I stared at the mounds of garbage in annoyance. "They didn't make...like roads through this nonsense or something?" The trash bags were piled higher than some buildings I'd seen. Granted they were in piles, so we could still kind of get between them, but the piles pushed right up against each other. "Hey Benny, stick close ok?" I activated my overlay, hopefully to catch any attacks before they got launched.

There was a shuffle and Benny squeezed into the trash pile behind me. Callie and Jessie were behind us. They had their coat and cloak wrapped around themselves respectively, but Impact would have protected them from pretty much any of the trash anyway. It was still gross, and I was beginning to seriously regret coming here. I heard a sound and spun to try to catch sight of what made it. There was nothing there.

The overlay predicted attacks, but I couldn't use it to see hidden things. That was a second level skill on the diviner tree. Mostly the first level was stuff like finding mines or rare plants and predicting attacks. It was hands down the most useful utility skill I could imagine, but much like my other trees it didn't get extremely effective until down the line. Most of the monk skills that I could use at first level were similarly useless in game, I'd gotten them for the unlocks later on down the line.

I turned to Callie. "Any chance you have some way to spot them? Does your tracking skill work out here?" Because there was a LOT of trash, and I honestly wasn't sure if we would be able to search through all of it even if we had months. Plus the little bastards could move so even if we did they might be able to to avoid us. That sewer rat bounty was beginning to look a lot more tempting. On the upside apparently my mask had a filtration effect for scent, something to thank Zeke for if the grimace on Callie and Jessie's faces were anything to go by.

The black clad brunette shook her head. "No. Or rather, it does, but it works too well. This whole place is full of random trash. Anything that they touch leaves a trace, and they've been basically swimming in it. Minor Tracking shows the whole damn garbage pile lit up like a spotlight." I cursed under my breath. That was inconvenient as hell. She narrowed her eyes off in the distance. "Might have another idea though. Looks like there are clear spots every so often, I bet we find some around there."

Which would have been a terrible idea for anyone else. Those clear spots were the perfect place to ambush us, luckily my overlay meant that was unlikely, and my perception was my highest stat which seemed to really clarify the arrows. I made a mental note to lean more into perception if possible, my overlay was one of the biggest advantages of the Fatewalker build. Though there were a few other abilities down the line that were helpful. Danger sense was going to be a big one when I got it.

We managed to struggle through the trash to a nearby clearing, it wasn't exactly hard with our Might and Impact, but it was annoying, and we kept having to stop and spin around to look for the source of noises. Finally though, we got to the nearest clearing and stepped out onto hard packed dirt. The area around us was about thirty feet in diameter, which gave us some room to maneuver. As we settled in the sounds of moving became louder and started coming from more directions.

I frowned slightly. "It occurs to me that it's weird for there to be little islands of clear space in this giant sea of trash. Don't suppose there's some valid reason for this based on the way trash is handled here?" They couldn't just leave it all, with the megaplex's so huge this alley would have overflowed into the street within a few days. I didn't know how many people were in those things, but going by city size it wasn't a small amount.

Callie shook her head, trying to stay within sight as we circled up, looking around at the shifting trash heaps. "Nope. They clear the alleys out three times a week. Not sure how, probably some kind of gravity compression power or something. But there would be no reason for anyone to take just a small portion of the trash here like this." Her voice became tense as she saw what I was wondering about.

My frown became a full on scowl. "So...these empty spots were probably made recently. Most likely by someone other than the people who are supposed to dispose of the garbage? Because it occurs to me that these make excellent funnel points for slightly weak creatures to herd stronger targets towards so they can surround them." The rustling trash became louder, as gleaming yellow eyes began to appear in the shadows between the bags. I sighed in annoyance.

I wasn't worried about us, we would be fine, but a whole sea of the bastards was going to put Jessie and Benny in danger. Luckily they had gear, and also us. "Benny, Agria, get behind Nightstrike and I, we're going to try to box you in. Nightstrike, can you set up some kind of barrier for them with your shadows?" I knew her shadow material was kind of brittle for combat, but a thick enough chunk of it should be a passable shield.

I stepped forward and so did Callie, the two weaker members of our party falling in behind us. Callie brought up her hands and two massive blocks of black material rose on either side of us. She clearly noticed where I was going with this. Once she had those in place (five foot tall blocks so they would be too big for the trash pandas to jump, but short enough for even Jessie to see over) we both braced for the coming tide of raccoon monsters.

