"Silthen, I am one hundred percent positive that dog was Awakened." Aitra insisted with a huff, gesturing to the entrance of the Bone Pits to their right with her kite shield.
"It literally just walked out of the Bone Pits while looking like something an [Animator] raised from the grave, then proceeded to break through my level sixteen [Control Beast] spell like it was tissue paper, then clearly activated something and ran! Also, its eyes were glowing, if you had looked at it you would know. It's either a doppelganger, or a decently leveled Awakened!" She reasoned, feeling like she was a moment's away from just walking away to find the damn dog herself.
Silthen groaned as he ran a hand through his brown hair, his eyes half-lidded from annoyance, then spoke, gesturing with his hands.
"Aitra, okay. Even if it is, what do you expect us to do? Chase after some small dog in a goddamn labyrinth Dungeon city? We're more likely to get lost trying to get the damn thing for you, we don't have a tracker, and The Factory teleporters open soon and we might lose our chance to be among the first batch going in. And even if we did get it, what the hell would you do with it? You're a [Spirit Summoner], not a [Corporeal Summoner], and you won't be for likely another couple years. You want us to just lock the thing in our inn rooms until it's able to have enough intelligence not to hinder or outright get us killed in the Dungeon?"
Curse him and his reasonableness!
"We could at least sell it to some fat fuck noble for a couple hundred gold crowns! That's multiple times more than we'd make by killing some weak ass golems and digging their cores out!" She protested, inwardly drooling over finally having a little bit more change in her pockets.
For a moment, her teammates' eyes light up a bit, appearing skeptical for the first time, only to be shot down by Silthen again.
"If. We catch it. If we don't get lost, then there's the fact that we're not going to get any levels on our Paths or progress for our Skills by chasing some starving mutt around like idiots. We're not chasing it, that's final."
Ankhan, the feather-headed Corfid, nodded. "Yeaaaaaaaaaaah, I'm with Silthen on this one. I can barely find my way back to our inn even after a week, and every time I leave I feel like I'll turn a corner and turn around to find a wall behind me. This place is a goddamn maze. Also… the locals are fucking scary. Have you seen how they glare at us?"
Nakim snorted from atop her crate, where she was swinging her legs back and forth, her innumerable needles, darts and daggers so well concealed even Aitra couldn't tell where she'd shoved them into this time.
"No, they glare at you, because you look like a rich boy peacock. Nobody gives a shit about you down here unless you look or act rich or annoying, and you act and look like both."
"It's not my fault I'm dashing. I'd look like a king wearing a potato sack." Ankhan shrugged, and Aitra watched Nakim's teeth grit, her fingers tensing with the desire to throw a dart into his forehead.
While she didn't share the animosity Nakim had for Ankhan, she could agree that he was if nothing else, making them look bad in the eyes of the locals. Wearing a gaudy brigandine colored bright red in the dirty slums was already stretching it, layering on a cape for no reason was just making him look like a prick. Especially considering that the only reason they were down here was because the teleport distance was shortest here, and thus the cheapest, only being one silver per person to enter.
Maybe if he was a high level adventurer it wouldn't seem as pretentious, but he definitely couldn't back up his wealth with power. He had no notion of 'saving' and it seemed like that extended to more than just conserving his mana.
Being the youngest member of the team however, and already feeling a bit chastised after being denied the chance to find that Awakened dog, she said nothing.
She just couldn't get over how quickly they just discarded the idea of capturing that little stray. As an aspiring [Corporeal Summoner], a dog was the perfect thing to bind as a first summon.
When the old Academy found a way to breed the [Devourer] skill out of wolves, followed by the systematic annihilation of said wolves, things had been smooth sailing between the newly made creatures called 'dogs' and humans. Until a couple centuries later, where through the selective breeding, or perhaps some other factor, it was theorized that they were too far from their origins in the eyes of the system, and that changed their Awakening requirements so much and so drastically that nobody could figure out what they even were anymore, or if most dogs were just locked out of the system by default.
Humanoids roughly tended to have to reach a certain level of intelligence, which everyone but the most mentally disabled could pass by the time they were six or seven years old.
Dragons were just born with access to the system, seen as animals, people, and monsters, because the world was unfair.
Dogs?
Nobody knew, and that was part of what made an Awakened dog so valuable. There were plenty of other tamed creatures for people to bond with, or create summons out of, but none were ever so compatible and easy as dogs. They were literally made to be companions to humanoids, unlike a raptirid, any one of the various species of elemental salamanders, or the tiny thraklings that people were hankering after just for the pride of having something that was sort of like a wyvern or a drake on their shoulder, if about the size of a small dog.
They were all fine and all, but they were difficult, and Paths that dealt with summons, familiars, or god forbid, soulbonds, they all had the common issue of the bond between the human and the animal they were with.
