Chapter 280: 280: What's one thousand minus seven?

Jason, whose real name was Yakumo Oomori, had been captured by the CCG years ago and imprisoned in a ghoul detention facility.

While he was there, he suffered inhuman torture at the hands of a deranged investigator.

To protect himself mentally, he created a second personality.

That personality was the Jason Rize knew.

After enduring all that torture, Jason became convinced that every bit of suffering came from weakness.

The weak deserved to be trampled on and abused by the strong.

Then, when a rare opportunity presented itself, he escaped from the detention facility.

After breaking out, Jason inherited the twisted investigator's taste for torturing others and even learned to enjoy it.

Whenever he tortured someone, he had a habit of cracking his own fingers.

And to keep his victim conscious, he would force them to count backward from one thousand in intervals of seven.

That was exactly why Rize considered him a boring man with pathetic tastes.

"Drag him out for me."

Jason gave a vicious grin.

"And don't forget Rize."

The black-clad men lined up behind him all revealed crimson kakugan at once.

Then they charged toward the villa entrance like a pack of hunting cats.

Click.

But before they reached it, the front door opened from inside.

Brilliant sunlight poured through the doorway as though welcoming some kind of Angel.

A man in a black coat stood in the center of that light.

A long black shadow stretched across the ground and completely swallowed Rize behind him.

"Ganging up on one guy?"

Ivan smiled faintly as he looked at the men rushing toward him.

Then, unbelievably, he slipped both hands into the pockets of his coat and took a single step forward.

His polished black leather shoe came down on the sunlit ground.

At the same time, under Rize's stunned gaze, two muscular arms with the clean definition of a Greek statue punched out through Ivan's back.

Their hands settled on Ivan's shoulders.

The arms tensed.

Flesh churned and twisted.

Then another Ivan's upper body forced its way completely out of his back.

"Your expression is interesting."

A fully formed head turned toward Rize and smiled.

Fear flashed across her face, and she instinctively took a step back.

"Don't be so surprised. This is only the beginning."

The new body extended both legs until its feet touched the ground.

Then, bent slightly at the waist, it stepped out from behind Ivan.

"I think I'm getting a little hungry."

Ivan's arms instantly transformed into two tentacles.

They punched through the bodies of two black-clad men who had already reached him.

After consuming the kakuhou inside them, the nutrients Ivan had lost were finally replenished a little.

"What are you afraid of? I don't plan on killing you yet."

Another man identical to Ivan casually wrapped an arm around Rize's Hourglass figure and walked over to stand beside the original.

And just as he had said, that first appearance really was only the beginning.

Soon, a second Ivan emerged from the original body.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

Only after the fourth had stepped free did the performance finally come to an end.

The flesh-transfer ability from Parasyte, combined with the five brains and seven hearts from Demon Slayer, plus Ivan's own fleshly body with its extreme regeneration, had come together into something absurd.

With almost no effort at all, Ivan could maintain four permanent clones.

And theoretically, that was nowhere near the end.

As long as he consumed enough nutrients, both the clones and the original body could regenerate five brains and six hearts again.

Of course, the original only needed to regenerate four additional hearts.

Once that happened, the original and each clone could split again and produce even more bodies.

Then those bodies could repeat the process.

Again.

And again.

Infinite division.

At least, in theory.

Reality was less ridiculous.

For now, Ivan could only maintain four clones at the same time.

If the brain inside Ivan's original body was compared to a central processor, then the others were merely ordinary processors.

There could only ever be one central processor.

And there had to be only one.

The other brains were more like his five fingers.

He could freely control his fingers, but his fingers could never turn around and control him.

In other words, the central brain possessed the highest level of authority.

Because of the Five Brains and Seven Hearts ability, only when the central brain was completely destroyed could one of the other brains obtain higher permissions and become the new central brain.

That meant whichever body possessed the central brain was the true Ivan Greevs.

Aside from that, with Ivan's current capabilities, he could only control five bodies at once.

Any more than that and his central processor would enter an overloaded state.

Unless he created a second central brain, or even more of them.

But that would be the equivalent of giving the other brains their own independent consciousness.

True autonomous consciousness.

That would be monumentally fucking stupid.

And Ivan could not do it anyway.

Even if he gained the ability in the future, he had no intention of creating clones he could not control.

"Capture Jason. Don't let him escape," Ivan said quietly.

"Understood."

All four clones shot toward Jason at the same time.

A layer of black, rock-like material resembling armor spread over their bodies.

It was Hyun-su Cha's ability from Sweet Home.

But Ivan had already distributed the mutated cells throughout his entire body.

Which meant his four clones now looked like monsters that had crawled straight out of molten lava.

Their defenses were terrifyingly strong, and at the same time, their bodies could release enough heat to melt steel.

Dozens of razor-sharp black tentacles lashed outward.

The men in black nearby were sliced apart as easily as vegetables, reduced to piles of mangled flesh.

"Fuck! Monster! That thing's a fucking monster!"

Jason, who had been calm just moments earlier, immediately panicked after seeing what Ivan could do.

He yanked open the car door, planning to drive away.

Bang!

A blade-tipped tentacle with a metallic sheen punched straight through the soft car door.

Jason's face twisted with fear.

Purely on reflex, he wrapped his upper body in kagune armor.

But since he was only a half-kakuja, the amount of his body the kagune could protect was limited.

And even against kagune harder than steel, the blade-tipped tentacle only met a little resistance.

Blood sprayed across the seat beside Jason.

The tentacle had pierced straight through his heart.

Then a violent pull ripped him out through the car door and sent him crashing onto the ground.

After being dragged across the pavement, one of Ivan's dark clones, clad like a black knight, grabbed Jason by the throat and hauled him in front of Ivan.

"What's one thousand minus seven?"

The moment Ivan asked the question, it almost felt as though a familiar piece of music had started playing in his head.

Had Ivan been tortured by Jason before?

Rize gave Jason a pitying look.

"I... I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Jason genuinely had no memory of the man standing before him.

If he wanted to live, all he could do was beg.

"I'll ask again."

The black knight behind Jason raised its other hand.

Its arm transformed into a long blade and stabbed straight through Jason's right arm.

The agony tore a scream from his throat.

"AAAAAH!"

"What's one thousand minus seven?"

Tentacle after tentacle burst from the dark knight's body.

They stabbed through Jason over and over again.

Even Rize, who had never cared much about human life, felt her skin crawl at the bloody scene.

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