No manners at all! This place has an owner! Do you people not know to knock before coming in?

The ratmen hadn't been around for long.

Based on the clues about the scholarly faction that Murphy and the players had uncovered, the ratmen's biological experiments had only truly made a breakthrough around the time the Explorer, Kant, joined the faction—less than ten years ago.

Setting aside the time spent preparing and perfecting their genetic blueprint, the ratmen as a whole had probably existed for less than three years. Yet these creatures, which could hardly even be called a "civilization," had already done many "great things."

The destruction of the shadow elf city of Mejewa had been their doing. The fall of Blackflame Pass had also been closely tied to the ratmen. Now they were carrying out their third objective as biological weapons: charging into the ruins of the Brass Fortress, slaughtering every Brass Dwarf still putting up resistance, and opening a path for the Black Calamity army to the Genoa Peninsula.

This wasn't an easy job.

The Brass Dwarves had first lost their god, and now they'd lost their city and their lord. They'd also lost a considerable portion of their people in the fortress's fall. But their population had been enormous to begin with. Even in these desolate ruins, the number of surviving dwarves was certainly no less than one and a half million.

The God of Wealth had kept his promise.

When the Brass Fortress collapsed amid the earth's tumultuous transformations, the dwarves who possessed wealth had managed to cling to life. Apart from the unlucky ones who had been crushed or fallen to their deaths, the Brass Dwarves as a people hadn't been wiped out just because a mountain had collapsed.

The ratmen attacking the fortress ruins now numbered fewer than a hundred and fifty thousand. Even if they traded one for one and all died,