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She swung the blade like she was chopping wood, but it was working. The Rat King backed off.
I got to one knee and wobbled. Alice was at my shoulder, helping me up.
“Did you kill it?” I said.
“Not all of them,” she said. “But it’s running away.”
The blood fell from my face. “It’s not running away…”
Only the final rat remained. Alone, it was of little danger. But the Rat King had more than one trick up its sleeve. It chomped at its comrades’ fallen bodies, slurping on the blood and making itself stronger.
“It can’t escape,” Alice said. “It’s trapped in here with us.”
“No, we’re trapped in here with it,” I said. “If it eats enough of its fallen brothers and sisters, it turns into a far deadlier creature. The True Rat King. Imagine a rat twice my size and with an insatiable appetite. It won’t stop with us. It will climb into the crowd and then escape into the city. It’s a one-rat plague. I can’t believe they were so stupid to import one here.”
“We have to stop it,” Alice said, determined.
We attacked it from both sides. Me, with my throwing blades, Alice with the sword. The rat gorged on the meat and had already swollen to twice its regular size.
The crowd had turned quiet, needing to run away to safety but on tenterhooks, waiting to see if we would reign supreme.
My blades found the rat’s body, its neck, its back… but small blades would not stop it. Only decapitation would end it, would stop it from gorging and growing ever stronger.
I ran out of knives. I had to stop it from eating. I had to give Alice a chance to sever its head from its shoulders.
I leaped and landed on the rat’s back. It turned and snapped at me with its jaws, kicking and flailing with its giant claws.
“Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” I bellowed.
Alice swung the blade so wildly I thought she was aiming at me. She sliced the rat across the chest and then skewered it through the heart.
The rat still wouldn’t stop gorging.
Alice swung the blade around and removed its head. She was off-balance and almost lost her feet.
But she had done it.
A thick puddle of blood spilled from the creature, turning the fighting pit floor red.
I rose to my hands and knees and struggled to breathe. Alice acted as a crutch and helped me to my feet.
We stood side by side, caked in blood and guts. Alice raised her hand to the crowd. They got to their feet and roared with excitement.
“You said I didn’t have to kill anything,” she said out the corner of her mouth.
“I didn’t know they had something like the Rat King here,” I said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered turning up.”
Alice kept waving. “These people are nuts.”
“You’re telling me,” I said. “Let’s get our money and get the hell out of here.”
The best ship I could afford was a refurbished shuttlecraft from an Enforcer war frigate. She didn’t look pretty but she ran like a dream. I took us off the planet’s surface and into outer space. I plotted the trajectory to Rogiz 4.
I unbuckled my seat and hissed through my teeth as I limped into the back. The entire ship was tiny. It was essentially a single room. It was designed for emergency landings, not for longterm living. We were in such a rush to leave we still wore our dirty clothes.
“Don’t you need to watch the controls?” Alice said.
“I input the coordinates,” I said. “Computer will take us there. It’s not far.”
