“Kill him.”

  Oh, shit. I’m so fucked…

  I take a step back, bumping into the player behind me. “W-why don’t we talk about this first? How about it, I’ll help you hunt and kill my teammates and then…”

  “Hahaha, this guy’s as unique as they come.”

  “His brain must’ve short-circuited.”

  The four players ignore my pleas as expected, and the one I bumped into raises a massive hammer, so large its shadow covers my whole body, ready to smash me into oblivion.

  “Say ‘good night’, hahaha.”

  As the massive hammer head approaches, there’s just one thought filling my head: I know this is a game, and physics don’t matter much compared to real life, but still, shouldn’t a hammer of that size be impossible to lift? I mean, a solid metal chunk of that size should weigh well over a ton…

  No, no, Andreu. Focus! Focus! You’re about to die!

  Kyaaaaah! I internally scream. I must avoid the attack, but the other three players are ready to strike me down if I try something funny. They’re about to jump at me.

  I didn’t want to do this, but you left me no option... I suddenly turn around and point behind me, “What’s that!?”

  Three pairs of eyes bore into me, their faces screaming, ‘Is this guy for real?’, and making me want to die in shame. Furthermore, the shadow keeps approaching, unaffected by my words.

  Aaaaagh! Don’t look at me like thaaaaaaaat!

  Forcibly overcoming the shame, I lower my body, pretending to buy time before the hammer hits me, and place my two hands on the ground.

  Alright, Andreu. It’s time for an emergency escape. It’s time to use your last resort and run away like the rat you are!

  My body suddenly shrinks, surprising everyone. I immediately start running, trying to get out of the hammer’s massive impact area before it squishes me.

  I feel the air shake as something huge falls behind me, almost smashing my tail.

  With a loud bang, the hammer hits the ground. The following shockwave sends me flying and almost releases the transformation, but doesn’t quite do it. Like a bullet, I escape their encirclement.

  Thank you for the emergency escape, big hammer guy!

  I somehow turn around mid-flight and see them chasing after my blurry silhouette with their eyes, mouths hanging open. I stick my tongue out.

  ‘Hahaha, catch me if you can!’

  It’s truly a shame I can’t talk while transformed. It’d have been epic if I could mock them right now… Well, you can’t have everything.

  The landing is a bit accidented, though – there’s nothing like suddenly stopping after hitting a large earth golem at incredible speeds. Luckily for me, even when the damage I take should have popped my transformation, it instead triggers my Indomitable Will skill. If I had transformed back right now, I’d have died for sure.

  As fast as I can, I climb down the golem and slip through the support mob's ranks. As soon as they detect me, treating me as an enemy, the monsters start a frenetic pursue. However, their actions only serve to exacerbate the chaos, making it very easy for me to escape.

  I’ve trained too hard for this day! Stupid support mobs can’t me, even when transformed, hahaha!

  Uuh, I’m starting to get dizzy…

  Ignoring the growing dizziness, I use this chaos to approach the nearby cliff, and using it as cover, I start running along its edge. But right when I think I’ve successfully escaped, I hear calm voices from behind.

  “I’ve got him tagged, boss; he won’t escape.”

  “Perfect. Open section B and raise C and D. Also, alter the rest to hinder his teammate’s movement.”

  “I’m on it.”

  What are they doing, talking calmly? Shouldn’t they be all shouting things like ‘He got us!’, or ‘What the fuck? Did he just turn into a rat!?’ with desperate voices?

  This isn’t fair! I demand panicked reactions!

  With a low rumble, the ground starts vibrating, and the cliff starts merging with the ground. At this rate, I’ll soon find myself exposed in an empty field with nowhere to hide. Furthermore, ahead of me, a massive earth wall starts rising, blocking my escape.

  Is this the ‘section B’ that guy mentioned…? Fuck. Why can’t anything go as planned!?

  The chase starts. Imagine a small rat running on concrete flat ground, chased by four players and a monster horde behind them.

  I wonder what this looks like from the viewer’s perspective. I’ll have to watch the replay later.

  There’s nowhere to hide, and the front is cut off by the new cliffs, so I try to escape to the sides. But every time I change my direction, the dungeon layout changes in response, cutting my advance. Walls and cliffs rise in front of me, and when I use them to hide, they sink, turning into flat ground.

  After a while of playing a game called ‘chasing the rat’, I find myself trapped at a dead end, surrounded by vertical walls. The single exit is choke-full of enemies, so tightly packed that not even a rat like me can slip through.

