My right foot hurt when I stood with my full weight on it.

  It had that bone deep kind of pain that comes from hitting it on something solid like concrete. It didn’t seem to be broken but I wasn’t sure. There would probably be some kind of notification if there was.

  The hangry status was still up in the top left hand section of my HUD. I also noticed that I had lost two hit points to my health. I only had one of the bandages left, and didn’t want to use it up on what was basically a stubbed toe.

  I sank into the chair next to the body of the rat I had killed with the other chair. My brain was hazy as I looked at what was left of the rat.

  Being pragmatic about the whole situation was not helping me feel better about what I had just done. I knew I was going to have to get over this, and be prepared to kill or be killed.

  I also knew that I had to allow myself to at least feel some of this or it would just be more fuel for the flames at the core of me.

  That fire would consume everything it touched if I didn’t stop feeding it.

  Of course I would choose now to try and process whatever was going on in my brain. Now was not the best time for some kind of self-therapy. But there was no chance I would ever find Troy if I didn’t get a handle on whatever broke inside me last year.

  I took a deep, shaky breath, and fully took in the sight of the very human-like rat I had just killed in spectacular fashion. The rat next to me was just a pile of limbs at this point, and was almost unrecognizable.

  If I had come into the room at some later time I would have thought it was something a wild animal had left behind. It was just a pile of flesh and fur and blood and it was something I had made, something I had caused.

  I looked over at the rat in the corner, and immediately threw up on the ground in front me. The head was basically gone, or at least it was no longer anything that could be considered a head.

  It was just a smear on the ground dotted with chunks of bone and brain matter.

  The blood and bits had gushed out in a spray away from the rat’s body like a messy painting. The body itself, while mangled and ruined, was mostly intact and somehow this made things worse. I felt like throwing up again, but did my best to keep it down.

  I started to cry suddenly.

  I’d never really killed anything before, let alone anything that could think or talk. It didn’t make a difference to me if these things weren’t fully real. I could still see the horrible look of fear and panic on their faces as I destroyed them.

  I wasn’t someone who felt that all life was sacred. Child rapists and serial killers could all be lined up and shot, and I wouldn’t be sad about it. But there is something about taking the life of a thing, even if it comes down to a matter of survival, that just didn’t sit well with me.

  It was one of the reasons why I had never joined the military or become a police officer or something. I knew I just did not have the stomach for that sort of thing.

  The tears kept coming but seemed to just leak out of me in streams. My body was otherwise mostly still. I was too exhausted, too worn down by the events of the last few days for it to reach my body at all.

  Or maybe there was something else inside me that was keeping me from experiencing the deep pain of what was happening. Some element of personal survival that was kicking in, knowing I couldn’t go down that road fully right now.

  It wasn’t clear if that was the case or if it was some part of the implants I received. Either way, I was thankful for it. Whatever was needing to happen to me in that moment I felt like I could survive the process.

  For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel like I needed to hide from it in a bottle.

  The tears kept coming, clouding my vision as I sat frozen in the chair. I let myself feel the weight of that for a few moments.

  “Ok. That’s enough,” I heard myself say out loud after a few minutes passed. “We need to keep going.”

  It managed to shake me loose of the emotional stalemate I was stuck in. I took a deep breath and nodded to myself. At least I had let myself feel something, even if it was ill timed.

  I stood up and walked over to the rat in the corner. The other rat had called him Jeeds. I felt like it was important that I remembered his name. Especially since I was about to unabashedly rob his corpse blind. I knelt down and started trying to pick his pockets without spending too much time looking at his ruined head. A menu suddenly popped up over the corpse.

  Loot Rat Fink Corpse Y/N?

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I clicked ‘Y’ and a grid opened up. It was populated by squares in a 2 by 8 layout, and held just a few items. The first was another Rat Sticker. Next to that was another bandage, and next to that was what looked like a canteen. I hovered over this.

  Rough Canteen 1/10

  Common

  Contents: Unknown

  Volume: Half Full

  Fun fact: This is a canteen made from the bladder of a goblin. Apparently, goblins and rats don’t get along and as a show of aggression rats like to make useful items out of their bodies.

  We would probably recommend other ways of asserting your dominance but, hey, whatever works!

  (Note: canteens can be filled with any liquid but their contents must be depleted fully before changing liquid types or there is a chance the canteen will be ruined. Canteen uses become reduced when liquid type is changed.)

