Chapter 15: In the Hall of the Rat King - Part I.

It was as generic a tavern as it gets. I even questioned if I didn’t, somehow, end up in a game of DnD. Anyway, tables, chairs, the few individuals drowning their sorrows or just enjoying a good buzz after a day of work (even though it was basically morning), and the occasional strange appearance or two. Like that minotaur hiding in the dark corner for some reason. I guess minotaurs were another sapient race, but didn’t inquire this thought further.

There were no windows to speak of. The only light coming in was from oil lanterns and the fireplace, casting their collective orange glow around while still letting darkness overtake some of the tables—excellent places for shady businesses.

Then there was, of course, the bartender. However, instead of a visibly beer-loving fellow cleaning a glass perpetually, there stood a pretty young gryphon who kept smiling for some reason, giggling every now and then as if remembering a joke.

I sat at one of the darkness-devoured tables while Paul went ahead and began the job hunt with the various sad or otherwise troubled individuals. Most told him to piss off if their tone was anything to go by, some just exchanged a few words, some just shook their heads. There weren’t that many people talking at this time of day, which meant I could overhear their conversations even though I didn’t really understand what they were talking about.

What was that? A catch, perhaps? One smaller gryphon, after being approached by Paul, started laughing hysterically. That is, until Paul pointed at the me, which was probably my cue to do something really tough. Like, crossing my arms or something like that while scowling extremely.

Now that he’d sized me up, an unknown creature that looked, and thus obviously had to be, tough, he scratched a small puff of dense feathers under his beak – a strange form of beard – before nodding slightly. He got up and was slowly escorted to my, and as such by extension Paul’s, table. This was good, hopefully.

Paul sat down and so did the fellow. The two of them engaged in a battle of wits or something. Me? I was just a spectator on the sideline, trying to still look tough. Man, my neck and jaws began to hurt from all the tension I was putting them under to channel my inner thug life.

Ooh, money! The good gentle… man? Gryphon? Whatever. This gentleman was obviously in a good mood with how much he gave us. Or, rather, tempted us with. Instead of giving us the pay, he took a small portion from the offered pouch full of shiny, shiny coins, and handed them to Paul. The rest he tucked away again.

Ah, a cash advance, then. Get the job done, you get payed in full, all that jazz.

The nice fellow soon picked all his feathers and shambled out of there still slightly under the effect of glorious alcohol. Well, at least we had some money now. Not much, however, even that is more than what we had a minute ago.

I high-fived Paul and we soon left that gloomy place behind. After scouring the town a little more, while obviously not being spied on by two certain guards, we found an empty, wooden bench we soon were sitting on.

“Good?” I asked him finally.

He just smirked enthusiastically before reaching into his massive backpack. After this dangerous plunge he pulled out a paper and some ink. Then he yanked a small feather from his wings. Promptly, Paul became an artist as he drew what couldn’t be said in words.

What it basically was:

A picture of a rodent, rat or something like that, followed by a big plus and the picture of a sword sticking out of an obviously dead rodent (‘x’s for eyes were a universal thing for dead things even in this world, I guess). All of that equals a bag of money. Yay.

So, hunting rats. Easy enough. It wasn’t anything… complicated or anything like that, which was good. But really, hunting rats? Could we get a more generic job than that? Well, I guess we could had been tasked to hunt mudcrabs…

“Where?” I asked him. Strangely enough, he didn’t point at any house. Rather, he unfolded our map and pointed at the foot of one of the hills just outside of this town. Weird. Perhaps a supply cave overrun with rats? Someone’s cellar or something? A breeding ground for the local populace of rodents? Whatever. They’d soon cease to inhabit this plane of existence.

Without much else to do but look like homeless people, we decided with a single, serious nod that we would set upon our mighty task immediately. Gryphon heads turned as we left the town on the other side than we entered.

