A rat as big as a human’s head was sitting with its back turned to the wolf as it nibbled on a piece of bone scavenged from the garbage bags, and the moment the wolf got close, the rat turned around, its beady eyes zeroing in on the wolf in an instant.

The wolf wasn't even sure what had made its ambush fail, but it didn't get much time to think on it.

The rodent rushed forward, its meager meal forgotten. Knowing that it was just a false charge for intimidation, the canine forced itself to freeze, [Bloodrush] ready to activate in case it got too close.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a false charge, the insane vermin charging at something two and a half times as tall and thrice as long as itself as if it was nothing more than a cockroach-sized meal. The wolf activated [Bloodrush] just as the rat’s absurdly large frontal teeth went to clamp down on its paw, pulled said paw back, and tried to swipe it away as it jumped back with its three other limbs.

Its legs weren’t built for much sideways movement however, so all it ended up doing was knocking the rat over on its stomach with three short but deep gashes on the top half of its body from where its nails tore straight through its fur like mist.

It reminded itself to check if its nails had changed like its canines later.

As the vermin twitched and writhed in pain and disorientation for a short moment, the wolf jumped forward with a snarl, clamping its jaws shut around its back legs and hips, and proceeded to tilt its head at an angle as it hurriedly lifted its head.

Not wanting to allow the rat the leverage or time to curl its abdomen and claw its eyes out, it threw its head towards the ground diagonally, slamming the top half of the rat into the cold stone below with a muted, satisfying thud.

Then it simply carried over the momentum of its first swing to drag the rat off the ground in the same direction, swung its head in a half circle, and slammed the rodent into the ground with another diagonal swing of its head, and repeated the process of swinging its head around in figure eights for almost the full duration of [Bloodrush], snarling all the while as best as it could, a thin sense of rage and bloodlust welling up inside it. Then, just a couple seconds before [Bloodrush] faded, it allowed its teeth to cut rather than only pierce as it swung its head sideways, tossing the rat away as its canines tore four giant rends into a third of its body.

It jumped back for a moment and crouched down, its fur spiked and bristling as it growled at the unmoving rodent, and after multiple seconds of nothing happening, its lips relaxed as they covered its teeth again. It observed the splatters of blood painting the spots it had slammed the rat into, and observed the utterly unmoving rodent, and after an almost disbelieving poke of its paw, it confirmed that the rat was, indeed, dead.

That… was scary for a moment, but easy compared to what it had been expecting. Sure it was bigger, but the rats were so incredibly aggressive it had simply assumed there was a reason for it, that they were strong enough to do it, and had simply panicked or ran away every time it was attacked. Mice were relatively tame, rats were just… illogical.

Even as its teeth tore its prey apart and quickly devoured it, it almost couldn’t believe how well that had gone. It knew better than to rush things and get hurt, but it couldn’t deny that its confidence in its ability to hunt had considerably risen after that encounter.

After licking the blood off the walls and floor, it eyed the dimly lit stone walkway surrounding the giant expanse of gears on the bottom of the hole. The walkway was only about two thirds of the way down into the hole, just high enough for the rats to clamber in and out of using the machinery on the sides of the hole and the trash itself, but nowhere near low enough for the wolf to head down itself.

But since every rat it had met was absurdly aggressive at the first sign of life, it was betting on them rushing at it the moment they saw it. Mentally deciding to scavenge for scraps around the hole until it could find an isolated rat or two to bait into attacking it like the first one, it got to enjoy passively watching the shifting bumps of darkness as they wormed their way in and out of bags, at least two dozen rats just among the first few meters of the hole.

It kept a healthy distance, and eventually, it saw a rat excitedly clamber out of the hole and separate to find a private place to eat its haul before the bigger rats stole it.

The wolf moved back several meters, then decided it was ready to kill another rodent.

Just to make sure the rat saw it, the wolf stood up straight, then chuffed through its front teeth quietly, but not quietly enough for the rat not to hear it. It turned, and predictably, it dropped its food and rushed forward with an odd sounding squeak.

The wolf didn’t understand their behavior at all, but as long as it got free, fresh food out of it, it didn’t really care.

The fight with the smaller rat went almost exactly the same way as the first. It simply blindly rushed at the canine, and when it got close enough, the wolf jumped back and battered it onto its side with a paw, then instantly dug its back legs in and leapt forward to grab the most available part of its body, the front half. Its canines dug in, and the wolf did only two figure-eight slams with the rat before it threw it onto the floor, and backed away.

The rat was alive, but unable to move from the four gigantic gashes across its body, spanning almost a fourth of its body width each, it barely took five seconds for the twitching, shredded prey to finally die.

It continued this for hours, constantly hungry despite its sated stomach. Because while it wasn’t physically hungry, now that it could stockpile flesh and food for its needs… why stop? It could technically eat endlessly, and the human’s blob of gore was almost imperceptibly reduced as it was digested and its flesh was slowly added to the wolf’s own, but wasn’t showing any signs of decay. It had free food and flesh storage, so it was going to use it.

The process was rather delicate, and it ran out of patience with wasting its spit by licking blood off the ground, so it simply sat in a corner near the spiralling metal staircase, waiting for a rat to come close.

It either very gently scraped a nail against the rock and cobble to draw the rats to itself, or waited for the fresh rat blood scent to draw the attention of the other rats, who came to eat their deceased brethren.

There was one intense fight when two rats rushed it at the same time, and it had to juggle between battering one of them on the ground then biting and throwing it into the floor once, before repeating with the other, and it was only due to using the [Bloodrush] it had saved up that it didn’t get bitten, allowing the rat’s injuries to kill them from blood loss as the wolf moved back from the crippled vermin.

