“That was excessive!”

“Don’t be like that. It was weak, unfit for survival. Better that it died at my paws than at the paws of others who would have made it longer and more painful.”

“You chocked her to death for a good 3 minutes before killing her!”

“IT! I choked IT for a good 3 minutes! Which is better than the alternative.”

“And what alternative would that be?!”

Chuu sighed as her beloved Husband-King tried to argue that she had been excessively cruel.

“Four minutes? Five minutes? Even if it hadn’t gotten in the way, it would have suffered immeasurably sooner or later. The ‘innocence and childish adoration’ that it suffered from are antithetical to our existence. Given enough time and enough experience it would have ended up either dead, broken, eaten, mutilated or as a being that exemplifies everything that we Rattan stand for. It was better to spare it from such a fate than to allow it to be turned into a monster, yes-yes.”

I couldn’t take it. If killing the little girl so cruelly wasn’t enough, the fact that her own kind cannibalized her, and her own god had so callously viewed her not as a ‘she’ but as an ‘it’ was certainly proof that this was not a good place. I had tried to argue for betterment for everyone, but time and again I was rebuked for my ‘naivete and compassion’ and told that I could not hope to change the way things were.

“There must be some way to feed your kind without resorting to something like that!”

“There is, but it would doom our race to extinction.”

“What do you mean?”

Chuu sat down in a massive chair and crossed her legs. Her eyes closed and she held her hands together, wringing her fingers as she went over the hypothetical situation that would temporarily keep her people from cannibalism.

“It is simple. We all rush out from the Empire and consume everyone and everything in the world. All the animals, fungi, plants, everything and everyone. Even you. This would keep us from starving for a time. Maybe about a century or two at most; but then what would happen? Without any plants there would be no ability to filter the air and with no more animals we would turn on each other. We would destroy ourselves in an apocalyptic orgy of destruction as our massive birthrate would result in the entire planet being overrun. With no more meals beside our own kind left, civil war would erupt and in that hell we would do even more damage to the already mortally wounded ecosystem. The result would be extinction, not only for us but for everything. The way things happen to be are cruel and against your morals, but we have no other way to continue to exist without destroying ourselves.”

Chuu’s eyes opened as she gave me a chilling glance.

“This is how things must be. There is no other way to do things. It is in our biology to be this way, and only through the daily sacrifice of hundreds of millions can many billions live and hundreds of millions more be born. We are not The Races, so don’t expect everything to be solved with sunshine and rainbows.”

She was right. As much as I hated to admit it, this was the way that they had existed in the Game and while undesirable it was the only way that their twisted society could continue to exist. They HAD to throw themselves endlessly into horrible meat grinders just so that the dead could feed the innumerable hordes of the staving masses. With the birth of hundreds of millions each day, hundreds of millions more had to be culled or the entire society would be unable to sustain itself. It was a house of cards, but one that they had no choice but to live in.

As a look of sorrowful resignation filled my face, Chuu flashed a self-assured smirk.

“Glad you see it our way.”

The clock on the wall of the room we were in chimed with a bell that sounded like something from a horror movie, sounding ominous and instilling a sense of dread. At the same time, a similar, but much louder bell tolled over the entire city, and the sounds from outside slowly faded away.

Chuu opened her mouth and seemed to breathe in a breath that lasted for far longer than it should. I felt something off about Chuu and the air, so I donned my mask and saw something extraordinary. Magic, or at least Mana was flowing from outside into Chuu’s mouth. Her eyes and horns were glowing with a light that shined brighter than the sun and yet was still a sickly green. As I turned away to avoid blinding myself, I saw what seemed to be screaming faces flowing through the thick soup-like Mana storm that churned around Chuu.

The Mana storm was slowly sucked into Chu’s mouth and as the last traces of the soupy mess of mana fled down her throat the bells chimed once again. I removed my mask and checked the time, only to realize I had stood enraptured by the phenomenon that was occurring for a good long while.

“What was that…?”

Chuu chuckled and stood up. Walking over to me, she placed her paw on my shoulder.

“The alternative to sending meat to the grinder. Still lots of new food for the starving masses, but at least they died in service to their Goddess, right?”

I had a sinking feeling that I knew exactly what that bell had forced her kind to do.

“Nothing truly beneficial for the nation comes without…. sacrifice.”

…

Old Ironsides trudged through the thick shag carpet made of churning rat-people that reached up past its ankles. With each step it crushed so many, and as it moved it constantly was forced to use its many tools that the Makers had built into it. Everything had to be thrown at the swarms of rats that flowed like a stream beneath him, but it was like trying to swat all the water in a kiddie pool away using your bare hands as it was continuously filled back to capacity.

It was an exercise in futility to try and render the Rattan extinct singlehandedly, but Old Ironsides had not been programmed to understand that. Thus, the machine continued to trample its hated foe underfoot as it unleashed mass amounts of destruction upon those around. It only had one way to truly push back the pool of rat bodies that constantly and flutily tried to destroy it.

“EXECUTE, PROTOCOL; HOLY, WUB-STORM! DECLARATION; DROP. THE. BASS!”

It was at that moment a noise that was unlike anything that any being in the world (aside from Vaile) had ever heard echoed like a ungodly storm throughput the cave, echoing off of every surface and amplifying the sound to levels unbearable for even a hardy being like a dwarf. The noise was so loud that it instantly killed every rat and Rattan within earshot and even kilometers down the tunnels in every direction. As the OST for a very old show about sunlight-wielding vampire hunters boomed in the darkness, Old Ironsides marched on towards its goal.