On to the next order of business, Shichiro had gotten word of another incident happening in the marketplace of Orchida City. Word had gotten out that rats had invaded the area, scavenging for any kind of food. Unfortunately, this wasn't the normal kind of rats he was dealing with, it was the mutated rats that seem to carry weapons and even in rare times, use magic. The first time he had dealt with this creature was in a neutral guild hall that had some sort of invisibility spell before unloading a flurry of bolts. Alone without any civilians, it would have been an easy fix. But with civilians, it was harder to deal with since he'd have to attack and protect at the same time. Luckily for him, at the time Keita was there so it wasn't all bad. In the end, they had gotten it done and nobody had gotten hurt. This time however, it would be different. Most likely, Keita would get the call but this was the entire marketplace he was talking about. Him, Panther Lily and Keita wouldn't be enough so he was hoping he'd get some other Rune Knights and maybe even some volunteer adventures and mages.  


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Keita was relaxing pretty easily on the balcony of his particular apartment, and was simply lounging on a beach chair that he had bought from the store, when suddenly he had heard the phone inside of his apartment ring. He had set the setting to do not disturb, but it seemed like that would not stop this from happening. This made Keita get up and quickly get dressed while answering the phone, because this meant that this was official guild business. As he was half-dressed, the hand that popped out of his shirt was clutching the phone and answered it, revealing another person on the other side of the line was from the Rune Knights. The man was informing him of some sort of rat invasion in the marketplace. Apparently the rat creatures came out of nowhere and started to attack the people in a flurry of crossbow bolts and weak, basic magic. The rat like creatures this time seemed to be the version of them that were smart, and some of them were even capable of using magic. This started Keita, and he was really glad that he was getting rapidly dressed before he was actually answering the phone, and then headed out. The man was told that Keita would head there immediately and provide support. He was more of a defensive person magic wise, and the only real offensive ability he had were the summons that he could create and send them towards the enemies to kill them. He then headed downstairs.

Heading on over to the marketplace, Shichiro figured the sooner he could end this travesty, the better. He'd have a bit of time to himself. Arriving, he looked around the streets to see it had already been cleared out of civilians. This was good news but the reports had said there were rat men looting and pillaging. He didn't see any sign of them either. Just to be on the safe side, Shichiro would activate his Dragon scouter spell as well as unsheathing his axe in order to keep his wits about him. He was unsure what he was going to run into or what was about to unfold but he needed to make sure he wasn't going to get caught with his pants down. Looking around the street vendors and stalls, he couldn't really see anything out of the ordinary and decided he would search around a bit. Panther lily would be joining him this time around, resting on his shoulder. He no longer had a shield for Panther lily to rest on so nowadays he just hangs onto his head. For now, he'd just slowly walk through the streets of the marketplace in hopes he'd find a clue as to what's going on.

As Keita was finally down the stairs, he looked around, as he was never one to be good with the four cardinal directions, so he had to look for one of the street signs that he knew ran west of the city, so that he could orient himself. He was not a trained survivalist, and it was something that he would have to work on in the future if he wanted to be a better person overall when it came to the Rune Knights. as he found the particular street sign that he needed to orient himself, he started heading in that direction, and soon he found himself coming up on the market where he needed to be. It was odd, because at first, he did not hear any screams or signs of running or a fight that he thought he should have seen, but this was neither here nor there. He wondered where the call had come from, as it seemed that the rats were not actually here, and the fact that there seemed to be no widespread panic was a bit strange to him. He was unsure if it was some sort of nagging in the back of his brain or what, but Keita decided to be safe and immediately summon two of his terracotta soldiers, one of them a normal rank and file, another a general. There had to be something amiss here, as he saw that people were evacuated, the streets basically empty, but there was also no sign of the rats either.

