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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 45706" data-attributes="member: 259">Rat Bastards, Part ISurging proved easier said than done:  without pulling out an axe, it was difficult to get through the hordes of screaming tourists.Lum eventually shouldered her way through the torrent, and Heluk took the cue from her.  Within moments, they stood on the edge of a clearing in the crowd.Oranges lay scattered across the road, and rats the size of housecats swarmed between them.  A man lay face-down beneath an overturned cart, a pool of blood spread beneath him.A figure rooted through the overturned cart, his back to the companions.  In front of him stood two demons.  Their build was human, but their faces were distended into a mockery of a rat’s face.  Each held a strange weapon, a sword with an abnormally thin blade.  On seeing the barbarian struggling to remove the cloth bag from the head of his axe, both the demons licked their blades and stepped forward.  “Squim, we got company!” one chirped.“Mithras, grant your supplicant strength!” Lum shouted, and her muscles bulged beneath her robe.  She too began working her weapons free – but not before one of the rat-men stabbed her deeply with his strange blade.  Heluk was also hit.  The barbarian snarled and tore the bag free; with a tremendous backhand blow, he swung it straight at the ratman’s neck.It was a solid hit, and nearly decapitated the demon – but when he pulled the blade back, the flesh healed like putty, and the wound was gone.  Off to one side, a merchant tried frantically to beat a rat away from his cache of carved wooden toys; but the rat leapt onto the merchant’s arm, scrambled up to his throat, and latched on. The merchant collapsed to the ground screaming, reaching desperately for the vermin..The figure digging through the cart turned around:  another rat-demon.  He snarled and joined the fight.  One of the demons ducked under Heluk’s axe and stabbed him again in the side.  The barbarian was nearly surrounded.Lum, remembering that some demons were immune to normal weapons, called again on her patron.  “Mithras, make this warrior’s axe shine with your holiness!”  As he said this, Heluk let out a tremendous yell, and his face turned beet-red.  He held the axe in both hands and swung it again.This time, the ratman’s wound didn’t heal, and he fell silently to the ground.  But the remaining two attacked again, and both their strikes fell true:  their thin blades seemed highly maneuverable, and their tips struck flesh again and again.Then a familiar voice began chanting from high overhead.  Korythis, invible and flying, called to a whirlwind spirit – and Heluk saw the world around him shift into slow motion.As a rat leapt at him, his axe became a blur, and two halves fell twitching to the ground.  He turned with a snarl on the ratman called Squim and buried his axe in the demon’s thigh; his third blow was just barely dodged by the demon.Lum, suspecting that her mace wouldn’t find purchase on the demonflesh, turned her attention to the rats around her.  There were two remaining; a single swing, and only one was left.One of the ratmen looked behind him, and then sprinted away, twisting out of the way of Lum’s haphazard blow.  He dove beneath the cart of wooden toys.  The other struck again at Heluk, who blocked every blow with supernatural speed.Korythis flew invisible down to street level so that she could see beneath the toy cart, drawing a silver dagger from her belt as she flew.  As she watched, the rat-demon’s clothes turned brown and sprouted fur; his body shrank, and his face elongated, until he was indistinguishable from the huge rats in the street.Korythis looked at the rat’s fangs, and at her dagger, and back at the rat’s fangs, and decided that others could handle the fighting.She was right:  the one remaining rat-demon fought fiercely, but bit by bit Heluk was wearing him down.  A rat climbed a cart near Lum and leapt onto her neck, but Lum was able to snatch it off.  She hurled it to the ground and stomped on it, listening with satisfaction to the crunch of ribs.With a final blow, Heluk hewed the last demon’s head from his shoulders.  The foes were defeated or escaped.  Unfortunately, so too were the fallen merchants.And Afet struggled into the battle scene.  “What happened here?” she said.The companions explained the battle to her and asked the nearby merchants what had happened.  The fruit seller had been speaking with three men when a figure stepped out of the crowd and threw a bucket of water on the men.  Nobody got a good look at the figure, except to say that it wore a multicolored robe; for when the three men were splashed, they immediately turned into the rat demons.  They drew weapons and attacked the fruit seller, and rats began swarming onto the scene, and“You two!  Drop your weapons!”  A contingent of town guards, clothed in red tabards, stood at the edge of the clearing, their crossbows leveled at Lum and Heluk.</blockquote>

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