The war between rats and slavers did not progress as Kairen had expected it to. His rats had been breeding for months, and the nomads and slavers kept most of their natural predators away from the Oasis, allowing their population to explode. Even if the rats couldn’t win a straight fight against the much larger humans, Kairen was positive that eating them out of house and home should have been an option.

Unfortunately, Kairen forgot to account for two factors. The first was Ramses, the earth mage. His lazy nature and difficulty working around Kairen’s presence had caused the ghost to write him off as useless, a stance he was quickly forced to reconsider. The mage’s ability to work the earth included not only raising and shaping it, but also compacting it. The storehouses used to hold the food were quickly upgraded under his direction. Walls were turned into singular pieces of brick, and doorframes molded themselves to perfectly fit around the doors when closed. Getting in wasn’t technically impossible, but attempting to do so took so long that a patrol was likely to come by and scare any rats off before starting repairs. There was only so much infrastructure that the mage could maintain, and the rats gleefully rummaged through the personal structures the workers had set up, grabbing snacks and tearing holes in as many clothes as possible.

The second factor that Kairen hadn’t thought to account for was the adventurers. While a good portion of the workers were laborers by trade, quite a few were adventurers or mercenaries with ties to Zar and his business. They had faced far more fearsome monsters than simple swarms of rats, and it showed in the way they methodically went about removing any rodent they came across.

The ranged specialists were the worst. While the rats offered smaller targets than they usually aimed at, the poor creatures didn’t have the reflexes or durability of larger more powerful monsters either. The sheer force put behind an arrow or thrown knife was enough to obliterate a rat even if it was hit off-center. Fortunately for Alpha and his offspring, ranged combatants were rare in the Sands. Far too many of the monsters either had camouflage or defenses capable of turning normal projectiles aside, and while archers would shine against other monsters, there were simply too many occasions where they would simply be dead weight. That wasn’t the case at the Oasis, and it didn’t take long for the rats to pick up a healthy fear of anyone carrying a bow or a sling.

The melee combatants were feared as well, if to a lesser degree. Years of fighting had pushed their physical capability further than Kairen had thought possible, and if any of the rats were caught out in the open it became a simple matter for the slavers to run them down with their superior physical attributes and size.

While they were outmatched in simple combat, the rats weren’t completely helpless before the onslaught. Under Kairen’s guidance they began to alter their habits, becoming active later and later at night, taking advantage of the dark and the slavers’ need to sleep. Even with the humans’ supplies locked away there were still plenty of plants and insects around for the desert rats to gather, making sure that all the rats were well fed and ensuring that the rat mothers could continue to birth litters of rats freely. In a perverse twist the pressure the humans put on the desert rats was actually beneficial for the rodents. They had been pushing the limits of their population capacity before, straining the limits of the Oasis to provide for their needs, and the death of so many rats saved them from the cruel fate of death by overconsumption.

The relative abundance of food and the lack of predators had also made the younger generations of rats lazy. While Alpha and his ilk had their increased intelligence and awareness to keep them interested in the world around them, most of the rats were only focused on enjoying their next meal, sometimes not even bothering to retreat to their nest to do so. They had no need for stealth, no need for caution, no need to push their capabilities to the limits until the slavers reintroduced the threat of death. Suddenly only the stealthiest quickest rats were left, and the difference in quality readily showed itself.

That quality was aided by Kairen’s blessings. The Endurance blessing was the most obvious, given the way the rats could pour their energy into a task long past the point any other small creature would have collapsed or gotten bored, but as Kairen invested into the other blessings their benefits began to show as well. The education blessing didn’t let the rats learn how to read or write, but it did aid their ability to memorize paths and hidey-holes as well as picking up new tricks. One unfortunate store room had been secured with a simple lock instead of the sturdy crossbars employed for the other structures, and while the solid bolt and complex mechanisms stymied the rats at first, Alpha managed to figure out its working with the help of Kairen. Alpha’s nimble fingers could reach inside the lock to grab the pins and push them into place, and turning the lock was made possible by using a bent stick for leverage. Due to the caution he had managed to convey to Alpha it took Zar three days to realize that supplies were going missing from that specific storage house, and soon after a bar was added to cut off access.

A level of the Martial blessing didn’t help the desert rats fight back against the humans at all, but it did make a difference in the mammals’ hunting habits. The increased combat capability with claw and fang gave them the confidence they needed to go after larger prey, taking down lizards and birds that were almost as large as the rats themselves.

The magic blessing didn’t have any obvious effect, not that Kairen had expected anything significant from it. Magic was something that took years for humans to learn to use correctly, and while his rats were definitely smarter than normal desert rats he knew they didn’t possess the same capacity for complex thought that people did. When their innate inability to use chants to help focus their magic was taken into consideration, Kairen figured he wouldn’t be seeing any miniature fireballs in the near future.

