Chapter 18: No Fighting.

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"It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog." — Mark Twain.

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Then she turned to the Small Bosses, narrowed her eyes at them, and asked, "Will you dare to say you don’t have money when I ask you to bet?"

The Small Bosses hurriedly shook their heads and said, "We wouldn’t dare."

With a satisfied smile, she turned to her brother and said, "See? They won’t dare. So we have nothing to worry about."

As she spoke, her hand crept towards the pile of silver again.

Stellan shook his head as he said, "Do you remember when we were Small Bosses and the Big Bosses cheated us?"

The question made her pause.

Before she could reply, Stellan said, "You always hated and were always complaining. Now look at you."

"Hmmm," she said with a scoff of derision. "So what? I was an ignorant fool back then. I thought everything was about me. That doesn’t mean the Big Bosses were wrong."

"Whatever," Stellan said as he rose from his seat and went in the direction of the stairs.

It seemed like he had given up on convincing her. But Stella didn’t believe him. She continued to watch him to make sure he wouldn’t toss another metal missile her way when she had her back turned.

But Stellan didn’t do anything. He didn’t turn back or say anything. His figure disappeared down the stairs with nothing from him.

She grinned after confirming that he was gone. Then she turned to the Small Bosses and said, "Are you dissatisfied with me?"

The response was a chorus of, "No, boss. We would never. It is impossible."

She glared at them for a while, causing sweat to bead across their face. Clearly, she was dissatisfied with something they’d done, but they couldn’t figure out what they did to offend her.

When she stopped glaring, it was to glance at the pile of silver. Then she snorted and turned to leave.

On her way out, she grumbled something about someone ruining something for her. They couldn’t hear her clearly because she was whispering.

On the other side, Alex had been taken to his sleeping quarters. It was a large room about three times as big as his previous cell.

There was a large bed in the room, so he didn’t have to sleep on a straw mat. The windows were large too, allowing relatively fresh air to blow through the room. But the window was still heavily barricaded.

After looking around and assessing the state of his new quarters, he shrugged and said, "It is at least better than my place in town, so I can’t complain."

His place in town is a room he shares with 11 other people. They sleep in bunk beds, and there are six bunk beds in the room.

The room is full of bunk beds, with barely room to move. They share cupboards in the four corners. Aside from these, there is nothing else noteworthy in the room.

It goes without saying that the room never offers a moment of peace. With 12 people sharing a single room, hostilities tend to flare up and escalate easily. Plus, sometimes someone would bring a lady friend over and have sex with her while everyone was in the room.

Even now, he can still remember the sound of wet flesh in communion against each other. It was a sickening sound that made him feel disgusted and irritated at the same time.

Just thinking about his experience made him shudder and say, "I take it back. This is heaven on earth."

Then he began disrobing.

He was physically fine, but mentally exhausted. The struggle he had with the worm trying to stop him from fighting the other two had drained him mentally, so he didn’t want to do anything for the moment. He just wanted to get into bed and sleep as soon as possible.

"That training wasn’t so bad," he said as he removed the trench coat.

"I don’t feel much different from before I began eating. The hunger is still there, but it is under control. Maybe it is because there is no readily available food in sight."

Currently, he felt intense, painful contractions, a deep gnawing and burning sensation in his stomach. A pounding headache also accompanied it. But this was far from making him willing to kill people to eat.

In fact, his situation could be said to be better because he didn’t feel weak and he didn’t feel like he was dying. That urgency to eat or die was absent, so he didn’t feel the compulsion to do anything to get food.

This was one reason he didn’t join the other two in fighting for food. He only seemed to lose himself when he was eating. But once food was no longer in his mind, he could resist the worm.

When he was eating, the worm always said, "Fight them. Stop them."

He agreed wholeheartedly with the worm to fight and stop them. The problem was that he had to stop eating before fighting and once he stopped eating, the worm lost its hold on him. No matter how the worm urged him, he simply didn’t have a fight in him.

Aside from the first time he lost control and tried to kill Tessa, whenever he raised his head from the table and pleasure stopped muddling his mind, he regained his clarity and refused to fight for food.

The recollection of that event made him chuckle and say, "I was the first one to fight, but those two did it better. At least, they knew to fight each other, not Tessa."

The memory of how he became foolish after eating and wanted to kill Tessa felt like a dream to him. Even now, he couldn’t believe that he did something like that.

He could only shake his head and say, "I guess the pain is easier for me to resist than the pleasure. But I’m getting better at controlling myself and that’s good enough for me."