Chapter 291 Second Wind

The Rat King needed a name. He had evolved. He knew more now... somehow. And amongst all the new things that he'd "learned" the most important was having a name. A name held power. A name held identity. He was no longer one amidst a trillion rats! He was now one amidst a billion or so humans...

'How are humans different from rats?' Except of course the way they looked. This was another thing he'd "learned" and was having a hard time getting used to. Walking on two legs. How does the physics of that whole interaction even work? It was like you were constantly tilting and falling over, but using your hind legs to stop it from happening. It was disorienting.

He carried the bundle of disembodied arms and dropped them on the ground. He took the thickest of the bunch and started to slap it hard against his tailbone.

"ATTACH!" He yelled

"ATTACH!"

"ATTACH!" Flesh hit flesh until flesh joined flesh irreversibly.

He released a satisfied grunt before picking up the second-thickest arm and continuing the exercise. After fashioning himself a magnificent tail capable of acting as a counterweight to stabilise his movement. He moved on to other endeavours, like figuring out how his arm worked. The marvel of opposable thumbs was worth everything! He could now pick, move, squeeze, and manipulate things with one hand! This fact alone was enough to clear all apprehension about his decision to change forms.

Although, he sorely wished he still had those sharp incisors. While it was a pain to keep them short, they did a lot more towards getting him out of tough situations. A human mouth sacrificed the specialisation for adaptation. Why couldn't he have merged his rat teeth with his human teeth for an overall superior set of teeth?

Another thing lacking was his sense of smell. His natural senses could no longer distinguish between all the beautiful odours floating around him. Things just felt noisier. However, a bit of work with his mana senses solved that problem. It was an interesting experience to smell without your nose. Air went in, but it felt empty, but he just knew what everything around him smelled like. The still-nameless Rat King didn't have to exert his mana senses so creatively in his previous body. His rat-amalgamated form handled almost everything he would ever need.

He pushed his senses further outwards. His previous body was in a constant state of information overload, which was conveniently tailored for his comprehension as it was being absorbed through the minds of his kin. Regardless, he was capable of parsing a lot more information without difficulty, and he took advantage of that fact.

More smells, more sounds, more... MORE!

WAIT!

Something grazed past his domain. Something familiar. Something that triggered one of the worst memories in his entire life, in rat yea- NO! In human years!

The Rat King dissolved all the errant thoughts having a field day in his mind. The human mind was so multi-functional and diverse, it could think levels beyond what it was capable of in its rodent form. But the sword cut both ways, what allowed him to think more also made him easily distracted. But the singular, bone-deep hatred he held for that smell and the person it was tethered to narrowed his focus to a sharp edge of a knife. He bolted with inhuman speed, bursting through all the annoying shrubbery with sheer force alone. He moved with a single purpose.

"KILL!"

The smell grew closer.

"KILL!"

He could see her now!

"KILL! KILL! KILL!"

Contact!

The fight started suboptimally. The Rat King realised he had severely overestimated his adaptability to this new body. He had more control over the arms hidden beneath his outerwear than the ones on his actual shoulder sockets. It was frustrating!

Why was he keeping his arms hidden? He learned, through an inconvenient encounter, that humans tended to not show all of their advantages at once. One particular weak, metal-armoured man had a piece of paper that exploded upon contact which he hid until the Rat King was close enough to sink his teeth into the man's neck. He killed himself and singed the Rat King's attire. That caught the Rat King by surprise and he wanted to do something like this with this woman.

That's right! The pest he fought earlier was a woman - a female version of a human. Although that information did little to aid him in this fight, which was stalling. He could feel that he was stronger than this woman! But why was nothing working?!

At that moment, the woman did something unusual. Instead of dodging she approached him. This set of all kinds of alarms in the Rat King's now highly evolved brain. Two sharp needles attached themselves to his skin, piercing through every protection in place.

And then it happened!

A dastardly explosion. The pain gushed through his nervous system, but it wasn't enough to drown out his consciousness. He knew that if the left arm exploded, the punctured right arm would too. It was a no-brainer to detach the affected part to save the rest of his body.

Rat King found no amusement in the irony of this situation because he had no idea what irony was.

"PLAYED. ALL. CARD! SEE. MINE!"

The woman showed her cards first, now it was time for him to show his. He revealed his magnificent tail and started to let out the heat accumulating in his core. After his transformation, he'd noticed that the released gas was a lot more concentrated than before. It was also more mouldable and could be controlled to a greater degree. He used this property to shape some released gas into a pair of arms he could actually use (that is to say rat-like). Sacrificing the revolutionary thumbs was irrelevant at this point. He just needed to really... REALLY kill this little rat-

"WOAH!"

