The tavernkeeper looked up at the sound of the Ratter's knock. Three times, then twice, just like they'd said. After hefting the heavy plank barring the door out of the way, he unlocked the cellardoor and opened it.

The sight of the young adventurer was something to behold: She was covered head-to-toe in blood. At his obviously shocked expression, the young adventurer said, "Don't worry. None of it is mine." They paused, then added, "I'll need a bucket of water to clean off with. After that, I'll need you to run to the guild and tell them they need a clean-up team sent to sanitize your cellar: Wererats got in, and I'm afraid that dealing with them got messy. Tell them to also bring a preventative for wererat infection. I don't think I have any cuts or anything else that would let the blood in, but better safe than sorry."

The tavernkeeper nodded, his expression serious, then quickly ran to get things done. One lesson he'd learned in his days with the military is that you don't question the person who knows what they were doing, especially when you have no idea what's going on yourself. That youngster might be around twelve years old, but they clearly knew how to do the job and had the good judgment to do it well.

As the Ratter cleaned herself off and waited patiently for the clean-up team, she kicked herself mentally at all the different ways she'd fucked up this situation, and how incredibly, impossibly lucky she was to be alive despite her poor judgment. She'd known that an adventurer's life was dangerous and that things could easily go wrong. In fact, an adventurer's life could be best described as a series of events leading to a final, fatal mistake, but for the first time, she'd learned just how bad things could get.

Her first mistake was honestly just doing things the slow, safe way, not the fast and dangerous way. Every day, no, every minute that the opening that the giant rats had used to get into the cellar remained open, there was a risk of something more dangerous getting in. Under normal circumstances, the odds of that were relatively low. However, upon learning that dangerous events were going on in the sewers that might rile up more dangerous creatures or cause other complications, she should have immediately dropped everything, killed the rats in the cellar, and then sealed the opening before it was too late. She'd been so confident that the odds of something else coming in was effectively zero and that she'd be fully prepared to handle anything that might have found its way in if it did happen, that she'd failed to recognize that the danger was still very real.

Worse, she'd walked into a dark cellar with no light source because she was overconfident in her nightvision. Had she taken a lamp down with her, she'd have seen the alpha wererat immediately upon descending the stairs and retreated. The wererats might have decided to rush her, but she would have had the advantage of the terrain. It was more likely that the wererats might have simply retreated, unwilling to risk their lives against an adventurer with unknown capabilities. They were wererats who were former assassins, after all, and an assassin prefers to fight by ambush and deception, rather than a head-to-head fight, whenever possible.

She'd taken a massive gamble, using the black eggs and dagger she'd received from the dead assassin. She'd had no guarantee that the black eggs carried poison. They could have just as easily been smoke bombs or filled with ground glass, which would not have been more than a trifling annoyance to a wererat. While the dagger had been a known, the black eggs weren't, and having to trust her life to those was something she'd only done because she was simply that desperate. If they'd not been filled with wererat-effective poisons, she'd missed the throws, or the wererats had dodged them, she had little doubt that she'd be dead. In all honesty, the fact that she'd managed two hits out of three was almost a miracle. Worse, perhaps, was the fact that the poison on the assassin's dagger had been a couple of days old, and was flaking off. It was still fairly potent, but she was lucky that it hadn't lost its potency completely. Poison on a weapon has to be used within twenty-four hours to be effective, and using poison three days old had been such a massive risk that by all rights, it should have failed.

On that note, using the Ring of Invisibility had likewise been a risk, albeit a more calculated one. She'd had no guarantee that it would work, but by the same token, such an item would have multiple charges, and an assassin wouldn't keep an item like that one on hand unless it had several charges in it. In truth, collecting that had been one of the few intelligent things she'd done, especially since it meant that it was unlikely to 'disappear' while the cleaners were doing their job. A Ring of Invisibility, even with a few charges depleted, was an incredibly valuable magical item. She'd need to take it to a wizard for a proper appraisal. Afterward, she'd need to weigh in on whether to keep it or sell it. Even if it only had ten charges left, that was an easy thirty gold coins that she could use on better equipment, and relying on an item like that was likely to dull her ability to remain hidden. You keep your skills sharp by using them, her teacher had often said, and any tool that kept you from utilizing those skills was a tool you risked becoming overdependent on. If you couldn't hide without an item like that, you'd be in big trouble once it ran out of charges.

However, the biggest thing she was kicking herself over was dealing with the alpha wererat, once something had started riding it. She and her teacher had spent a long time working to get her temper under control and while it had been something of a success, it had turned that tendency towards blind rage into a tendency towards vicious sadism. Whenever she was hurt, scared, or angry, she had a tendency to use cold-blooded torture towards whatever had caused her to feel that way. When whatever supernatural force it was had tried to frighten her, she was forced to admit that it had succeeded. Her response had been to reply in kind, butchering it piece by piece, rather than simply decapitating it. The alpha wererat was poisoned, wounded, and near-death even with a thropic creature's infamous regenerative abilities. Decapitating it would have been easy, especially with the Ring of Invisibility hiding where the attack would come from. Instead, she'd slowly, calmly, and viciously cut it apart piece by piece, just to show that whatever that thing may have been, the Ratter was far scarier than it was. On the one hand, doing so had been cathartic and empowering, hurting something that had hurt her and scaring something that had scared her being a powerful experience. On the other hand, it had fed something dark inside of her, some evil and vicious part of her that, if she wasn't careful, might turn her into something horrifying.

