Beyond the open door I saw a huge horde of giant rats, and as I watched they started cramming their bodies together, writhing, twisting, squirming, merging into a single organism that was shaped like a rat but the size of an elephant, a rippling mass of brown and grey fur that bristled all over like a hedgehog with the protruding claws and tails of its outermost component rats, the hooked claws flexing and the tails longer than broom handles wriggling like prehensile pink worms.

Giant Rat King Individually, Giant Rats are bad. A horde of them is very bad. But then, if they get really serious, they will merge into the Giant Rat King. That’s very very very bad. Powers:

Ferocious Nibbles - Expert: Nasty bites

Scurrilous Claws - Expert: Nasty claws

So Sick - Adept: Wounds inflicted cause disease

Skills:

Bite - Expert

Claw - Expert

The good news was that it was too big to fit through the door. The bad news...well, that was obvious.

“What’s the matter?” Lancelot said.

I gestured toward the doorway. “Take a look for yourself,” I said.

Cautiously, everyone poked their head around to peek through. The Giant Rats had finished coalescing and their new King form stalked back and forth inside the room, dark cavities where its eyes should've been remaining fixed on the doorway, watching us. Behind it, filling one corner of the enormous and spilling over onto the raised section, rose a colossal pile of what can only be described as garbage taller than me. The Giant Rat King seemed to be protecting the jumble of junk, which I assumed must have been the rat horde’s nest.

”Well that’s just awful,” Morgan said.

“What do you guys wanna do?” I said. “We could probably just walk away.”

“Is that what you want to do?” Sigrid said.

I thought for a moment. “Not really.”

Lancelot smiled. “Good. Let’s kill it.” Without waiting for a plan this time, he charged inside and began swinging his sword at the huge monstrosity.

“Guess we’re killing it, then,” Sigrid said, and rushed in to join Lancelot’s attack. Kenji was quick to follow, ducking to the side to flank the Giant Rat King, which had reared up on its hind legs and was raking its front paws at Sigrid and Lancelot. Morgan and I stayed back, attacking it at range.

Our individual attacks didn’t seem to do much. Every few hits, a single dead rat or two would fall away from the mass, but the attrition was slow. Sigrid and Lancelot took the brunt of the Giant Rat King’s attacks, and their health bars were falling faster than the monster’s.

If we kept that up, we were going to lose.

“Everyone! This isn’t working, fall back to the corridor.”

Morgan and I remained just inside the door, firing off attacks from either side of it while Lancelot and Sigrid backed up and left the room. Once they'd exited I waited for Morgan to get out safely, then just as I was about leave I felt something rush past me. Once I got out I realized that the something was Kenji, making his sneaky rapid escape.

The Giant Rat King was too big to leave the room, and no individual rats followed us out, so we were safe in the corridor for now. Morgan handed potions to Sigrid and Lancelot, who had numerous cuts and gouges all over them.

“So what have we learned about rushing into things?” Morgan said, looking straight at Lancelot.

“You sound like your brother,” Lance said.

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“Yeah, well, it’s not like this is the first time you went cowboy and put the team at risk.”

“Okay, all right, fine,” Lancelot said, waving his hand dismissively. “I get it. No more rushing in guns a-blazing. So what are we gonna do then?”

“Should we give up?” Sigrid said.

Everybody looked at me again.

Why did they keep doing that?

“We could run away, I suppose,” I said, reaching into my inventory. “But we all know we’re not going to do that.” I started pulling out clear glass flasks full of a viscous liquid. “Personally, I’m really curious why such a strong monster is in there. What’s it guarding?”

“What’s in the bottles?” Sigrid said.

I tossed her a flask, which she caught deftly. “Basic Adventuring,” I said. “Always carry some oil.”

“What are we going to do with this?” she said, shaking it.

“This,” I said, hurling another flask into the room where it shattered against the Giant Rat King, spraying a section of its enormous body with glistening oil. Sigrid did the same with hers.

“That’s surprisingly satisfying,” she said.

“You think that felt good,” I said, “this is what I’ve been waiting for. I pointed my finger at the monster and said, “Pew!” A bolt of fire shot out like a bullet and struck the beast. It whooshed into flames. “Now that is what I call satisfying.”

The monster was big but slow. It had no way to douse the flames that spread across it, it could only prowl inside its room as charred dead rats started falling from the main body. Morgan grabbed a flask from me and tossed it. It hit the beast’s side and shattered, adding to the flames that burned it.

An unnamed observer really enjoyed that

“Gimme one of those,” Lancelot said, and I handed him another flask. It was fine, I had lots. Not like I was going to need them for all the lanterns I'd also packed, just in case; there wasn't a dark spot in this entire dungeon. He tossed it, and more fire erupted when it smashed against the Giant Rat King rump, spraying splashes of burning oil around the room. A few landed on the pile of crap, igniting it too.

“Aw crap,” I said. “I hope whatever treasure it was guarding isn’t flammable."

Morgan glared at Lancelot. “What?” he said. “You threw one too.”

The fire spread quickly over the Giant Rat King and it was soon completely ablaze, sending scorching flames as high as the ceiling. Intense heat poured through the doorway as it ambled around awkwardly, growing visibly smaller as more and more crispy rat corpses dropped from its bulk every second. Then, suddenly, its decline hit critical mass and the King collapsed into a jumble of individual Giant Rats. Dozens of them scurried in all directions, some still on fire, others smoking, but many of the rodents who’d been in the middle of the King’s body were still unscathed.

“What now?” Sigrid said.

“Back to the original plan, lure them into the funnel of death by the door.”

We took our positions outside the door, and I started firing more flame bullets into the room. The aggro worked, and the Giant Rats swarmed toward us. No more than two could get through at a time, and soon there was a pile of dead rodents filling the doorway as Sigrid and Lancelot hacked and slashed at anything that tried to get by. Eventually, the flood of vermin stopped, and after Sigrid bulldozed over the tower of rat corpses blocking the doorway so we could see inside, we found only a few of them left alive, all covered in scorch marks. Kenji scampered in and quickly dispatched them all while I went over to the smouldering remains of the rats’ nest and hosed it down with a jet of water.

Most of the nest had been burned. Sifting through the soggy ash and rubble, we found the ‘treasure’ the Giant Rat King had been guarding: a creche of baby rats, cooked to a crisp.

“No gold? No nothing?” Lancelot said, prodding a shriveled immature rat with his armored toe.

“It may not be a total waste,” I said, poking into an area that was less burnt than the rest. I reached into the debris with both hands and pulled out something pink the size of a housecat. It was a baby rat, and it was still alive.

Lancelot strode over, sword pointing forward aimed at the infant rat. I quickly snatched it away before he could stab it.

“What gives?” he said.

“Advanced Adventuring,” I said. “Always carry a bag of rats.”

“The bag of what?” Sigrid said, wrinkling her nose.

I pulled a sack from my inventory, then shoved the baby rat inside. “It’s a controversial dungeon-delving technique I have employed for years when playing tabletop RPGs,” I said, then reached into the mess and pulled out another live baby rat. Into the sack it went. “One for which I have been teased often in the past.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Morgan said. “Do we dare ask why you want a bag of rats?”

“They have innumerable uses,” I said, stuffing more baby vermin into my sack.

“If you say so.”

A curious observer wonders how this strategy will work

A thoughtful observer wonders if one can actually call this a strategy

An unnamed observer can't wait to see