Walking through the marketplace with his axe out, Shichiro remained vigilant as he traversed through the streets of the marketplace. He remembered plain as day, the rats that took on the human features were capable of using stealth magic and hiding their presence. Shichiro wasn't even all that sure if it was magic that was being used or if it was a biological function of theirs like his dragon force transformation. Either way, it didn't change the fact of what he had to do. As he walked, Panther lily began to tap the side of his head before pointing forward. He could sense something that was dangerous up ahead but he didn't know what. All he knew was the closer they had gotten, the more the hairs on his back would stand up and he could feel it. Shichiro learned to trust his companion's instincts so he raised his axe up to himself a bit further before focusing his attention to the area ahead Panther Lily warned him about. Using his dragon scouter spell he acquired from one of his subordinates, he used it to see if he could spot any trouble ahead in the area where his companion was most concerned about.

Keita cautiously made his way through the streets with his terracotta soldiers leading the way, and as he rounded the corner of a street, he simply saw a large amount of different stalls and such throughout the marketplace, and he had no idea if he was actually walking into a battle that was said to be happening here. The person said that the marketplace was under attack, but he barely saw anything around, until he walked a little closer and saw that there was a broken arrow on the ground, the head of the arrow lodged into the stone bricks of the ground. As soon as he saw this, he remembered that one rat creature that suddenly shouted at he and his cousin when they were in one of the guild halls, suddenly coming out of nowhere to rain poisonous arrows towards them when they were not paying attention. This also reminded Keita that the more human looking rat creatures were ones of deceit and ambush predators, and so he immediately summoned a magic circle below his feet and stomped on it. This sent out a pulse of earth magic around the area, revealing everything around him as if by sonar. Luckily because it was magic, he could interpret these signals as actual information, so he saw everything around him with crystal clarity. As he studied what was around him, he saw a couple of rats that were off in a corner of one of the markets, seemingly waiting for him to walk in front of them.

Taking a look with the spell he had acquired from his subordinate, Shichiro looked into the direction his companion was pointing in. At first he couldn't see anything for the first couple of seconds until he spotted a few rats lying in wait. Four of them to be exact, three of them were dual wielding scimitars small enough for them to handle. Well, that was a nice surprise but nothing he couldn't handle. Since he was aware of their ambush, Shichiro would now have to think about what course of action they should take. He'd think it'd be best to continue to walk towards the trap, pretending to be unaware of the trap until he got close enough to unleash a devastating attack first, catching them off guard. There were other options but he wanted the most direct and quickest route. Holding his axe in hand, Shichiro had begun to walk towards them as if he was an unsuspecting traveler. When he got to a certain point, he lifted his axe higher and slammed it down onto the ground in front of him in order to activate a spell that was imbued into the weapon itself. It would cause devastating damage to the surrounding area alongside the invisible rats that thought they were alright.

Keita was not some sort of ambush predator like the rats were, but he knew how he could take care of them fairly quickly, especially because he could take precise control over his summons. He wondered how smart they were, and if they would attack his summons should they start walking down the street where they were hiding in stealth. He decided to test it, as even if the summons were atatcked and destroyed, he could simply re-summon them, as it did not cost any more mana for him. He had plenty of mana power at this point, but was still trying to train himself to get more, as well as earn enough money so that he could buy the special potions that helped expand his mana capacity. He had the terracotta soldier start walking through the street, and during this he also had the terracotta general get ready, poised to strike the rat creatures if and when they attacked the soldier. This was a simplistic plan, but he assumed that although the creatures were smart enough to set up an ambush, they would not be smart enough to differentiate between targets, and would simply attack the soldier as it entered their ambush point, which was the center of the street between the two shops that they were hiding in. Soon, the soldier walked a bit ahead of them, in the line of fire of the two rat creatures, when suddenly they popped out of their invisibility, screaming something about the air being clean.

