Some things in life are sacred. Immutable. Cosmic certainties that hold the very fabric of existence together. And for Annabell Smith, there were precisely three:
- Never turn off the Wi-Fi.
- Never invade her personal space.
- And never, under any circumstances, mess with her snacks.
The first had already been sacrificed at the altar of the apocalypse. It had taken time, but she’d made peace with it. Sort of. When the world ends, you expect to lose things—like electricity, civilization, and the comforting notion that your next-door neighbor won’t try to eat your face. Still, there had been something to cling to.
When the other two sacred laws were broken, however, at the same time, well—there are some sins even the end of the world cannot excuse.
***
Annabell had barely stepped over the threshold of her apartment as a ripple of unease passed through her soul, the kind that suggested something was deeply, fundamentally wrong. Not wrong in the shambling horde of undead slowly following her up the stairs kind of way. That, she had long since relegated to “background noise.”
No, this was worse.
This was the sound of something else, something ahead of her and far more concerning.
This was the sound of her domain being invaded.
Sprinting down the cramped entranceway, Annabell skid around the corner to her bedroom just in time to witness a sight so profoundly horrifying that her brain very nearly refused to process it.
There was movement. There was squeaking. There was an unacceptable quantity of scurrying.
Her snacks.
Her space.
Her very existence.
Under siege.
Despite her carefully cultivated shut-in lifestyle, Annabell had never actually encountered a rat infestation before. And certainly not one composed of big, undead rats.
Big, undead rats that were, at that very moment, tearing into her life’s blood and last reason for existence—her snack horde, heroically salvaged from a convenience in a crumbling world.
She had been saving those for a special occasion.
Yet now, as one of the abominable little horrors lifted its crumb-stained whiskers and let out a hiss that could only be described as offensive, she knew. She knew in her bones that this was it. The final death knell of civilization.
Because some lines should never be crossed. And raiding a girl’s snacks? That was the kind of crime that toppled empires.
“Wallace, SICK ’EM!” Annabell commanded, charging forward to rescue the last remaining shreds of her dignity and processed carbohydrates.
Wallace did absolutely nothing.
Which meant it was up to her.
The nearest rat met her foot, punting it across the room with the kind of force usually reserved for sporting events and sibling rivalries. It hit the wall with a sickly squelch, and yet—
The other rats did not care.
If anything, her attack caused them to redouble their efforts. Not in survival, but in shredding through wrappers with newfound enthusiasm.
“NO!”
This was personal. Someone—something—had sent these rats to hurt her in the one way that mattered. There was no other explanation.
She could feel it.
And, indeed, somewhere, deep in the unseen, dungeon-spun entrails of her old world, a Core was laughing. Not a polite chuckle. Not even an evil cackle. This was a full-bodied, deep-in-the-belly, gasping-for-air sort of laugh. The kind that suggested it thought it was being very clever indeed.
What it hadn’t realized, however, was that it’d just declared war on the pettiest Gremlin to ever hoard convenience store snacks like a dragon hoards gold.
***
"…At the end of that road, only mutual destruction awaits."
In the politest way possible, Lionel had taken a seat. Some conversations were best endured from a stable position, and Stonemason Bac seemed to only be gaining momentum the more she spoke.
"Never go head-to-head with a dungeon," she intoned, with the grim air of someone delivering a prophecy no one would heed. "Per their very design, they are made to steadily adapt and crush whatever Delvers find themselves inside, targeting the things they love the most..."
***
Annabell was infuriated.
Infuriated, in this particular instance, involved a lot of kicking, thrown collectibles, and the occasional scream of rage as she waged a one-girl war against the infestation of undead rats.
Fat, ragged, and about as hygienic as a sewer’s worst fever dream, they weren’t strong, exactly. Just persistent. And numerous. And with a sweet tooth that could rival even a Gremlin’s.
There could be no co-existence.
Annabell’s pillowcase of loot—half blanket, half emergency bludgeoning weapon—sailed across the room with the grace of an Olympic hammer throw. A particularly ambitious rat, halfway through dragging an entire bottle of soda under her bed, was promptly reduced to a smear.
