I was deep in thought as I walked back out into the hallway and right out in front of a rat quite a bit larger than the others I’d seen so far. Whereas the other rats I’d been fighting were the size of large cats, this beast was about the size of a medium breed dog. Damadarn it! I’ve got to keep my head in the game. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

While I was startled at seeing the rat, and berating myself for not being more cautious, it didn’t seem to have the same hesitation I did. With a screech it dashed forward and leaped towards my face with its teeth bared to rip my throat open! If it wouldn’t have been for me moving just a little quicker from spending those points in DEX, I never would’ve gotten my arm up in time to block it. As it was though, the bugger latched onto the midsection of my arm, sank its teeth in deep, and hung on!

I had to swallow down a scream in my throat as I knew that if it escaped my lips, it’d draw all the other rats and I’d be swarmed and rat food once again. Wildly I tried to bash at the rat as it hung onto my arm with its mouth and clawed at me with its paws. After a few moments of ineffectively trying to beat it with my club, I dropped the iron rod on the ground and simply grabbed at its body with my free arm and then I dashed forwards into the wall.

WHAM!

Crushing it between me and the wall finally worked as it squealed in pain and finally let go and fell towards the ground. As it was falling, I drew back my foot and punted the beast up the hallway as hard as I could.

“OH HELL NO!”

Watching where the rat had sailed up the hallway, I could see where the rest of the rats in the nest were starting to swarm out and come this way. I may have held my scream in so I wouldn’t alert them, but if a few taps on the wall can draw out a couple at a time, slamming against it like I had was enough to draw them all out once again!

After yesterday, I’d learned my lesson: DON’T DIE NEAR THEIR ROOM!

I’m not the least bit embarrassed to admit that I turned tail and ran back down the hallway as quickly as I possibly could. Sure, I might come back to life again when I die – but dying is danged painful and I sure as heck didn’t want to experience another half-dozen deaths like yesterdays! I ran all the way down the hall, slid into the room where the goblin corpse was, and leaped over several chairs and bodies until I could get myself into the far corner. I figured I might as well get as far away from the beasts, and as much out of the way as possible, so that my rebirth wouldn’t attract their attention – but instead I was rewarded with a pleasant surprise for a change: The rats refused to chase all the way into the goblin room!

They had halted at the entrance, and were hissing and spitting and growling loudly in this direction, but they wouldn’t come into the room itself. I wasn’t certain what was keeping them out, but I ducked down to hide myself as much as possible hoping that if they couldn’t see me, they’d forget about me quicker. It took them several minutes of growling, hissing, and spitting, but finally I could hear their claws scraping across the floor as they gave up and went back towards their nest again.

Weak in the knees with relief, I finally just flopped down on the floor. I don’t know why they didn’t come into the room here, but I had to stop the bleeding on my arm before worrying about anything else. Without anything else to use, I unwrapped the pieces of the gym clothes I’d found and wrapped my legs in earlier and repurposed them as arm bandages for now. I didn’t know how many more times I could get away with such a trick, but it worked this time as my arm stopped bleeding and my health slowly started going back up.

My arm was too sore to practice lifting anything heavy with it, so I just sat and tried to figure out why the rats hadn’t kept swarming and devoured me again. From what I could tell, none of the rooms in this hall seemed very different. Chairs tossed and thrown around. Most of the desks seemed to be broken. Everyone was dead; hacked and slashed several times. The smell of blood and ripening decay was all around. The only thing different about this room was the fact that the goblin had built an igloo here.

And then it hit me like one of those dings out of the blue. The only thing that was different about this room was the goblin! Thinking on it a bit more, I came to realize that the first rats I’d met had treated me much differently than all the rest of them. That first group of four that I’d fought was right outside their nest, and they were scared of me. They acted much like they did outside the door here: hissing, snarling, growling, but not actually attacking -- and none of the others had swarmed out to help them either!

I don’t know why, but the rats are afraid of the goblins; that’s the sudden realization that I’d came to!

When I first fought the rats in the hallway, I was covered in the blood and grime of where I’d killed the goblin and fainted afterwards. They were scared of me then! But, after I invaded their nest like an idiot and they’d killed me the first time, I’d lost that smell when I was reborn by the flames! The smell of goblins seems to frighten them. The smell of people however seems to be the smell of dinner!

Coming up with an idea, I started over towards the goblin’s remains while grinning to myself. I couldn’t be positive that I was right without testing it first, but that little goblin baster.. err.. bobo might actually be useful after all. What I planned on doing to it wouldn’t be considered pretty or decent by anyone’s standards, but after what it did to the girl in the igloo, I didn’t care.

It was time to get just a little bit dirtier...