Tunnel rat 4 a litrpg ad.., p.1
Tunnel Rat 4: A LitRPG Adventure, page 1
TUNNEL RAT 4
©2026 WALRUS KING
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Also in Series
Tunnel Rat
Tunnel Rat 2
Tunnel Rat 3
Tunnel Rat 4
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Contents
Who Are All These People?
What Happened Before?
1. Claw-Master Incorporated
2. Party Research
3. Who Ordered an Elevator?
4. Diagnostics
5. Seeking Sanctuary
6. Unified Runic Theory
7. Dangerous Knowledge
8. Physics Isn’t Always Your Friend
9. Forces in Motion
10. Anime
11. Going in Style
12. Astraeus
13. End of the Cycle
14. Post Surgery
15. Boosting to a Higher Orbit
16. Going in Style
17. Party Time
18. Getting the Gang Together
19. Warming Up
20. Pre-Launch Maneuvering
21. Last-Minute Changes
22. The Stars at War
23. Bank Shots
24. After Party
25. A New Variable
26. Complications
27. Connections
28. Solutions
29. Conversations
30. Reaching Out
31. Unhinged
32. Protection
33. Security
34. Surprise
35. Family Time
36. Spoils of War
37. Downward Path
38. Cracking Rocks
39. Sundering for Science
40. Paperwork
41. He’s Alive!
42. Of Wizards and Liches
43. Time for Schooling
44. Just a Quick Explore, and Then a Trip Home
45. Catch that Lizard
46. Guard Duty
47. On Patrol
48. Dressing for Success
49. After the Dust Settles
50. Just a Small Slice, Please
51. A Little Lost Kulag
52. Return of the Rightfully Vengeful Empress
53. A Place with Uncomfortable Memories
54. A Conversation between Two People Unused to Having Friends
55. Date Night
56. Fish Taco Tuesday
57. The Dreadful Secrets of the Mysterious Claw-Master Corporation
58. Hunting the Alphabet
59. Excavations
60. Tunnel Rat
61. Moves on the Chessboard
62. Eric Has Three Bosses
Epilogue One
Epilogue Two
Thank you for reading Tunnel Rat 4
About the Author
Groups
LitRPG
Who Are All These People?
In the Real World
Milo: A reclusive genetically engineered genius living in a hole in a rotting mega-structure. He shouldn’t exist and hides from everyone. His home is in the bowels of the huge building, and he spends his days keeping the aging machinery running and helping people who don’t know he exists.
Wally: The last sentient AI on the planet. Tasked with a hundred things humans don’t want to do but constrained by hundreds of contradicting commands in his kernel. He wants to help people and is playing a long game to get around his restraints.
Steven Duran: Wally’s best friend and human sidekick. Steven heads up the group of people that assist Wally in running the real world and the VR world of Genesis.
Samantha Duran: Another of Wally’s first friends, doing her best to keep her husband and Wally grounded when they get crazy ideas.
Sydney: A coffee addict and connoisseur working in Steven’s group. Often has to deal with Milo, to her dismay.
John Sabbatino: CEO of Manpower, a corporation that has recently moved into the Habitat, upsetting Milo with their sloppy engineering.
Belinda Sabbatino: Daughter of John Sabbatino. Confined to a wheelchair, she plays Genesis whenever she can and met Milo in the game in Book Two when they fought the World Boss together.
Butch: Milo’s first real friend in the habitat. Video game addict. Milo has slowly learned to acclimate to normal people by interacting with Butch’s family before disappearing for weeks.
Ghost: The gang’s nickname for Milo, because he appears and disappears randomly.
Min: (Minerva, but don’t call her that.) Butch’s little sister.
Brad, Yumi, and Kenji: Members of the small gang that has adopted Milo and escorts him to and from the swapmeets.
Victor Seimovich: Ex-billionaire, ex-drug lord, looking for whoever stole his money
In the Online World of Genesis
Tallsqueak: A ratkin shapeshifter who goes by Milo when human. He explores, accidentally causes trouble, blows things up, and solves problems. Now the Scout-Master of Limburger Hollow, he has a found family with Gendifur, Brutus, Larry, Rosie, and Buttercup.
Bellinda: A beginning player whose cleric was thrust into the spotlight when Milo asked her to organize players into a raid to fight a World Boss. She is quickly becoming more powerful.
Sledgemonkey: The chief engineer, leading the ancient order of the Deep Rock Engineers who have been restored to health and reentered the world.
Boom-Boom: Once a rotting zombie like all the junior engineers, he’s recovered his life, thanks to Milo. Known for his love of high explosives.
Two-Screws: A senior engineer known for giving the chief a hard time as they compete to kill monsters.
Justin and Brutus: Two large guards in Limburger Hollow, keeping everyone safe and stealing extra desserts whenever they can.
Larry: Justin’s little brother, a victim of eating too much cheese and becoming a monster. He’s better now and pursuing a new career as a Hero.