  I turn back to my human form and hold back the urge to puke.

  “W-wait!” I shout as the four players approach, clearly angrier than before. “Let’s talk this, guys. I-I surrender!”

  One of the players laughs at my ‘persuasion’. “Ha! Look at him. After giving us so much trouble, he thinks we’ll let him free.”

  “Can we torture him? Just a teeny tiny bit?” Another one asks, but the leader shakes his head.

  “No. We’ve wasted enough time already. Just get rid of him and start searching for the other two.” He then asks the third player. “Did you tag them?”

  “I couldn’t. They left before I could get close.”

  “Hmm. It’s fine. We’ll find them; they have nowhere to hide.” With those words, the four prepare their weapons and spells, aiming them at me.

  Having nowhere to retreat, I glare at them. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die while fighting!

  “Did you know? Cornered rats bite! Like this, haaaaaaaaaaa!”

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  I muster all my courage and rush at them, swinging my arms wildly to scare them off. As expected, the only thing my actions achieve is to make them grin and mock me, but it’s enough. Nobody can say I didn’t try.

  “Hahaha, look at him!”

  “Pathetic last struggle…”

  My HP falls from full to almost zero in just five or so seconds, but I persevere – yes, while transformed, the HP is reduced to that of the imitated unit, but it returns to normal right after.

  I keep pushing forward, receiving all the attacks with my body, until I reach their leader and deliver a punch right to his face, taking him by surprise.

  “Ha, eat this! See? Rats bite when cornered, hahaha!”

  He wipes the hit area with the back of his hand and glares at me. My attack did less than 1% of his HP as damage.

  “Nice last effort. Now, die.”

  The shadow of the gigantic hammer approaches from behind, like a death angel declaring my end. I accept my fate and lock eyes with the leader, standing right in front of me.

  But, right before the hammer hits me, I grin.

  Upon contact, the hammer makes a loud crash. But, as if I were part of the indestructible walls of the dungeon, I remain perfectly still, unperturbed by the impact. The surreal sight makes everyone stop for an instant, and it’s then that they notice the strange glow that’s starting to accumulate around my body.

  I smile at their leader, face-to-face with me, and at the same time, I make an explosion gesture with my hands. “Got you. Boom.”

  “Shi–” *BOOOOM!*

  Light floods my surroundings after the explosion, encompassing the four opponents as well as a few of their support monsters, who are staying behind them.

  The world turns white, and when I recover my vision, I start laughing like a madman.

  “Hahaha! Told you: don’t trap a rat or it’ll bite you, hahahaha! Did you think you could ambush us? Wrong! I’m the one who ambushes, not” “you! Fufufu! Hahaha!”

  I finish my monologue in my phantasmal form after being killed by their team leader.

  He must have killed me before I could finish because he doesn’t want to listen to me anymore. Especially not after dealing such a blow to them.

  …both to their pride, and to their ‘perfect ambush’.

  I keep laughing, rolling on the floor as I watch their faces. A single hit, even if it’s from my strongest skill, isn’t enough to kill them, but they aren’t doing well. They’ll need to recover before they can fight at full potential, or they’ll risk getting eliminated by Laura and Clara.

  And talking about them… It’s up to those two to finish what I started.

  Remember when I said, ‘Run away, I’ll delay them’? That was a trap to mislead our opponents.

  We planned this a long time ago, when training under Marta. She told us to spend time coming up with plans so we could react faster to unexpected situations like this ambush. Knowing I have a self-destruct skill, one of those plans went like this: I’d pretend to get caught in a situation I can’t escape, and force mutual destruction. Telling them to run away and ‘find the dungeon core’ was part of the code we set up to mislead our opponents.

  Of course, it isn’t a tactic that would likely work a second time, as now every team knows I have a self-destruct skill, but we never expected it to work repeatedly. We just have to come up with new plans.

  The four players quickly reorganize themselves. The healer starts to recover everyone’s HP, another one controls the support monsters, and the leader and the guy with the tracking skill discuss something.

  But I don’t pay much attention to them, because my eyes are glued to the hidden shadow on top of the cliff.

  “What's that!?” Someone shouts, noticing a black, shadow-like barrier behind the support monster mob, trapping everyone between the cliff walls they themselves have raised to trap me.

  At the same time as the shout, black fire fills the ground, burning players and AI-controlled monsters alike, and a smiling succubus reveals herself from the top of the cliff.

  “Missed me?”

