I felt a strangely strong urge to do as the notification asked, but with my willpower I was able to easily resist the effect. This must have been how it was able to command all of those rats, I highly doubted that even a single one of them had nearly as much willpower as me.

The Rat King stared at me for a few seconds expectantly before it screeched once again, although this time the sound was accompanied by a wave of force and light.

I stumbled back, losing my balance for a moment, and The Rat King gathered itself and began to scurry towards me. There were at least two dozen rats piled together and less than half of them were close enough to the ground to help moving at any one time, so most of their legs were waving around in the air uselessly.

It would have been comical if I didn’t know that this monster was likely much stronger than me, and was actively trying to kill me.

My Lightning sprang out of my hands and I began to bring it together in preparation for a Lightning Bolt, the strange rivers of Mana pulling in more Mana than they did the last time I used the skill.

By this point, The Rat King was still a few seconds away from being able to bite me, so I risked charging for a few more seconds, using up a third of my Mana in the process. The Lightning was beginning to form a sphere between my hands, its cyan glow overpowering the small amount of light coming from the torches on the surrounding walls.

As the Rat King reached just a metre away from me, something in its movements changed and I instantly unleashed the Lightning Bolt. The beam was larger than I’d expected, and at some points it seemed like the Lightning spilled out and struck randomly around it, but the majority of it stayed in line.

I thought that I might have been able to end the fight then and there but, strangely, the rats in front moved out of the way just in time to allow the Bolt to get past and strike the rock that held them all together. My first thought was that they wanted to destroy it so they could separate and attack from multiple angles, but the Bolt seemed to do absolutely no damage to it.

In fact, it did less than that. The rock pulsed and then burst into cyan light, sending waves of Mana up the tails of the rats. Their fur began to stand on end, and they let out a strange high pitched screech before all at once they stopped.

The rock was once again covered by the bodies of the rats, but now they looked different. Instead of the regular brown fur that I would have expected they’d changed to become the same cyan as the rock, and my Lightning.

“Shit,” I had nowhere to run. The tunnels behind me were all collapsed and judging by the scratch marks on the door the only exit to this room was barred from the other side. I either had to fight and win or die.

I felt a static in the air before The Rat King pounced at me, somehow managing to pull all of those rats through the air towards my torso. Moments before they landed on me, where they would most likely rip me to shreds, I managed to roll underneath them and run a few steps before turning around.

You would think that such a mass of rats would have trouble turning around, and you’d probably be right, but who said that it even needed to? There were rats on every side, after all.

From the other side, it looked like all of the rats were the same size, but from here I could tell that it was different. Well, it was mostly true except for one notable exception. A single massive rat that looked even bigger than the Shadow General was there, almost buried under the other rats.

If I were to guess, I’d say that this was the original and it somehow forced or convinced these other ones to form this with it. The large rat took one look at me and began to run at me, forcing the rest of them to run with it lest they be left behind.

Unfortunately, it would seem that I underestimated their speed because, in a burst of Lightning, the rat slammed into me. My ribs were safe because I hadn’t stopped at any point and had begun running to the side in the hopes of finding some kind of weakness, but my shoulder wasn’t so lucky. Something popped and I barely stopped myself from crying out in pain.

Reflexively, I spun around and slammed into the mass with my left arm that was as of yet unscathed and turned on Lightning Cloak for the moment I was swinging. The strike hit on the rats and, whilst the lightning didn’t do as much as I’d have liked, the rat was still killed and left hanging limp.

Strangely, the rest of the creature didn’t even seem to notice, and instead of reacting pounced at me once again. This time I was more prepared and sucked in a deep breath to calm my nerves before launching a Lightning Bolt at the closest rat to me. This time none of them moved out of the way to allow for the rock to absorb the attack so the rat I hit was also killed, and the momentum that the rest of them had built was reduced.

I just barely had enough time to crouch before the rats sailed over head, leaving us in almost the same positions as the start of the fight. I would have thought something about how it seemed we’d shared close to equal blows, but The Rat King didn’t seem to care and instead pounced once again.

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It sailed through the air, but I didn’t even need to dodge as its attempt completely missed me. But I didn’t let myself lower my guard, I’d thought something was easy only to be proven wrong far too often for me to not be cautious.

Turning around, I was proven right, as the creature was now standing in front of a small red rat that must have been able to squeeze through the rocks. Assuming that it was asking for reinforcements, I shot the small one with an uncharged Bolt, killing it instantly. For some reason, a few of the rats on The Rat King turned and looked at me mockingly, making some sounds that I could only assume were the rat equivalent of mocking laughter.I stood confused before the larger rat that I’d seen already snaked out of its confines and then literally swallowed the small rat whole! For a moment a red light shone from between the rats and they burst into flame, continuing to make the irritating laughing sound all the while.

What? Why did it do that? How?

