Chapter 290: The Ugly Rat that Polluted the Sea (7)

The ground crumpled like wet clay and sank into a fresh crater, and the Ugly Rat slammed deep into the earth.

“Wh-what?” people stammered, as their eyes went wide.

The creature they could barely endure looking at, a thing so powerful and alien that the mind tried to slide off it, had just been punched straight into the dirt. A lone figure dropped to stand on the fresh rim of the pit, dust and vapor curling around his boots.

One of the barbarians recognized the profile and breathed the name as if it might break, “Ketal...?”

“

Kaaaa!

” The rat shook its head as if to rattle the ringing out of its skull, then lifted its eyes and saw him. Rage flared in the ruined sockets. “You damned barbarian!”

Ketal studied it without hurry. In the White Snowfield, he had crossed paths with it over and over, until even loathing dulled into a hard, practical weariness. The beings of that place were born in the dark age, the first living things in a universe that had not yet learned what rules were. The Ugly Rat was one of them as surely as the White Bear, or the White Serpent. Knowing the root changed the taste on his tongue, but it did not change the choice before him.

“Leave, rat,” he said. He lifted his fist. Power gathered as if the world itself had slid toward his knuckles; veins burst in sharp crimson dots across the skin. “This isn’t a place you get to covet.”

He stepped and drove the punch. Air collapsed before it, then snapped outward, and for a heartbeat, everything within sight seemed to empty out, as though a vacuum had opened in the middle of the day. The ground’s surface peeled back in ragged strips.

“

Kaakh!

” The rat tried to throw itself aside, but it was too late. It tumbled and skidded in a long, gouging slide. The sound caught up an instant later.

The wind that rode the shock front slammed into barbarians and faithful alike and tossed them as if they were gnats caught in a storm. Those who kept their feet did so with their teeth clenched and their eyes astonished, and they stared at Ketal as if the mind would not yet let the body believe what it had seen. The power he moved with outran instinct. It ignored the lines of expectation and left only the result.

The rat clawed a furrow in the earth and levered itself upright, then opened its mouth. A line of venom gathered with a whine like a blade on stone. The beam ran arrow-straight for Ketal. He closed his fist again and threw another strike.

Force met force and erased itself. The collision bought the rat a moment to find its balance; it staggered to its full height, breathing hard.

“Barbarian!” it shouted, the sound so sharp even the faithful flinched. “What do you think you are doing? Are you taking the side of these small, worthless beings?”

Ketal’s blows had fallen to protect the line of barbarians and the ring of priests. The rat understood that much, and the understanding sickened it.

“You stand with humans. You shield the children of the Outside. Have you lost your mind, traitor?” the rat said.

“Traitor, you say,” Ketal repeated, and an odd look touched his face.

The barbarians of the White Snowfield had left the world by their own will. They had betrayed it for the sake of the Demon Realm and chosen to live as pieces on the oldest board. For that, gods and demons alike had called Ketal a traitor to his kind. Now, one of the White Snowfield’s creatures threw the same word at him.

“So I am a traitor to both sides. In that case, whose side is mine?” he said, and a small laugh slipped out of him. He shook his head, and the amusement died in his mouth. “Call me whatever you like. My enemies are you and yours.”

His voice fell, and with it the temperature of the air seemed to change. He moved again. Fists fell one after another, each one a clean, precise denial of space. The rat tried to counter, but strength had its own grammar, and Ketal wrote the lines faster; every response ended crushed under the next blow.

“

Kiiiiik!

” the rat shouted as its limbs snapped, bones shattered. Green blood blew out in sheets and splotched across earth already too foul to name.

Ketal gave his hand a slight shake to flick away spatter and asked the rat, almost pleasantly, “Do you want to continue. It does not trouble me. Pounding you is likely to be good for my temper.”

The rat gritted its teeth and said nothing. Its shape sank by degrees, as if the soil itself were swallowing it. Soon the body was gone, and even the presence faded as if it had never been there.

“You should have done that from the start,” Ketal said under his breath and turned his head. He faced the barbarians and the faithful together. “That will do. Keep cleansing the ground.”

He smiled as he said it. People nodded without speaking, their eyes still distant.

