It was surprisingly hard to get to sleep in the end, I'd always struggled to get to sleep even under the best circumstances and being blinded in hostile territory was nowhere near optimal circumstances.

But the new day had now started, light was bleeding through the curtains and granting a comfortable level of light and revealing the disarray I'd left the room in when I'd gone to sleep.

There was still a suit of shrunken ODST armour in the middle of the room, along with the blood-soaked clothes I'd been wearing for the past few day, the Priest Cassock making and the clothes that had been left for me making an unholy abomination the floor.

And the coke can was still sitting on the desk. It wasn't involved in the mess, but I felt it was worth noting.

[You are now Well Rested]

[All Resource Pools have been restored]

Huh, so sleeping heals me. Good to actually see that in action.

I missed the simpler times, back when my greatest worry was getting my homework done on time and when I'd sleep four to six hours a day. I miss sitting until the early morning and listening to the birds chirping as the light of the rising sun would fill my room.

Hopefully when I got all these dungeons sorted out I would have some time to think this all over, since now that I think about it I'm basically a ghost. I've got no ID, no family history, no records, nothing. Right now all I've got is a few swords, some clothes, a duffle-bag full of money and a can of coke.

Christ, I'm just a catastrophe in human form.

One by one the various sets of clothing, armour and soft drinks were pulled into my inventory, leaving me with the clothes I had been loaned. It was just a rather basic plain black t-shirt and a decent pair of jeans, not the best thing I'd ever worn but it was still a nice thing to give me.

"I'm glad to see you rested well." I practically jumped out my skin as the Ancient One surprised me. I don't know how she'd managed it but the door was wide open and in its place was her.

"Uh, yeah. The bed was really comfy." I replied awkwardly, caught off-guard as I was by her sudden presence.

Well by that and the mark that sat in the middle of her forehead, it was two parallel lines that suddenly bent towards each other and joined at the ridge of her brow and a slightly curved line crossing over at the midpoint of the parallel lines.

Oh yeah, illusion piercing eyes. She probably has some glamour or something to hide the mark. Note to self: figure out what the hell to do with Dormammu.

"I'm glad to hear that." The smile she had on her face was oddly disturbing, it was the type of one I'd usually see on my friends when they were planning on fucking with me in some way. "Now that you're awake I was wondering if you'd accompany me for breakfast?"

"Breakfast?" Wait, it was 12ish in the afternoon when I went to sleep. How long had I been out of it?

"Yes, one of the most important meals of the day. Will you join me?" It was hard to read anything from her, it felt that whenever I got a feel for her it was because she was letting me. And honestly, that scared me.

"Sure, and then afterwards we're going to the rift right?"

"Of course, I'd just rather you be in good condition before you show me what the rifts are like."

Mordred was a curious case, even by my standards. You didn't live for nearly a millennium surrounded by arcane knowledge and not come across some strange and mysterious things, but usually they don't come in the form of children being blessed by an unknown patron that was sending him into dangerous situations, giving him random items and altering him whilst he slept.

I wasn't even sure if he was aware of his eyes now glowing. It wasn't the most vibrant glow I'd seen, but it was still noticeable when you looked closely, and I wasn't too sure at whatever effects the eyes now carried . Add to that the subtle changes in his face and general physique it was clear to see something was wrong with the situation.

He'd just moved onto his sixth bowl of food, he was eating like a man possessed and I wasn't sure if it was to fuel the changes his body was undergoing or if he was just a big eater normally but at the rate he was going it was likely he'd empty out the pantry before the morning was over.

"Mordred," I spoke as he finished his current bowl. "Have you been eating properly?" He looked confused at my question, at least until he looked over the table again and realised just how much food he'd eaten.

"Uh, sorry about that. It's been a while." He scratched at the back of his neck and at least had the decency to look sheepish.

"What do you mean it's been a while? When was the last time you ate anything?" I asked, if his patron was making him skip meals and throwing him into danger then finding out who his patron was and how to sever their contract became a top priority.

"I'm not quite sure to be honest." He answered, leaning back in thought. "I think it was… three or four days ago," He said casually, as though not realising the implications of that answer.

"If you don't mind me asking, how long have you had your… 'guide'?" I pressed, using the term he himself had used. I wasn't sure if he was truly aware of the effects that having a patron granting him his abilities could have.

"About three days, I've been busy." He explained, a look of earnest confusion on his face. "Why?"

