Sitting around in a circle the dwarfs were digging into a pile of rat corpses. Picking out the ones that were salvageable and throwing away the ones not worth keeping. Those not kept were fed to Reaver’s animals to increase their growth and given to the chickens as feed.

Simply speaking they just had too many rats to get through to skin them all. They worked on the bigger rats first and decided to cook them in the pit fire. There were dozens of them causing each dwarf to work on one alone. They finished cleaning and beheading the rats so that the water mages could dry them out. The dwarfs would have felt good if there wasn’t a mountain of bodies still waiting for them to skin and harvest.

Uria looked around to see how stressed the dwarfs looked and decided on an order. “Except for enough rats for dinner, carry all the good bodies to the crystal for storage. We can skin the rest to eat later.”

“O-ok.”

“If you think so…”

Hearing it was Uria’s suggestion the dwarfs were not in the mood to sound excited after her sudden shift in tone leading to half-hearted responses. They kept one-fourth of the pile left behind and the dwarfs used buckets to carry the corpses into the area of the crystal. Urist was notified beforehand and mentally sent the bodies inside to be preserved.

With much less work to do, the dwarfs made quick work of the meat and started to prepare dinner. With so much meat, Urist bought 9 large bags of potatoes to go along with the stew that they were making. He did the math and figured a bag of potatoes could feed ten dwarfs averagely unless people invoked skills they needed double the food usually. He spent only 90 points to buy them all so for today they had saved money on food.

He felt good about saving points and even better when he noticed the usual point gained had doubled for reasons he wasn’t sure of.

‘Is this a bonus for killing all those rats?’ He thought offhandedly as he searched the marketplace while reading the chat to see how the rest of the world was faring. As he was exchanging information with another civilization leader Uroa walked into his room with a bowl of hot soup.

“Here is your soup boss. Umm, what happened to your cheek?”

“Ah thank you very much Uora and don’t worry about it, it’s something I deserved.” As he tried to reach out to grab the soup he noticed how slow and sluggish his movements were. He could feel the weakness in his bones as he tried to reach for the bowl only to feel light-headed and dropped his hands to the ground.

Helplessly, he looked up at the confused Uroa. ‘This is a little embarrassing, but can you feed me the soup? I can’t hold my hands up.”

Seeing the helplessness in her boss expression made her smile. Sitting down next him Uroa took a spoonful of soup and held it in front of him. Not embarrassed in the least Urist opened his mouth around the spoon and a sudden feeling welled up within him.

In a haze, he didn’t even chew and instead directly swallowed the spoonful of stew whole. That one bite had triggered the hunger he didn’t know he had suppressed mentally. Every fiber of his body suddenly screamed for more food to which he replied with a growl, “More food.”

Thrown off by her bosses sudden change Uroa didn’t stop shoveling food into his mouth until it was empty.

To which Urist roared, “More food!”

This led to Uroa running back and forth to feed Urist until he finished ten bowls of soup. After the tenth bowl, he was finally full and stopped Uroa from going to get another bowl. As he was about to say thank you, a wave of tiredness hit forcing him to close his eyes. Within seconds he was out cold, much to the surprise Uroa who decided to not wake him up.

...

And so time passed, the rock holdings were completed, two hundred bombs were made, everyone fed and the chores are done for the day the dwarfs turned in for the night. On guard duty stood three dwarfs instead of the usual two, to patrol the walls which were lit up by oxygen light crystals.

Together with the torches the guards could easily see in the night and would be ready to sound the horn in case the rats charged them. The night was eerily quiet like the morning before it, the sounds of birds and bugs are still gone from nature.

Fortunately, the three had grown used to the silence thanks to the three of them being on duty together. Unfortunately, these three and everyone else currently sleeping had no idea what the rats were truly capable in the night.

Just out of the light and earshot of the guardsmen, the rats were currently digging into the side of the mountain. Under the orders of the king, they made the tunnel efficiently to fit regular rats inside.

A few reasons why the rat king didn’t order for it to be bigger was because he wanted to use the rats stealthily to kill all the dwarfs before they awoke. Second, they were on limited time and couldn’t make the holes big enough for quarter rats to enter. And third, something was tugging on its mind to steal something inside the hated two-leggers possessed.

The Rat King didn’t know exactly what the item in question was, but something inside him pushed him. That if he acquired it, he would become the true king of this world given enough time.

With such forces compelling him and the thought of sweet vengeance, the Rat King rubbed his paws together. The thoughts had given him the best plan to kill two problems with one stone. Not only that, with each passing hour foreign knowledge entered his mind as it grew in size. Even as he oversaw the construction of the holes it didn’t stop him from eating his brethren’s brains and guts to grow even stronger.

It had to end it with him feasting on the brains of who had wounded him. Just the thought of revenge caused the King to drool causing it to once again dig into the pile of flesh.