Just at the edge of it, though, we turned around and waited. Waited as two completely inconspicuous ninja guards appeared as if they magically sensed our leaving the town. Well, we wouldn’t want to dash their hopes of becoming secret agents, now would we?

Carefully approaching us, they handed us back our axes before quickly flying away to, presumably, spy on us again.

Paul and I just shrugged at each other before going in the direction Paul’d indicated on map.

The cave was rather underwhelming, barely high enough for me to stand in. The entrance was obviously hidden, or at least someone tried to hide it, but failed miserably. Though, I did question if we ended up in the right place. It was quite devoid of anything, appearing as a generic cave entrance to me. The ground seemed a little scratched in places, but again that could just be a natural thing.

In any case, I unsheathed my axe and undid the cloth covering my crystal lamp, which I held in my left hand. A brilliant white light with a tinge of blue flooded the cave to reveal that the whole thing sloped downwards deeper into the bowels of the earth.

“Joy,” I sighed joylessly, before taking the first step inside, careful not to slip. Paul followed closely behind, his cleaver-axe-alldestroyer held in his beak, nomming on the cured leather handle. Being quadrupled must have sucked so bad.

Though it felt like forever, but was actually only half a minute, the cave began to even out and enlarge, no longer inducing claustrophobic feelings. Which was good, I guess, by the way Paul seemed to be more comfortable now.

Still, no rats, nothing. Just a… well, natural cave was probably not true. The more we walked the more it occurred to me that nature couldn’t make such a perfectly straight cavern. Soon, my thoughts would prove true.

The first screech almost painted my pants brown as a small thing charged me from the darkness. It was small, its head coming up to just below my knee. The creature was dressed in rags and in its little claws it held a piece of sharpened stone set into a thick stick. The thing was obviously struggling to hold this great burden.

The creature itself looked like a rat, but with a cup of anthropomorphism and half a spoon of human intelligence baked into it. If it really tried, it could probably do much more than incoherent screeching. But it didn’t seem like it wanted to expel such effort and energy into being more human-like. Not like it knew about humans, anyway.

The rat creature took about ten seconds (long enough to for me to look at Paul and shrug) to reach me. I just sidestepped and stuck out my leg, tripping him. The poor creature hit its head and didn’t get up.

Before I could even blink at the now unconscious body, Paul finished the job with a swift jerk of his head.

“Oh,” I voiced out my slight surprise as Paul just looked at me questioningly. Sometimes I forgot he was a predator like every gryphon.

I was breathing hard, the axe hanging limply in my right hand with the lantern hanging loose from the fingers of my left hand. Real fighting wasn’t all that awesome as movies would lead you to think. No, real fighting was terrifying and really exhausting. One wrong move and you were dead, just like that. A lifetime of creation snuffed in the blink of an eye.

A screech went down the cavernous hallway from somewhere ahead of us.

“Again?” I asked almost at the verge of breaking down and just dying. I could barely move my limbs.

There, from the darkness beyond the cleansing light of my lamp, came scuttering another of those things.

It was fast. Too fast for tired ol’ me.

However, Paul being the awesome gryphon he was, was tired only mildly, and as he must’ve seen my unwillingness to defend myself from this pest he rushed quickly to my side with a familiar looking, though now bloodied cleaver-axe hybrid in one of his claws.

Paul swung the axe just barely above my hunched back and head as I crouched to avoid the creature’s attack, and right into the ugly mug of that rat asshole.

A sickening crack echoed around the hallway mixed in with Paul’s shout of ferociousness. The creature flew a good few metres back to where it came from, this time, however, in two pieces. Paul didn’t even bat an eye. Perhaps he wasn’t as innocent as I’d thought.

No matter that, served the ratling right, trying to sucker punch a defenseless opponent.