The woman stumbled to get up - she still had a lot of fight left in her. He started to let out more of the heat from his core. He could see that the gas was affecting her now. The woman's focus was wavering, and he could feel her mana fluctuating and hastily moving towards the places where his gaseous fists punched her.

____

Josie couldn't flush out the virus running rampant through her system. The creature's gas had truly grown potent, and they were now resembling the same Plague her Young Miss dreaded. This could only mean one thing.

"Who is your master?!" Josie bellowed. "Is it Ziva Lune?!"

"YOU. DIE." The creature responded before disappearing into a wave of putrid gas that gushed towards her with malicious purpose. Josie quickly compressed her mana domain and overpowered everything in her immediate vicinity to protect herself from the disease-ridden spell. As the gas enveloped her, she could feel her control being challenged. But she had little time to focus on anything as the man used the cover to sneak in attacks. The tail of arms struck her like a whip, and fists of gas hit like boulders.

It was hard to see anything, and Josie could not rely on her mana senses since her domain extended barely two finger lengths away from her body. Her mana was draining quickly in trying to combat the highly distributed nature of the gaseous attack.

It was becoming clear now that losing two arms had done little to tilt the match in her favour. If anything, her death was scheduled forward.

Josie still had three more of those darts. One would expect that people would stockpile such an impressive and effective weapon. But the fact was that the alchemical fluid stored within the dart is highly volatile and had an extremely paltry yield rate (the conversion between the ingredients required to the output amount is abysmal). Furthermore, brewing a single batch was a week-long endeavour that could not be hastened in any way whatsoever. Finally, due to the brittleness of Dimiriteum, it was impossible to create an effective ranged weapon to shoot the dart - it had to be administered in person. All in all, the dart was a high-risk-high-reward play. Unfortunately, that was all Josie could opt for at this point.

The "tail" snaked towards her once again and coiled to strike her at an off-angle while the gaseous arms kept her occupied. Josie decided to take the sacrificial play - she let the fists through her guard and moved just enough to cause the damage to move through her. Her real target was the tail, after all. Right as it reached half an arm's length away from her face, she spun her arm and grabbed the thing. The creature did not see her stab it with the dart since it was occluded by her highly compressed mana domain.

However, it did feel the prick, which was why it immediately proceeded to eject the tail by whipping it upwards. The move was too slow, though as the explosion occurred right as the tail left its body. Both Josie and the man were tossed back by the sock of the attack (the man more so than Josie). The alchemical solution causes an explosion to occur within the body of the person, bouncing from one place to the next, never escaping until it has thoroughly mulched every organ, muscle and bone in a wide radius around the location of injection.

"RAAAAAAA! MY TAIL!" The creature bellowed its first coherent sentence, though there was no one to celebrate it.

Its eyes were blood red with rage. If a gaze could kill a person, the next fifteen reincarnations of Josie would die at birth. Though weirdly, it did not vent its anger like before. Instead, it started to look around.

"NEED MY TAIL!"

Suddenly, its anxious head swivelling stopped. Its eyes looked past the decimated treeline and into the distance. Josie followed its gaze and realised exactly what it was looking at. And when the realisation struck her, Josie's stomach dropped like a hammer on an anvil.

"No.... No, no, no, no."

Josie shakily got back to her feet. All of her bones groaned in pain, most had already broken and were barely holding on. Blood oozed out of her mouth, nose and ears, and dark patches formed in various parts of her body. Her clothes were decimated, leaving just enough to protect her dignity. Her mana was nearly depleted. Josie had lost.

However, the creature wasn't satisfied with taking her life. For some twisted reason, the creature wanted to destroy Josie completely. It had to take the one thing she cherished most dearly. Something she held above her own life. It wanted her Young Mistress.

Seconds stretched to minutes as each heavy step fell and Josie moved forward.

How ironic. She would die to the very creature she despised with the very fibre of her being.

The man had reached the Young Miss. Josie's eyes narrowed, she was within leaping distance and she went for it.

The man raised his gaseous hands and moved them forward. Josie was an arm's length away now.

Just as the arm was about to grab the collar of her downed Young Mistress, Josie brought down a great whip made entirely of air circulating in a dangerous whirlpool, ready to slice the man and shred his body to nothingness.

Alas, the attack would never realise its purpose. The man turned abruptly, and his gaseous hands caught Josie by the neck.

"I WILL KILL YOU NOW," the man declared before a pitch-black mist oozed out of his mouth and wormed towards Josie.