Raptirids were smart little bastards, but they were greedy as hell, had a nasty temper, and were more than a little difficult to control. You couldn't chastise them too much without building resentment, and they felt entitled to rewards even if they knew they didn't do the command right. They were also overactive, every minute of sleep being paired with twenty minutes of constant yelling and flying about. You had to have a damn leash on them at all times or risk losing them the first couple years. And despite their intelligence, it was extremely rare for a raptirid to genuinely bond with their owners, limiting the communication and teamwork of the summon severely despite their natural predatory abilities.
Salamanders had the opposite issue. They were extremely easy to bond with, but they were stupid, and barely did anything. Getting a fire salamander to spew a bout of flammable liquid at something hostile was an exercise in futility if it wasn't feeling directly threatened. You had to have a low power control spell on them constantly, or else they wouldn't feel the tiniest bit motivated to move. They were pretty cute though.
And thraklings were like raptirids, if you made them twice as big and gave them the attitude of a psychotic pyromaniac.
A standard dog was perfect. It was weak on the spectrum of available summons, especially when technically there were thousands of different animals one could get, but they were by far the most stable and reliable. They absolutely adored their owners if they were treated well, and that bond let them flawlessly communicate and understand the summoner without even a word being spoken, almost like a permanent telepathy spell. Paired with some Skills like [Elemental Summon Infusion], they could be a surprisingly diverse companion, able to act as artillery, infantry, or a shock troop, rushing in and out of battle with [Haste] buffs and shields.
She was still far away from becoming a [Conjurative Summoner], but she still felt like she'd just lost an amazing opportunity. For a stray to either have learned [Peace of Mind] or [Mental Resistance] at a level where it could break her spell so easily, it must have been absurdly strong for its age and size.
Maybe if she hadn't relied on her Skills so much and approached the little thing with some meat in her hands, that whole fiasco could have been avoided.
She sighed as she leaned back against a metal wall, wondering when the doors would open and they'd get to step through the teleporters so she could let out some of her frustration by throwing spirits at the golems.
Thinking about The Factory definitely didn't help her mood, unlike what she'd expected. She had been to other dungeons before on the opposite end of the world, but comparing them to The Factory was downright insulting, in both size and complexity. This place was the size of several small countries, without factoring the actual country sitting on top of it.
And they were going to go straight inside very soon.
It was a little terrifying, the fact that the Bone Pits were so lethally toxic that they had to build warded military facilities around all the entrances to the active floors of the Dungeon below, with the only way in or out being a bunch of teleport platforms and portals. The possibility of something breaking the teleport magic and the purification wards would all lead to a scenario where they would be stranded in a dead, city-sized labyrinth of metal covered in poison fumes from top to bottom, or at best, stuck in a warded facility, waiting for rescue as food supplies dwindled.
Not that any unfortunate fate waiting in the dungeon would be much better, but thankfully, few were psychotic enough to go lower than the topmost active floor of The Factory, and her team wasn't a part of that small percentage.
When the wolf woke, it was around the time the light crystals would dim, in what it assumed humans did to tell the time by counting light cycles. It stretched its forelegs and dipped low to the ground with a jaw-popping yawn. During its nap, it had confirmed that roughly three fourths of the human still remained as a blob of gore stored… somewhere, and had tried to prod around its body to better understand how it worked, to varying success. It had tried to toughen up the insides of its throat, but even during the process it somehow knew that it wouldn't be much of a change, and would increase chances of inflammation, making it choke, so it dropped the idea quickly.
It turned and walked through the open area, most of the humans congregating around the wooden carts and going in and out of the glass-covered buildings as they gave things to each other, allowing it a surprising amount of ease in its navigation.
Yet, as it went to curve around some female human's legs, the woman crouched low on her ankles, her coat pooling around her feet, extending an open hand towards it, palm up. The wolf stopped in its tracks, curious yet cautious, and as it examined the woman, she reached into the basket she was holding under her other arm, and with a bit of fiddling, pulled out something vaguely white and…
Smelling like food. Good, human food.
Then she held it out to the wolf, making some odd sort of cooing noise.
The wolf eyed the taller human female standing behind the woman as she looked around, wary but not nervous or aggressive, and it decided to go for the food. Extending its neck out as far as possible, and with its legs in a half-crouch, it slowly sniffed the delicious scent of the fluffy yellow-white food, the human's hand, and even proactively set [Bloodrush] in a corner of its mind to be used if the female tried something.
As its teeth closed around the edge, it made them not cut and only pierce a little, and quickly dragged the piece of food out of her hands, and chomped it down in a single bite, licking its chops. The woman moved the corner of her lips up, and cut out another piece, which the wolf ate with increasingly less suspicion, until it barely sniffed them before throwing them down its gullet, and until it was eating out of the human's hands.
The taller female glanced at them, and her expression tightened.
"My lady, please do not debase yourself by letting mangy, dying mutts lick your hands."
The woman moved her shoulders up and down once as she reached for an entire loaf of the white stuff, and laid it down just below her knees, extending an empty hand towards it, which it licked once, twice, and then nosed in gratitude, before quickly moving forward to take the food away from the woman by stabbing a canine through the corner and dragging its body back. With its eyes on the women, it pinned the food with its paws and started tearing it apart with gusto.