Another rat, clearly fueled by hubris, launched itself at her face. Annabell met it halfway with a flying knee, the impact painting the ceiling a shade of crimson that interior decorators would struggle to name.
That, apparently, was enough to convince the rest of them to change strategy.
Two of them, recognizing the true threat in the room, immediately lunged for Annabell’s feet—darting in and out like tiny, plague-ridden fencers, just barely avoiding her attempts to launch them into next week. Meanwhile, another three had committed themselves fully to their foul work, shredding through wrappers with the single-minded intensity of creatures who had nothing left to lose.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Annabell watched in horror as foil wrappers were torn apart with reckless abandon, as chocolate bars were devoured by tiny, necrotic teeth.
“You monsters!” she howled, eyes wild with grief. “Take Wallace instead! Take my clothes, take my furniture, take my dignity! But leave my chocolates alone!”
The rats did not, in fact, leave her chocolates alone. If anything, her desperate plea only seemed to embolden them, sending them into a snack-fueled frenzy worse than even Annabell’s most dire late-night munchies.
Maybe sensing the incoming retaliation, one particularly audacious rat made a leap for her shins. Annabell, moving on pure instinct (which, in this case, was 90% outrage and 10% questionable decision-making), jumped over it—landing heels-first on the bloated back of another traitorous rodent that had just finished her last Chocolaty Mana Bar.
“Take this!” she cried, with all the confidence of someone who had not actually planned this through.
She had expected… well, she hadn’t expected anything, really. But she definitely hadn’t expected the rat to pop like an overindulgent mosquito, painting the floor, the walls, her scattered laundry, and—most unforgivably—any remaining snacks within a one-meter radius, in gory, undead filth.
And that was only half of it:
Dexterity Roll…
Failed!
Annabell barely had time to process the magnitude of the tragedy before her brain caught up to the much more pressing concern that she was, in fact, slipping.
Her world tilted. Gravity betrayed her. And the rat that had been lunging for her heels suddenly found itself experiencing the full force of a dropping elbow—completely by accident, but still with a level of commitment that would make professional wrestlers weep.
It, too, burst like an overripe fruit in summer.
“Why do you keep making a mess of my apartment?!” Annabell roared, flipping onto her stomach.
Then she saw it.
The plastic basket. The last stronghold of her snack empire. It was nearly empty.
With a strangled scream, she lunged for it, sending the remaining rats scattering in terror.
But it was too late.
Only a single jellybean remained.
She reached out with trembling fingers.
It was too tragic… Heart wrenching. Simply unimaginable.
A lone survivor. Its family, its friends, all gone.
If there had only been—
She paused, frowning as she took a closer look.
The jellybean had… markings. A certain texture. An unsettling dampness.
And a dawning, terrible realization settled over her.
Her last source of sugar had already passed through the digestive system of some unholy, undead rodent.
Annabell’s eye twitched.
“You thieving little—”
Before she could rightfully accuse a rat of being a rat, the unmistakable scrape of something heavy being dragged across the floor yanked her attention sideways.
Her pillowcase of loot.
By the joint effort of two unnervingly determined undead vermin, it was steadily vanishing into the depths of the largest laundry pile in her apartment. Which, given the state of said laundry, was more akin to terrain than clothing.
Annabell’s heart sank.
First, they had taken her chocolates. Then, her will to live. And now they were coming for her shinies?
Not on her watch.
With a frustrated yell, Annabell pounced, scrambling across the floor on all fours in a desperate attempt to reclaim her stolen treasures before they were lost to the eldritch abyss that was her own mess.
And that was precisely when the last rat burst from the pile like a fleshy, rotten torpedo.
A hissing torpedo.
With teeth.
Still halfway to the loot, arms outstretched, Annabell didn’t have time to dodge.
The teeth sank into her hand. Deeply. Enthusiastically.
A notification promptly blinked into existence:
-1 HP
Annabell let out a very dignified scream (which was absolutely not a shriek), yanking her hand back with the kind of raw, instinctual horror normally reserved for discovering a spider in one’s shoe.
Unfortunately for the rat, this meant that it, too, was yanked across the room—except at the kind of velocity only the finest medieval siege weapons could have hoped to achieve.
