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~ I’ve edited some of the previous Chapters to remove anything you might consider "cringe" or "unnecessary." I’ll continue reviewing them from time to time!
~ Very soon, we’ll return to releasing two Chapters daily, including bonus privileges for Power Stone contributions
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Sighing again, the Sekiryūtei looked around the dais. The bosses always had the lever to the exit stashed somewhere near their throne/starting area. That was one common factor between them. And, sure enough, there was a hidden switch in one corner of the dais. Issei pressed it.
With a rumble, the centre of the dais started to rotate, a circular stairway emerging and ascending up. Issei waited until it was fully deployed before starting to climb it. It looked rickety and there were a few rotten steps, but he managed to avoid falling down them.
The landing at the top was dusty as hell. No one had been there in ages, but there was a long trail of blood leading from midway down the landing through the only door that was left to go through.
Swallowing, Issei drew his swords again and stepped cautiously down the landing until he reached the door, which was slightly ajar. A slight push was all that was needed to swing the door open and reveal the contents of the room before him.
The corpse of a human sat in a chair behind a desk, the trail of blood leading up to it. The human had been dressed in a white uniform with black trimming and had a patch over the heart and on each shoulder of a white torch set on a blue background. Underneath it, the words ’Veneficas et Supernaturalis Mortem’ was written in stylised script.
The cause of death was obvious; the corpse was missing his arm from the elbow down and there were numerous cuts across his body that had a familiar green liquid left over. Warpstone.
"Looks like someone pissed off the rats." Issei muttered once the [Gamer’s Mind] kicked in and calmed him down. It wasn’t every day that you came across a partially desiccated corpse and his heart had shot into his mouth before he had been calmed down.
Just as every time before, there was a piece of paper lying on the desk, which Issei picked up first. It had bloody fingerprints on it, presumably from the dead man.
’To whom it may concern.
I, the corpse you see before you now, am the former Head of Project Rat King. I was a member of an organisation known as the Purifiers, we who have dedicated our lives to the destruction of any and all supernatural forces on the planet. I proposed Project Rat King, hoping that I would be able to create the perfect cannon fodder for our cause. A simple-minded race of creatures whose sole purpose would be to die so our brothers would live.
I was a fool.
The substance designated as ’Warpstone’ is a marvel unlike no other I have encountered before, allowing evolution and mutation that would normally take centuries of careful breeding to occur in a span of weeks. Simple physical proximity over a three week period caused our test subjects (a group of rats that had already been modified genetically using the latest genetics technology to combine the best traits of several existing species) to grow to the size of spaniels. Extended exposure over a six month period resulted in immense leaps in mental development to the point of a lower primate. Eventually, two years after the project was started, their bodies had mutated to allow them to walk on their hind legs and began to regularly develop opposable thumbs.
The initial training regime showed extremely positive results. Human wave tactics seemed to fit the species perfectly, they had little to no regard to loss of life among their own kind but had strong personal survival instincts that made them fight ferociously to defend themselves. Combined with their limited ability to craft crude weapons and armour on their own, and thus making them reliant on us for anything better, and they were quickly shaping into the perfect cannon fodder for our eventual war.
When the first examples of larger, more physically powerful specimens emerged (I theorized it was a genetic throwback to the black rat genetics) I saw no issues in having them trained more heavily into a semi-competent ’elite’ force within the Ratmen ranks, This would give rise into the first true subspecies within Project Rat King, which was later dubbed the Stormvermin over the Slave (subjects of the earliest Ratmen that did not fully develop cognitive sapience) and Clanrats (the first fully-developed Ratman genus that emerged).
The next divergence was slightly more worrisome. Several specimen developed increased cognitive skills and intelligence and an unnatural affinity for manipulating the mutagenic abilities of Warpstone. I theorized it might be due to their constant exposure to the substance that gave them a unique affinity for it.
Several began to experiment on their own kind, causing further mutations. The two most successful results of these experiments were the ’Rat Ogres’ (an extreme advancement of the same mutation that gave rise to the Stormvermin but at the cost of the creature’s cognitive abilities), and the ’Giant Rats’ (a throwback to the first stages of their mutation, only greatly increased in size). Several specimens quickly began to develop an instinctive ability to tame and manipulate these mutations. I later dubbed them Packmasters and the ones who specialize in creating the mutations Vat Masters.
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