The grown children, she needed a name for their body-to-age situation, gathered by two large cellar doors. They were bolted shut. Haze walked in front of the bolted gateway and instructed the crowd of newly adult children.
"Take one weapon. If you can cast spells you're welcome to also take a spell medium of some kind such as wands, crystals, and staffs. Lastly, everyone takes a dagger, never hurts to have a backup on you. Those of you who can use armor. No, you, you can't have armor, you need training first." Haze broke off his speech and started helping individuals get ready. Chloe and the other babysitter soldiers did as well.
Rega for her part picked out a long staff that had feathers and small sheets of metal at the top forming a flower.
"This one is pretty!" She said happily. Cutlery snorted. A pretty thing for killing starving rats. Cutlery browsed the weapons and settled on a simple blunt mace with some ridges on the weighted end. If they were just rats then just hitting them hard with something heavy should do the best. Cutlery knew they would fight to the end. Crushing them was just gonna be easier.
Adult kids swung their weapons about and spoke excitedly with each other. The babysitters gave them pointers on how to use each one. Chloe gave Rega a thumbs up at her weapon choice. Walking over to Cutlery, Chloe motioned for her to swing it. She tried and it was heavy enough to make her nearly hit the floor on accident with just momentum. Chloe showed her how to just raise it and let it swing itself.
"The best part of this is that you can hit from any direction. Most swords gotta be turned to their sharp ends, but this can come at any angle. This means it can be a lot faster since you can just go nuts with it. It's a bit small so it is harder to defend with but that means you'll have a free hand." Chloe said. Cutlery was surprised, Chloe was being interesting and helpful to her for once. Maybe she wasn't so boring and was just a talkative nerd. All ready, Cutlery pocketed a dagger and looked around.
Haze spoke up from the center of the group near the cellar doors.
"All right now everyone! Down here is the wine cellar for the entire tower. It's practically a maze. Here's the deal. Every hundred rats you kill is one keg of wine! Don't get too tired though cause you're carrying it! That is unless you can kill a thousand! Then you get to take the elevator!" Haze proclaimed.
Excited and nervous murmurs went about. Some voices asked if drinking wine was okay for them, and others laughed at how few rats they had to kill compared to their homelives. Haze smiled and motioned for the guard. The Cellar doors were opened. A foul stench rolled up.
"That is if you can find any wine down there!" Haze laughed.
-
"Who's gonna go first? It's gonna be scary to be first down." Rega whispered to Cutlery. Cutlery wasn't sure either. After the tentacle monster incident, it was hard to tell what could happen.
"Charge my warriors!" A boy next to Roddy said. Half the men rushed into the cellar's doors and disappeared down an unseen flight of stairs. Laughter erupted from the other dozen boys. They all charged down after them. Several of the muscle-bound women shoved to get ahead of them with battle cries. Cutlery and the other wiry but strong kids looked at each other and moved after. The swarm of two dozen beanstalk magicians followed suit. So the order was created, muscle-bound monsters, limber kids, and then magic users.
The stairs were dusty. Refuse had been kicked up by the stampede. Everyone behind the sprinters had to breathe it in. As the stairs descended they switched directions. So those at the back had no idea where those at the front had gone. Cutlery and Rega stuck together. At the second turn down, the light was getting dim. Several kid adults raised their hands and orbs of light filled the stone staircase.
"I wonder how the charge is doing in the dark." The blue demon girl asked Rega.
"Yea! Seems scary! Wait! What's your name?" Rega asked. The girl looked at her and smiled after a second of inspection.
"I'm Flavor." Flavor said.
"What a name! Oh, I mean. That's nice!" Rega said. Flavor laughed and they talked about names. Cutlery couldn't believe Rega could meet someone in this situation. The group seemed to relax as the two's banter echoed to the front and back of the group. As they reached the fifth bend in the stairs, the large group slowed to a halt. A dark room was attached to the bottom of the stairs. Everyone squinted and then several of the light orbs caught up and came around the bend.
Black mold soaked the corners and it was filled with rotting wood. The chargers were nowhere in sight.
"Uh, where did they go?" One boy man asked.
"Let's not take their advice. Stick together." A woman girl said.
Cutlery thought very hard about what to do. The group began arguing over how to find the others. Cutlery focused through the noise. What should she do? Then it clicked.
"We can call each other youths! It's like an adult but still young!" Cutlery blurted. Most of the group looked at her. The arguing picked back up. Even Rega raised an eyebrow at her. Well, she had figured it out. She turned and walked through the group into the room. Ahead two open entrances had been cleared of wood. Cutlery moved to the far one. Rats always used dark and scary paths. People went there less.
A few kids called out to her. What was going to happen, she thought. It's just rats. A faint stream of echoes bounced to her from the doorway. She started to jog. Flickering orange light danced ever so faintly through several lined-up doorways. She passed through pitch-black rooms until the glow was brighter. She tripped on some rotten wood as she chased the distant light.
As she reached it, the sound of wet squelching registered in her mind. Around the corner, a pack of brutes was gathered. A corpse the size of a large dog was getting brutalized. They turned as she let out a noise in surprise. Then they all smiled, blood staining their faces.
