The rat ate the core.

  I was stupefied for a moment. I had thought the cores were system items because so far the ants and beetles had completely ignored them. I mean, a near as I can tell they’re twisted balls of magic with instructions on how to grow a monster. Just a ball of aether and some left over mana from the monster that dropped it.

  My musings on the subject were interrupted when I noticed that the core was still drawing aether, and a lot of it. More aether than a slime would need. I tried to cut the flow and found that I couldn’t. I assumed that this wasn’t good. Early on I had lost a game by running out of aether. I was still getting a massive amount of mana off the rat but the conversion of mana to aether wasn’t instant.

  The rat didn’t seem to be having a good time of it either. It was shaking and growling with foam coming out of it’s mouth. random muscles along its legs and back would swell up to double or triple their size before shrinking back down. Its eyes started glowing a baleful red and its fur was darkening. The scales of its tail started standing up, thickening and sharpening in the process. The rat started swelling up, growing until it completely filled the tunnel. It grew so large that it started cracking the walls of the tunnel.

  The rat was screaming and growling in pain. I seriously thought it was going to pop when it suddenly started to shrink and give off steaming clouds of free mana.

  The new rat was smaller than it originally was, maybe 2/3 the size. It had those glowing red eyes, black metallic looking fur, a spiked tale and claws that left gouges in the stone floor. It was also staring directly at my core despite the walls in the way.

  I had a very bad feeling about this.

  The rat was still drawing in aether, but no where near the amount that it had been. It was putting off a lot of mana. So much that free clouds were swirling around an sparking on the stone of the tunnel. Grass started growing out of the ceiling and the exterior wall faded into transparency. I was again impressed by the dev team on this game.

  Still, I had to keep focused here. The rat was starting to move, scampering along at quite a clip really. I took a moment to review my defenders.

* 24 large beetles.

* 15 small beetles.

* Roughly 100 ants.

* Dozens of slimes.

  It didn’t look promising. The rat had torn through a slime with no problems before its powerup. I didn’t expect much from slimes anymore, but even so the rat hadn’t even been trying when it killed the stupid thing.

  The first order of business, set a bunch of aether streams to start collecting all the free mana. As they say, waste not want not. After that I started ordering some defenders to fall back while pushing others forward. I wasn’t going to be able to pull a zergling rush, my monsters were just too slow, but I could and would get a few choke points up. Hopefully.

  As the rat rounded the tunnel into my first room I had the handful of ants present drop onto its back from the ceiling. A few of them actually landed. They immediately started biting and tearing but had difficulty even damaging the rats new glossy black fur. The rat likely didn’t even notice them.

  What it did notice was the large beetle standing in the way. The rat barely even slowed before launching itself at the beetle. The beetle stood firm, positioning its horn in the perfect position for the rat to skewer itself. The rat simply batted the horn aside with a paw and nearly severed it in the process. A follow-up bite killed the beetle.

  The rat took a moment to dig through the dissolving beetle before eating its core and moving on. Thankfully I didn’t start bleeding aether again. I assume that it was an interaction caused by my attempt to respawn the slime that caused this mess. Still, the delay was welcome. If it let me move my monsters just a bit further I’d gladly welcome it. I prepared to sacrifice a few of my small beetles in the next room. The rest were on their way to the third and final room before my core.

  I was starting to regret my dungeon layout. It sort of looked like a strand of spaghetti that was coiled up on itself, and unfortunately not a long strand. It was just six loops around my core with three bulges for rooms. The rat was just now leaving the first room which sat at the end of the outer loop.

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  I had two more rooms, one was at roughly the halfway point and the final room was sitting midway through the final loop. That would be my final stand. All of my ants and most of my beetles were slowly crawling toward this last room. My slimes were just wherever I had last left them, the rooms, near my core, a few were even in the tunnel that the rat was now scampering through. It did pause to eat their cores so it wasn’t a total loss.

  The rat was still throwing off some serious amounts of mana. I latched onto it with every aether stream I had when I discovered a quirk of the game. My aether streams had a distance limit. Sure I had some large streams that reached all the way to the edge of my range. These were the ones that cleared out the fog of war around my core. The majority of my streams seemed to have max distances. I guess that if I had ever let a beetle get closer than the first room I’d have easily popped it. I had a feeling that the rat wouldn’t pop now. Not after its transformation.