***

“It has been a spectacle,” Bayern said later.

“What has?” Ketal asked him.

“Your strength.”

The rat kept returning, trying to ruin the faithful and turn the warriors to its use. Each time Ketal appeared first and threw it back. Many barbarians and many followers of the gods had seen him fight as he truly was, and they had watched him lay hands on the world so directly that air and space seemed to come apart.

It was beyond what they could frame. When people saw something past the edges of the possible, simple awe became something closer to worship.

“There are some calling you the avatar of the God of Strength,” Bayern said. “Have you heard it?”

“I heard it in passing.”

“The avatar of the God of Strength?” the Holy Sword cut in, sounding genuinely flustered. “The God of Strength is truly strong. You are very strong too, of course, but to reach the god... Hm, I don’t know...”

It could not decide where to land. Ketal ignored the fretting and answered Bayern instead.

“It seems the admiration for you has grown just as much,” Ketal said.

“It is more than I can stand,” Bayern said with a crooked grin.

Ketal was strong. The rumor said he was so strong that even the God of Strength could be mistaken for him. And the Barbarian King had won a duel against such a powerful being. By the time the tale came back around, the barbarians were marveling at how their king must be stronger than the man who had just put a monster in a hole with his fist. The truth, of course, sat at an angle to their assumptions, which made the whole thing harder for Bayern to bear.

“I should have admitted defeat faster that day,” Bayern muttered. “Then I could have handed every bothersome barbarian to you with a clear conscience.”

Ketal chuckled.

“Either way, it has been quiet,” Bayern said after a moment, tone thoughtful. “The rat has not shown itself.”

It had tried to break every attempt to purify the soil. When it came, Ketal hit it. After a half-dozen such clashes, it simply stopped appearing. The shambling dead it had sent earlier no longer popped up from bad earth either.

Without a doubt, it was a strange development. Even with Ketal and Bayern moving as fast as they could, the stained area was enormous. If the rat chose to dart in and out, it could have made trouble almost anywhere it wished. Instead, there was nothing.

“Has it given up?” Bayern asked Ketal, eyes narrowing.

“No,” Ketal said at once. “That is not it.”

He knew what the rat was. It would not retreat so cleanly.

“It wants to spend nothing on small fights,” he said. “It will pour everything into one moment when we near whatever it wants to call home.”

Ketal rubbed his jaw as he thought. He had fought the rat a great many times. A creature eager to spread its boundary line would inevitably clash with a tribe trying to raise its own. They had fought so often he had lost count, and the number had certainly tipped past three digits. He had never seen the rat’s full strength.

The reason was simple. The rat’s power scaled with the density of its domain. The thicker and deeper the stain, the more it could draw. Density grew the longer it rooted in a place. It could only pull its true weight inside its own lair.

That lair was in the sea, and Ketal had never had a reason to dive into it, which meant he had never forced the rat to pull out what it had only there. If it chose to kill him now, it would do so with an effort he had not yet seen.

The thought drew a thin smile. “That part is true for me as well.”

The rat did not know what Ketal had found Outside. He had Myst now, and that changed what he could reach for. He wondered if what he had brought back from the world would work on a being that had been born before rules.

“Curious,” he said, and his eyes cooled.

Far below, in a place even deeper than the bottom of sight, the rat lay very still.

“To meet that wretched barbarian the moment I came Outside...,” it muttered.

With that one factor on the board, the path was not easy. Even for a powerful rat, the odds did not feel generous.

“Where did such an Anomaly come from?” It clicked its tongue.

The Oldest Ones knew each other too well. In that society, the barbarian was almost a newborn, a recent disturbance measured against a span that was otherwise too long to count. He had grown too quickly and pushed his border too far, and in the process, he had ruined a balance in the White Snowfield that had held for an age.

“You’ve faced the Primarchs before, so I know how strong you are... I could lose,” it said. Even so, it would not withdraw. “I am the Ugly Rat.”

Venom crept and climbed along its hide. This was not the thin stuff it used when it played. The concentration deepened until the air quivered.

“I am the second living thing born of the Mire of Filth. I once dirtied the world. I will not go quietly. This time, I will spoil you for good, barbarian.”