In the distant future Kairen had hopes that the magical potential from his blessing would manifest in other ways than spellcasting. Combined with his ability to add magical plants to the rats’ regular diet, Kairen was hopeful that eventually one of the litters would contain a rat with an innate magical ability, such as natural camouflage or minor teleportation. The sheer number of rats that could be born and the speed at which the desert rats reached maturity made such developments likely to happen in a reasonable timeframe for Kairen to take advantage of. Alpha’s ability to see and listen to Kairen was likely one such mutation, one that had been caused by eating his corpse but had somehow managed to breed true. If nothing else, Kairen was hopeful that the Magic blessing would increase the number of rat followers available to him and help ensure the ability didn’t die out.

Skills were similar to magic, as both were abilities beyond the capability of a normal body, but the rats had immediately benefitted from the blessing. Only one in a hundred rats actually developed even a basic skill, but that still gave Kairen three rats capable of acting as his special forces, able to accomplish tasks that the slavers wouldn’t think possible. Miner could practically fly through the ground, and Kairen saw the least of him, busy as he was expanding the warrens the rats had established. Ramses' reinforced walls were beyond Miner’s ability to dig through for the moment, but Kairen did his best to pay attention to the rat’s slowly increasing capabilities, ready to put a few plans into action once that equation changed.

Theta had developed the ability to run on the pond, a skill she took full advantage of when playing tag with her fellow rats. A few times Kairen joined her on her expeditions, wading through the pond next to her, enjoying her simple delight in defying the natural order of the world. Only once did he yell at her, when she dodged onto the lake to avoid an adventurer chasing after her, after she stole some bread from him. Kairen had been mad not because she had revealed her ability to the slavers, but because her life had come far closer to ending than he was comfortable thinking about.

The final rat to develop a skill was Scarlett. Kairen had named her after she had been rescued from Rab and his cruel knife, but Scarlett was unable to see or hear Kairen directly, and had little interest in listening to Alpha or any of the other rats Kairen asked to convey information. Her personal injuries at the hands of Rab drove her forwards more intensely than any other rat, pushing her to dangerously risky feats all to irritate her nemesis. Her developed Skill allowed her to move as if she were completely boneless, slipping through the smallest of holes and ensuring she would never be caught by human hand again. Kairen knew it was only a matter of time until her luck ran out, and all he could do was wish her the best of luck in the meantime. Rab’s almost continuous cursing and foul mood pointed to her initial success, but every raid Scarlett undertook brought her that little bit closer to death.

While three rats had manifested new skills, none of the slavers had. Kairen knew part of it was that Zar and his adventurer minions had likely already developed their essential skills, the three or four abilities that allowed them to confidently face monsters. The rest of the reason simply came down to laziness. The living rats were those willing to work hard to stay alive, and every waking moment was one where they were pushing their body to the limits to gather food, to expand their nests, to harass the humans, or simply to socialize with other rats. Their willingness to push their limits far exceeded that of the humans to do the same. The workers and adventurers already had expectations of their limits, and instead of challenging those limits were content to simply coast along, taking it easier than they could. Kairen knew that eventually his blessing would make the difference between a slaver gaining a skill and not gaining one, but he was positive his rats benefitted far more from the investment than the slavers ever would.

It wasn’t anything the boy could actually pin down as completely accurate, but Kairen suspected that the blessings provided a flat increase to ability. Each blessing provided a small increase to stamina, to intelligence, to compatibility, and to magic and skill potential. Small bonuses, that is, for a human. An extra half hour of work didn’t change much for a busy human, but gave the much weaker rats an almost endless pool of energy to pull from. For the weak, stupid, magicless creatures the blessings elevated them to a completely new level. Kairen had only ever heard of a few creatures that had picked up skills of their own, legendary mounts or beasts only found in stories. In every case the creature had taken years to develop their abilities, not due to a lack of effort, but simply because most animals did not possess sufficient ability to learn skills. Humans had all the ability to learn skills that they could ask for, while that same innate ability was the only thing his rats and other animals were lacking.

There were limits that Kairen knew he hadn’t found yet. Even in the best of circumstances it was rare for rats to live longer than two years, giving them a far shorter window to push their abilities to the absolute limits and develop high tier skills. While his rats were more creative than most, Kairen also doubted their ability to envision and pursue truly unique skills. It was one thing to develop abilities that enhanced what a person or rat could already do, be it running, or digging, or swinging a sword. It was another thing entirely to pursue the impossible, to practice and pursue an unreachable goal long enough to make it reality. Singing so sweet it could heal wounds and sickness, sword maneuvers that cut enemies a hundred feet away, and cooking that conjured missing ingredients out of thin air were just some of what masters of their craft were capable of.

Even if his rats would never reach that level of mastery, Kairen was eager to see what abilities they would learn in the future. Even small tricks played at the right time could make all the difference in the world, and Kairen looked forward to seeing just how frustrated Zar could get as his plans continued to run into unexpected obstacles.