Giant Rat

You might be a ‘giant’ rat but that just meant that you came up to the knees of the shorter heroes so you aren’t going to hang around in the open waiting for some human to get the drop on you. No you head down one of the numerous passageways that make up the catacombs in which you always respawn looking for a place to hide. You may have spent your life underneath the city but you didn’t really know your way around since the tunnels seemed to shift every few months.

Just two turns later and you realized that one of those shifts must have happened since the last time you’d respawned, meaning the map you had been building in your mind was completely worthless. You couldn’t even know what level the heroes would be when they found you as your kind was more or less endemic, not just restricted to the tutorial zones. Spotting a crack in the masonry next to a spike trap you wriggled in; maybe if you were very lucky it would injury an adventurer enough for you to finish them off.

While you waited you decide to check out your stats hoping that they might have been changed along with the layout:

Giant Rat
Lvl: 2
Melee Attack: 3
Ranged Attack: 0
Special Abilities:
Diseased - 5% chance that a melee attack will deal poison damage.

Yep, your diseased ability got nerfed reducing the chances of you poisoning someone down to a quarter of what it had been. You were so busy cursing, well chittering, over that that you almost missed the rather noisy approach of a group of heroes. Judging from the autotuned voice belting out bawdy lyrics there was a bard in the mix whose singing alerted not just you but possibly every other monster in the area to their presence.

“He but his hand upon my knee, yo ho yo ho. He but his hand upon my knee, yo ho yo ho,” the bard, wearing velvet bodice and pants laced incredible tight even though her hourglass figure made that lacing gap over her bust and hips, sang from the middle of the group. She did not seem to be expecting a fight as her lute was on her back and the long dagger she carried hung from her belt. The barbarian wasn’t much more prepared; he did have his long, notched blade in hand but he carried across his shoulders in a causal way. No if any of the heroes was going to spot in your hiding place it would be the rogue leading them through the dark.

“Stop.” Her eyes narrowed and you shrunk back in hole sure that you were going to die.

No, she’d just seen the trap which wasn’t great but still YAY you’re not going to die. You also got to watch the rogue very closely as she disarmed the spikes. She was wearing an outfit in dark grey that somehow managed to be both tight and loose, depending on where you looked, with plenty of leather straps and pouches for holding weapons, tools, and potions. Even though she was more modestly endowed than most female heroes her top was cut low enough for you to get a distracting eyeful of cleavage while she was bent over the mechanism. With a click she made it safe and the heroes could move on unscathed.

Damn. There goes that plan. Maybe you could follow the party deeper in, wait for them to get into a few fights, and then strike. Or maybe you’d be better off resetting the trap in the hopes that you can get them on their way back out.