Lia looked at the block of bait on the ground in front of her. It was…well, it looked just like a normal bait block that would be put in a mouse trap, a small rectangular cyan block of some sort of…bait stuff.

Now, to poison it. She maneuvered herself so she was positioned closer to the bait, then stung it, and began using her stinger to pump as much venom as possible into the block. Once the venom stopped being absorbed and was visibly leaking, she stopped, withdrawing her stinger and surveying her handiwork.

It was…slightly larger and now had a hole on the top, but that probably didn’t compromise the effectiveness of it. So, she put it into Dimensional Storage, and set off for the marketplace once more.

It didn’t take her long to find another patrol. It was the as same the others she’d seen since her first kill, two goblins, one of which had a lantern. Fortunately, things weren’t quite as bad as she had first thought. The goblin that held a lantern had no weapon, and the lantern wasn’t a particularly good one, only shedding light about fifteen feet away from the goblin.

She maneuvered herself to the front of the goblins, and placed the bait block about thirty meters in front of them. She then proceeded to hide a short distance away, choosing not to activate Active Camouflage until the light reached her.

It never did. Once the goblins reached the bait block’s area of affect, they both dropped what they were holding and rushed for the bait block. They clambered over each other, and, once they got to the bait block, turned on each other. It turned into a full-blown fistfight as they tried to take the bait for themselves.

Lia moved to take advantage of their scuffle, but by the time she had reached them, the result had been decided. They split the bait evenly, and both bit in. The result was immediate and striking – both goblins fell to the ground, the poison taking hold and numbing their bodies.

Sensing her opportunity, Lia struck. She climbed onto the nearest goblin and stung its eye while taking a bite out of its face, watching in satisfaction as it just sort of…stopped moving.

The other goblin struggled to get up, but Lia was there first. She latched onto it and was about to let the modeling wax flow, but her instincts told her that she didn’t have enough of it to fully convert the goblin.

So, she instead delivered another killing blow, watching in satisfaction as the experience came.

That was…an elite race sounded really cool, but it…had to do with rats? Was that something she really wanted to make part of her identity?

She paused to think that over for a moment. Yes, if it led to power, it was absolutely something she wanted to make part of her identity. She could…probably jump ship if it ended up being bad, but for now she didn’t see the harm in delaying her evolution until she could unlock whatever that was. She needed a safe place to evolve anyway, and having more members of her swarm would speed up that process.

So, she sprinted out of the marketplace and back towards what was rapidly becoming her home base. Her swarm was still obediently working at making a burrow, and by this point it was large enough that she could probably begin moving the rat corpses inside.

She set the drone to doing that, while she began to look for more rats. And, like last time she had been searching for rats, once Amelia caught on, she started to find a lot of rats very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that she wasn’t able to produce modeling wax fast enough to keep up with the rats she caught. She had to take a break as she consumed the rat corpse from her storage and waited for it to convert into modeling wax.

She split her conversions equally between drones and burrowers, and, eight rats later, she was informed that the conditions to evolve had been met.

She thought about that as she made her way back to her burrow. Ranking Venomous Sting down was a huge blow, but innate mental magic was incredibly alluring to her. Innate magic was far, far easier to use than its learned counterpart at the expense of being more limited in scope.

And goblins were notoriously weak to mental manipulation. They weren’t very bright to begin with, and even the magic of a novice would take a goblin out of commission for a while. If she gained access to something that would let her knock the goblins out easily, she would be able to convert them without much issue, and grow her forces quickly.

Losing wings was also kind of disappointing, but she hadn’t been able to make good use of them so far and Spiderclimb would fill the role of allowing her into high places, so it wasn’t as bad as it would otherwise be.

And, finally, she wouldn’t be some sort of weird bug-thing anymore, she would be one step closer to becoming close to a foxkin again, and that was a huge plus in her book. She didn’t even have to totally sacrifice the Skill benefits of being insectoid, meaning she’d still be able to gain things like Active Camouflage. “Prey” Skills would get easier to obtain too, and while she wasn’t totally sure what that entailed, she could guess it benefited things like Presence Detection and maybe even Active Camouflage if she was lucky.

Yeah, she was totally taking this evolution. She reached her burrow, now a bustling space where ten rat-ish creatures were hard at work expanding a living area. She lowered herself into the burrow for the first time, and was surprised to find that the floor wasn’t actually dirt. It looked like dirt, and it felt like dirt, but, somehow, she could tell that it was actually hardened modeling wax.

