A clearing began to materialize just beyond the trees they were approaching and Patrick held up a hand.

  “I’ve got three matriarchs in the clearing,” he whispered, his posture rigid.

  “How many bullets do you have?” Emil asked Ozzy. “The big ones I mean.”

  “Six, seven if you give me a sec.” Ozzy responded.

  “You’ve got it,” Patrick said, “we need to plan this out, thoughts anyone?”

  “Ozzy can handle one of the matriarchs, big slow things are his bread and butter.” Emil said, only for Patrick to look at him dubiously.

  “He can do it,” Lars said, backing Emil up, “He was the one who maimed the snake when we were crossing the Murk.”

  Patrick turned a thoughtful gaze on Ozzy. “Where do you suggest we put him?” Patrick asked Emil.

  “You can put me in the back or I can get up in one of these trees. Just depends if you want extra support in our backline or for me to focus on the matriarchs.” Ozzy said, answering Patrick directly rather than letting Emil do it for him.

  While Ozzy had a great deal of respect for Emil and would follow him just about anywhere, he wasn't as convinced of the man's ability to judge his abilities. Or for any of these people to judge's his capabilities well. As far as they were concerned, he was an unknown factor. A powerful one, but what you didn’t know in battle could get you killed. If they expected too much of him they’d get overwhelmed as he failed to deliver, or if they expected too little, they’d underutilize him, lowering their potential ability and increasing the risk of their failure.

  Ozzy was completely unwilling to let that happen. Sure, he’d follow whatever strategy they set their minds on, but he’d be damned if he let his abilities go to waste where they might matter most.

  “And you’re sure you can handle one of the matriarchs on your own?” Patrick asked, turning his attention to Ozzy.

  “I mean, that depends. I don't know anything about matriarchs. How tough are they compared to something like a Root Sucker?” Ozzy asked, summoning another rifle round.

  “If you can get beneath their armor they’re no tougher than you or me, getting through’s the trick though. Their armor’s at least twice as thick as a sting crab and twice as hard. Normally we have to go for the eyes and blind them before we can even think about breaking through their shells.” Patrick explained.

  “They have shells?” Ozzy asked, perplexed if these were the same matriarch’s Emil had told him that led murk rat packs.

  “Yes, and they extend up and over their faces. If you can break through then they’re no problem. I’ve never heard of a tier 1 let alone a tier 0 getting anywhere close though.” Patrick finished, “Where do you think you’d be best?”

  “I’ll sit in the backline with Emil and Myla, I should be able to blind them more easily than you all can. You’ll just have to stay behind me until I do it.”

  ***

  Following Lars out into the clearing Ozzy held his rifle ready, though rather than any rifle rounds chambered he’d gone ahead and taken the liberty to fish out some of the first rounds he’d ever looted from a kill. Stun blast shotgun shells.

  While not entirely sure how well the shells would work for blinding the rats he was certain they’d at least give them a little breathing room.

  Pushing out of the tree cover, they were greeted by a sight that was wholly alien to the terrain they had just been moving through, solid, dry, ground. It was like stepping out of a swamp and into an African savanna, the dry earth continuing on for nearly half a mile.

  The dry earth was broken up by giant earthen mounds, it was like termites had taken stimulants, tripled in size, and then taken on the greatest construction projects of their lives. The mounds soared upwards hundreds of feet, looking down on the cypresses with their towering spires.

  All throughout the mounds were murk rats, though different from the ones Ozzy had seen before. These were hairless, scarred, runts of monsters, and they busied themselves with building up more and more of the towers, digging into the earth, and venturing down into their massive burrows.

  Ozzy had been confused as to how it was possible for an animal to have burrows in a swamp, but as he looked closer, he realized that the entire area existed on an artificial hill. It had been built up above the swamp growing in height the closer you got to its center, in all leaving it potentially several hundred feet tall at its center.

  Due to its height Ozzy was certain of one thing more than anything else, this thing was full of winding tunnels. A feeling that was reinforced as he got a better look at the furless murk rats. They bore an uncanny resemblance to earthly naked mole rats, save for bony spikes that ran down their backs and a being nearly the size of the average house dog. There were also normal murk rats, though the smaller but albeit creepier looking naked mole rat looking ones outnumbered them nearly twelve to one.

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  “The ugly ones are their builders Ozzy, Myla will handle those and keep the battlefield locked down. Emil you’re in charge of handling the soldier rats that get through Myla’s kill zones. Lars and I will take a matriarch each and keep them busy while trying to blind and break through their armor. Ozzy, you’ve got the farthest one and if you can blind them do it as quickly as possible. The quicker that’s done the quicker we can get them in their blind spots.” Patrick explained. “Any questions?”

  No one said a word, their eyes hard and focused on the cracked dry earth in front of them.

  Patrick stepped out onto the dry ground and no sooner did the dry dirt crack and crunch under his foot than a screeching cry rose up from the rats. They knew they were coming.

  ***

  Myla was the first to act, using some sort of movement ability to shoot forward in front of their group, landing nearly 70 feet ahead of them in a puff of dust. Instantly she went to work, waving her arms about and making strange symbols with her fingers as Ozzy watched mana flow off of her and onto the earth around her in a semi-circle nearly 200 feet across.