"I was just making conversation," I quickly threw out a decent excuse, "I was hoping I could stop you before you emptied out my store rooms." He was surprisingly easy to fluster, as he was rendered a mute blushing mess at being reminded of his appetite. "But as much fun as it is to watch you squirm, I believe we have other matters to attend to." The general cheerful mood seemed to fade away at those words.

"Yeah. So, how do we get there?

I had to suppress a smirk that threatened to form, slipping on the Sling Ring that had been sitting in my pocket and with great ease I opened a portal in the middle of the room. Through the portal you could see a large open field that sat before a mountain range, there was nothing on the other side of any worth.

Yet this was where one of the rifts had manifested, and for some reason it was one of the largest.

"Shall we?" I ask, turning back to Mordred who was, to my surprise, already armed and half-throwing himself through the portal. I guess that's another gift from his Patron, though his willingness to do so was startling.

A sudden sound of glass shattering passed through the portal and with it so did the landscape change. Now instead of an open field lies a giant open underground cavern filled with man sized rats scurrying around a large metallic ring.

It was easily the size of a small city and it was full of these beasts. The same beasts that I had seen in the visions granted to me by the time stone.

"FUCK!" Mordred yelled from the other side of the portal and practically disappeared from my sight as he leapt forward out of the vision from the portal, even as I followed suit.

He was already in the midst of them, cutting through a swath through the rat-men that were pouring out of a series of half-collapsed buildings that were clinging desperately to the uneven ground that looked on the brink of collapse.

Almost as quickly as the barrier had shattered I'd been set about by a group of naked, skinny rat bastards that were about as much a threat as a gust of wind. Their blood was thick, black and slimy, almost like oil in its feel.

[The Skittergate]

{Recommended Level: 150+}

This dungeon needed to collapse soon, I wasn't risking Warhammer bleeding through and having to deal with the Chaos Gods.

Yamato was in hand almost as soon as I'd finished reading the prompts, I wasn't going up against magic bullshit without my own magic bullshit to counter that. The ODST armour followed soon after, replacing my casual clothes.

This wasn't something I was willing to chance, if I was fighting I was going all in on it.

"DIE-DIE MAN FILTH!" Another Skaven slave threw himself at me and was cut down just as easily as a blade of grass… and the building behind him.

Okay, maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to pull this out.

"What were those creatures?" The Ancient One asked, having caught up to me whilst I was dealing with the first batch.

"They're Skaven, rat-men who live below the surface of the earth and rule the Under-Empire. They also really hate us."

"And you know this how?" She asked me, following me as I climbed onto the elevator. In response I tapped the side of my head, and like that a look of realisation crossed her face.

I guess blaming my guide for everything would help out for now.

"Why are you in such a rush to go deeper?" She asked as I pulled the lever and we began to descend.

"See that big glowing ring over there?" I asked, pointing at the large ring with a bridge leading up to it. She followed my finger and nodded, looking right at the ramshackle thing that looked like one back knock away from utterly collapsing.

I could see the large glowing crystals sticking out of the side and it wasn't hard to tell what they were.

Warpstone, literal Warp energy in material form. The fact that chaos isn't bleeding through right now is insane, but that shit is one of the most unstable materials I could think of off the top of my head and it's being used by fucking Skaven.

"Well that ring is a teleporter that works by tearing a hole into another realm. This realm is full of entities formed from thoughts, concepts and events that manifest as daemons made of rape and lemon juice who want nothing more than to break into this reality and do things you literally can't imagine to everything that has ever drawn breath." I lectured her, growing louder with each word until the point where by the time I stopped I was practically yelling in her face.

"That… is certainly less than ideal." She said, slightly stunned though from what I didn't really care. I needed to hammer in just how fucked the whole situation was in general to her.

"But it gets worse. That portal has also been made by a race of sentient ratmen whose work ethic can be summed up as 'fuck it, it's good enough' if it was in pieces and on fire and as far as I can tell that ring is being held together by a fine mixture of hope, duct-tape and slave labout."

"And then, as if it couldn't get any worse, there's a good four-in-five chance that it might just spontaneously tear a rift into that world anyway because the crystals used to power it are so unstable that they could explode if someone sneezed nearby to them."

I was panting by the end of it, venting my frustration out on the… innocent and confused woman before me. No longer did she seem caught off guard, now she seemed more prepared and more… on-duty I guess.

"Well then, what do we do?" She asked, and this time I was put on the back foot.

"We need to kill everyone, that weakens the rift enough that my guide can't sever the other world's connection to yours." I explained, my plan was simple and had worked twice already so I had no doubt it would work again.