  She playfully asks, sending a flying kiss in my direction. Well, not exactly, ‘me’, but at my corpse, because she can’t see me, but since I haven’t moved at all since I died, that’s, in fact, my direction too.

  “Enemy attack! Get her!”

  Our opponent’s reaction is swift and precise. Attacking simultaneously, all enemies with ranged attacks aim at Laura, but she uses Blink to appear on the opposite cliff, avoiding them.

  Almost at the same time this happens, the dungeon layout starts to change once more, and the cliffs sink into the ground. Soon, she’ll find herself at the same level as everyone else, and our enemies won’t be trapped, even if the black barrier remains.

  “Fufufu! Is that all you’ve got?” She provokes our opponents while licking her lips, and a new wave of attacks is aimed at her.

  Laura chuckles and sets up another type of barrier in front of her: Conversion Veil. The projectiles and spells, reduced in size, mostly miss her, but her Fireballs, shot from the side that augments their size, turn into small suns. Engulfed by the black Hellfire flames from below and the blazing red flames from above, our opponents learn what true hell feels like.

  Monsters fall like flies, especially those who were hit by my previous Grand Finale.

  But, as expected, as flashy and dangerous as her moves are, she quickly runs out of MP. Both barriers disappear, soon followed by the black fire.

  Laura takes out her whip and gets ready for melee combat: the cliff, too tall to climb at the start, is now just about two meters tall.

  “We’ve got her now. Kill her!”

  Sigh… why do some players keep saying stereotypical low-key villain lines all the time?

  Don’t they get tired? Don’t they learn from repeatedly having to eat their own words?

  If there’s a chance you’re going to have to eat your own words, at least do it like me: make it so grand that you can pretend you’re doing it on purpose.

  Haa… I shake my head. Never mind. Some people don’t learn.

  Anyway. The fact that Laura has lost her advantage isn’t important. It’s fine because her job was to distract them, to grab their attention.

  The real danger is elsewhere…

  “I’ll. Avenge. My. Brotheeeeeer!”

  How rude. I told you I’m not dead yet… Oh, right, sorry. I am indeed dead… now. Now, I am dead, but I wasn’t the first time you said it; that’s why it’s still rude.

  With that weird battle cry, my sister jumps down from the left cliff, right into the middle of the four players.

  What follows is too gross to describe, so forgive me for not trying too hard.

  Taking our opponents by surprise, too focused on Laura to pay attention to the opposite cliff, Clara swipes her tentacles around, entangling the four unsuspecting victims in a single motion. Like black worms, the tentacles crawl over their bodies, limiting their movements and dragging them towards my sister.

  “You’re all mine now, hehehe!”

  As the expert players they are, the four react with astonishing speed, attacking the tentacles to get free. But they must not know, or the frenzied battle clouded their judgement, because they target the tentacles instead of my sister, which is completely useless.

  Clara detaches her tentacles, keeping all the damage over time effects on them while avoiding damage thanks to her innate skill, and as soon as new tentacles grow out of her arms, she repeats the process, slowly but surely dragging them closer.

  There’s little our opponents can do to resist her, as her kit is designed to counter anyone as long as she gets a hold of them.

  From my place, it looks as if a portal opened into the abyss, and a cosmic terror came forth, dragging anyone near to the other side. The mass of tentacles writhes, life-like, and pulls what it touches as if devouring them.

  “Aaaagh! What’s this shit?”

  “I can’t use my skills! This is bullshit!”

  “My regeneration isn’t working!?”

  By the end, it’s as if the four players have been devoured by the black mass. Meanwhile, Clara calmly stands in the center, laughing with a cute (terrifying) voice.

  “Hehehe! Brother, can you see this? I did well, didn’t I?”

  I shiver. Consumed by the abyss creature, minds and bodies alike… Thank god I wasn’t there to witness it… Oh, right. I’m dead, but I can still see everything in my phantasmal form. I see everything, up close, and hear all their screams.

  “Shit. I’ll have nightmares again...” I resign myself to my fate.

  At least, we overcame their ambush and won the match. So not everything’s bad, right? RIGHT!?

  Please, someone tell me it was worth it.

  9th of January. I'll use this time to focus on my new project, which I hope will be more successful than The Mad Rat's Lab. And since it'll take long for you to see them but have already told you about them, I decided I will share the drawings now. You'll have to wait for the story, though!

  Instagram. He is a new artist, just starting his career, so there aren't many drawings, but you can give him a like or follow to support both of us. We may work together again in the future.