A young adventurer sat across from the guildmaster, his fingers drumming idly on the wooden table as the older man examined the glowing cores in his hand with disbelief. The cores being pulled out from the actual sewer king, the evolved two headed monstrosity that alone raised the threat level of the most easy combat quest of the guild. But as if pouring cold water on all of guildmaster’s doubts the cores pulsated with dim light, almost alive. The Guildmaster held one of them up to the faint lantern light, turning it over carefully, eyes narrowing with interest.
"Hmm," the Guildmaster muttered, before flashing the young adventurer a rare smile. “Quite the prize you’ve got here young Reed. I’ve read the reports but I would still like to hear the whole story, if you may.”
With a sigh, Reed recalled the day he slayed the sewer king.
----------------------------------------
- Lydia -
The damp, choking air of the sewer greeted them as Lydia led her crew deeper underground. The echoes of dripping water and the faint scurrying of rats were the only sounds that accompanied them. Their mission was simple—clear out the sewers of the critters that bred in the filth—but as usual, Lydia’s mind was elsewhere.
The group had just finished dispatching a pack of giant rats, their corpses littering the tunnel floor, when someone in the rear spoke up.
"Hey... isn't that him?" whispered the man, nudging his companion.
"Who?" came the reply from the girl holding a mace.
"The Rat King!"
Lydia's jaw tightened upon hearing that. She whipped around, silencing her entourage with a sharp glare. The two junior crewmates of hers shrunk under her gaze. Shaking her head, she glanced back toward the shadowed figure at the far end of a side tunnel, the man fighting off a swarm of feral wolf sized rats by his lonesome. His movements were quick, efficient, almost mechanical with his face showing no hints of emotion. There was no mistaking him.
"Yes," she murmured, her voice dripping with reluctant admiration. "That's him. Reed. The so-called Rat King."
Her group exchanged glances, wide-eyed and curious, as they watched Reed. The name had become infamous in the guild—whispered in corners, used as a joke, a mockery of someone who’d never made it into a crew. But Lydia knew better. She had seen the truth. They all had.
As Reed moved deeper into his chosen tunnel, Lydia’s companions turned their questions toward her.
"Why are we down here, doing sewer subjugation like Rat King though?" the girl asked, her mace resting lazily on her shoulder. "We're already part of a crew with a captain. Why do we need to do this?"
Lydia sneered at the girl, her irritation rising. "Just because we're in a crew doesn’t mean we slack off on combat training, you would do well to remember this Clara, both of you" she snapped. "Mundane or not, you're here to work. A captain doesn’t make you invincible on quests outside."
The young man shrugged, pulling the crossbow to rest casually over his shoulder like Clara. "You know doing this will piss off Captain Farran, right?"
The name made Lydia’s lips press into a thin line. Farran—Captain Farran, the so-called leader of their crew—was everything wrong with the city’s guilds. Tied to a noble household, the man had never faced a day of hardship. Resources, wealth, status—it had all been handed to him on a silver platter, including the revelation. Farran had ascended to the ranks of the rare superhumans in the world without ever knowing what it was like to struggle.
And that made Lydia sick.
"I don’t give a damn what Farran thinks," she muttered, turning her back on her companions and heading down the same tunnel Reed had taken.
Her companions helplessly followed their so-called senior crewmate deeper into the tunnels, along the way Lydia couldn’t help but ask her juniors, "What do you guys think of him? The Rat King, I mean."
The crewmates exchanged odd looks before Clara offered. "Isn’t he just... a joke? Rejected by every crew. He spends his days killing sewer rats. What do you think, Felix?"
The guy, Felix added with a snort, "Yeah, dude’s just obsessed with sewer quests. Lives down here, practically."
Lydia laughed, but unlike them, her laughter was bitter and hollow. They didn’t know. They didn’t understand who Reed really was. She did. Reed and her had joined the guild at the same time, both orphans from the slums. But while Reed had been scorned and pushed aside, she had been allowed to scrape by, accepted into a crew—Farran’s crew—but only for reasons that made her skin crawl.
As they kept following Reed's trail, the dead bodies of giant rats grew more frequent. The man was relentless. The path before them was a massacre, strewn with rat corpses he had taken down in his silent rampage.
"Well," lowering his crossbow Felix muttered, nudging one of the rat carcasses with his boot, "he really does live up to his name."
Lydia remained silent, her thoughts far from the mockery. She remembered the day Reed and her had approached Farran, both of them hoping to join the same crew. Farran had sneered, his disgust barely concealed as he humiliated Reed in front of the others. She remembered the man’s lecherous gaze on her as he accepted her, licking his lips. Reed had walked away that day, head held high but heart bruised. She had stayed behind, hating herself for it.
A year later, she knew all too well what kind of people ran this city’s guilds. The real captains—the ones with experience, grit, and integrity—didn’t stay in this backwater. What was left were spoiled rich kids pretending to be heroes.
