In Which the Battle Princess is in Another Castle

With both hands occupied dragging the heavy, stinking, blood-soaked canvas bag behind her, Smol Rumblehide had no choice but to kick the door open. Luckily for everyone involved, it wasn't completely closed in the first place. The last thing she wanted to do was to pay to repair the damn thing again.

All eyes were on the azure-scaled kobold as she shuffled through the portal, huffing and grunting with each inch of ground she covered. The scant few members of the Runescale Company who had nothing better to do than to loaf around, nurse lukewarm mugs of stale ale, and trade stories and jokes didn't offer to help. Why would they? They all knew what she was carrying. Nobody could offer them enough free drinks to risk getting that all over their shiny adventuring duds. It would never wash out, for starters. Plus, the stench would linger for weeks--not that any of these folks had the sense to bathe more than once every few days to begin with.

Behind a cluttered counter, a linen curtain parted. Out came a man as wide as he was tall, crafted entirely of muscle, scar tissue, and dark body hair. "Smol," he grumbled as a greeting.

"Bartok," she barked in kind.

Bartok Runescale, the chief lieutenant of the Company, rested his arms on the counter (mindful of the sticky patches) and leaned forward to get a better look at what the kobold was dragging behind her. "That what I think it is?"

"The sooner you take it, the better. I'm tired of lugging this around."

The barbarian reached over the counter with a meaty paw. "Alright, give it here." Smol complied, lifting the bag as high as she could before it was snatched away from her. Everyone in the guild house simultaneously drew in a deep breath as Bartok opened the sack, reached in, and pulled out something that tested the gag reflex of everyone else present.

Imagine a severed head. Eyes rolled up in the back of the head, mouth held agape by rigor mortis, gooey congealed crimson slowly oozing from all the places that one's neck and throat would normally be, and a bit of the spine dangling from the bottom. Now picture, if you will, everything sort of being a little... off. The nose twisted, broken, upturned, and stretched out further than usual. Like a snout. Picture all four central incisors twice as long as they should be. Picture a scruffy, patchy, oily beard covering the pale, pockmarked skin of this... this creature, spread out enough that the only skin you can clearly make out is that of its forehead and upper halves of its gaunt cheeks. The thing's ears are a solid inch bigger than necessary and angled in a manner that would have gotten you relentlessly bullied as a child. The whites of the eyes were more yellow than anything.

And by Hromagh's hairy balls did it smell horrendous.

"One Rat King," Smol said matter-of-factly. "Fresh from the sewers beneath Radasanth."

Bartok, against better judgment, brought the King's head closer for inspection. He narrowed his beady brown eyes at it as he turned it around in his hands, admiring the Battle Princess's work with the blade. "Nice clean cut," he remarked as he ran his finger against the surface of the spine before wiping the ichor off on his shirt. "And a good shot, too."

He was referring to the gaping hole in the Rat King's forehead, wide enough to fit the shaft of an arrow.

Smol nodded. "He wouldn't shut his trap. Kept going on about the 'revolution of the Sewerverse' or something. Got sick of hearing about it." Her crimson eyes scanned the room, falling upon each of the six or seven sellswords who had their hands covering their noses in a feeble attempt to ward off the smell of the creature. "Now, about my payment."

Bartok wasted no time digging around in his pockets for a small purse of gold. "One-hundred fifty pieces."

The kobold snapped to attention, the exhaustion of her adventure suddenly thrown off her shoulders. Her voice was like that of an earth-shattering quake, an erupting volcano--or a yapping lap dog, depending on your perspective. "One fifty?! What the-- No! Have a staring contest with a gorgon if you think I'm only taking one fifty for killing that!"

"The contract was for one twenty-five," the lieutenant reminded her. "The extra twenty-five is for a hot bath."

"I killed two of them," Smol blurted out in anger.

"Two?" Bartok cocked his head in confusion. When he spoke with the owner of the tavern whose wine cellar was acting as a headquarters of sorts for a mob of chittering rats, he was only made aware of there being one monster leading the rest.

The Battle Princess spun on her haunches and bolted out the door. A few second passed before she returned, hauling a second sack behind her with greater ease. With a mighty swing, she hefted the thing onto the counter. Out tumbled a ball of twenty or so rats, each with a body no bigger than your forearm, each with their little heads neatly severed. The little sewer-dwellers were trapped together in an orgy of fur and filth, their tails knotted together in a way that none could escape their fate.

"The contract never specified Rat King or rat king," the kobold hissed. "So I grabbed both."