Like you never sucker punched anyone, my consciousness reprimanded me, not missing the irony and hypocrisy of my own words. Don’t blame me, it’s not like I had much of a chance in a straight fight. I wasn’t really buffed. Humans are also fragile creatures compared to the monsters and beasts walking the face of this Earth. I’d decided to call it Earth, until I could learn the real name of this place. Sucker punching, in other words, was an unquestionable tactic for me. Ending fights before they begin and such.

I slumped to my knees, breathing heavily. Freaking ambushes hiding in the shadows of a large cave, man. And there were only eleven of them. Hopefully, that was all there was, otherwise it seriously wasn’t worth the money. But, by the last screeching, there had to be.

“Shit,” I breathed out, looking at the upper half of my left arm. One of those bastards managed to bite me, sinking its blackened teeth filled with a hundred diseases into my flesh. If I didn’t contract a single illness, you could all fall on your knees and worship my name, because I’d be the most miraculous, luckiest guy on this planet.

Well, now we knew where the money would go. Hopefully they had one of those nice hospitals somewhere, with pony magic and stuff.

Taking the cloth I’d previously had tied around the lantern, I wrapped it around the wound tightly. Would have to be enough for now.

After taking a breather while not being bothered by more rats, I decided we would still go forward, just to make sure those were all the rats we had to kill. We’d need the money, and risking not completing the task entirely would be foolish.

Paul and I shambled onward through the now once again narrow cave. There were clear signs everywhere pointing out the heavy usage of this hall. It was probably mined out by the rat things, as the whole cave didn’t look natural at all now.

We didn’t notice the orange glow because of our lantern until we were near it. The narrow cave suddenly ended and opened into… well, now I felt like I’d ended up in Moria.

The cavern was gigantic, probably the entire mountain was hollow for something like this to even exist. There were torches everywhere, illuminating the entire complex of grottos in its glory. A huge ravine divided two sides of the mountainous cave, so much that I could barely see the bustling activity at the other side of it.

I immediately hid the lantern under my shirt. Hopefully it was enough so that none of the billion ratlings that were all over the place had noticed us.

Not daring to even whisper, I looked at the completely terrified Paul. We both stared each other in the eyes, in unison deciding that fuck it, this shit wasn’t worth a billion whatever the local currency was, and we backed into the narrow cave again. Of course, nothing ever worked in our favour as my ears picked up the unmistakable scuttling of feet and claws against stone from the direction whence we came.

How the hell did they get behind us? The entire time there were no turns or entrances to other caves. Didn’t matter now. What mattered was that we were utterly fucked.

There was another loud screech. Someone, or rather something had found the corpses.

No, no, no, no, no! My mind went into overdrive. Perhaps there weren’t that many of them. Perhaps we could fight our way through outside.

Those perhapses were drowned in a sea of improbability like a tsunami snuffs out a campfire. Dozens of rats appeared in the light of their own torches, running toward us, but the narrow cave enabling for only a slow jog.

Dropping any pretenses at stealth, I screamed like a little girl, “Run! Fucking run!”

I’d never ran so fast in my life. I mean, there was this time when I was running just for fun, trying to build up some stamina when this cute girl joined me all of a sudden. She was running faster than me, and without any apparent effort. Of course, my manliness wouldn’t take it and made me go faster to the point of almost getting a heart attack. However, it was worth it. Yes, very much so. We ended up together for a few glorious months.

Anyway, I digress. We hightailed it out of there and we ended up backing into the enormous cavern. Looking behind me, I didn’t notice the end of the cliff until it was almost too late. My feet barely managed to stop at the very edge of of it, all while I swore profusely, my arms swinging around trying to not lose balance.

Paul didn’t care about my efforts to not fall to my death, though, as he just rammed me, throwing both of us over the edge and into the life-incompatible depths below. My curses turned into incoherent screaming. Man, I’d never screamed so hard before.

Of course, there was this time when I almost lost my vocal chords when I broke up a spider nest. Fuckers went scurrying and jumping everywhere, including onto me.

You know what? Compared to that, this wasn’t really so bad.