Lydia had accepted her fate as the mundane, never allowed to saturate her core enough to rise above. Eventually, she would fall into Farran's grasp. Pushing down her disgust at the thought Lydia thought about how she couldn’t stop watching Reed with hope.
Even after being denied at every turn, he kept going, kept pushing. The only quests available to mundanes without a crew were sewer subjugations. And Reed had taken every single one, over and over again. To the point of lunacy, it was the first after a whole year where she spotted the quest today on the board. And since it was there, Lydia couldn’t help herself taking it to catch a closer glimpse of Reed in action. She wanted to see what a determined slum kid like her could achieve on his own.
Just then, Clara gasped, breaking Lydia out of her thoughts. Lydia stopped, her gaze shifting to where Clara was pointing. In the dim light, the massive corpse of a giant centipede lay sprawled across the tunnel floor, its body severed into three pieces.
Felix muttered, his voice shaky, "What... what the hells is a wyrmling doing here? This wasn't in the quest description."
Lydia frowned, her grip tightening on her spear. She could feel it—the change in the air. Something more dangerous lay ahead.
----------------------------------------
- Reed -
"By the gods," Reed muttered under his breath, barely managing to suppress his frustration. "Do they think I can’t hear them in these narrow tunnels?" His voice echoed softly off the damp, slime-slicked walls as he trudged deeper into the labyrinthine sewers. The stench of decaying rat carcasses clung to his minimal leather armour like a rancid fog, blood and filth smeared across his hands and the sack slung over his shoulder.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
This wasn’t part of the quest. He had already collected the pea-sized cores required to finish it — tiny, glowing spheres harvested from the rats. That was all the guild cared about.
But Reed? He needed more.
His knuckles whitened as he gripped the sack tighter, his pace quickening. He had been saving up for months, scraping together every coin to buy what he needed. Poison. His entire savings, his earnings from one miserable sewer subjugation after another, had gone into buying the paralytics and the special venom he now carried.
He could still feel the resentment burn deep in his chest as he thought of all those nights where he was in the mess hall dining on bread and soup the bare minimum he could spend his coin on while all the other crew people dined on the finest meat. He almost shed a tear thinking about it, but his resolve was set. This will be worth it.
Reed had a plan, one that required bait, patience, and timing. The rats barely gave him a challenge. Their meat though was used to lure in bigger monsters. Creatures way more dangerous. He had been at this for months now, pushing himself to hunt the stronger creatures that lurked in the deepest parts of the sewers like the wyrmling from earlier. And one day, he’d find an infinitely dangerous trapped one in the maze-like ruins that was part of the sewers.
His pulse quickened as he reached the narrow tunnel opening from where he stood he looked down into the secluded chamber, one of the more hidden sections of the sewers that was long abandoned. Perfect for the finale.
From the narrow tunnel entrance, Reed flicked on his pocket torch, scanning the shadows in the colossal chamber below him.
The chamber seemed empty but Reed knew it wasn’t. It was here, hiding and waiting. The thing about the sewers was there was always some critter making a noise that echoed throughout the tunnels but here there was none, the silence that was unnatural in this part of the sewers.
Quickly, Reed untied his sack, and started dumping out the rat carcasses he had strung along — each one was laced with enough paralytic to bring down a creature ten times his size. The smell of the meat, mixed with the faint tang of poison, filled the air. He tossed the remains into the wide-open space, hearing them land with a sickening thud.
Then, the low hiss. It slithered out of the shadows, an eerie vibration that sent a chill creeping up Reed's spine. It was coming.
From the shadows it emerged, the sewer king — a two headed snake, its body blistered, covered in tumorous scales, slithered into the range of his pocket light. The evolved monster had become a mockery of a snake warped by whatever twisted creatures it consumed to evolve. One of its head was blind, its eyes sunken into its skull, while the other glowed with a cold, malevolent intelligence. Both heads snapped toward Reed, tongues flicking out, tasting in his familiar scent.
The snake hesitated, its head swaying between looking up at Reed and the meat that was sprawled around the chamber; it knew the entrance in which the blasted human stood was entirely too small for its form to fit into. Reed shuddered under the mutated snake's calculating eyes.
With a sudden lunge, the creature snapped its jaws toward the pile of rat meat, devouring it in ravenous gulps. Reed’s heart raced. He could barely contain his excitement watching the snake’s movements slowing, its heads swaying more erratically with each gulp.
“Yes, keep eating you dumb bastard.” Reed mumbled watching the snake gorging itself on the rat meat.
But then the snake stopped, suddenly aware that something was wrong. Turning both of its grotesque heads towards Reed, it hissed in fury. Its massive body coiled tighter, the muscles flexing as it fought against the venom seeping through its veins.
“No wonder they call you the sewer king.” Reed smiled, a shiver ran through his back seeing the monster showcase its unnatural intellect.
The paralytic had slowed the monster enough for Reed to match its speed. Quickly, he pulled the jagged spikes from his bag. Each one had been prepared with a lethal poison at the tip, a final touch for the killing blow.