Admittedly, a supernatural creature suddenly just popping in to ride an alpha wererat like that was completely unheard of, and as such it was something that she could not have prepared for in any way. Inflicting such serious harm to it before finishing it off would likely keep it from trying to come back for revenge: That creature had possessed a powerful host with numerous advantages, and the Ratter had not simply killed that host but had also slowly tortured it before finishing it off. Unless that... thing could find a far stronger host, it was unlikely to come looking for the Ratter any time soon.

Finally, she was kicking herself for not getting a weapon silvered when she'd had the chance yesterday. Her own issues notwithstanding, a silver weapon would have greatly changed the balance of that encounter, potentially even scaring off the wererats just by being present. An enchanted sword could wound a were-creature far longer than a normal weapon can, but a silver weapon can be fatal with even a moderate injury since wounds made with silver to a were-creature do not heal. After this was done, and she'd received the full balance of the bounty she'd earned today, she'd need to get her weapons silvered, or at the very least get a silver hold-out weapon for when another situation like this appeared.

She needed to be better than this, she told herself angrily. With how many mistakes she made today, she should have been dead a dozen times over. She'd burned through what might have been ten lifetimes worth of luck over a few minutes down there. If she ever found herself in a situation like that one again, Lady Luck would likely just throw her hands up in annoyance and desert the Ratter completely. She needed to be prepared for anything, or else she'd likely never see her next birthday, nevermind adulthood.

The Guildmaster of the Ratcatcher's Guild sat in his study, iron self-control being the only thing keeping him from screaming. The master was angry. Very angry. Worse, he was frustrated, and more than a little scared. It had taken time to gather the details, but the facts were these: A trio of feral wererats, including an alpha, had recently emerged. Before their turning, these three had possessed magical items that prevented them from being psychically controlled or detected. However, once they'd turned, those items were useless, and the master had sensed great potential in them as possible slaves. The alpha, however, had been badly injured during the events that caused it to go feral, and its need to feed to replenish its strength had overridden any control the master might have been able to assert and the underlings couldn't be controlled unless the alpha was properly dominated. The master had waited patiently, as the alpha was feeding and near to fullness. Then, some kind of threat had appeared while it was feeding. The master couldn't see it, but that wasn't necessarily unusual: One in ten mortals were psychically resistant, and of those, one in ten had such a strong resistance that it made them almost impossible to sense psychically. This 'empty space' had killed two of the wererats and disabled the alpha. The master had taken over the alpha and had used the host's senses to get a look at the thing that had slain two of its potential slaves, and had been rewarded with a strike across the eyes followed by a slow, deliberate dismemberment before finally being killed.

The loss of three potential slaves with many useful skills was hardly a setback, as there'd been no guarantee that the master could have taken them over before and only random chance allowed it the opportunity to take them now. No, what had the master so angry was having been hurt so deliberately, and been defeated so completely, and it had no means by which it could identify the one responsible. The host's eyes had been damaged twice, and it had all taken place in a dark cellar, so identification via sight was out. The enemy had also filled the room with a powerfully foul scent, so that method of identification was unavailable as well. It didn't even have a name or a clear location from which the one responsible could be traced. The master had been hurt, frightened, and worst of all, disrespected, and it could do nothing to take revenge.

Then, a message came through from the ones who commanded the master.

"For now," came the message, sounding as if it came from a choir of unified minds, filling the psychic network that the master and all of its slaves shared. "You cannot take revenge for now. When we have thrown down the cities of man and devoured the flesh of those who thought themselves the rulers of this world, then you will have the revenge you seek. When man, elf, and dwarf fill the bellies of our kin and the crowns of kings are naught but decoration for the bones, then you will have the revenge you seek. For now, take it as a lesson. You rushed into a situation that you already knew was falling apart with no known means by which to salvage it. You stuck your head into a mousetrap and unsurprisingly, it came down on your head. Nothing good would have come from that situation, and you rushed in. Take it as a lesson in patience. Learn from it."

The master fumed, but after a few moments, it gave its agreement. Yes, patience was critical, and by rushing in, it had risked far more than it had any hope of gaining. It would be more careful in the future. It was still angry, but that anger was now controlled, not wildly lashing out at all of its servants. It would wait and it would watch, and if the opportunity came, it would take its revenge, but not until it could do so without risking the greater plan.

Then, the voice of the ones who ruled them all seemed to change, directing their will to everyone in the psychic network, not just in this one city but to every member of the grand conspiracy in the entire kingdom. "All of you, take this as a lesson. With time and patience, this world will be ours. Nothing will come to us if we rush in blindly, madly, trying to take something when we have no means by which to keep it. Our day will come, so long as we bide our time and gather power. It may take months, or it may take years, but so long as we are careful, so long as we take the time we need to put our agents in the right place, and then strike at the right moment, the Day of the Rat will come, and this kingdom will be ours."