"Do you have any idea how many there are? Where are they within this massive underground base?" She pressed me, the elevator was nearing the bottom. "Even if I called for reinforcements right now it would take days, if not weeks, before we actually got them all and from the way you're talking about this it sounds like we've got hours, if not minutes, before the world will come to an end."

"I'm fucking well aware." The elevator came to a stop and so without pause I threw myself towards the entrance to the hive, all I needed to do was kill and that was what I was good for.

There were screams, I wasn't sure whose they were but with each passing second more and more of them filled the air. There were dozens of them throwing themselves at me, some bare in form with naught but a knife on a stick to fight me and some came at me wearing plate and packing halberds.

All I could do was cut away at them, limbs flying through the air as the enchanted blade of Yamato cut through them like a scythe through grass. The collateral damage following each swing was frankly absurd, the stone walls having deep slashes carved into them.

Hordes didn't matter, as long as I could keep cutting and marching forward I was fine.

Suddenly a black mass slammed into me, two glowing blades jammed between my ribs and stabbed into my heart.

[-5000 HP]

He ripped it out again, going to plunge in once again. I threw my arm in his path, catching one of the blades within my forearm, and gripped at his neck, crushing his windpipe in my grasp and flinging his body off of my own.

The glowing green blades were trapped in my arm but I didn't even have time to pull them out as more skaven began swarming in. I punched, kicked, beat, bashed and bludgeoned my way through any that got close enough for me to tear apart.

For every one that I felled two more rose up to take their place, an endless tide of vermin constantly swarming me granting little respite. I needed Yamato now more than ever but I couldn't afford to take my eyes off the growing horde for even a second to try and recover it.

Fucking gutter runners and their bullshit hunter leaps.

A lash of orange energy flew in from the corner of my vision, striking down one of the Stormvermin that had been trying to flank around me, followed by what looked like air refined into blades piercing into several more of them.

The sorcerers had arrived, the Ancient One had gone back for reinforcements. I guess that was a positive.

Still it wasn't stemming the tide enough to make a difference, in fact if anything they were growing bolder. A familiar sound nearly stopped my heart as the rattling of barrel screamed out from behind the horde.

The ratling gunners opened fire, a half-dozen of them formed into a firing squad, and tore through their own men to try and kill us. It gave me the opening I needed and so I bolted forward, leaping through the horde and the rain of bullets they were letting loose, and set about them with blind fury.

The first one died quickly, a halberd that had been dropped by one of his brothers rammed through his chest and impaling him into the floorboards. The next one I threw myself at died slower, my lack of weapons meaning I had to resort to tearing him apart. My hands tearing into his torso and pulling apart with enough force to rend meat from bone and leave a gaping cavern where his chest once was.

Before I could set about the next one he'd already turned to me, hefting his heavy chaingun and whirring it up. At this range there was no chance I could dodge and I doubted my ability to just run straight through it, but I didn't have to.

With the window given to the sorcerers, they quickly intervened. A series of blasts and whips tearing apart the remaining gunners before they could let off even one more round.

"I think you'll need this," one of the sorcerers spoke up, casually tossing Yamato as though he hadn't seen me accidentally leave meter deep gashes in the walls with it.

I think the sorcerers need to do more arm days though, considering the sword missed me by a good half-meter and landed in the pile of corpses between us.

"Thanks," I said insincerely, trudging through the bodies to recover it. This thing was going to need a serious cleaning when all was said and done.

"Would it have killed you to wait a minute or two for me to call in backup?" The Ancient One spoke up from the crowd, the body of one of the sorcerers killed by the chaingun fire being sent back through one of the portals she had opened.

"No." I admitted, I would rather have done this on my own but they were already here so I couldn't exactly just tell them to piss off and leave me to it. "So you got a plan?"

"None so far, I was hoping our resident 'Skaven' expert could give us some ideas." She remarked in a somewhat joking fashion, though considering the situation it felt a bit off kilter.

"They're rats, they've got; numbers, guns and magic bullshit. We need them dead and dead quick, so unless you can nuke this area we need something that will kill a large number of them all at once." I snarked back, unless she was packing a dirty bomb under those robes the best thing we could hope to accomplish was to kill them like this.

"We are underground." She prompted, pointing at one of large stone pillars that seemed to be supporting the ceiling.

"Yeah, so?" I responded, confused at her point.

"..." She seemed stumped for a second, and suddenly I felt like that kid in class who'd stopped paying attention halfway through and messed up a simple question they'd been asked by the teacher. "We are underground, in a cave system full of rats. If you can cause a cave-in with that sword of yours then we can form portals that trap them within."