Its fear slowly but surely evaporated, routine replacing it as hours passed by with the thrill of the hunt to embrace and indulge in.

It started counting the rats it had consumed, and when it counted around two dozen, it decided to retreat and find a place to sleep, starting to feel exhausted.

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As it went up the staircase however, its paws felt a vibration ring through the metal, and it focused on its hearing as it looked up.

Humans were descending.

The staircase was really wide, but it was terrible ground for the wolf to fight or run, so it simply descended again, going to the opposite corner of where it had been lurking and fighting, and after a brief encounter with another rat that it eviscerated with hurried fury borne of fear, it rushed to the dark corner and got to eating, watching the staircase for a chance to ascend.

Eventually a band of four humans occupied the rectangular area around the staircase, and after a couple minutes of them doing some weird movements and making their weird grumbles to each other, they moved towards the hole, obviously intending to attack the rats.

Judging by the human’s rather blandly-colored coverings, they were most likely nothing like the crowd of humans waiting outside the place of burning rivers in terms of pack status. Maybe they were just some sort of servant, or just too young and weak to be given good stuff, the wolf didn’t particularly understand humans.

And it had no desire to, at least right now. Right now it just wanted to sleep, and tune itself a little. It really wanted to hurry its body along in the process of making its antennae, especially considering just a moment ago, it was vibrations that made it realize something was coming down the stairs.

The wolf licked the blood off its snout as best as it could as the humans formed their weird battle formation of three up front and one in the back, and sensing the tension in the air, it got up with quickened steps towards the staircase.

Just as it turned to climb upwards, an orange light burst from behind it, and it instinctively dashed up a couple steps and turned its head around, limbs ready to rush up and away if it was under attack.

It relaxed and straightened its legs once it realized that the human in the back had done one of the strange mystical things humans did by making a ball of light float above her head, likely to draw the rats towards herself like the wolf had done.

Or, no. Rather, it was probably so her group could see better. It kept forgetting how terrible humans were at seeing in the dark.

Relieved, it turned back to keep rising up the steps.

And stopped once more, the creaking gears of its mind starting to spin.

It didn’t know why exactly, but humans rarely ate the rats, only the most sickly and starved daring to do so. Which meant that if the humans killed the possibly hundreds of rats in and around the pit…

They would… do what? They wouldn’t eat them. Maybe burn them? Humans did burn a lot of good meat, including their own dead sometimes for some insane reasons the wolf couldn’t figure out. Or they might just leave the rats lying around for someone to push into the trash pit, where they would most likely somehow end up in the burning rivers down below.

All that flesh, going to waste.

It turned around again, watching pensively as hordes of frenzied rats dashed at the humans, cleaved apart by spear, some strange weapon the wolf didn’t have a name for, and the strange mystical energy the female in the back was using.

Its ears perked up as it realized something again, the odd, nonsensical descriptions it had gotten about [Mana Perception] flashing by its mind.

It was mana. The human was doing something with mana.

And the humans were not having as easy a time as the wolf expected. They probably hadn’t realized just how many rats were in the trashbags and the open pipes, with their horrendous hearing and even more worthless sense of smell. They were still tiny things compared to the humans, and rats couldn’t chew through metal leg armor, the only part of the humans that was using metal as covering, but they outnumbered each human by almost thirty to one, with even more constantly getting drawn out of the trash pit by the loud sounds of battle.

Oh, they wear metal only on their legs on purpose. They came prepared.

Still, they were constantly having to backtrack, yelling at each other and only managing to attract more rats with their idiotic barking.

The issue was where they were retreating towards. They were slowly back up to the staircase, the only way of escape. Towards itself.

The wolf didn’t really know what to do.

It was feeling greedy, and it wanted nothing more than to find some way to help the humans kill the rats, if for no other reason than the fact it could get such immense amounts of mass out of the steadily increasing horde if said rats were all somehow killed. If the humans killed only half the horde, the other half would eat their brethren in no time, and the wolf would get nothing out of it, so the situation was out of its control, truthfully.

Additionally, it was exhausted. It had been down there for multiple hours, and even if the majority of that time was spent waiting and resting between bouts of short battles, it was still weak and malnourished. If it weren’t for that +1 in Endurance, it felt like it would be dragging its feet right now.

Its mind recalled the vision it had gotten when deciding to accept or reject that choice of a [Path], and it narrowed its eyes, trying to focus on the limb in its chest as it watched the human’s increasingly messy battle as the seconds rolled by.

It could… sort of feel it, not anywhere near as intense as that time in the alley, but it could feel it. The more it fiddled with the limb and tried to make it shoot a ball of darkness like it had seen in the vision however, the more it realized how terribly difficult it was to use the limb. It felt like trying to operate a human device with its paws, it just couldn’t catch onto the ‘mana’ thing and properly push it out of its extra limb.

Growing frustrated and anxious as the battle with the humans drew nearer and more frenzied, it gave up with a mental side note to try and figure out how to throw the balls of darkness later.

The humans were definitely losing. It looked like a slaughter if one went by sheer numbers, but their movements were getting messier and sluggish, the two males and single female at the front constantly retreating, the female in the back using her ‘mana’ more and more sparingly.

Seeing how the battle was going, it inwardly wallowed in disappointment, and turned around to resume its climb. The humans would retreat or die, and the horde of rats would consume everything that was edible afterwards. There was nothing to be gained from sitting there so near to danger.