It turns out that darkness makes holes in the ground look a lot deeper than they are. Kay ended up falling for fifteen feet before he slammed into the ground. With the number of tiers, he had under his belt, his blood armor, and Blood Boost going, he basically bounced back to his feet instantly.

There were a few rat-men standing there, waiting for a turn to start climbing up, and they turned to him with exclamations of “Food!” and “Sacrifice!” as they attacked.

In the narrow confines of the tunnel he’d been dropped into, Kay wasn’t able to use his halberd effectively, so he switched to just his blood. High-pressure blasts and thin blades of liquid flashed out in all directions, killing the entire group of enemies in seconds. They’re crumpling like they are all tier ones. Why would they throw out weak combatants like this? Kay wondered as he turned to start taking out the rat-men that were dropping down from the walls of the shaft leading upward. At least down here, I don’t have to worry about hurting those fruit trees. He launched a fire-hose-level spray of blood up the shaft, knocking down all of the rat people that had been climbing up and the ones that had been climbing down to get at him.

The rat-men crumpled to the ground in a big pile, the first few actually injuring themselves heavily as they landed and the rest cushioned by the bodies of their comrades that they landed on. Kay sent a series of blending blades through the pile, making sure they all died before he went and stood at the bottom of the shaft.

Kay looked up at the top, and there was a weird effect going on. He knew he was only fifteen feet down, so the light of the sun should be shining down through the hole onto him, yet it was strangely muted. On top of that, even though he had no light source and no way of seeing in the dark, he could still see well enough down in the tunnel in order to fight. He frowned, considering the strange dichotomy when a surviving rat person stuck their head over the edge.

“Food!” They cried out. The stone staff of the rat-man priest or mage or whatever smacked into their head.

“Sacrifice!” The robed rat-man snarled. They leaned over the pit and looked down at Kay. “The Great-”

A needle-shaped bolt of blood shot into their throat, cutting off whatever they’d been about to say. They staggered out of sight, clutching at their wound.

The other rat person screeched in anger and leaped down at Kay, clawed hands outstretched as they dived in to attack.

Kay just held out his halberd and let gravity impale them for him. He spun the halberd around and let the body drop to the ground as he looked up at the surface again. He glanced around him at the bodies of the rat people who’d attacked him and their slowly pooling blood, blood that still felt wrong and malignant. “So… Learned something new today…” He reached out with a tendril and grabbed the lip of the hole to pull himself up. “Let’s go talk to everyone about this.”

Kay stuck his head into the dining area and found it empty. He sighed and walked over towards his office building. He’d ended up dumping the bodies of the rat people in the hole and covering the doors with a big rock he’d found. He opened the door and looked inside, finding Ahthia looking over some papers at the table.

She glanced up at him. “Hey Kay, welcome back. Find anything interesting?”

“Some cool fruit trees that analysis says are rare. Also, there are crazy rat people living in the tunnels, which are apparently everywhere around here. They wanted me as either food or a sacrifice to something.”

She stared at him, mouth gaping. “… Wait. Seriously?”

Kay nodded. “Yeah, they came out of a hole in the ground. The hole also had doors on it, so I think this whole area might have been occupied by someone else in the past.”

Ahthia slowly set down her papers and stood up. “I think that’s less important than hostile Rittians that think people are food or sacrifices.”

“Is that what they’re called? Good to know. Also, of course, it is, I just… I don’t know. Let’s go find Eleniah.”

“Definitely. She should be near the lake. I think they’re planning out a dock for fishing boats.”

Eleniah was by the lake, with Darten, David the administrator, and Vened the fisher-dwarf. They all glanced over as Kay jogged over with Ahthia on his heels.

“Hey!” Darten waved at them with one hand from his kneeling position by the shore, “What’s going on?”

Kay glanced at all of them and then shrugged. “When there are more people part of our settlement, or if there are more people, I guess, then we need to think of an easier way to share bad news without freaking people out. In that vein, there are crazy Rittians?” He glanced over at Ahthia, who nodded. “Crazy Rittians that popped out of the tunnels in the ground and decided they wanted to eat me. And then one of them who seemed like a leader showed up and said that I wasn’t food, they were going to sacrifice me to something.”

They all stared at him in silence, just like Ahthia had.

“They wanted to eat you?” David asked incredulously.

“Yeah, they kept calling me ‘Food’.” Kay shrugged, “Honestly, I’ve never even heard of Rittians before this, so I wasn’t sure if that was normal behavior.”

“It is definitely not.” David shook his head emphatically, “There was a decent population of them back home, and I was even friends with a few. They’re people like me and you, and like most other people, eating thinking beings is a huge taboo. I’d say it’s even more of a taboo with Rittians than others since they have a bunch of stigmas and prejudice from how they resemble rats.”

