Ratmen, building a city?

The news struck Shen Cong as comical, absurd — burrowing rats raising a city of their own. Then he thought it through, and had to admit there might genuinely be something in it.

Liu Yiwu pressed at once. "The ratmen have built a city in Changxing County? Is this lot connected to the Chuzhou City ratmen? Has their intelligence really come far enough to build a city? What does the city look like? How big is it?"

Xiao Ma laid out what they knew.

Changxing County sat on the shore of Lake Tai, just a wall away from Huzhou's urban district.

The Huzhou pathfinding advance team had followed a stretch of the Nanjing–Hangzhou Expressway, and once inside the county limits it put its drones up. Standing over the ruins below was a walled city. Crude, but square and true and very tall, with a good many buildings visible inside it.

And figures moving to and fro among them.

The team took it for a new survivor settlement and drove for the walls. They had only just reached Jiapu Town when a ratman host closed on them from every side.

On the footage, the ratmen of this force looked much like the ones from Chuzhou City.

The differences were slight and all pointed the same way: further along in their evolution, more sharply differentiated, better equipped, more organized in how they moved.

"Going by behavior and body type, the advance team sorted them into five kinds — rat officers, rat generals, rat soldiers, rat-beasts and rat slaves. Their guess is that it's the old Rat King, that it took the remnants and fled to Changxing County, and that it's been stirring up trouble there ever since." Xiao Ma pointed out each type on the footage as he explained.

In the extermination at Chuzhou City, Shen Cong had shot down rat knights and rat-beasts beyond counting, and had never once turned up the Rat King.

Word came later that while the theater command was clearing out the remnants, they had sighted a ratman in gaudy, many-colored clothing astride…