the guards told me, a basic skill costs one hundred and eighty salaries, if we earn one salary a day you will need a year of half rations to be able to save up the amount..."

"But why do I want a skill? When I get out of here we'll go to the dump, I don't think I'll be much use there..."

"I don't know, Toothpick, but all the guards say that if you ever want a chance of not being a G-class anymore, it's by buying some skill that's useful to the space station..."

Mouse looked at his ration full of food, he really had a hard time eating a whole ration, he had spent so much time-sharing his food with Balloon Head and Rabbit that eating a whole ration was a feast for him.

Right now Mouse was five and a half years old, even taking away that half year he had left as a guarantee in case he got sick, if he ate only half a ration from now on, by the time he was ten years old Mouse would be able to buy not one but four skills. If he had any chance of getting up from the scum it was that, that was his trump card and his opportunity, now all that was left was to survive for four years in the tunnels.