“Wait,” June whispered. “I think we’re coming up on the nest.”

Neil stilled with the rest of the group, squinting into the darkness.

He saw nothing.

“How many?” Asked Jackie, readying her spear.

She tensed, gaze hunting through the darkness. Neil couldn’t see anything more than the back of her head, hair pulled into a tight bun.

“Less than two dozen,” June’s voice was grim, and her eyes serious. “More than a baker’s.”

“Can they see us?” Asked Jackie. “Smell us? Hear us?”

“Dunno, they’re all huddled together.”

“How far?”

June counted, eyes shining like garnets in the torchlight. “The end of the hall, eight cells down. Call it fifty-ish feet.”

Neil blinked. He could hardly see ten. Their light kissed the rusted iron cells on either side of the corridor, but went no further. Shadows crept and flickered beyond the bars, too small to be rats. Too small to be the rats they dealt with, at least.

Beyond, there was only darkness.

“Right,” Jackie nodded, taking this information in stride. “Peter and Thomas, you're with me on the vanguard. Keep your spears low, and hit anything that scurries. Anne’s got the torch, so Neil—keep her safe. If that light goes out, we’re dicked. June’s our eyes, and she’ll go where she’s needed. Everyone got it?”

Jackie nodded at each of them, and received nods in turn.

Neil held his poker in a double-handed grip, and scanned the darkness for movement.

He couldn’t see them. At that point, he didn’t need to, when he could hear them just fine. Pattering feet stormed beyond his vision while slithering tails snaked on the ground with an audible *hiss* of movement.

As they got closer, two sounds became more and more apparent. The first was the squealing, like contented pigs playing in the mud and rain. The second was the muted jostling, the oily churning of fur-on-fur from what Neil imagined to be a mountain of rats.

He was not far wrong.

The eyes came first. Mirrors of orange torchlight emerging from the darkness, far from the moon-colored blindness of their first. The eyes swarmed like an array of sparks, undefined and unbound by form, only by collective mass. The pile reached Neil’s chest, judging from the highest point of the stirring.

“Oh, Gods,” said Anne, horror in her voice.

The swarm of eyes froze, growing in size as they faced the intruding Heroes directly. There was a sound, like a croaking breath in Neil’s ear, echoing the rush and furious beat of his coursing blood. Half a moment passed with the weight of a hundred, until Neil simply couldn’t bear it.

“Would now be a bad time for a Jurassic Park reference?” Neil asked, baring his weapon like a baseball bat.

It was then that three things happened, close enough in sequence that—to Neil—it appeared simultaneous. The first was a shared look that both June and Peter gave him, as if to say, ‘yes, idiot, shut up.’

Jackie remained focused, saying in a calm voice, “Get rea—”

At the same time—Thomas took a single step back, lowered his head, and shouted, “Charge!”

As if taken by the same command—rats surged forward in a wave of fur, teeth, and fiery eyes. Neil stepped in front of Anne, iron ready.

The rodents trilled together—a noise almost like laughter—as Thomas waded into them, stabbing his spear haphazardly into their midst. Jackie and Pete immediately took steps away from each other, closing the gap in their formation.

Two amateurs with spears, however—even if they are very good amateurs—does not a wall make.

A rat dashed between them, putting distance between itself and the chaos Thomas stirred behind it. It threw itself, leaping upwards at the torch Anne was doing her utmost to hide behind, shielding her eyes.

Neil stepped to the side, shifted his elbows, and swung downwards with all the force his shoulders could bear.

Whatever sound iron makes against matted fur was quickly drowned out by the terrible scream of the wretched creature. An intense creaking sound, like sheering metal—reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard—carrying the weight of bestial pain and visceral hatred.

The rodent almost bounced against the ground, scrambling and hissing pathetically before scurrying away from rats and humans, both.

Neil watched it leave, a stab of alarm running him through as he asked himself: What kind of person hits an animal with a metal stick?

Thomas was screaming with barbarian rage, the stabbing function of his spear abandoned in favor of wild, sweeping swings. The large man had rodents nipping at his heels, with one notably biting into the fabric on his shirt, hanging on for dear life while Thomas spun like a drunken ballerina.

