The kid was dead!

Goodie knew something like this was going to happen, and it did…and now the kid was dead.

He felt no pleasure at being proven right, though. In fact, he felt like an utter prick for not warning the boy. If he had just taken a moment to have a word or two advising him and the others about the dangers of not guarding the rear, he was sure that the kid might have survived.

If they had bothered to listen to him, that is.

But, then again, he was a slave. Their slave, to be exact. The reason he had not warned any of them was that they, through action or inaction, had deprived him of his freedom and dragged him into this mess against his will.

Of course, he was smart enough to know that life was more complex than the simple binary division of right or wrong, left or right, good or bad; not helping this band of fools, leaving them to die, may just be the very thing that would lead him to his doom, that that kid that reminded him so much of himself may have been the very thing that would have helped him survive this cluster fuck.

But more likely, the loss of lives would help dissuade this band of fools from venturing further into the Burrows. At least, that was what he thought was the logical option. He did not know if it was, though. Goodie did not know much, or more precisely, he knew too much, too many options, too many possibilities, and more relevantly, too many feelings. The strongest of which was that the whole thing had made him feel like an utter prick for treating people like pawns. No matter what these idiots had done, most of them did not deserve to die for the stupidity of a few…but then again, it was not as if they had put up much of a resistance to that stupidity either.

The middle of combat was probably not the best time to be having a guilt trip, he realised, but this was not his fight and as much as it made him feel like an arsehole, he had no intention of making it so.

It was, however, a moment for a voice in the back of his head to enquire as to whether or not those mole-rats knew that.

Goodie stared at the beasts who, in turn, stared at him.

They were large creatures, still in the size range of dogs, but Goodie would attribute the two mole-rats as being the same height akin to that of a pair of Great Danes rather than the Labrador size of the rabbits. Both were completely bare but for the exceptions of odd clumps of wire-like hairs that speckled their wrinkly hides; their skin hanging loose, not from starvation, but from excess growth.

The one in the lead was cleaning the viscera off of his over-sized buckteeth and whiskers while the other knelt down to sniff at the quiet boy’s corpse, their eyes never leaving him for a second.

Goodie heard the splashing of some type of liquid behind him, someone’s breakfast, no doubt.

He often had the same experience when he first arrived in this world, but had long since gotten used to the sight of gore down in the sewers of the city. When you got down to it, there was little difference between rat guts and human; both were just a bloody mess that stank. And it was that stench that did cause him to feel nauseous, that along with the sound being made by whoever was getting a second taste of their breakfast, even now the thick, acrid odour of the boys innards that had escaped into the air was bringing tears to his eyes and tickling the back of his throat. Goodie willed his stomach to calm down as vomiting was unlike to put the monsters before him off their ideas for lunch.

He heard something directly behind him, instinct causing him to turn to look; Goodie realised his mistake too late, he looked back to see the mole-rats barrelling towards him, both issuing mismatched squeals that, to him, sounded like the scream of a crow.

He raised his spear, a pointless gesture as they were more than likely far stronger than him, admittedly, the bar had not been set high on that front, but making a run for it was off the board as the two monsters approaching him seemed far faster than he was, again, not a very high bar to overcome.

He had already called Her Majesty back to him, but her journey to reach him would take far more time than he had, so he grit his teeth and steadied himself, aiming his spear as straight as possible as he braced the bottom of it against the ground, ready to impale one of the approaching monsters.

He hoped.

Only for him to be bowled over as one of the cousins come up from behind him and bashed the charging beast aside with his thick wooden-club, the sound of the impact upon the creature’s skull sending a thick, meaty thwack echoing throughout the tunnel. Goodie did not know the particulars of the party’s finances, but they appeared to have spent almost everything on gearing up the front-line troops, Alpha-Douche, Beta-Douche, and Spear-guy, leaving little more than the free equipment the city handed out to newcomers for the rest of them. Not a bad strategy when you considered that the front-liners were acting as meat-shields for the rest, but not the best as it left far too many weaknesses where the group remained unguarded.

As the numbskull kept braining the lead mole-rat, the other one came round, not towards whichever of the cousins that had pushed him down, but towards him. The beast lunged forward; with his spear having fallen to the side, Goodie could only think to raise his left foot between him and descending maw. The creature bit down on his Gaterdog-skin boot, the scaly hide strong enough to prevent the beasts overly large buckteeth from piercing it, but not soft enough to prevent what Goodie was certain was at least a hairline fracture if not an outright break in his ankle.

In his pain and panic, He let loose with an attack he had never thought he would have ever been desperate enough to use, the move being far too unstable for him to ever be able to trust in its reliability, but staring down the mouth of a mutated beast tended to cause a person to reassess their life choices. The move involved a highly focused, rapid generation of gaseous-form shadow-matter, two sudden bursts of gas from the soles of his boots that, were he stronger and more familiar with its effects, would have propelled him two to four feet in the opposite direction. His own personal rocket power.

