This was a story that circulated in Mumbai's Dharavi slum. Stripped of its deliberately sensational ghost-story trappings, its essence was chillingly simple.
A married couple, driven by unemployment and debt, had been forced to move into a makeshift shack built from sheet metal and old wooden boards.
They had a skinny young son who had suffered years of abuse. He always hunched his shoulders and walked close to the walls like a frightened animal.
Although Raju, the young man living across from them, knew perfectly well what the boy endured, he had always considered it "someone else's business."
There were too many such things in the slum. Everyone struggled just to survive, with no energy to spare for other people's troubles.
But to the boy, this neighbor who was willing to speak to him normally might have been one of the few kindly presences in this filthy world.
Raju's casual "How was school today?" might have been the only greeting without malice that the boy heard all day.
And that was precisely why-
When a swarm of rats from some unknown source bit his parents to death late one night, the boy escaped covered in blood and stumbled toward the door opposite. He had only noticed something was wrong and survived because the rats had gnawed on his parents first and attacked him last.
He pounded on the sheet-metal door again and again, his nails scraping shrilly across its green paint. Blood seeped through the gap beneath the door, pooling dark red on the concrete floor.
"Uncle Raju... help me..."
But Raju, assuming this was another of that family's usual disturbances, merely rolled over in irritation.
He had worked twelve hours at the textile mill that day. He was so tired his bones ached.
What did the neighbors beating their kid have to do with me? That was someone else's business.
The knocking continued, mingled with stifled sobs and an unsettling rustle-the sound of rodents moving en masse.
Whatever it was, it was someone else's business.
And so, lying in a pool of blood, the boy gradually stopped knocking.
When the bodies of the family of three were discovered the next day, almost all their flesh had been gnawed away. The sight was unbearable.
Rats almost never attacked living humans unprovoked-but even if it did happen, the slum's police would never investigate closely.
They would never do anything that demanded effort without offering a reward.
From then on, rustling sounds haunted Raju every night.
He had long since grown accustomed to them. In a place where people struggled so hard to make a living, silence meant something else entirely.
Either people were too hungry to have the strength to speak, or they were holding their breath, listening to the noises outside.
Rats scurrying inside the walls, leaking pipes dripping, wind slipping through the gaps in broken windows-all were ordinary sounds.
But everyone had nights when they could not sleep. At last, one day, he could bear it no longer and flung open the door.
A hideous rat as tall as a person pounced on him, knocked him to the ground, and feasted.
It had been born in the forgotten corners at the city's fringes.
Those perpetually damp basements, abandoned warehouses that never saw daylight, the spaces behind partition walls that scratched in the dead of night-and the slums where life rotted while still alive.
What would breed in forgotten corners?
Unseen creatures were gnawing away at the foundations.
Residents heard noises late at night but dared not get up to investigate.
That fear of "not checking," that evasion of "pretending not to hear," that collective inaction which allowed cracks to widen and darkness to grow had hatched the Gnawing Rat Duke.
It was no mighty emperor.
It was merely a reminder, forever hungry, forever crawling, forever at the edge of human vision-something would eventually crawl out of the corners you abandoned and gnaw away at your foundations.
"They aren't ordinary rats."
When Amit arrived with the two foreign gentlemen, the slum elder spoke inside his sheet-metal shack.
"They're organized. They steal newborn babies and leave behind nothing but swaddling blankets soaked in saliva.
"Last week, they dragged away a sick old man. The next day, we found his skeleton in a drainage ditch, as clean as if it had been burned."
Following Amit and the guide appointed by the slum elder, Dio and Geto ventured into the slum's labyrinthine alleys.
Partway there, as Geto took Playful Cloud out of the Inventory Curse Worm's mouth, he suddenly remembered that Toji Fushiguro had stored other Cursed Tools inside it.
"Want a weapon? Do you prefer a large sword or a chain?"
"A chain? What kind of exotic weapon is that? I couldn't handle one. I'll take a sword."
"The Soul Liberation Blade. Worth five hundred million."
Geto handed Dio a broad-bladed sword.
