Thump, thump.

They were barely noticeable. Certainly, they had been completely disguised by Elsie’s steps before. There was a pattern to the way a child skipped, and whoever—whatever— made that noise had picked up on it.

And yet, when Elsie and I stopped moving, the lightest of taps became deafening in the silence of the tunnels.

One would expect some form of sound in any situation. Of course, there was the faint inhale and exhale of breath from Elsie and me, but other than that the tunnels were absolutely deprived of any form of sound. For a place said to be infested with rats, I would have expected small noises and signs of life; the hum of insects, the scuttling of rat feet, even a drip of water, but there was absolute silence.

So what made those thuds? If it lived down here, there would be nothing to eat. I motioned for Elsie to stay still and quiet, but my ears picked up absolutely nothing. There was not the slightest sound of something that breathed.

“What was that?” Elsie whispered, displaying a fearful expression I had never yet seen on the child’s face. Although her voice came out as the smallest whisper, the emptiness of the “sewers” we were in made whispering useless. The drop of a pin could be heard from a mile away in this eerie emptiness.

“I… I am not sure.” What exactly did we know about this job? Was this really a sewer? “I feel as though we should head back to the surface and ask questions before returning. Something feels off about this.”

“The poster just had drawings of rats though. And the shark lady didn’t act as though this was a hard quest.”

“Ellie, what does it mean that you are a platinum adventurer?”

“Huh, is that how it translates to English? Adventurer sounds pretty cool,” she remarked offhandedly, reminding me that we had typically been speaking in Xamxa. “Anyway, I just have the title because Carter needed me to be platinum to join his prissy team, so I got some powerful artifacts a long time ago. It means I am a powerful monster hunter who can take on the harder quests. Oh…” She finally caught on.

“So if you asked for a hard quest..?”

“I guess she assumed I could read rank levels. Uhm… at least that means better pay!”

“We don’t have any fancy artifacts, Elsie. We need to get back to the surface and think up something else,” I said, turning around to escape.

But there was no entrance behind me. Just a giant glowing wall that seemingly appeared in the moments we had been talking. In fact—I looked around and realized that the whole room seemed to have changed in some why. Even the tunnel behind Elsie, which we had been walking towards a moment before, had disappeared.

“Where the fuck did the exit go?” I asked, more rhetorically than anything. I didn’t even think to care that I swore in front of my five-year old charge. I didn’t have time to think of it, since at that moment the fucking wall body slammed me.

You know, before venturing into a spooky sewer system, I really should have at least gotten some kind of weapon. A nice sword, a shield, even a fucking tree branch would be helpful in this situation.

“Elsie! Use your magic!” I screamed as more chunks of the wall (?) started leaping at me. No—that was not a wall. As I kicked them off me I tried to look at them better. It was hard to see with the bright light they emitted from their skin, but they were definitely rodents.

“These are the rats?! Why didn’t someone tell us they glowed?!” I shouted. “Elsie..? I could use your help…”

I only heard the last few words, whispered under her breath, when I was covered with a force field like the one she used earlier against the crocodile monster. I didn’t have time to thank her, though, since a few of the glowing rats had been encased in the force field with us. Those few remaining inside seemed to hesitate as they realized they had lost the security of numbers, before charging at me trying to bite on and claw my skin. One of them, no bigger than my palm, managed to bite into my shoe and dig its teeth into my foot, forcing me to roar with pain. The pain, however, mixed with adrenaline and gave me the power to fight back. Thankfully, they were small enough that, while Elsie held the barrier, I stomped on the little things until my shoes glowed with their luminescent blood.

Of course, stepping on their kin outraged them further and the other monsters surrounding us smashed themselves repeatedly against Elsie’s barrier. Their claws dug in and it almost seemed like they might be able to actually tear away the magic with enough numbers and ferocity. Looking at Elsie herself, I saw blood trickle down her nose. It actually seeped into her mouth as her lips moved, still reciting magical incantations.

I clasped her hand. “You can take my power again, right?”

She nodded, without letting her focus slip from her task. Shit, this kid scares me sometimes. She can be all cute and innocent and then turn into a magical powerhouse willing to endure what seems like pretty severe suffering to keep a barrier around me.

Suddenly, a feeling I had experienced only once before filled me, snapping me from my thoughts as I began to recite the barrier chant and allow Elsie to focus elsewhere. “Sasunt’vath fur van…”

I was only dimly able to watch the proceedings, but still the conscious part of me was amazed. The force field became a ball of energy, seemingly sucking what must have been magical power from the scattered corpses of dead rats to power lightning, which encircled us and electrified any rat that came too close.

Suddenly, Elsie’s eyes rolled back. I wanted to grab her, but was unable to move because the barrier spell anchored me to my spot. I continued spewing words in Xamxa, praying for magical protection using Elsie’s training and power, when I heard Elsie speak in some new language.

It was neither Xamxa nor English, but it also could not possibly be from my world. It was too pure, too tonal and melodic, to come from a human mouth, and yet it came from Elsie’s. I could not understand it, and yet still I knew that there was something deep in there, calling out to not only sapients, but all creatures of this world to help their master.

The rats paused, and in that pause something threw them aside and charged through the barrier, to Elsie.

“Ah, I missed you. I am glad your kind is still alive,” she said to the giant fucking mole standing over her, before passing out completely.