  There was an option to loot each piece or I could loot them all and I chose that. I pulled out my book, and brought up the canteen to see if it would tell me more about the contents.

  It called the contents ‘pungent liquid’ which did not sound promising at all. I wasn’t sure I was at the point in my thirst to start drinking random liquid held in the bladder of another humanoid.

  I went over to the other corpse to loot it but hesitated. The thing just looked so pathetic and smashed that I felt bad even touching it. I grit my teeth, and waited for the loot tooltip to pop up. It also had some of the gauze, another canteen, and thankfully, some food.

  Or, at least, it looked like food until I examined it:

  Goblin Stew (Spoiled)

  Common

  Crafting: Not Learned

  This is a food item.

  This is goblin stew and probably worse that it sounds. Rat Finks REALLY dislike goblins but it’s really a love/hate relationship once you consider how much of them they seem to be willing to appropriate.

  It can’t be a healthy relationship but we aren’t therapists, so who knows.

  (Note: food items can cause buff and/or debuffs. Eat at your own risk.)

  Well shit. I decided to pull the book back out, and look at the stew more closely. Sure enough, it was exactly what it said it was. In this view I could also see that there were a few ingredients needed to make it but they were blurred out.

  I could take a guess as to what some of them were at least. It didn’t tell me if there were any debuffs at all, but that it was definitely spoiled. There was a good chance I would get more information from certain items after I used them. I just wasn’t about to start experimenting on spoiled food.

  Turning to the help section, yet again, led me to a mostly useless passage:

  Eating is Your Friend (But Maybe Don’t Eat Your Friends).

  In the game world you will need to keep yourself full. This is measured by your satiation level and can also be announced by a grumbling tummy that grows louder the more hungry you are.

  Starvation can cause certain debuffs and eventually death! Your best bet is to keep yourself full and don’t starve.

  Of course that was it. I kept hoping there would be something helpful in that damn book, but it just kept disappointing me no matter how many times I looked. Yet I continued to look again and again.

  This felt familiar.

  When I looked closer at ‘spoiled’ it just told me it would cause a spectrum of terrible debuffs from vomiting all the way to potentially dying. That seemed like something to avoid. It was weird that the food itself didn’t show any of these debuffs.

  I closed the book with an audible ‘thwump’ and stowed it away. There was just enough anger left for me not to care about the sound I was making. A few thoughts were going through my mind while my heart continued to race.

  My leg was shaking up and down while I considered my options. The first was that this stew was made using goblins, and so must mean you could loot the actual bodies somehow. Not just loot them of inventory but loot them of their body parts.

  I hadn’t seen that as an option when I had looted the rats, but I also wasn’t looking for that. Keeping dead things wasn’t usually part of my day to day, so it hadn’t crossed my mind.

  If I were going to find other things to kill and eat in these corridors I would probably need to be able to do something with the bodies.

  The other thought I wasn’t able to shake was that it would just be my luck I would eat some random body parts and end up dying of dysentery or something.

  I pulled the stew out of my inventory, and set it down in front of me. It looked a little less than real, like it was made using plastic and paint rather than food.

  I stuck my finger into it, but it was not hot at all despite it bubbling around the edges. This just added to the overall fakeness of the dish.

  It smelled absolutely awful, and I wasn’t sure if that was by design or just a result of making something out of goblin flesh. And probably the fact that it was very much spoiled.

  I sat there a moment really contemplating my options. Eating this could create some real disturbances in the force of my guts and currently I had no idea where a bathroom was.

  The system mentioned there would be places for me to go and that it wouldn’t happen very often. It did not, however, tell me anything about the event I got murderous diarrhea.

  Being shot out into space because I shit my pants was not on my list of things I wanted to get done. Compounded with that was trying to avoid doing anything else that was totally insane due to my ‘hangry’ status.

  I could not get past the smell.

  It was so hard to wrap my head around. It was a mix of something rotten, and had a musk that reminded me of when I’d left some smoked salmon out in my truck overnight. It was a sort of sour and sickly smell that had hints of spiciness.

  It somehow smelled like ammonia used for cleaning and the smell that would come from soaked in cat urine. But only if those things had been distilled down to somehow be stronger.

  My body shuddered while I looked at it. There just weren’t any alternatives that I could see. I had no idea how far the corridor went and what I would even find.

  It could be hours before I found another creature and who knows what kind that would even be. I looked around again and my eyes settled on the rat in the corner, on Jeeds.

  For some reason I licked my lips.