Another rat broke past Jackie and Pete, eyes glinting orange before a gleam of metal whistled past Neil, and a dagger sprouted between its eyes.

He glanced back. June had another dagger in her hands, pinching it by the blade as she prepared to hurl another. Her eyes were narrowed with deadly concentration, not leaving her next intended target.

Neil swung again as another rat approached, thrashing its way past Jackie and Pete’s spears. He grazed its right forepaw, sending it into a spitting fury. A shock of force ran up Neil’s arm as metal struck stone. He recovered quickly.

Neil struck it again in the head—dazing it—and again.

It yelped in pain—sounding all-too-much like a beaten dog—and scurried away from the fight.

“I’m not—” Neil swiped with his poker, not hitting another rat, but driving it back. “I’m not doing a whole lot of damage, here!”

He could hardly hear himself over the rodentian squealing ringing in his ears. He looked back at Anne. Her face was pale and bloodless, a rictus of fear and disgust. But not—he noted, with some amount of pride—physically hurt.

No one responded to his yell, though he was pretty sure Thomas was shouting something as well.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Booooosssss Fiiiiiiiiight!” The large man screamed, no longer whirling, but smacking his spear downward against a particular foe.

Neil couldn’t see the subject of Thomas’s ministrations, but the larger man’s eyes reflected burning elation and terror, both. His teeth were bared and clenched, a snarl and smile in one expression.

If Neil wasn’t looking at the man, he would have missed it. A rat—no bigger than the earthly variety—clung to the tip of Thomas’s spear, hanging on for dear life. He imagined that he could hear it over the chaotic din permeating the air—high and whining—warbling in tune with every ringing *clang* against the stone floor.

He could almost sympathize with the poor thing. He did sympathize with the poor thing.

“Incoming!” Yelled Thomas, raising his spear overhead in a two-handed grip, till the rat-tipped point nearly touched the ceiling.

Giant rats continued to scratch and claw at him, waist-deep in fur, teeth, and grabby little paws. The torchlight caught his face, glowing in his eyes like trapped embers, and he brought the spear down like a hammer.

“Hyagh!” The clinging rat detached—flying straight past Jackie and Pete—hitting Neil squarely in the arm.

It felt a little bit like getting hit in the arm with a softball, Neil thought—if that softball had teeth, claws, and strong opinions about being launched fifteen feet through the air. He yelped on first contact—he couldn’t help it—and dropped his poker like it was fresh from the fire.

Then he got a good look at it.

It was black. Not a very notable feature for a rat to have, Neil would admit, but this rat was black. Black. A living shadow, dipped in ink, coated in soot, and tarred with raven’s feathers. Black.

It hissed at him, scratching its way up his arm as he swatted at it with his bare hands. He could barely see it, the way it blended with the shadows cascading down the front of his body. Anne’s torch was behind him, stretching his shadow long down the corridor.

The rat was cold, and the scratches it left in his arm tingled with cloying numbness. In the chaos and carnage of slaughtered rodents, Neil didn’t think much of it, only acted on the impulse to—

‘Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!’ He finally grabbed the thing before it made its way to his face, and threw it to the ground.

The rat, contrary to Neil’s expectation, did not scurry away to be someone else’s problem. It splashed against his shadow—like a water balloon filled with ink—disappearing in a plume of umbral smoke.

Neil was quick to pick his iron poker back up, feeling for it in the expanding darkness, eyes wide in a frantic search for a scurrying creature hiding in the dark cloud. He did not find one.

The cloud drifted forward, blown by an unfelt wind, flowing around Neil as he swiped his poker ineffectually through it. The dark haze filled his vision, and he swung wildly downwards, hoping that he might hit something.

He didn’t. The cloud passed, disturbed but unabated. Towards Anne.

“Shit!” He yelled, over the screeching din. “Problem!”

It was all Neil could do to hope that someone knew what to do at that moment. He certainly didn’t. He could barely see the blonde through the miasma. Only her silhouette was visible, and the muted light of the torch she held aloft, as the aetherial shadows lapped around her like water.

Anne screamed, freezing the blood in Neil’s veins.