"Katherine." The woman started softly. "Can you not see that its eyes are glowing? Don't alarm it." She added on quickly as the wolf continued staring at them, biting chunks out of the rapidly diminishing food in front of it.
The woman in the back suddenly nailed her gaze on it, and it stiffened slightly, its lightly wagging tail going rigid.
"Awakened." The woman in the back breathed out. "Or something an [Animator], [Infuser], or some type of summoner lost."
The woman in front bobbed her head, then extended the basket behind towards the tall woman, who quickly took it. She muttered something, and a thin film of white covered the hand the wolf had been eating off. Then, just after the wolf finished the odd rectangle of food, she extended an open hand towards it, and the wolf tilted its head as it licked its chops. After staring at it for a moment, it moved forward, gently nosed it, and started wagging its tail as the human got closer, rubbing its snout, head and under its chin.
Humans were dangerous and scary, but if they were nice, the wolf loved nothing more than to let one pet it. After getting progressively filthier and bigger, that quickly happened less and less frequently, so even if it kept its eyes open and [Bloodrush] in its mind, it luxuriated in the hands of the human quite easily.
"What do you wish to do? Do you want me to capture it?" The woman in the back questioned the one on the front, who shook her head side to side.
"No, we will do precisely nothing. You know that even if I brought this little guy home, they'd take him from me and give him to my father, or brother. Can't have the bastard child running around with an Awakened guard dog by her side. I'm just going to heal it a little, and leave it alone. Someone that actually lives down here could use its companionship more. And, we still have to visit the red light district and the orphanages."
She spoke softly as she scratched, an oddly pleased air about her, and the woman behind her bobbed her head mutely.
After a couple moments of the wolf enjoying a pleasant head massage by the odd human, she put her fingers onto its infected ear, and before it could even flinch, an odd tingling sensation washed over both its surface and its insides, and a moment later, the pain vanished as the dog jumped back, startled. Neither of the two humans moved as it moved one of its paws to gently poke its ear, finding that it still hurt, but less than before, and all the itchiness had disappeared.
Hesitantly, it approached the crouching human that hadn't moved, and nosed her hand. She touched its foreleg this time, and the wolf watched in fascination as the scabbed wound healed a thousand times faster than normal, its skin visibly growing to cover and consume the scabs until all that was left was the faint marks of a scar.
Although still guarded, the wolf let the human poke its ear a couple more times, each time making it less painful and itchy, until eventually, it was barely able to feel anything. Relative tingles of numbness, sure, but that was all.
"Alright, let's go." The woman in front of it said, and regretfully retracted her hands, the odd white film over her hands disappearing into thin air as she brushed her paws down her extra coat of skin that hung loose down to her ankles. "Used up a lot more mana than I expected, so let's take our time for me to recover a bit."
The woman in the back bobbed her head, and they turned around to leave.
The wolf followed for a bit, both curious and hoping that if it bumped its nose into the food basket enough, the human would give it more food, but eventually, the woman turned and barked out a "No!", and the wolf cowered back, knowing that it had pushed the human's patience.
Adding that round open area into its mental map of the human's nest, it stalked through the streets, for some reason drawing a lot more stares and double-takes than it was used to. It sped up, moving as far away from human noises as possible, and made its way to the trash area of the human's nest, where humans would throw unwanted stuff into a large pit that periodically made everything disappear. The rats with their small bodies could stuff themselves in and out of bags quickly, allowing them to easily traverse the human's waste, something the wolf could not do.
But the rats tended to mostly steer clear of the large, turning gears that crushed the waste bags, staying on the more stable ground around the base of the hole, where the occasional human would go and check up on the machinery down there.
Of course, the only way to get to the bottom was by walking down a giant spiraling staircase, at least for itself, so that was where it headed.
Following the more foul-smelling pipes for human waste tended to lead to the waste pits, or at least relatively close to them, as humans separated their bodily waste and other waste, for some reason.
As long as it gave the wolf a vague sense of direction, it didn't particularly think about it too much.
The usual sights flit by its eyes as it wandered around. Humans mating in alleys, some fighting and killing each other in very similar alleys, rowdy giant groups of humans howling together and knocking together some metal liquid holders, gathered around some odd boxes and machines that spewed distorted sounds and melodies, the occasional spot where humans would give each other things stuffed between living blocks, until eventually, its eyes turned to an alley much like any other, and recognized by smell that it had found its mark.
The fact that the alley led into a small protruding walkway of metal without a railing, but some strange hooks, framing a gargantuan cube-shaped hole definitely helped. It moved out of the way of some human as he pushed a foul-smelling cart towards the hole, and watched curiously as it put the hooks around one of the two pipes on the bottom of the wheeled cart, and then pushed the cart over the edge, the trash spewing into the hole while the cart stayed upside down just under the walkway.
A very sturdy one, thankfully.
The human yanked a lever on the side the wolf hadn't noticed, and the hook curled into the platform, placing the cart back to its spot, and the owner simply grabbed it and moved past it once more.
Well, it had definitely found the trash pits.
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.
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