Pest control.

You wake up some number of hours later—you're not sure when, exactly; there's no possible source of natural light this low underground, and you hardly have a timepiece on you. But at the very least, you feel decently-rested from the exertion your running took earlier. The others are still sleeping, and you leave them be. You would hate to have to wake them up early twice in a row, so instead you do your usual wake-up routine: yawn, stretch as far as you can, and check your status sheet. It looks exactly the same as last time, taunting you with its 130 experience to level up, save for the disappearance of the Well-Fed buff. An unhappy growl from your stomach confirms that; it looks like lamb stew could only take you so far. Fortunately, with the coins you got from the ambush it shouldn't be too difficult to get some more to eat.

Morning rituals completed, it's time to start thinking about how you want to try and get those 130 XP. The most straightforward solution is to try and kill some of the critters that infest the catacombs. Given that this is still a pretty low-level area, most of them should be pretty easy to handle, as long as you don't go too deep into the darkness and run into a miniboss like the Spider Matriarch or a Rat-King. The key to winning will be through the Pack Tactics feat; individually you're all scrawny weaklings, but if you coordinate your attack it should be well within your grasp. While that does mean that it’ll take a bit longer to level up, since as far as you can tell it seems to split the experience evenly between the three of you, it’s the only way to do this even remotely safely.

You briefly entertain the idea of scouting ahead for any convenient critter spawns, but ultimately decide against it. If you fucked up and got uncovered by yourself, you’d be dead in seconds to starving rats or—ugh—spiders. Same with getting some more food; whatever time it is, it’s still entirely possible that the berserker is still looking for you. Instead, you decide it’s time to see to another need entirely…

Slipping out of the room and a bit down the hallway, you have yourself a little bit of privacy. Your member doesn’t need any stimulation to get going; it’s already fully hard under your tunic. After having to pause your last session abruptly and without getting any chance to deal with it since then, it’s demanding that you take care of your pent-up horniness now, and you happily oblige. You start stroking, first slowly—teasing yourself more than anything—and increasingly faster, small breaths turning to low, heavy pants as your arousal grows. Your nubby cat-cock begins to twitch as you approach orgasm, your padded fingers rubbing you closer and closer to completion, and finally your hips buck against your hand and you let out a small yowl as you cum, shooting a few ropes of jizz onto yourself. Satisfied, you clean yourself up a bit and turn to head back and see if the others are awake.

As you turn, though, your eye meets a pair of glowing, diamond pupils staring right at you. Before you can say anything, a quick left hook from Ratty decks you and you’re moaning on the stone floor.

“What the fuck, Ratty?” you ask, startled and angry.

“You’re still really fucking loud when you jack off, Milky. You woke me up, again, so be grateful I didn’t stab you like I said.” she retorts, looking just as irritated at you as you are at her. You pick yourself up off the ground and head back to the room you had hoped to claim fuming, any trace of a good mood from your moment of self-pleasure well and truly gone. You’re not too angry to notice the traces of a blush and a slight shortness of breath from Ratty, though; how long was she watching you?

In any case, once you’re back in the room it’s clear Jitter is awake as well—you briefly wonder if he was watching too—and that means it’s time to try and enact your plan. All it takes is a brief explanation to the others and they’re on board; you have to try something, at least. The three of you head down the passage, eyes bright and alert for any signs of easy prey to grind, and soon enough you come across the tell-tale evidence of a small rat den in a half-collapsed room not too far from what would become your lair. You smile; if there’s anything cats pride themselves on it’s killing rats, and catfolk can’t be too different in that regard, right?

Since he has the best Perception out of your trio, Jitter takes a quick peek around the corner. “It l-looks like ther-r-re’s about f-four big ones, an’ three t-tiny ones.” he reports, in as hushed a tone as his stuttering voice can muster. Fighting four Large Rats and three Small Rats should be a piece of cake for the three of you; you might have that third level faster than you thought!