My questions were cut short when the rats moved aside to reveal a burning ball of fire that had been forming around the rock. A rat on the other side of the pile did something, though the angle made it hard to tell, and the ball was sent flying through the air. As it travelled, instead of getting smaller as I expected it only grew in size until, at the top of its arc, it had at least tripled to become nearly the size of my torso.

Hoping that it wouldn’t backfire, I shot a Bolt at it. The Lightning wrapped around the ball for a moment before I guess it disturbed something inside and the thing detonated. I was too close to it so the entire front of my body was burned and I felt more than saw my travelling cloak fall to the ground.

Whilst I wasn’t actively on fire, the burns hurt, and it took all of my Willpower not to lose focus. Taking deep breaths helped, but only to a certain degree, so I was still left on the back foot and struggling to keep my vision from swimming.

Could that have given me a concussion? I feel like I was more hurt by the explosion than the fire.

For all that I was in pain, The Rat King looked to have it a lot worse. It must not have expected that I would be able to detonate the fireball early, I certainly didn’t, so it didn’t have any particular defences against fire. Not only that, but it was much closer than I was, so it took much more of the blast. Several of the closest rats were charred and hanging limp, probably dead, and several more were severely injured.

Despite my own injuries, and against what little common sense I had left, I grinned. The fight wasn’t looking nearly as bad now that I knew it couldn’t just freely absorb attacks.

I shot a Bolt at it, just to test its response so I didn’t bother to charge it, and a few of the rats barely reacted fast enough to move out of the way and allow the bolt to be harmlessly absorbed by the rock.

Or that’s what I expected to happen at least. At the beginning of the fight it looked like they were perfectly in sync, but after just a few attacks the rats were panicking and not working together in the slightest. Because of that, it seemed like some of the rats were building up another fireball, which was disrupted by my Lightning Bolt.

It wasn’t nearly as significant as the first explosion, but most of the rats were displaced in a burst of flame, and I could see that one was brutally torn from the rock and quickly died from… something.

This is beginning to look a lot more manageable.

I raised my arms to the sides and dimmed my Lightning before saying, “I thought that a King would be more competent than this, are you even really trying?” I don’t know what compelled me to taunt the rats, but my head was spinning and the fact that it barely seemed to be functional may have made me a little cocky.

Regardless of my reasoning, The Rat King didn’t seem to actually understand me but it clearly understood the intention behind my words, and quickly gathered itself back up and combined all of its voices into one massive, fiery, screech. It was like a wall of flame that I had no doubt would be impossible to avoid.

I panicked until it had nearly reached me, and then held my hands up to at least protect my face from the flames. The shout washed over me, burning what remained of my clothes and agitating the burns I already had even further.

The Rat King seemed pleased that it was able to inflict yet more pain on me, so it took a few seconds to chitter and squeak in a way that I thought must have been copying my taunt from earlier. Of course, I wouldn’t let its laxness go unpunished, just as it did for me, and began charging my Lightning Bolt, forcing the rivers to flow as fast as I could in order to get as much mana into the bolt as I could.

Within a few seconds I had used up almost all of my remaining mana, leaving roughly a tenth in the hopes that I wouldn’t have the same backlash as the last time I did something similar, and the sphere was looking much more impressive. Arcs of Lightning licked my hands as I struggled to keep it together, and it seemed to be struggling to maintain its shape as a sphere.

I knew that this probably wasn’t the smartest idea, but I was all out of those after the first one, so I let out an unintelligible scream and pushed the ball towards The Rat King. It seemed confident and simply moved the rock back in the way of the attack, but once it saw the beam it seemed to change its mind. Of course, I’d been doing some thorough testing and knew that a few rats weren’t able to outrun lightning.

The beam was half as thick as my torso, and was far from the smooth cylinder that I’d been able to produce at lower power. Much of the Lightning shot out from the sides, a lot of it even managed to curve back and scorch parts of my already burned skin, but there was still a clear centre where the light looked more white than cyan.

Combat Cleared

1 Minor Flare Rat [Level 3] Defeated

1 The Rat King [Level 22] Defeated

Reached Level 13

Incredible Feat Accomplished

You Have Earned The Feat [King Slayer]

Please Choose A Stat To Increase Willpower

Wisdom

Strength

Agility

I must have blacked out for a second there, because all I remembered after that was walking away from a pile of charred corpses holding the white rock that had once connected the rats. It was glowing cyan and arcing off small zaps, more of a static shock than anything, but that was already beginning to fade.

The door was right there in front of me, after all these hours, and I wasn’t about to pass out before I got there. I tried to push it open, but that didn’t work and there was no handle, so my only option was to knock and hope there was someone on the other side.

Once I knocked thrice I heard hushed whispers before someone in iron armour hesitantly pushed open the door. Once they saw me they gasped and opened it fully before pulling me in.

I began to feel incredibly tired and my eyes were drooping, but I had to say just one thing before I went to sleep.

“There’s a buncha rats, in th’ sewer,” I didn’t get the words out quite right, but I was already halfway asleep so I didn’t care to say them properly before sleep finally took me.