Rodent Kebab

Rat Ogre
Lvl 15 Lesser Rat Ogre
239/250 HP
0/0 MP

Physical Appearance:
A large anthropomorphic rat with patchy fur and chipped teeth. It looks like a cross between a rat, a silverback gorilla, and a late stage crack addict.

Information:
Raise Observe Level to Unlock

Loot Table:
No system loot from naturally occuring creatures

First Kill Bonus:
No system loot from naturally occuring creatures

That was a lot of HP, but the first one had been tough as nails so it wasn’t exactly surprising. While John threw the Observe, Qhila lobbed a vial at the brute. It shattered against the ground, unleashing a thick plume of white smoke.

John backed up while he used mental commands to swap the squirt gun into his inventory and reload it with alchemist’s fire instead of bleach. He racked his brain trying to come up with a strategy, but kept running into the same wall: he had no idea what options Qhila had on hand. Which really only left him with one choice: tell her what he had and trust her to come up with something.

“I’ve got bleach, alchemist’s fire, molotovs, one Taunt and a baseball bat.” While he spoke, the rat ogre shot out of the smoke towards Qhila. It was immediately obvious that it was faster than the one at the recycling center, but the kobold still managed to dodge.

“Forget the bleach. Get me a shot. Save Taunt.” As she responded tersely, the kobold dodged another grasping swipe of the beast’s hand. She kept trying to put trees and shrubs between herself and her attacker, but many of both were too flimsy to be a meaningful barrier to the brute. John had to do something fast or it’d get her.

But how to draw its ire or trip it up without Taunt? Alchemist’s fire? No, even the lower Level one had ignored the fire on its own, only the gas combo had given it pause. What else? Well, there was one thing that got any male seeing red…

He switched to the bat and moved in from behind the rat and made a low, upward swing.

9 damage.

The rat ogre had noticed him approaching and half-turned, causing John to hit its leg instead of delivering a proverbial nutcracker. The impact shock to his arms felt like he had hit a tree. Or how he imagined hitting a tree with a bat would feel. Regardless, he staggered for a moment.

-21 hp.

Taking advantage of that moment, the rat ogre backhanded him. The impact came with multiple cracking sounds from John’s shoulder, and from what seemed like one moment to the next, he was on the ground two meters away, clutching a shoulder that, for a moment, felt like it was filled with fire and needles.

He had succeeded though. Qhila got a moment to stop, aim and shoot. Despite taking 1 point of damage, the rat ogre didn’t seem to notice the injection dart at first. But halfway through taking a step towards John, it keeled over with a high pitched screech and lay writhing in obvious pain.

John took a moment to gather his wits and banish the mental phantom of the pain in his shoulder, but Qhila didn’t miss a beat. Two more vials shattered against the downed brute, one of which produced a veritable explosion of yellowish foam. John shot an Observe at the foam, but the beast was getting back on its feet before he got time to read it. If that had been the same stuff that put the boar on the ground, the rat ogre recovered a lot faster.

“Burn the foam!” The brute’s attention was locked on Qhila again and halfway to its feet, making it an easy target with the squirt gun.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

How much was from the alchemist’s fire and how much was the foam, John had no idea, but the creature lit up like dry kindling. It shot a glare and a hiss at John, but still went for Qhila. Its movements were a bit stiffer now, but she still only managed to dodge narrowly.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

John needed to do something to give Qhila breathing room again, but he wasn’t keen on taking another hit like that. He had to be more careful with his swings.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

8 fire damage (ongoing).

While John scrambled for the bat that he had dropped and ran to catch up, the creature took another few unsuccessful swings at Qhila. The last dodge saw her trip over an exposed root, however, so John’s intervention was at the last moment.

He took a swing at the creature’s head, distracting it from attacking Qhila long enough for her to get back on her feet. The rat ogre raised an arm to block, but since it was just a feint, the impact didn’t shock John’s arms this time.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

Poised to get back even before he made that swing, avoiding the counterattack wasn’t terribly difficult. Instead of turning towards John, however, it resumed its **** on Qhila. What was it with that focus? Did it somehow know that her arsenal posed the bigger threat?

8 fire damage (ongoing).

8 fire damage (ongoing).

8 fire damage (ongoing).

The ‘dance’ of John feinting at it with the bat to relieve some pressure from Qhila, then evading a counter attack repeated a few times. Through that, the kobold got enough breathing room to reload and shoot the rat ogre with another injection dart, but whatever was in this one didn’t put it on the ground like before. It wasn’t clear to John what it might’ve done.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

The next swing not only didn’t elicit a counter attack, the rat ogre didn’t even bother blocking or evading. It completely ignored John and lunged at Qhila again and, maybe because she expected it to be distracted by John, she didn’t get out of the way in time.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

The rat ogre had caught Qhila by the tail. John had to make it let go right now, and his only idea that felt remotely guaranteed to work was a rehash. Hopefully, the feints meant it wouldn’t react to that until it was too late.

Critical Hit! 23 damage.

Getting a nut shot with a baseball bat did make the rat ogre drop its prize, momentarily stunned. Then the creature turned its ire fully on John, roaring angrily as it lunged after him.

8 fire damage (ongoing).

He managed one dodge but was still off balance when the next lunge came, forcing him to throw himself on the ground to evade.

Critical Hit! -81 HP.

For a moment, there was a terrible pressure on John’s upper back. Then a stomach churning cracking sound accompanied a moment of white hot pain in his entire body that disappeared too fast even for Gamer’s Body to have fixed it. Then he couldn’t feel anything below his shoulders. And he couldn’t breathe.