  The rat continued to tear through my slimes on its way to the second room. It was moving faster than I’d hoped but slower than I’d feared. From the looks of things I’d have a couple large beetles in the second room and then another few halfway to the third but most of my ants and the rest of the beetles would make it to the final stand.

  All I could do at this point was wait. The rat continued to eat the slime cores as it made its way along until it reached the second room. I had about 10 ants waiting with another 6 still clinging to the rat, 4 small beetles and 2 large. It wasn’t an ideal fighting force, but it’s what I had.

  As I had said earlier, the room wasn’t really planned as a room, it was just an area where I had widened the tunnel so that more of my defenders could pile up on something. This made the walls uncomfortably thin and really wasn’t that pretty. I had planned on tearing it all out to make something better, but had been putting it off for the last few days.

  The rat saw my defenders and stopped. It lifted its front paws off the ground as it looked them over. I’m sure it wasn’t impressed. There was a pregnant pause before all hell broke out. The rat slammed down and darted forward to the largest beetle. I quickly ordered everything to just attack. To fight to the death. It didn’t help. The rat was unstoppable. It only took a swipe or bite to kill a beetle and the ants didn’t phase it at all.

  I was supprised when one of the small beetles did manage to draw blood from the rat’s hind leg. It wasn’t much, and the beetle was instantly killed for it, but it was the first progress I’d seen so far.

  The rat killed everything after that. It even shook off the ants and killed them. It then ate all their cores. The depressing part is that the tiny cut on its leg healed over by the time it was done.

  I was beginning to think that this would be a wipe and that I should find the contact info for the devs to submit a bug report about the weird interaction that spawned this demon rat. It was completely balance breaking at this level. I was getting plenty of mana off it, more with every step it took toward my core, but I’d never been able to carry over mana to a new game in the past so it wasn’t the balm to my ego that it could have been.

  The rat seemed to not want to continue on. It kept staring at my core through the wall. The very thin wall. It started digging at the stone and tearing through it with ease. As soon as it had a hole barely bigger than it’s head it crawled through. I’d heard rats could do that but still, that hole was tiny.

  I held my breathe as the rat started clawing at the next wall. I let out a long sigh when it made no marks on my metal laced ruby wall. This was the first thing that had gone right so far.

  The rat seemed confused for a moment. It scampered back and forth a bit before it broke out into a fast scamper heading toward my core again. It only paused to eat a few more slimes along the way. The three beetles I’d been sending to the third room were now actually behind the rat and falling further behind every second.

  The rat made it to the third room much quicker than I’d have liked. It didn’t pause this time. It just charged in and started fighting. It was a chaotic mess. The rat and the beetles rolling over each other, biting, scratching, tail whipping. The beetles were about as effective as in the second room but there were a lot more of them and a hell of a lot more ants. A slime or two even got close enough to latch on to the rat for all of the second needed for the rat to crush them against the floor or a wall.

  The battle lasted longer than I’d expected and the rat was wounded, but not seriously. It was visibly healing as well. I had enough and started looking for the exit button... and didn’t find it.

  I turned back to the rat, it was finished eating the cores and had started walking along the tunnel. It was only a matter of time until it reached my core and then it’d be game over.

  I decided to go out with some style. Rack up as high a score as possible. I latched every single aether loop I had onto the rat. It’s slow, steady walk seemed to mock my attempt. It was even putting off less mana than before.

  I again looked around for the exit button. It was odd. I started growing concerned. Where was the exit button or the UI or my hands?

  Maybe this was just one of the dreams and I didn’t have to submit that bug report after all. But now that I knew it was a dream I wondered if I could go flying. I’d always wanted to play superman and fly around.

  The rat was taking forever to finish this. It was even taking breaks. I mean it only had a couple body lengths to go before it stepped into my core room.

  Dreams are annoying when they go lucid. You never have the control you’d think you have.

  The rat slumped over. I was still feeding every scrap of aether I had through it but wasn’t getting any mana back. I was getting a weird reddish, greenish, purple energy from it now. My core was throbbing in time with the bursts of this new energy that I was sucking down.

  The rat died.

  huh.