***

Because the rat stayed out of sight, the work went forward as if nothing stood in the way. The faithful spread the circle, and light followed them across the ground. Most of the corrupted land went back to earth and stone. At last, they reached the edge of the sea, the place where the rat had first set its feet on the surface.

Darkul made a thin sound and stopped. Many of the others did the same. This was not part of the world. It had the shape of a shore and a spit of land, but it did not feel like either. The field ahead was not ground but a collapsed thing pretending to be ground; the water was not water. Everything looked like a bog that boiled without heat.

Ketal whistled softly. “That is thick.”

At this point, it was hardly any different from the rat’s nest from the White Snowfield. It seemed as if the Ugly Rat intended to make this place its new home.

“Can you purify it?” Bayern asked one of the priests.

“I... do not think so,” the priest answered. He had no color left in his face. “The poison is too dense. It is hard just to stand this close. If we use our scriptures, perhaps we can begin, but only just.”

Even in healthy orders, only a very few could cleanse a stain this heavy, and no one could say how many months it would take. The density alone told the story. That was not the only problem.

The surface of the bog heaved, and things began to rise. There were many of them. The rat had spent weeks saving them back like coins it did not wish to spend.

Suddenly, something else came with them.

“

Urrrgh!

” A larger shape burst through and stood swaying.

“A bear...?” Bayern stammered, eyes round.

It was not the one from the White Snowfield, yet it carried the same shape. Parts had decayed and twisted away, but he could not mistake it. This one was smaller than the White Bear he had witnessed. The White Bear he had seen was the size of a mountain; the thing that had crawled out of this mire was as big as a small hill.

“The rat has fouled a cub,” Ketal said. “Of course it has. The White Bear must have gone wild when it realized.”

“A cub...,” Bayern repeated, and the light in his eyes cooled into something reserved for the few things he took personally. “I will take care of that.”

“Okay,” Ketal said. “Best of luck.”

“

Uwaaa!

”

“Kill it!”

The front line broke into a dozen fights at once. Barbarians who had learned to work beside priests moved inside rings of pale light and cut until the creatures that came out of the bog stopped moving.

Bayern walked into the bear with his weapon in both hands, and the first shock of their collision wobbled the horizon. Ketal passed their battle and stepped onto the black edge of the mire.

“You meant to live here,” he muttered.

“It is a little thin still, but it is acceptable.” The answer rose with the reek. The rat stepped out where he could see it.

Ketal let out another low whistle. “Filthy.”

The rat had gone beyond shape. Its body had melted into a mark, and yet what stood there put out more force than it had before. It had gathered corruption to the lip of its own limit.

“You really do want me dead,” Ketal said.

“You are a traitor, barbarian.” It spat the words. “You are of us, and yet you stand for the Outside. That insult will not be overlooked.”

“Be quiet,” Ketal said. He cut the speech with a flat hand. “I am human.”

“You may believe what you wish about yourself, but your nature is closer to ours. To betray us and attack us should shame you.”

“That is a funny line to take,” he said. “The ones Inside did not get along as well as you make it sound.”

“That is true...” A sour little laugh shivered in the rat’s throat. Even in the White Snowfield, the monsters tried to kill one another as often as they could. It was not a community so much as a long war without resolution.

“You dragged a bear cub out here,” Ketal said. “The bear must have tried to tear you apart.”

“It did. It let go of its own domain and came after me. It was not easy to shake.”

“I imagine not.”

For one quiet instant, the two of them smiled like men who had known each other for too long. It was not entirely wrong. They had crossed weapons for a span too long to number. If there was such a thing as an ill-fated companion, someone who greeted by trying to kill, then perhaps the word fit.

“Shall we?” Ketal said.

“We shall,” the rat answered.

Killing intent rose like heat off a road. Far back on the line, warriors who were busy with their own foes felt their skin prickle and looked up without knowing why. Emotion struck emotion and distorted the air between the two until the light looked crooked.

“This time I will not leave it at words. I will kill you,” Ketal said, showing his teeth.

“That is my line. I will foul you and break you, barbarian!”

Venom and fist met, and the world began to shake.