The hissing noise was the only thing the man could hear at that moment; it was so overwhelming and terrifying that the constant sounds of trucks and horns blaring 24 hours a day outside the window vanished in an instant.
Lohan activated [Efficient Digestion] and forced his Mana to saturate the pores of his palm, acting exactly like the molecular processing he used in Elysium.
In the real world, his skin functioned like the membrane of a Slime, while his sweat turned into biomass, isolating and breaking down organic matter at the molecular level.
Fortunately, this was the skill he had trained most frequently in the real world, since it was what allowed him to bathe for free in that world.
When he opened his hand a few seconds later, the henchman’s finger had simply vanished, leaving only a clean, cauterized void where the bone and flesh should have been.
To the man’s horror, not even the blood that should have been gushing uncontrollably from a wound like that was there!
The leader let out a choked scream, his face turning pale to a grayish hue. "What... what are you?! Did you eat him?!"
"What I am doesn’t matter," Lohan replied, his voice even colder. "I can start with your fingers, or I can simply wrap my hand around your head and rip out your brain while you’re still screaming, just as I’ve done to hundreds of other victims."
Hearing that, the man’s face paled even further, realizing he had walked into the house of a fucking serial killer psychopath!
Lohan reached out toward the leader’s face, causing strands of [Magical Weaving], blue and nearly invisible, to begin sprouting from his fingers, slowly wrapping around the man’s neck like tiny snakes.
He applied subtle pressure, not to kill, but to make it even clearer that the man was hanging by a thread while creating the sensation that the man’s very life essence was being drained by the threads, which it literally was.
The psychological torture of watching a comrade permanently lose a limb right before his eyes, combined with Lohan’s oppressive aura, was the final blow.
The group’s leader broke down.
"STOP! I’LL TALK! IT WAS OSCAR!" the man screamed as tears of sheer terror washed the dirt from his face. "Your landlord... he came looking for us last night. He was possessed, screaming that you had humiliated him and that he needed to be ’put in his place’!"
Lohan clenched his teeth, feeling his Mana boil. He remembered the impact of the punch he’d landed on Oscar’s solar plexus and the threat to make him "disappear."
It seems the drug-addled landlord didn’t take the financial and physical humiliation well.
"He offered a good sum for the job... and I could keep whatever we found of value here." The leader continued, trembling under Lohan’s gaze. "He didn’t want to contact the Asphyxia Gang directly so he wouldn’t have to pay the management commission. He hired us on the side, through a third party... said you were just a skinny kid who probably got lucky in Elysium and needed to be ’processed.’"
Lohan loosened his grip on the man’s neck, feeling a cold satisfaction. Oscar had not only tried to extort him, but had now sent mercenaries to steal his Elysium Helmet and deliver it to clandestine laboratories.
’I see. So the rat decided the handout wasn’t enough.’ Lohan thought, feeling his long, dense muscles relax slightly. He looked at the leader with indifference. "Very well, you are no longer of any use."
Then, with a flick of his hand, Lohan increased the force with which the filaments clung to the man’s face, and with a swift open-handed strike, Lohan struck the leader’s temple.
The man’s vision darkened instantly, leaving only his face dominated by shock and disbelief that even after telling the truth, he would likely still not make it out alive.
Silence returned to the apartment, broken only by the electric hum of a hanging lamp and the hiss of Lohan’s breathing.
Five men lay scattered across his room, unconscious.
Lohan didn’t want to go to the trouble of killing these men, because of the complications that might arise, but considering how much of his own power he had had to display in this fight, he knew there was no other choice.
Unfortunately, Memory Resonance only allowed him to read the memories of creatures he had killed and digested, not allowing him to alter the memories of creatures still alive, so to ensure no one knew of his power and potential, Lohan would have to kill those men.
Fortunately, Oscar hadn’t hired the gang directly, so it was possible that no one besides Oscar knew that this group had come to his house that night to cause trouble.
So if they vanished from the face of the earth, only Oscar would know who the likely culprit was.
In such an advanced world, it would be difficult for others to make corpses vanish in the city center, but for Lohan, this was an easy job, time-consuming, but easy.
As long as he had enough time, he could digest those corpses himself, completely erasing the evidence of the crime.
’Maybe there might even be some unexpected benefits...’ Lohan thought excitedly, since this would be his first time testing the digestion of other living beings in the real world.
As for the guilt of killing other people, he had already lost that when he killed in Elysium. Sure, if they were kind and innocent people, Lohan didn’t know if he could take the final step and end those lives, but for people who wanted to turn him into a lab rat and steal everything of value he had, there was no mercy.
Lohan looked at his own shoulder.
The cut was no longer bleeding; the skin was closing at a much faster rate than is common in human biology, leaving only a pink line that would disappear in a few hours.
He felt an incredible sense of satisfaction with the evolution he had undergone in the real world as well.
"I think Isabella was right... I really do need a new apartment," Lohan muttered, knowing that after today, he would no longer have any peace in this place. "But before that, I have one last debt to collect from a certain landlord."
[NunuNote: I mixed up the dates, and today is Sunday, with tomorrow being Monday, so Lohan will miss class (I edited the previous Chapters to fix this).
An interesting note: NovelFire made an animated trailer for Slime Evolution; I posted the video on Discord.gg/NunuXD for anyone interested in watching it. The art style is quite different from the characters’ style in the novel, but I thought it was pretty cool to watch haha.]