"That's… pretty smart. Alrighty then, I'll cause a cave in, you make the portals." I'll give her credit, it was a decent plan though I think I could've come up with it eventually. "Still, I'll need a minute. I need to get to the center over there," I pointed at the area beside the Skittergate, from where I stood I couldn't see all the supports so if I wanted to cause a cave-in then that's where I needed to be."

"Will you be able to make your own way out?" The Ancient One asked, and honestly I couldn't say I did. If I was lucky I might just be able to cut my way out with Yamato but in all honesty I didn't have a way out. But this didn't matter right now, hopefully my luck would get me out of this.

"I'll be fine, just take care of yourself." I took off running after that, the way was surprisingly clear likely as a result of the horde being pulled to the entrance by my dumb ass jumping in and causing a mess.

Even the grounds around the ring seemed empty, almost dead in how little there was in the area.

It was the embodiment of the saying "It's quiet, too quiet."

"Man-filth!" I should've kept my fucking mouth shut. "You will die-die, you will pain-suffer for what you've done." A ragged looking rat with white hair and wearing a skull helmet yelled out, mounted on the back a giant riant, a hulking beast whose hands had been replaced with chainguns like those of the ratling gunners.

"Bring it you rat bastard." I yelled back, and immediately regretted it as the beast moved with startling haste and slammed into me like a monster-truck colliding with a tuk-tuk.

[-5000 HP]

I felt like my organs had been rendered into pulp, blood flying out my mouth as my body bounced off the floor repeatedly until coming to a sudden stop as I collided with the guard rail.

Huh, even the Skaven have to abide by OSHA.

"Fucking ow." I muttered, pulling myself back together and rising to my feet. A bolt of green lightning blew apart the wall beside me and the big rat charged again.

I would've killed for a red cap as the beast charged at me like a bull. Waiting until the last moment I let the beast approach, before cutting out his legs beneath him as he stormed by sending him tumbling into the depths.

Fuck, I wish all bossfights were like this. No chipping away at a boss's health for five hours, just cut them apart with the bullshit sword.

Still, I could see each pillar and support from here. It made my life slightly easier as I repeatedly tried to cut them down, desperately trying to emulate the judgement cut.

Screams were coming from every direction, ratlike squeaks growing in increasing volume with each passing moment.

The ceiling was coming down, a storm of rock and dust breaking apart the platforms and damning hundreds, if not thousands of Skaven to their deaths.

And you know what. I'm fine with that.

Fuck 'em, they're a race that is literally evil for the sake of being evil.

Though it probably would've been smart to think of a way out, as the ceiling didn't choose who it crushed and a few seconds after it all started coming down it came down upon my head.

I didn't remember falling asleep in a cave, then again I hardly remembered what happened when I was awake a majority of the time.

There was this horrid, putrid smell like a mixture of shit, blood and piss and the air itself felt… heavy. That, combined with the ominous latin chanting carried on it rapidly escalated the rate at which I recovered.

I was in a cave-in, one that I'd caused. I'd killed the Skaven and got caught in the aftermath, hopefully the sorcerers would recover me later.

Then why was there this feeling of dread practically flooding my mind?

There was no notification, the dungeon wasn't complete.

Oh fuck.

My eyes scanned the area, a small section that had managed to avoid being completely covered in rock. There was only one person in this section beside myself, the rat wizard.

Oh fuck.

I tried to pull myself to them, to kill them before whatever ritual they were casting was done, but I was trapped. My left arm was pinned in by the rocks and I couldn't manage to pull myself free no matter how much I tried, I was pinned in.

Yamato was outside of my range, still in its sheath on the floor. Almost tauntingly my key to freedom lay just beyond my grasp.

Murasama was called in, I couldn't risk causing the wreckage to collapse again. That might kill me and right now my life was far too valuable to throw away. I needed to get myself free from this with as little disruption as possible.

[-9200 HP]

My arm was severed at the shoulder, a flash of blinding pain shooting through my body as I bit down a howl of agony. Murasama was left behind as I dragged myself towards the rat man, leaving a trail of blood behind me.

"Soon-soon, they will co-" I yanked at his ankle hard enough to slam him into the floor face first. As soon as I'd grabbed him the glowing energies of the rituals dissipated, and I dragged him closer before setting in for the next few minutes.

Over and over and over again I slammed my fist into this dazed skavens skull, again and again until what was left behind was a bloody paste.

[Skittergate dungeon has been completed]

Oh good, fuck it I'm going back to sleep. This is someone else's problem now.