He could only watch, in muted horror, as the sinister cloud condensed around Anne’s elevated light, turning it from a bright orange-yellow to a dusky red, as the flame at the end of her torch was reduced to wavering embers, and then nothing.

Unquiet darkness reigned over the chaos in the dungeon hall. True darkness, not like the kind found in the heart of night, with the moon and the stars shining down. This was the dark of caves, of underworlds, of the yawning trenches at the bottom of the ocean. Dark.

“Anne!” He yelled in futility, crouching in a wide stance, feeling for more rats.

He was still wired with adrenaline, not taking the time to be scared. In want of anything else to do other than stumble blindly, he focused on senses other than sight.

His hands and face were hot with a rush of blood, clashing against the cool burning in the scratches on his arms and chest. Panicked energy radiated from his chest, urging him to do something.

What could he hear? Anne’s scream, undiminished. Chaos. Human grunts of exertion, barely audible under the screeching and hissing of rodentian malice. Thomas was still yelling in wordless barbarian rage, spear whistling through the air at an increasingly erratic tempo.

Smell? Other than dust and mold—metal. Possibly from the iron weapons or cell bars, more likely from the blood of a dozen dead rats.

A dim realization stirred at the back of Neil’s mind. A notion that he found truly bizarre.

He wasn’t afraid. He was excited. The cool rush of endorphins clashed against the burning ache in his muscles, and the tingling ice in his cuts, washing him in a feeling that bordered on pleasure—that bordered on ecstasy.

No—thinking he wasn’t afraid wasn’t quite right. He was… but he almost liked it.

Anne’s scream renewed—high and loud—a desperate cry for help that Neil meant to answer. He turned towards the scream’s origin just in time to regret it.

A star was born in the void-like dark.

Light dawned upon the dungeon, burning through the haze of unnatural darkness in a sinister red, then orange, then yellow, revealing and driving back the cloud of miasma, forcing it down to the floor, compressing it into the shape of an ordinary rat.

Water sprang from Neil’s eyes under the assault of light, and the Heroes gasped in wonder and awe.

Anne stood, wonder written across her face, torch abandoned and cast aside, delicately cradling a miniature sun in the palms of her hands. It burned a brilliant white, so intense that it appeared to run off Anne like a jet of fire, a miniature coronal mass ejection.

Neil only glimpsed it before he had to look away, spots dancing in his vision. His eyes fell, as if by coincidence, upon the shadowy rat which snuffed out the torch.

It was brown, now—though that may have just been a trick of the light. It stood on all fours, facing Anne, back arched high in the air as all its hairs stood on end. He imagined that it was scared, possibly even petrified.

More importantly, it was distracted.

Amazement at Anne’s… whatever it was that Anne was doing, aside—the adrenaline boiling in Neil’s stomachs urged him to take some kind of action that didn’t involve staring into a bright light like a dazed moron.

He raised his poker high, in a double-handed grip, taking a soft step forward towards the stunned, solid rat, and—

A shining blur of metal collided with the creature, sending it rolling away with a high-pitched squeal of pain. Its long-winded screech faded quickly into silence, bisected by a dagger with a cream-colored handle.

‘Damn it, June.’

“Let’s fucking goooo!” Thomas yelled, raising his spear over his head, holding it like a barbell.

The awe-inspired treaty of inaction was broken, as the rats answered Thomas’s call with their own piggish screams.

The light winked out of existence as suddenly as it appeared, leaving Neil blind and blinking.

“We could really use that light again!” Called Pete, voice straining.

“Uh—” Anne yelped a high note. “Okay?!”

Once more, light flooded the dungeon corridor, banishing shadows and assaulting senses. There Anne stood, staring into her impossibly bright light with wonder, unblinking and unflinching.

Neil forced his eyes from the scene, taking stock of the remaining rats. There were fewer, now—he knew that for certain. But how many fewer? A twitching hill of rats stood before Jackie and Pete, barricading them from Thomas, swinging wildly with renewed vigor.

Rats climbed over—or dug their way through—the hill, only to be skewered by the spear-wielding pair, adding to the pile’s mass. The twitching movement of several of the rats Neil could see might have been from the jostling of its brethren, or merely the final throes of death.

No more made it past Jackie and Pete, and—as suddenly as it began—the battle was over.