Sometimes you get a flash of brilliance when facing an impending life-threatening situation. The world slows down, your focus narrows, and you know exactly what you need to do.

  And sometimes you do the first dumb thing that comes into your head in a dead panic.

  I climbed on top of the door.

  Well, specifically I slightly opened the door with utmost care, stepped on the knob and hoisted myself up onto the top edge. Stupid Rusty Sword in hand.

  Carefully, carefully, carefully, I pushed the frame and swung the door, the one I was still standing on, open.

  My logic was this: if they don’t see me, maybe they’ll get bored and leave.

  I could hear guttural grunts from within The Bad Room approaching.

  With a loping jog the three of them suddenly burst into my room, The Good Room.

  Close up I liked them even less, and that’s saying something, since I liked them very little from far away. They were sparsely covered in coarse black hair. Their foul odour caressed my gag reflex like a lover, a heady bouquet of days old compost left in the sun. They were coated in what was truly a lot of dried blood, which I suppose wasn’t really their fault. The Bad Room hadn’t been equipped with showers, or even basic drainage. If anything, I was impressed they weren’t coated in even more blood.

  They were snorting the air aggressively, glancing around the corners of the room. Their hunched over form was the only thing that prevented them from instantly spotting me at my high angle, but I knew that they were moments away from finding me regardless.

  I resolved to take advantage of their poor perception and hunched nature at the first opportunity. I would leap from the door; fell the first of them in a devastating sneak attack; use the shock of their fallen comrade to slay another; and then finally duel the last, which, I conceded, would likely have gathered their wits by then.

  My course laid out for me, I continued to crouch on the door in absolute terror.

  I was imagining them pulling me down from my precarious perch, taking my much beloved Rusty Sword, and doing things to me with it.

  But somehow, even as my imaginings trended towards ever darker uses of eighteen inches of poorly maintained metal, they didn’t spot me.

  In fact, they were kind of heading back in to the first room. There were some gestures of confusion on their part. Like ‘one hand with palm up at chest height, other hand scratching head’ kind of gestures, some ‘ah well, these things happen’ shrugs and head shakes kind of gestures.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  It was highly relatable. I thought these things were just mindless killing machines, which, while bad enough, at least removed the moral culpability for the whole murder-eating they were doing.

  But no, they were guys! Guys who liked to murder-eat! This place made and kept murder-eat guys!

  And I needed to kill them to live, which would inevitably make me not a ‘murder-eat guy’, but the still somewhat bad ‘murder-guy’. I’d gone my whole life without being a murder-guy, believed in the essentially correct attitude that being a murder-guy was a non-ideal outcome. And now I was finding myself in a world where the long arc of the moral universe curved inevitably to murder-guy!

  A thought suddenly came to me. If there was no other food around... would I become a murder-eat guy as well?

  This final thought came to me just as the final creature was passing beneath and next to me back to their Bad Room, and it was too much.

  I fell onto the murder-eat guy, sword first.

  I would like to say it was a lunge, or an acrobatic tackle, or maybe even a calculated grapple. But really I had just lost my balance and tried to catch my fall sword first.

  The result however, was glorious!

  In a gush of green blood my Rusty Sword pierced into the creatures neck, plunging deep into their torso and undoubtedly rendering numerous organs redundantly destroyed!

  And then the blade broke off.

  Not the whole thing, just like, most of it. But anyone will tell you it’s not about how long your blade is, it’s how you use it. And by god I was gonna use it.

  So there I was, broken blade in hand, covered in the green blood of a very dead thing. I was now a murder-guy manslaughter-guy. It was unintentional after all, these things count.

  In front of me the other murder-eat guys were already turning, their eyes widening in feral aggression at my presence.

  I sprung back from the corpse in front of me, sort-of-blade in hand. If I could use the doorway as a choke-point...

  But then the monster in front lunged at me, ducking beneath my reach to... grab their fallen comrade? Swiftly they pulled it away, snarling at me defensively.

  One of them clutched at the body desperately, wailing in distress while they rocked back and forth, growing increasingly covered in the fallen one’s blood.

  The other hunched defensively over the other, watching me intently. But I could tell from its frequent glances and momentary flashes of clear pain that it too grieved what I had done.

  “OOH FUCK YOU GUYS! YOU HAVE EMPATHY?!” I screamed at them. “YOU’VE JUST BEEN EATING ALL THESE PEOPLE WHO APPEAR IN THIS ROOM!” I strode forward, oblivious to the risk I was taking. “AND YOU FEEL EMPATHY?!?! YOU CARE FOR ONE ANOTHER?!! WHY NOT THOSE GUYS?!” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the body pile. “YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME FEEL BAD FOR THIS!”

  So I became a murder-guy. It was actually remarkably easy. With the one of them already emotionally murdered, I just had to feint towards them, and the defending one reacted in a flash, moving to cover their distraught companion. So I stabbed them in the neck as well—a proven weak-spot.

  The last one saw it happen, and then just kind of started staring into space, an utterly vacant expression on their face. Like their world had just disappeared. Like nothing could pierce the veil I had cast over them. They were obviously no threat at all. Easy pickings.

  YOU HAVE ACQUIRED ROOM PERK: COLD-BLOODED MURDER-GUY!