What it did instead, was force the creature to let go of his foot as the sudden influx of gas forcing itself down its throat, no doubt causing the beast to start choking. Had Goodie, now out of the immediate reach of the monster, then ceased generating the matter, he would have then been free to have stood up, retrieve his spear, and then have been able to dispatch the foot muncher with relative ease.

But he did not.

Goodie spun across the ground, his back bruising as the motion took him across every rock, bump, and one oddly smooth patch that he was certain was last night’s supper.

He came to a stop as he rammed into someone, their legs buckling as they fell on top of him.

She screamed; it was Alpha-Bitch. He pushed her off.

Rising with only a minor twinge from his foot, he took in the battlefield.

Alpha-Bitch was still next to him, picking her fat arse up off the floor, but she was not important right now.

Looking over, he saw that the cousins were bashing in the brains of the mole rats, three more having shown up during his short trip, the near twins were wading through them with no apparent concern for the monsters’ elongated teeth or their sharp claws. His guess as to their powers being focused towards shielding them from harm may have been right on the money.

He turned back to view the front lines; Alpha-Douche and his backup singers were maintaining a wall between the incoming monsters and the rest of the group, the monsters coming from the front that is. Alpha had formed a field of small, earthen spikes between them and the hoard, far from lethal, but they were enough to cause the monsters to slow in their march forward. Spear-guy seemed to be restricting himself to unleashing piercing jabs on single foes rather than relying on his weaker swipe attack from earlier. Beta-Male was just fending the beasts off with a sword and shield. He doubted that even that idiot was stupid enough to have taken a warrior class, so maybe he had some type of telekinetic shield like the cousins?

Behind the three of them was the Geezer, using his space wizardry to keep the approaching monsters manageable by picking them up and tossing them back towards the rest of the gathered beasts, buying precious time by knocking them over.

Were it not for an ice javelin flying out towards the lizard who had only now just arrived, Goodie would have completely missed Ditsy as she stood with the Geezer between him and her. Goodie’s eyes followed the projectile, watching as the javelin flew through the air. He saw it heading towards the beast whose scales could not be pierced by Her Majesty’s fangs. Admittedly, her fangs were not equal to an ice javelin, but he doubted that colossal toothpick would do much damage even if it could break through the monster’s hide.

The javelin pierced the creature’s eye and after the longest of seconds, the armoured beast dropping like a brick.

Goodie stared for a moment, mouth literally agape.

Somewhat anticlimactic, he thought after regaining his senses and shutting his mouth. Goodie had assumed that the living tank would have been the hardest to bring down, with the thing inflicting heavy damage before falling. But that’s what happened when rolled a natural 20, he concluded.

He just wished that he would get that roll from time to time.

After seeing Ditsy doing a fist pump while squealing and doing his best not to roll his eyes, he spared a glance to see where the rest of the Invisibles, now one fewer, had scurried off to.

The skater kids who were doing…something…the refined mana pumped out by the system was invisible to the human eye, so who knew what they were getting up to? But whatever it was that they were doing, they were doing it together, which meant that they were doing something big, something he probably should be staying clear of.

Goodie was about to turn away, but stopped as he received a shock as he spotted that creepy Mousy-Girl huddling in the shadows nearby the skaters.

“Fuck, that girl needs to wear a bell,” he swore to himself.

He cleared his head to try and think, what did he need to do? What could he do?

The monsters in the front were numerous enough that the front line might actually collapse to their assault, he could not risk himself or that idiot Alpha-Bitch while her runes remained on his neck, so he sent Her majesty to assist them, beyond that, however, there was little that he was capable of doing, his mana had been spent on that glorified shadow fart earlier and he was certainly not going to be risking his life fighting in close combat. So, what could he do?

He looked for his spear, but seeing that it was too close to the cousins and the mole-rats, Goodie crossed that off for lost. Hopefully, he could retrieve it later, but for now, all he could do was leave it.

He looked around again. Then again.

He saw Alpha-Bitch running around and tapping people wherever their skin was exposed; was she placing bombs on them, as well?

No, that did not make any sense, not in the middle of combat…some type of support rune, maybe?

“Whatever,” he whispered. There was nothing more that he could do, at least nothing that he was willing to do, so he walked over and stood beside Mousy-Girl. He did not dare sit down in case things went south and he needed to run, a task made more difficult not only by his lack of physical attributes but also his recent injury. So, he just leant back against the tunnel wall.

He winced as he felt a small squelch as his back met the earth, a wet stain that he was only now beginning to notice the acidic smell of over the rank odour of the kid’s innards that currently filled the air.

He had forgotten about the wet patch.