A tide of the little bastards began to slink out of the trash, I counted at least two dozen. Still easily manageable for a pair of G rankers. Still, they were weird looking little things. They were called raccoons, but they looked more like gremlins. Big heads, huge ears, tiny limbs, and muzzled recessed. They were like some sort of fuzzy raccoon goblin. They were bipedal, with legs too tall and wide for their bodies, bending their knees as the crept forward so they were in a constant crouch. All in all they were...

"Cute!" Jessie's squeal broke the silence, and I sighed. We all looked at her and even under the mask we could see the blush. "What? They are! They're little fuzzballs. Do we really have to kill them? I don't want to hurt a bunch of tiny raccoon gremlins." One of the arrows on my overlay flashed as it indicated an incoming attack, and I swung around and lashed out with one of my tonfas, smashing into the raccoon gremlin midair as it hurled itself at me. Jessie paused. "Huh. Well that was less cute. Proceed."

I laughed a bit at that. She wasn't wrong. The elongated naturally crouching legs were apparently perfect for springing at prey, and those recessed muzzles were packed with razor sharp teeth, probably recessed so they could bite into flesh, because unlike normal raccoons THESE weren't scavengers. They weren't very tough though. My casual swat with my tonfa had broken the leapers neck and sent it sailing into a trash pile like a fastball.

Unfortunately the thing landing seemed to be like the starting shot of a race for the little bastards, and they swarmed us. Callie dropped another five foot block of shadow on top of the existing ones, clearly worrying about their jumping abilities and we both went to work. I triggered Flurry of Blows. A short burst of fast attacks was perfect for these things, even without Touch of Tears to put them down. My tonfas licked out, smashing skulls and breaking spines with every blow. I kept the daggers Callie got me in my belt. I didn't feel like dealing with all that blood until I had to.

Which sadly was going to be soon, because my tonfas were made with Minor Enchanting, which meant they were temporary gear. Even as I had the thought the two of them exploded, able to last longer than the original bat but still not anywhere close to proper weapons. Still, it was lucky for me they even did damage considering they were technically I rank gear. I assumed the combination of my Might and the explosive force from the runes pushed my hits up into the H rank easily enough.

Once they broke I pulled the daggers, which while not enchanted were H rank and more than up to handling the strain of my second Flurry of blows and I mowed down another six or seven of the things. That left me open for the last one to get in close and try to tear my throat out. Which...failed. It's claws scraped off my skin without even leaving a scratch. It felt pretty great being on the other side of that rank difference. Flurry of Blows ended and I skewered the last one on my back swing, dropping the tiny corpse to the ground.

I turned to check on Callie and she'd calmly mowed all hers down with a bunch of shadow imbued hair tendrils and her shadow imbued coat. I was pretty sure conjuring material took time and concentration, but her shadow touched gear and hair worked just fine even without any conjuration. We looked around. "Huh. Well we should gather the bodies, have to turn them in for the bounty. Benny, you're the one doing the collecting for reputation so you can pick up all the dead raccoons."

He snorted and started walking around to pick them up. I pulled the one on my dagger off and looked it over, seeing nothing I could use material wise. "Hey Benny can you use any of this for anything? Because if not I say we just sell them to the guild for some chits. Not worth the time stripping them for parts if you can't use them for anything." I'd kind of expected them to be...bigger. Maybe have some decent sized bones I could enchant or carve, but they were way too tiny for that.

Callie chuckled at that. "Yeah, these things were barely H rank. Most of the good stuff shows up later on. There are a few parts that are decent from what I read when I was looking into monster activity. The eyes are valuable as an Alchemy component." I kept my eye out but didn't spot any upcoming attacks so I stepped out to help gather. Jessie was surprisingly fine picking up bodies, given her desire to let them live before, and after only about five minutes we had them all grouped together.

Now the only thing we needed was to figure out how to move them. We ended up dumping out sturdy garbage bags and filling them with bodies, which was gross, but much less gross than carrying bleeding and broken bipedal raccoons to the skyride one at a time.

As we got started packing them up though, we heard a telltale rustle from the bags around us and I groaned. "So...what are the chances this giant ass trash dump only has twenty four of these things total?" My question was answered as another wave of fifteen or so started to creep forward from the piles. I groaned. Great, well, at least we could make some money, and it was looking more and more likely that Benny would be getting some points, because we were going to have to turn in a bunch of these I was pretty sure. I cracked my neck. Back to the grind I supposed.