  All throughout the semi-circle, sharp spikes of earth protruded up from the ground. Shadows darkened wherever the towering spires blocked out the sun. Even the air around her seemed to change, a breeze picking up and billowing her hair out.

  Builder rats reached her semicircle nearly instantly. Every single one of them charging to their dooms as the very world around them turns hostile. The spikes that had formed just beneath the surface of the ground shot up like rising spears, impaling any who cross them. The deep shadows became mires, sucking the rats who crossed them down into the earth, never to be seen again. The patches of shadows looking completely undisturbed despite the thrashing rats who'd only just so desperately sought to escape.

  Gradually, the tide of the builder rats became a flood. They numbered easily in the hundreds, their charging army potentially even reaching a thousand strong. Despite this great number, however, they were individually, little more than nuisances. It was easy to tell as Emil began to occasionally sling his balls of fire at some of the bigger groups, killing rats outright with a single attack.

  It was a massacre of seismic proportions, and it wasn't until the normal Murk Rats, who Patrick had called the soldier rats, began to come that they actually began to see any sort of resistance. The murk rats poured onto the battlefield, sprinting over their fallen builder rat brethren and taking strike after strike from Myla's environmental traps.

  As the normal murk rats began to close in on Myla's position, she pulled an unusual looking crossbow out of her bag. It was short and had an angled foregrip that reminded Ozzy very much of the ones he'd had back on Earth. As Myla raised the crossbow, she pulled down on the foregrip, and the whole crossbow bent in half, a mechanism that Ozzy couldn't quite understand from this distance, cocking the string. Whereupon Myla summoned a bolt that looked to be made of the same spikes that were rising up out of the earth and fired it on the closest murk rat.

  Despite never really achieving a single hit kill, her bolts were incredibly useful in the fact that they slowed the encroaching murk rats. As they made it further than their builder brethren had they ran out of meat shields to run over, and once again the environmental traps began to take their toll on the charging monsters. Slowly but surely whittling their number down.

  The pace of the fight changed as Ozzy, Emil, Lars, and Patrick reached Myla. Where it had previously been unlikely that any of the rats would reach Myla, it became an impossibility as between Emil's Fireballs, Ozzy's revolver, and Lars' ice spears were all but untouchable.

  “We’re gonna have to wait them out! The matriarchs won’t come until they feel like we’ve killed enough of their children to pose a real danger to the nest!” Emil shouted the explanation at Ozzy, just barely loud enough for him to hear over the din of combat.

  Slowly they begin to advance, moving further and further towards the center of the artificial hill. Each time they made it 50 feet or so, Myla would stop them before reapplying her spells to the area, expanding them out further and further.

  Ozzy realized, one of the benefits of her doing this was that if they had to fight a retreating battle, she was stacking her abilities denser and denser as they went, meaning that all of the space behind them would have even more protections and environmental traps on it than the area in front of them. While he wasn’t sure how effective the traps would be on any larger monsters no murk rat would even be able to get close to their last position, much less their first.

  They were only about a hundred feet off of the center of the island when the first true roar came up from the caverns. It was answered by two others, each monstrous cry shaking the earth and vibrating its way through each of the core user’s chests.

  Rising up out of different mounds in the center of the artificial hill. Three murk rat matriarchs made themselves known, bellowing with unrelenting fury at the ones who had dared to invade their home and slaughter their young.

  The Matriarchs were nothing like what Ozzy had come to expect them to look like. In fact, they hardly even looked like rats. True, they kept to mostly rodent-like traits, but they were actually closer in appearance an armadillo. That was if you took an armadillo made it the size of a large city bus and gave it horns like a triceratops.

  Each of the murk rat matriarchs, had massive, segmented shells that covered nearly their entire bodies, stretching all the way down to just above their feet. This did not mean however, that they were slow. The matriarchs charged at them nearly as quickly as their children, albeit with about thirty times as much momentum. As they ran, the very earth itself shook and dust and debris flew up into the air.

  Despite their names the matriarchs cared little for the smaller rats around them, and they used their horns to knock, toss, and even impale rats who’d been too slow to get out of their way. The horns were probably the most obvious of the monster’s weapons, the horns were nearly as long as he was tall. One sprouting from the tip of the matriarch’s long snout, and two from their forehead. The horns framed a sloped armored face, plates of bone concealing every one of their features save for two furiously glowing yellow eyes.

  Raising his rifle Ozzy stepped out in front of Patrick and Lars and switched the safety off, aiming at the one who’d first exited the burrows he fired. BOOOM, the stun blast shotgun shell lighting up the world.

  Any of the smaller rats that had been in front of them in about a 30-degree cone immediately either dropped and began seizing or simply ceased to move at all. The matriarch stumbled, shaking her head wildly about, digging furrows in the ground and tossing any of the sizing rats unfortunate enough to be near her sky high as she tried to regain her senses.

  “This might just work!” Ozzy shouted, reloading a second stun blast shell and taking aim back on the one he’d just blinded sealing the deal with a second brilliant explosion.