-
"Hey Cutlery! I knew you were lurking around here!" Roddy said from the right side of the group. He smiled pleasantly with blood on his face.
Cutlery stepped back and placed a hand on her mace.
"Hey what's wrong? It's just a dead rat? Though... it is big." Roddy said and turned to look at it. Cutlery looked back at the corpse carefully. It truly was just a huge rat. She had thought they had killed a person! She relaxed and stepped back towards them.
"On fucking edge, sorry bitches." Cutlery said. She walked towards them. The rat held her attention. It was at least five feet long. It looked like it weighed somewhere around a hundred pounds or more. They all looked at it some more and the muscle heads congratulated each other on it. Cutlery looked around and saw many more rats had been put into piles near the edges of the room. Most were at least a foot long if not more. Though none came to half as big as this one.
Then they heard faraway scraping and clattering. The group quieted and looked towards the doorways. It seemed they were coming from multiple directions. Weapons were drawn and whispers were passed around. Some groups partnered up to protect each other's backs. Others looked nervous. Light blossomed from one of the noisy openings. The other opening was filled with dark fur.
Chaos broke out as the mage group walked into the back doorway, and a swarm of rats poured into the front entrance. Half the fighters sprung at the rats and began hacking. The other half jumped, stopped, relaxed, then turned to see the rats. The rats pressed into the room. They darted to run against walls and corpses to hide as they moved.
A few of the fighters started to yelp as rats nipped at them. Their large buckteeth even dented a few swords and pieces of armor. Splashes and splats echoed from the front entrance as everyone went ballistic.
The mages on the other hand took in the scene slowly. Cutlery who they had lost was here, a huge rat, and also a river of living rats poured inward at them. Wands, staff, and the like raised up sporadically. They blasted off spells, screamed, or smiled at Cutlery and waved. Arcs of lightning, spikes of transparent energy, balls of fire, and more joined the fray. Most splashed into the rat river. Some strikes flew near the muscle heads or even hit swords aside.
Cutlery jumped back as the river of rats reached her. She pulled out her mace and stepped up onto a rotten barrel of wine. The rats poured around it. The next few minutes were chaos. Muscle heads started to slip and fall on rat corpses, blood, or from their bitten ankles. Kopei and other healers would rush to them as rats began to run on top of them. Fighters would begin to whack at their own friends. Rats would fly off them only to be replaced by five more. They screamed as the struggle of pulling them to their feat coincided with dozens of bites. Some youths didn't get back up.
-
Cutlery slowly stopped smashing the floor around her while holding onto Rega's arm. The skittering sound had begun to fade away. Looking about the space she saw only a trickle of rats moving through the space. She was sure they were gonna die when the spells started to run out. They had switched to small bolts of energy they could do for a long time. But they didn't work well against the huge swarm of rats. More and more slipped through and attacked the casters. Right as things were really breaking down the swarm began to slow.
The rat river eventually stopped completely. A diminutive number of rats came in and stuck to the edges for another few seconds. Not that anyone had time to notice that. Everyone was swinging their arms up and down, jumping up and down, and blasting out spells.
They had survived the first few minutes as the spellcasters tried out some of their prominent spells. Once the fighters who were injured had gotten out of the way, the spellcasters started shooting out walls of fire, arcs of electricity, tremendous booms, and so on. While on one hand they had been discombobulated by the sensory detonations for a second, it was worth it. Shockwaves completely made out of rat viscera had been launched onto the ceiling. That had been five minutes ago. Now they observed the carnage.
Everyone eventually relaxed with Cutlery. Most kids had been injured to some degree. Those who had fallen were confirmed to still have a heart in their chest. Those who had been under the rat river the longest now lay in the back of the room with Kopei and three magicians standing over them. Cutlery and the other thin muscleheads bound around and killed rouge rats.
Cutlery looked about. With slick wet sliding of meat, Cutlery pulled her boot from the floor. The foundation was a carpet of rats. Some areas by the fighters or more powerful casters were as deep as five bodies.
"THIS IS DISGUSTING!" The blue demon girl yelled. Flavor, that was her name.
"I'm just a kid! I'm just a kid!" Flavor continued to yell. Kopei moved over to her and started to put a hand on her shoulder. As she did it was like Flavor let loose a valve. She collapsed to her knees with a loud slosh of rat bodies.
"I'm just a child! I shouldn't kill, or be an adult! I shouldn't have to worry about my body..." She said then breathed in and let out another body-lurching sob.
"I can't do this! I can't live like this! I can't deal with the boys staring at me, I feel like I'm in danger! Then I have to fight for my life, my life! I'm a child! Children shouldn't be subjected to this! I watched children die! To a monster! Slowly, in front of me!" She cried again. Sobbing she slowly let out the words, "I... heard there...there... bones crush... they spoke to me! I heard them begging for help!" Flavor continued. Everyone else had gone silent. Most stared at the floor. Some had the strength to look her in the eye. "I, I, I can't. This is disgusting! This is more than that! Something worse! Something a real demon would come up with. Something a real devil, like they call me, would do!" She wept. A few seconds of just crying and wet silence went by.
Gradually they all moved and helped each other out in silence. They left the rat room, the wine cellars, and the stairs. No one touched a rat's body to bring up with them.