Without wasting another second, Reed pulled the jagged spikes from his pack, each one coated with a lethal poison meant to finish the beast. He steadied his breath, recalling every bit of javelin-throwing practice he’d ever done. His grip tightened, his fingers brushing the smooth metal of the first spike. He aimed for the glowing eye of the snake’s sentient head.
With a swift motion, he hurled the spike.
But even in its weakened state, the sewer king was fast — far faster than Reed expected. The snake recoiled, its monstrous body crashing into the stone walls of the chamber, sending debris raining down from above. The broken stone falling from the ceiling brought light to the dark chamber and in time for Reed to see his thrown spike missing by inches, clattering uselessly against the wall.
The ground trembled under Reed’s feet. As if the snake had already read his plan to carefully snipe it from the relative safety of the narrow tunnel entrance; the snake’s thrashing grew more frantic, its immense strength shaking the entire chamber. The snake kept moving its body, making it impossible to aim for it.
"Fuck you, you diseased pile of flesh!" Reed cursed, his mind racing. The tunnel entrance was no longer safe. The sewer king was trying to bring the entire chamber down. If Reed stayed here, he’d be crushed before he could even land a hit.
Reed’s instincts were screaming at him to leave by now. He hadn’t survived fighting the stronger pests of the sewers by being stubborn. Yet, his body refused to retreat.
Reed cursed as he regained his footing amidst the mini earthquake caused by the sewer king. He scanned the chamber quickly, his eyes locking on a small mound of rubble that had formed near one corner—just high enough to give him a vantage point, just low enough for him to reach. A suicidal plan formed in his mind.
His heart pounded in his ears. With grim determination, he tore his sack into a makeshift holster for the remaining spikes, slinging it over his shoulder.
"Fuck me," Reed muttered and he jumped.
The air whipped around Reed as he plunged toward the chamber floor, his stomach lurching in freefall. His fingers scraped at the rough stone, finding jagged edges of rubble just in time to break his descent. Yet a sickening crack echoed through the chamber as his body met stone, but he ignored the sharp flare of pain in his ribs. Get up. Move. Now.
Suddenly the sewer king grew still, both its heads snapping towards Reed with lethal speed, their glowing eyes narrowing with predatory focus. He saw the cold intelligence in the creature’s gaze, calculating, analysing its prey. His pulse raced. The paralytic was still in effect—he could see it in the sluggish, uneven sway of the serpent’s heads—but it was fading fast.
I’ve got seconds. Maybe less.
Reed’s hand shot to the makeshift holster on his side, fingers closing around the smooth metal of a spike. His heart sank. The fall had scattered most of them across the chamber floor. His fingers closed around the last one left in his holster.
One spike. Just one.
The sewer king lunged, the massive jaws of its sentient head snapping the air inches from Reed’s face. He twisted away, using its moment of confusion to drive the spike straight into the glowing eye of the sentient head. The jagged metal sank in with a wet, sickening squelch. Black ichor exploded from the ruptured eye onto his arm.
The sewer king screeched in agony, its body convulsing violently. But Reed grinned through his ragged breaths. The brain-eating bacterial poison — extracted from an evolved monster Reed had to burn all his savings to get his hands on —had found the perfect entry point. The eye. Straight to the brain.
As the creature thrashed, Reed scrambled out of the way. He watched in satisfaction as the snake, in its frenzy, raked its body across the chamber floor. Its blind, wild movements impaled it on the spikes scattered from Reed’s fall. One lodged deep in its belly, another in its side, releasing more venom.
The snake’s movements became erratic, its body jerking and coiling as the poison spread through its nerves. Reed could see the effects—the bacterial venom eating away at its brain, scrambling its remaining senses.
The sewer king let out one last ear-piercing roar, its heads flailing wildly before the beast collapsed in a heap of twisted coils, its body finally going still.
Panting, bruised, Reed dropped to his knees, staring at the fallen creature. It’s over. He let out a hoarse laugh.
"Thank fuck that poison worked." And with that, exhaustion overtook him, and he collapsed against the cold stone floor.
----------------------------------------
- Lydia -
The distant sound of a fight howled throughout the tunnels, loud and violent tremors coursed through the walls. Lydia's heart raced as she sprinted through the narrow passageways, her grip on her spear tightening. "Reed..." she whispered, fear spiking through her as she ran toward the noise, Clara and Felix following her closely.
After seeing the dead wyrmling and now the sudden quakes. Lydia could guess Reed had challenged something way beyond his level. As she rounded the final corner littered with dead critters, the sight before her stopped her in her tracks.
From the narrow tunnel entry she saw the fissured ceiling of the sewer bringing the light from above upon the ridiculous scene below.
Bathed in blood, with one his hands bent in an unnatural angle, Reed towered over the corpse of a massive, twisted snake, its two heads lying lifeless. With his good hand he was cutting into the monstrosity when he looked up and met her eyes.
With a grin he said, “Hey do you mind lending me a hand.”
Shaking his broken hand a bit he added, “I’m kinda missing one, haha.”