Winston Churchill: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
Apparently, the shock had twisted his brain and turned him stupid. But even though his mind had become slower, he knew that someone’s arm shouldn’t be inside another person’s lungs.
As he wondered why her arm was impaling him, Tessa examined him, and her confusion seemed to match his, if not greater than his.
"That wasn’t a lapse in judgment. You looked far too gone to be human. What is going on with you?" she asked, confused. "One moment, you’re out of control. The next, you look fine and sane."
"I’m hungry," Alex said in response. "My worm was too hungry, so it took control of my body."
"That shouldn’t be possible. If your worm can take control of your body, it should be able to eat your mind and should have done so by now."
Alex could only say, "What can I do?"
Her face looked uncertain for a while. Apparently, she didn’t know what to say.
But then her eyes became steely as she said, "You will learn to control your worm, or you will die."
After she dropped the ultimatum, she shook her arm, dropping his body to the ground. Then she turned away, walking towards the stairs without looking back to see if he would follow her.
There was a large hole in his chest, and the pain was wracking his entire existence, but the most important thing to the worm remained the cooked food and the food that looked like human people nearby.
As usual, the worm wanted to go for the food. But this time, its mind wasn’t set on getting the food at all costs. Because of recent events, it wasn’t sure it could reach the food at all before Tessa appeared to block it.
Even though it was stupid, it knew that if, by some miracle, it could reach the food, punishment would descend upon it like lightning soon after. It couldn’t tell if the punishment was worth it, so it could only look on with longing while Alex controlled the body to rise and walk after Tessa.
Inwardly, Alex was saying, ’You have to behave, or Tessa will kill us.’
’But food,’ it said, whining pitifully.
’Living is better than food. If we die, there will be no food. Therefore, we have to be obedient,’ Alex explained.
The worm still wasn’t convinced, but it knew that they were strong enough to defeat Tessa. So it decided to go along with Alex’s plan for now.
The three new Apostles followed Tessa up the stairs to the second floor. Upon entering, Alex saw a room bigger than the one on the first floor.
There was no kitchen on this floor. Instead, the space where the kitchen should have been was empty and led to a balcony.
There were also no long tables the length of the room. Instead, there were small tables scattered everywhere. Each table could accommodate at most four people, not the 20 he saw earlier.
Some of the tables also had occupants. All of them had four eyes and naked jaws, marking them as Apostles. Some of these four-eyed people were as big as Tessa, but most were smaller.
Tessa said, "These are some of the Small Bosses and Big Bosses of the Meat Brute Order. This floor is where the bosses eat. The first floor is for the Drones."
"If you survive this week of restraint training, you will officially become a Small Boss of the Meat Brute Order."
As she spoke, she went to sit by the table at the center of the room. There was a corpse on the table. It was a headless corpse.
’Isn’t that the corpse of the fourth miner from earlier?’ Alex thought to himself.
He recognized who the corpse belonged to because he had seen it earlier, and the wound on its neck was still fresh. But the wound wasn’t wiggling anymore, so Alex wasn’t as disgusted as he was the first time.
Unfortunately, it was a bad thing that he didn’t feel disgusted, because without that feeling, the worm could flood his brain with unprecedented yearning for flesh. There was nothing to negate the influence of the worm on his mind, so his appetite shot through the roof and the corpse became the most appetizing thing he had ever seen.
’Now I know why they couldn’t hold back earlier,’ he thought in realization.
Unlike the other two who rushed out earlier, he stepped back in fear. The worm didn’t try to take control of his body, letting him step away from the food. This was because Tessa was staring at them.
Her eyes were languid and calm, as if she didn’t have anything nefarious in mind. But she held a wooden baton and sat too close to the food. So the gluttony worm decided to hold off from charging.
By now, everyone in the room was paying attention to the three newbies. One of the Apostles, a red man as big as Tessa, asked her, saying, "Are these the new flesh titans?"
"Yes, they are," she replied without looking away from the three of them. "They are lacking in restraint far more than normal."
The big fellow shrugged as he said, "Who can blame them?"
"They are surrounded by food. If iron were walking around me all the time, I too would find it difficult to control my appetite."
A second Apostle, a green woman as big as Tessa, said, "I’m guessing you’re going to subject them to restraint training now. That’s going to be interesting."
These two colorful Apostles weren’t oddities in this room. Everyone else had a skin color that was not white.
Tessa was black as soot. The colors of Green, Red, and Black were the three main colors of the Apostles. Even their hair and teeth matched their skin color.