After Shichiro's axe had collided into the ground before him, Panther Lily had also grabbed ahold of the axe in order to be able to withstand the effect of the incoming spell without getting harmed too much. As soon as he slammed  the axe into the ground causing it to expel an icy cold wing that lingers around the activation area. The cold creeps deep in the muscles of anyone standing within the icy storm. The range of the icy storm was massive but it was able to engulf the rats in the area chilling their very bones to the core. The ambush had turned out well but not in the expected party's favor. After a few moments, Shichiro would end the spell as some property had started to become negatively affected by his storm. Luckily, nothing too expensive had been damaged but he had to be careful to make one hundred percent sure there were no civilians in the area next time. Luckily for him, there were not at the moment, or at least when he checked with his sensory spell. Well, what was done is done and he needed to keep moving forward in order to get to the bottom of this mysterious disappearance.

The rats ended their stealth spells, whatever they were, and suddenly the area was filled with a sickening stench of rotten meat and some sewage. Whatever stealth magic that they used was pretty damned powerful, Keita joked around with himself in his own mind. These creatures also were not very good at the whole stealth angle, as they popped out of their invisibility spell to shout some words about the air being too clean up here or something of that nature, before attacking. This meant that the creatures were essentially taunting them before they attacked, or maybe their transformation just made them go insane and so they had no more critical thinking skills. They were so delayed in their actions that Keita thought that he did not even need to worry about it, as he could have simply reacted when he walked into the area and used a spell before they even attacked. He did just that, however, as one of the rat creatures was run through by the terracotta general that was closing the distance to them already, while the second one that did not die shot at the terracotta soldier. The arrows had some sort of sickening green color on the tips, and they were shooting pretty fast, the arrows hitting the soldier and actually damaging it. After a couple of bolts from the makeshift crossbow, Keita finished a spell and sank the rat into the earth up to its head, and it was trying to struggle quite fiercely, but was simply not strong enough.

Continuing on with his path, Shichiro had walked down the street towards the marketplace in order to figure out where everybody had gone and why. He had definitely received a report of a large skirmish similar to the one in the apartments but now that he was here, he couldn't spot anything out of the ordinary. He continued to search the area until he came across a large warehouse he didn't take notice of. He had heard what sounded like muffled screaming of a woman and immediately began to move towards the warehouse where he heard. Turning around the corner of the warehouse, Shichiro managed to catch a glimpse of a pair of rats hauling off a female mage into the side door of the warehouse before they left his field of vision. Walking towards the door, he had checked to see if the door was opened or locked and to nobody's surprise, it was locked. This time, he had to figure out how to get into the building without alarming the place. Though he only saw two rats go in, who's to say there weren't more of them inside. The place almost seemingly was built like a fortress instead of a place to store goods.

As the rat creature's head was the only thing visible in the soupy and sticky ground, Keita stomped on the ground again, causing a tremor to wash over more of the marketplace where he was, making sure where the other rats were. Now that he was somewhere further into the marketplace, he could see more with the tremor sense wave that he sent out. There seemed to be quite a few of the rat creatures here, and they all seemed to be hiding, waiting for unsuspecting humans to show up so that they could ambush them. It was a pretty simple and dull tactic, as if they knew a bit more about human society, they would know that now this place was cordoned off and no one but highly skilled mages could enter the area, so they would just be fighting actual fighters and threats to themselves now. Luckily they were dump, and it seemed that the cleanup job that they had to do was going to be fairly easy. Keita had the general finish off the rat that was struggling in the earth of the shop before looking back at the damage done to his terracotta soldier. It seemed that the soldier took a lot of damage, more than he initially thought, and was now more worried than ever about the bolts coming out of the crossbows, wondering why they were so strong, and if they were so strong, why did the bloody things bother putting poison on them when seemingly wanting to hunt humans.