Curious, she prodded at it with a leg. The top layer of the stuff moved around slightly, to give the feel of loose particles of dirt, but remained almost magnetically attached to the harder layer, preventing it from moving away from the harder layer.

Interesting. It appeared that modeling wax made from different materials behaved in different ways. She’d have to look into that later. But, for now, it was time to evolve. So, she sat herself in a distant part of the burrow, and began her evolution.

When Lia awoke, she was ravenous, much like she had been the last time she had evolved. Fortunately, the rat corpses she had made earlier that day had been neatly stacked next to her, and she began to dig in, savoring the taste as she did. Fortunately, it seemed her evolution hadn’t changed her tastebuds, so the corpses were still just as tasty as they had been before.

While she was eating, she took some time to check over her body. The wings were gone, yes, but everything else just felt so much more…familiar. She had ears, a nose, a mouth that wasn’t just a set of insectoid mandibles…and she had feet! Well, paws, but they were much closer to feet than the stubs she had had as a Swarm Battlemaster.

And she had a tail, too! A glance behind her showed that she did indeed have a rat’s tail, though it ended in a sort of…knotted ball of tails, with several stubs protruding, looking like the severed ends of other tails. Actually…she was sort of a rat now, right? Did that make eating the rats cannibalism?

She paused, then dismissed the idea. She hadn’t received any sort of Title when she began eating, so it seemed she wasn’t close enough to a real rat for that. She finished her meal, then took a moment to look at her new status.

It really hadn’t been kidding when it said there was going to be a massive boost to all her other stats; her Magic and Magic Defense were higher than they were before she had evolved, even though her other stats had fallen a great deal.

That did kind of hurt, but now she had more tools she could use to level up again. Or, should, anyway. She took a moment to check her Skills, scanning for anything new. And, to her delight, there was not one new Skill, but three!

Lia smiled, though she guessed the effect was likely lost due to not really possessing a mouth that worked quite that way. Though…she did have a much more expressive mouth now, so that was definitely a step up from what she had before.

Ruminations on smiles aside, those abilities would be quite handy when it came to dealing with the goblins. She only had two uses of them before her Mana ran out, but two uses would be more than enough to cripple any goblin. Now she just needed a way to level up a couple of times, so she would have the raw stats necessary to take down a goblin before its cries drew the attention of other goblins.

That probably meant converting more rats. Which wasn’t nearly as much of a waste as it had been before, since she apparently “vastly” strengthened her rat-based subordinates now. Actually…

She called over a drone, and began to inspect it. There had to be some way to see the status of her drones, right?

Oh, it was as simple as that. As expected, the rats were pretty weak. That wasn’t anything surprising, they weren’t even monsters when they had been converted, so expecting more than that would be unreasonable. Still, she was supposed to strengthen the rat members of her swarm, so, why was it still so…bad?

Ah, it was bad because she needed to evolve it. She set that process in motion and watched in fascination the drone dropped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, and its flesh began to writhe and change. Was that how she looked when she evolved? It was kind of gross, but she supposed there really wasn’t a pretty way to completely restructure a body, so she’d just have to live with it.

She called the rest of her swarm to her and set them to evolving before she left in search of more rats to convert. Soon, very soon, she would have a swarm worthy of actually being called a swarm.

Fighterman481

*Strangled inhale followed by maximum volume screech* I'M DA GIANT RAT DAT MAKES ALL OF DA RULES

…Right, right, sorry. There's a real possibility I watched that video far too many times while writing this (check last chapter's author's notes for the link if you're confused)

Anyway, let's talk about rat kings. They're a really cool bit of folklore that I was first made aware of via Terry Pratchett, and their implementation here takes a lot of cues from what I remember of that book (though it's been quite a while since I read it, I could be entirely misremembering the details).

But, yes, the phenomenon of finding a bunch of rats with their tails tied together in a knot is a thing. Whether it's something that occurs in nature is...uh, well, there's very limited evidence for it, according to Wikipedia. Seems likely to me that most instances are caused by cruel people looking to engineer a hoax for a quick buck.

Though, interestingly enough, it seems there is relatively significant evidence for a similar phenomenon occurring naturally with squirrels, in which they get their tails tangled with sap. Curious stuff.

Anyway, I really wasn't expecting to lean into the rat thing as hard as I have but I'm just letting myself be carried away by whims with this series so now we've got this.

Um, that's really all the rambling I should do, next time it's gonna be a raid on the marketplace (or, at the least, I'm hoping it is. There's a bit of leadup that shouldn't take a full chapter but what do I know?), so look forward to it!

And, as always, thanks for reading!