Eleniah shook her head. “I was so hoping for some kind of dark artifact or something we could ignore. Crazy people that want to eat or sacrifice us is not the kind of danger I wanted.” She sighed and walked over to Kay, “Start from the beginning while we walk back. We should warn everyone and figure out a plan.”

On the short walk back to the main part of the settlement, Kay shared the whole story in detail. He obviously didn’t mention how he’d been missing Murunel, but he told them about figuring out the Orb, the trees, the doors, and then the fight and getting thrown down the tunnel, and his observations about what the doors meant. He also described how the name or word that the Rittian leader had said had made him black out momentarily, plus the nastiness of their blood.

“At least you didn’t get kidnapped again,” Eleniah muttered.

Kay scowled at her, “I didn’t get ambushed; I got swarmed en mass. I bet you could get abducted if they threw enough people at you.” He frowned, “Although they didn’t throw enough people at me to deal with me. Most of them were tier ones from how weak they were. The leader and one or two others might have been tier two at the highest. I wonder why they didn’t send someone stronger?”

“Maybe they weren’t expecting to fight? It might have been just a scouting party,” Eleniah shrugged, “Or they could have some reason we’d never even think of. If they really are as crazy as you’re describing, I wouldn’t rule it out that it’s some complete nonsense reason.”

“Point.”

They split up at Kay’s office and started gathering people up. Once they had everyone in the mess hall, Kay stepped up on one of the chairs and started talking about what he’d discovered for the whole settlement to hear. Everyone was apprehensive, but no one was outright panicked. The kind of people that wandered into the wilderness like all of them had weren’t the kind of people to lose themselves when they heard about a threat.

“What are we going to do?” Someone asked.

“As much as I’d like to wait till Meten gets back with the other new people before doing anything, we don’t know if more Rittians are going to attack or not. So we’ll start Darten and Leya on building some walls. Since they’ll be stone, we can always take them down later to expand, but for now, we need the protection. Combat classes will rotate watch duties to keep an eye out for incoming attacks. We’ll make a schedule for that later. Finally, after Darten and Leya are done, they’re going to start searching around us for more tunnels to close off or otherwise disable so we can’t get attacked from below.”

“What about me?” Rhia held up her hand from inside the small crowd, “What am I going to do?”

“We need you to keep growing food, so we’ll double or triple your guard and be extra careful about your defenses. If we can, we might think about putting your fields inside the walls as well, but I’ll leave that discussion to our architect and builders.”

There were no more questions, so Kay hopped off the chair. “Alright, everyone, that’s all I have for now. I’ll update you all when I have more.”

People started splitting up and leaving, although a few people stayed behind to talk or grab some food.

Kay stepped over to Eleniah, who was frowning. “What’s up?”

“Cindy and Claudia aren’t here.”

“Aren’t they with the kids?” Kay looked over at David, who was talking animatedly with Darten and Leya. “I’d think their dad wouldn’t want them in here for this.”

“No, he said he’d rather them be with the group than off by themselves somewhere.” She pointed across the room to where the twins sat with Ahthia, some pieces of paper in front of them as they struggled to write. “They’re right there.”

“Weird. Want to go find them?”

“For sure.”

They found Claudia outside one of the buildings that had been erected as housing for the newcomers, carrying Cindy over her shoulder.

“What happened?” Eleniah asked as they hurried over to her.

Kay pulled open the door, and Claudia carried Cindy inside and dumped her on the bed. “She passes out sometimes and wakes up telling us about a vision she had. I’m guessing that since she’s a Dream Seer, she has to be asleep to use the Class, but she’s never confirmed that.”

“That’s another piece of alarming news,” Kay muttered.

Claudia looked over at him, “Why is it another piece of alarming news?”

They told Claudia everything, and she grimaced. “That sounds bad. Let’s just hope that Cindy’s vision is completely unrelated.”

At that moment, Cindy sat straight up, gasping for air. She squirmed for a moment, then opened her eyes and looked directly at Kay. “The thing. The thing underground that they’re following. We have to get rid of it before it’s too late!”

Kay slowly looked over at Claudia. “You jinxed it.”

“Sorry.”

Kay turned back to Cindy, who was panting and staring at her hands. “Can you tell-”

◄════════════════════════════►

Quest: The Danger Beneath

- Beneath your new home, a danger awaits. Something lurks in the tunnels that cross the land around you, and it has Rittian minions under its sway, searching for sacrifices. Rid the world of this evil before it is too late, or face the consequences.

Objective: Remove the unknown threat.

Rewards: The safety of your new home, ???

Failure/Refusal Consequences: The destruction of your new home, ???

Difficulty: Hard

◄════════════════════════════►

Kay started at the screen for a while, not saying anything. Eventually, he sighed. “Well fuck.”

“What?” Eleniah asked.

“I just got a Quest. Whatever is down there is a direct threat to us, apparently.”

“Oh. Fuck.”

“Yeah.”