Standing there pondering on how to get in, Panther Lily decided he would take the initiative in finding a way of getting the both of them inside. Seeing a vent around six meters above them, Panther Lily had unsheathed his blade and jumped towards it in order to break it open with a swing of his sword, hitting only the bolts and hinges holding it together. The entrance had fallen out of the vent and onto Shichiro's head as he had been unaware. Looking up, he saw his animal companion waving towards him with his weapon out before sheathing it and crawling into the ventilation shaft to find a way inside of the building. Shichiro had stared at it for a couple of seconds before looking back at the door in front of him. Folding his arms, he'd let out a quiet sigh, before sheathing his own weapon, waiting for his companion to find a way to open the door. Panther Lily had crawled through the events and spotted various scenes through other vent openings. He had seen where humans were being held, civilians, mages and adventurers alike. Shaking his head, Panther Lily found a way to exit from the vents safely and undetected as he made his way back towards the door.

Keita looked at the individual bolts as he pried them out of the soldier that he had summoned, and he noted that the soldier that he had summoned was on the verge of collapsing from the amount of damage the bolts did to him. He also looked at the bolts and noticed that they were al either bent out of shape or simply broken from the sheer force of how hard they hit the soldier. this was also due to the fact that the soldier was made of earth, so that it was a lot harder than the soft flesh of a human. Keita could imagine that these bolts could go clean through a human and put a nice little hole in them, leaving the gross smelling poison in their bodies even if it did not kill them outright. Keita also felt bad for all of the people that probably died when the fighting first broke out, but luckily the nearby guilds were quick to contain everything and make sure that the normal civilians were quickly evacuated. This reassured Keita that they had things under control for the most part, and he just had to focus his efforts on exterminating the creatures for now. He could figure out where they were coming from later, and stop them from entering the surface at all, but for now, simply getting rid of the pests attacking everything was the priority. Keita then started heading over to the next set of rat creatures he saw that were set to ambush them.

Making his way back to the door as stealthy as possible, Panther Lily had to maneuver through what seemed like a troupe of rats before getting back to the door in order to unlock it and let Shichiro inside. It was a bit of a hassle to reach the doorknob but eventually he had gotten it open in order to let Shichiro in. Shichiro slowly crept inside the warehouse so as to not alert anybody, or any creature that may or may not be around the two of them. With that, Panther Lily had motioned Shichiro to come closer to him to give him the valuable information that he discovered while vent crawling. Turns out the rats were capturing civilians, defeated mages and adventurers they could find and stick them in cages they had acquired from somewhere. Panther Lily knew where most of them were being kept but he didn't know exactly how to get to that room since he was up in the vents so they'll have to search by foot. He also warned Shichiro that he shouldn't start fights in the fortress or they will be in here fighting for who knows. They'll probably run out of stamina and mana before they'd make a dent in their forces.

Heading through the now empty streets of the marketplace, Keita was wondering if the creatures would learn form their mistakes and the mistakes of their partners when they tried to ambush him. This would mean that over time it would be harder to fool the creatures into attacking the soldier preemptively, and would instead wait for Keita himself to walk forward. Keita was giving the creatures a bit too much credit, however, as the next pair of the rat like creatures were simply stupid, and just as stupid as the last one, coming out of their stealth, waiting a few seconds while they said something about how they liked to eat rust, or that mold was delicious, something or other that denoted their insanity, as it was all complete and incoherent bullshit to the ears of Keita. The first one of course forget to check his sides and immediately got skewered by the general, while the soldier was peppered by the crossbow bolts of the other one, which actually did manage to destroy the soldier. This was, until the general also removed his spear and skewered him as well. the second one managed to get a shot off at the general, which dealt a small amount of damage, but the general was much stronger than the normal soldier, so there was no chance that it would die to a couple of bolts like the soldier did previously. Keita would then walk over and try his act a few more times, until he was sure that the marketplace was cleared out of threats.