No longer attached to her hand (in what could now be considered a mistake on its part), the unfortunate creature achieved airborne status, spun once—twice—perhaps even three times—before reaching the logical conclusion of its journey:
A high-speed collision with the hallway wall at Mach Absolutely-Obliterated-On-Impact.
The result was, regrettably, another explosion of undead innards.
More regrettably, this particular detonation had an optimal blast radius for maximum devastation.
By the time the squelching had stopped, every last parcel she had painstakingly hoarded by the entrance was now coated in a fine, shimmering sheen of collector-value-reduced-to-zero.
Annabell stared at the devastation.
Then at her gore-slicked hands.
Then at the blinking notification that was still insistently vying for her attention:
Rodent’s Blight:
All Stats Reduced by 1 Until Cured
A deep, shuddering inhale.
Wallace, still tucked safely into her hoodie, held his silence in vague concern.
“AHHHHHHH!”
If these undead little thieves thought they could ruin everything she loved and just scurry away, then they had made a grave miscalculation.
A very grave miscalculation.
Ignoring the blinking notification about her dropping health in favor of a guttural battle cry—the kind normally reserved for warriors charging into battle—Annabell tore into the laundry pile the rodents had disappeared underneath.
A laundry pile which had, over the years, developed from “a mess” into “an ecosystem” and, just now, had been formally classified as Rats’ Nest (Level 0) — Hostile.
By all logic, it shouldn’t have been large enough to hide a single squirming rat and her precious sack of loot.
And yet, when she violently peeled back the first layer of fabric strata, two more undead rodents sprang forth, hissing, snapping, and bringing the whole proud evolutionary history of vermin into disrepute.
Having already been bitten once, Annabell promptly introduced both to the hard rubber sole of her shoe at a speed generally considered inhospitable to life.
One punt. Two squeaks. A pair of airborne rats.
They landed on opposite walls with the same kind of squelshy enthusiasm that had already ruined most of Annabell’s possessions that day.
Rat Swarm — Defeated
10 XP Earned
Level Up A…
She didn’t even spare the notification a glance.
Until she had her loot, until she had vindicated her stolen snacks, the battle wasn’t over.
What she found at the bottom of the laundry pile, however, was neither her precious shinies nor the rats who’d stolen them.
She didn’t even find the floor.
Instead, there was a hole.
A gaping, chewed-through, rodent-made hole that led straight down into the apartment below.
Annabell peered into it.
It, presumably, peered back.
It also squeaked.
"So, this is how you want to do things, huh?" she said between strained breaths, standing on the precipice of what could only be described as swarming, hissing, and possibly chirping darkness.
Retrieving her loot wasn’t going to be as simple as she’d hoped.
Not that there was any time to adjust her expectations, because at that very moment—
Groan.
Thud.
CRASH.
—the unmistakable sound of several things falling all at once pulled her attention back to the hallway.
Ah.
Yes.
The zombies.
The ones that had been shuffling up the stairs after her.
The ones she had, in hindsight, been entirely too focused on snack-related matters to properly account for.
And the ones that had now reached her apartment through a door she had absolutely, without question, never shut.
The first wave had already fallen over the mess at her entrance, tripping over a mixture of destroyed parcels, laundry, and general Annabell-induced hazards.
Now, having finally located her with their lifeless, beady little eyes, they were eagerly—or, well, as eagerly as shambling corpses could manage—closing in.
Safe Zone Invasion: Failed
Warning! Safe Zones Permanently Disabled
Warning! Danger Levels Rapidly Increasing
Annabell’s stomach twisted.
The zombie intruders hadn’t taken off their shoes before invading her space. Now, they were making a mess out of everything. Everything as in: anything not already covered by rat filth.
Any last hopes of restoring her kingdom (aka her apartment) to its former glory had just been reduced to ash.
The gremlin had, at last, been chased out of her nest.
ANNABELL SMITH HP: 3/9(12)
Rodent’s Blight: Active
SCENARIO:
The Dungeon’s Revenge (Stage 1)
In Progress…
Those last three dots slowly faded in and out like an outdated sign of buffering, as if the universe itself was eagerly waiting to see what would happen next.