A rushing sound, like harsh winds, filled his ears and almost drowned out Qhila screaming something. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone sounded like a mix of horror and fury. Then there was a crackling sound, like fireworks.

The edges of John’s vision were starting to go black and red, and he distantly noticed a debuff icon above his health bar but couldn’t muster the energy to open the tooltip. Then all of a sudden, feeling returned in his body, the rushing sound vanished and the world returned to sharp focus.

The change was so rapid, whiplash left him disoriented for a moment. When he got somewhat shakily back on his feet and tried to take stock of the situation, he noticed that Qhila and the rat ogre were several meters away.

It was down to just over 100 HP but that still put it too far away from ****, especially because the burning foam was starting to go out. Going back into melee without a plan was suicide, but he couldn’t leave Qhila hanging for that long either. At least John bounced back from anything that didn’t kill him, but on her an unfortunate hit or two could cripple her permanently even if they weren’t fatal.

Sticking to the alchemist’s fire would be too slow, and he had to assume Qhila didn’t have anything that could change things significantly. Or that whatever she had wasn’t an option for some reason. In any case, if he was to find an edge, he had to look elsewhere.

Scanning their surroundings for something to help, John came up mostly empty. Molly seemed to still be fighting the other rat ogre, so help from her couldn’t be relied on for now. Besides that he found nothing useful, but a particular pine shrub kept sticking out to John for some reason he couldn’t think of.

Just as he was about to resign himself to going into melee again and hoping, he realized why his mind was getting stuck on that shrub. A quick Observe confirmed it: before he even looked at the window, a name plate with resource bars appeared above the ‘plant’.

Harpoon Hedgeslug Lvl 26
530/530 HP
80/80 MP

When they found out there was one in the area, Qhila had said it had a 10 meter range. That put her and the rat ogre fairly close to the danger zone by John’s estimate. In moments, a plan crystallized in John’s mind.

“HARPOONSLUG BEHIND YOU ON YOUR RIGHT. YOU CIRCLE THAT WAY, I CIRCLE THE OTHER AND TAUNT. PULL THE RAT WHEN TAUNT WEARS OFF!” He couldn’t see Qhila’s face well enough to tell if she understood, but he started moving and hoped for confirmation.

“GOT IT!” In the second it took the kobold to respond, John had meant to pull out the potion flask and start chugging. He didn’t get that far because the moment he had even decided to drink from it, he was stalled by the taste of cough syrup and his HP jumped by 31. Having found a mental ‘button’ to use potions directly from his inventory, he used the remaining two doses, putting him up to relatively comfortable 102 HP and decimating his HP regen.

“YOU CAN’T CATCH ME, EMBERFACE!” John was pretty sure the rat ogre understood, at most, single words. But the spell needed a verbal taunt, so a verbal taunt it got. The brute reacted instantly, abandoning the pursuit of Qhila to charge at the Gamer.

A small, foolishly optimistic part of John had hoped that he had circled enough around the slug to make the rodent monster get in spine range from changing targets. He wasn’t that lucky, however, but the rat ogre needing to switch targets and close the distance still bought a few precious seconds.

John dashed the few meters he could before the noise told him he had to turn and face his adversary so he could see when to dodge. Then it was dodge back, dodge left, dodge backwards to the right.

He got a few meters more of his way around the hedgeslug, but with each dodged swipe and lunge, he took slightly longer to regain his balance than the attacker did. Then it happened: he fell enough behind the pace that he could either throw himself on the ground or take a hit. So the ground it was, but face up this time. A handful of dirt and leaves thrown at its eyes bought him a fraction of a second. Just enough to get to a kneeling position.

No way to avoid the next strike. But he could lean his head into the attack and hopefully get the hat to take care of it. Which it did, throwing the brute’s balance off enough that John needed to half-jump, half-roll away before it landed on top of him.

It rolled over to loom on all fours above John before he managed to get up. Resigned to inability to avoid its attack now, he glanced at the 1.1 sec countdown remaining on the debuff icon in its name plate and swallowed. Hopefully his HP could tank for that long and Qhila could draw it off as soon as the Taunt ended.

The beast got halfway through the movement of biting the Gamer in the throat, then stopped suddenly. It raised its snout into the air and breathed in, nostrils flaring. Then its entire body language changed.

The tension in the creature’s body didn’t leave. It didn’t even stop seeming aggressive. But it seemed like a different sort of aggression. The creature’s tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth, splattering John’s face with droplets of thick rodent saliva. And if that didn’t max out the Gamer’s disgust, the thing pointing at him through the beast’s loincloth certainly did.

Thankfully, John wasn’t the focus of the brute’s new mood. With 0.2 seconds left of the Taunt, it pushed itself away from John and started half-dashing, half-crawling away, as though it was suddenly in too much of a hurry to remember how to stand up properly.

While its actual goal was probably somewhere near Qhila, the rat ogre ran almost directly at the Harpoon Hedgeslug. It got about two meters away from John before the slug reacted. A tremor went through it in a far too jelly-like fashion to retain the illusion of being a shrub and the rat ogre got a faceful of green quills that looked like short pine needles.

The brutish rodent kept going for another second or so, its movements suddenly so stiff and jerky that it looked like a bad animatronic doll. Then the slug quivered and launched a second volley, followed by half a meter of vaguely branch-like, barbed harpoon. The now all but immobilized rat ogre was skewered, the slime-like tether attached to the back of the harpoon grew taut, and the carnivorous slug started dragging back its dinner. Its paralyzed but still alive with just shy of 70 HP dinner. As much as he was growing to dislike rat ogres, John decided that he really didn’t need to watch what came next.