Keeping the advice in mind, Shichiro just nodded his head towards his furry companion and stood back up again. Making sure his axe was put away and fastened, Shichiro continued to creep through the warehouse, on the lookout for the magic rats and their patrols. Sometimes he'd run into a small patrol or two but he'd silence them quickly with the help of panther lily and attempt to hide their bodies so it doesn't alert the other rats anytime soon. He'd have to be quick as rats had a keen sense of smell and would pick up on the smell before humans would. Well, one by one they searched the room in order to see if they could find the humans held captive by the rats. Eventually, they came across the room panther lily was familiar with and started to frantically search until he found a secret room leading down a flight of stairs into a corridor. Following it, it led to some cells where he eventually found some of the civilians and adventurers. He'd instruct Panther Lily to work his magic on unlocking the doors while he kept watch in order to make sure no rats would come in. Panther Lily nodded in compliance and hopped off of his shoulder once more to deal with the locked cage doors.

After going around the marketplace and finding a couple more of these ambush squads, he was suddenly greeted with another problem. He had finished off all of the rats in the vicinity, but for some reason he had a nagging suspicion that there was something else wrong. He looked around and made sure to use his tremor sense ability every time he could, and all over the area and found nothing. Still, something was off and his instincts told him that there was something that he was missing. He trusted his instincts, as they were honed from martial arts and his parents ever since he was a child, as he did not have an easy childhood, and was fighting creatures of magical nature by the time he was eight years old. This gut feeling he had told him that he was missing something, or that something bad was going to happen soon, but he had no idea what, as he had combed this place thoroughly. After thinking about it for a little while, Keita figured out what he had been missing, and that was the dead bodies of the other people, the humans. He wondered where the hell they could have gone if they got ambushed, as these rat creatures did not seem to kill them. He saw very few signs of blood and battle, and so he knew that the humans that were attacked at the beginning should have been kidnapped, and so he started to expand his tremor sense search to things such as tunnels or the sewer entrance instead of more rats.

As he stood guard with his axe at the ready, Panther Lily was hard at work attempting to pick the lock with his small, delicate hands or paws. He figured because Panther Lily was smaller than him, he'd have better finesse when it comes to opening these locks. Some of the locks gave him trouble while others weren't so easy to open. As he got them open, both Shichiro and Panther Lily heard the hybrid sounds of squeaking and human speech. It seems they had found some corpses of the unconscious or dead rats they had dispatched. Well it was time to fight the droves of them, even Shichiro was unsure if he could take them all by himself but he had no choice. Readying himself, he had been joined by some of the freed mages and adventurers. Nodding towards them he raised his axe into the air with both hands, inspiring them and bolstering their attributes. He'd also yell a war cry of sorts to activate his guild spell to further rally them, increasing their physical stats. In tandem with the fact they were rescued and freed, they were more powerful than ever together, overwhelming and annihilating the rats over all. With that Shichiro would call some Rune Knights to take care of the clean up work and went back to monitoring a situation elsewhere. 

[Exit.]

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After scanning the marketplace over and over again, he was sure that there were no more rats around the area, and eventually found himself nearing a tunnel that seemed like it led to the sewers. There were not any rat creatures around the entrance, but he wanted to make sure, so he decided to head down himself. First though, he sent down his terracotta general before himself. The general slipped through the fairly wide sewer entrance and hopped down, landing on a bit of a damp bit of the stone. The stone floors of the sewer were pretty smooth for some reason, and Keita thought that there was probably something in play, such as the waters smoothing out the surface more than normal. The general looked around, and Keita had already scanned the area with his tremor sense, so he knew he could go down there. As the two walked through the tunnels of the sewers, he noticed something in his tremor sense, and it seemed to be a bunch of the missing humans ties up in makeshift cages made of rebar. Standing next to them were a couple of the rat like creatures, their eyes seemingly vacant of all sane thoughts, but they were still sitting there guarding the area. Keita wondered what they were up to, but decided to say screw it and simply attack them to rescue the people. The general rushed one of them while the other was covered in mud so that it could not move, easily dispatched as well. Keita wondered what the hell was going on, but decided to just get the people out of the area.

EXIT