"If someone who can perceive souls uses it, it can bypass matter entirely and damage the soul directly.
"To restore the soul's shape, you have to know its contours. The wounds it inflicts usually can't be healed with Reverse Cursed Technique, which makes it a very valuable Cursed Tool."
"Why did you have to emphasize its value?"
"A belated meeting gift. It's yours."
Dio accepted the sword. Only after a moment did he speak. "...Thank you."
After winding their way around for nearly half an hour, they finally reached their destination.
"The trail of Cursed Residue leads underground."
Suguru Geto crouched beside an open drainage ditch and recalled the burrowing Cursed Spirit that had just finished scouting.
"Very deep... It might be an air-raid shelter or sewer system left over from the colonial era."
Amit had been reasonably thorough and had secured the slum elder's permission beforehand.
By now, the illegally built shacks that had blocked the sewer entrance had all been torn down, exposing a pitch-black square opening below.
The iron ladder along its edge was mottled with rust, gleaming dark red beneath the dim yellow daylight.
The group descended the iron ladder. Its rungs groaned ominously beneath their feet, and rust flaked off in showers.
After descending roughly twenty meters, they stepped into a gloomy space the city had utterly forgotten.
Dampness, mildew, and an indescribable rank, musky stench assailed them.
A sound came from ahead-not dozens, not hundreds, but the scalp-prickling squeaks of thousands upon thousands of rats gathered together.
The sound echoed through the enclosed underground space, layer upon layer, as if the entire earth beneath them were writhing.
Dio glanced at Amit's pale face beside him and pointed upward. "You can head back up. Remember to evacuate everyone.
"What comes next isn't suitable for spectators. We won't divert our attention to protect you."
Amit opened his mouth, but in the end, he only bowed deeply, turned, and stumbled back up the iron ladder.
He knew he would only be a burden here. He knew even better that these two Special Grade Sorcerers had no obligation to keep him safe.
"Let's go meet this 'Rat King.'"
Tens of thousands of rats gathered into a surging black tide, their rustling flooding the entire space like waves.
At the center of that tide crouched a misshapen figure. It had an almost human torso topped by an enormous rat's head, with a tail as thick as a python trailing behind it.
Its "throne" was built from countless bones, among which tiny infant skeletons could be seen.
The Gnawing Rat Duke was no hulking monster. It was about the size of an adult man, but its perpetually hunched posture made it seem short.
Its skin was a filthy gray-black-not dry fur, but moist, sticky, bare skin, as though it had just crawled out of the depths of a sewer. Scattered across its surface were dark red, ulcer-like patches that constantly seeped thin, cloudy fluid laden with curses.
Its face was grotesquely strange and ugly.
It had no eyes. Where its eye sockets should have been were two smooth, sunken slits, like wet clay someone had pressed inward with their fingers.
It had no ears. On either side of its head was only a coin-sized hole with ragged, torn edges.
Its "sight" and "hearing" depended entirely on sensing Cursed Energy, yet it still deliberately turned its head as though "looking" and "listening."
That hollow, intent posture was more chilling than any vicious gaze.
Its snout was pointed. When it opened slightly, it revealed two dense rows of slender, inward-curving conical teeth.
The teeth were not white, but yellow like old bones, their gaps forever clogged with black, rotting matter-any human who saw them would instinctively feel that they ought not look too closely.
Its limbs were slender, but its claws were abnormally developed.
Its five claws resembled five slightly curved, rust-pitted iron hooks. Tumorous growths bulged at the joints, and every movement left fine scratches across the ground.
Its tail was particularly unusual-not a rat's long, thin, naked tail, but a thick, scale-covered appendage with a hammer-like swelling at the tip. As it dragged along, it rasped like sandpaper scraping metal.
At rest, it looked like a heap of wet garbage abandoned in a corner.
In motion, it was like sewage itself, flowing low across the ground, clinging to walls, and hanging from the ceiling without the slightest hitch in its movements.
Sir Newton's coffin lid was about to fly off.
Now the Gnawing Rat Duke stopped moving. Hanging upside down from the ceiling, it slowly raised its eyeless face toward the intruders.
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