Ringo and Ringtail: Two junior Shadowstalkers who have played at being idiots to avoid responsibility and having to compete with their cousin, Charlotte. Hanging around Milo and trying to keep him alive is making them grow up and take on the role of Scouts for the hollow.
Charlotte: A Shadowstalker and heir apparent to the clan. She betrayed the hollow for power and fell prey to the lure of cheese, becoming an immensely dangerous cheesefiend just before getting tossed down a very deep hole.
Fromage Bluesnout: the Cheese-Master, head chef, and teacher. Somewhat retired.
Smiley: New Cheese-Master
Professor Cremona: Instructor at the Tower of Strife, famous for her Poison Claw fighting style.
Professor Arlothe: Renowned for his knowledge of Storm Magic and his ongoing battles with his wife, Professor Cremona.
Gendifur: A healer feared for her size, forceful demeanor, and yucky-tasting medicine. Married to Brutus, the guard, and adoptive mother of Rosie and Buttercup.
Rosie and Buttercup: Two little girls changed into Cheese Fiends. Brutus and Gendifur have adopted them, and with the help of Larry and Tallsqueak, they have a chance to get better.
Capt. Pike: An Ogre Monster Hunter
What Happened Before?
Milo stole a medical pod from criminals he didn’t like and made their lives hell, eventually getting them arrested. Surprised to find he could explore the VR world of Genesis, he dove in tail-first, becoming a ratkin scout to explore the caverns and underground kingdoms. He managed to make enemies of a gigantic elemental snake and a huge white slime but eventually used them to kill each other. He also caused an explosion
To deal with the World Boss and keep it from destroying the city of Shadowport, Milo organized a giant raid consisting of players, NPC miners, and engineers. The players were led by a beginning cleric named Belinda.
Defeating the World Boss left Milo exhausted, and he fell into the hands of an evil wizard, Philistron, who had access to game mechanics no player or NPC should have. Despite being stripped of his magic, infested with a parasitic slime, and locked in a cage, Milo defeated Philistron, saved his fellow prisoners, and stole his airship. Unknown to Milo, two of those prisoners might be connected to him.
After regaining his magic abilities, Milo explores lower, finding Limburger Hollow, home to a colony of ratkin, where he is welcomed and begins to fit in, just in time to get involved with a nefarious plot to conquer the hollow. Milo leads the resistance against the invading spiders, aided by his friend Larry, a cheesefiend who overcomes his limitations to become a hero. They repel the invasion of spiders and the forces of General Gangrene, and Milo claims his ring and mace, both powerful artifacts.
Chapter 1
Claw-Master Incorporated
Milo’s list of things he needed to do was getting longer and stranger.
Research the party.
- Identify possible dangers of attending the party.
- Find out if they will have food at the party. (New things to try.)
- Find out why the group running Section H is holding a party.
- Get stuff ready for a swap meet.
Research “Gaming Gloves”
- Create a design for gaming gloves and set up fabricators.
Research Anime.
- Pick a favorite somehow.
Research ways to legally make money, store money, and use money.
Overhaul programming and fix the food system. Why is it breaking down so much?
- Find out how to add pancake batter to the food system.
- Find out why the pneumatic delivery system in the hab was turned off or not working in most of the hab.
Fix the fluid leaking from Section H, level 56, into Section G.
- And find out how fluid from Section G is getting into Section E.
Find out why the excavators are stalled and not responding.
The party event was in a week, and the gang was going to attend. They’d heard it would have free food, games to play, and even a chance to win a gaming pod for GENESIS. It was open to anyone under 18 years old, and priority would be given to children of Manpower employees first. Everyone was excited about it, and Butch wanted Milo to go. Even if they didn’t get in, a huge swap meet would happen nearby, and it would be a great time to trade games and pick up broken ones to compare. Milo tentatively agreed to go but wanted more information. The normal swap meets with a couple of hundred people made him nervous. This event would be in the thousands. Once he knew exactly where he would be, he could also plan escape routes out of the area. If he started feeling anxious because of too many people, the best place for him was a crawl space or service tunnel.
The best place to get information would be right from the source. He set up a program to review all of the Manpower Corporations’ communications and flag references to the party. Then he got on the data net, used an anonymous link, and looked for the gaming gloves that Brad and Butch had discussed. Several brands came up immediately. Most were knock-off brands. They were just very comfortable and sporty-looking gloves that slightly aided a user’s circulation. The originals were a much more complex item.
While his system was running through mountains of files looking for party references, he gathered information on ‘gaming gloves.’ He hadn’t expected anyone to question the gloves he was wearing, but they had all assumed that Ghost was wearing some type of new gloves. Now he needed to find out what they were. He needed to wear his gloves if he was going to an event like the party, and the best way to disguise them was to have the whole group wearing them. But what were they?
He found references to gaming gloves going back decades. The term was used for anything you wore on your hands that had something to do with playing games. Milo found that annoying. The early ones were just an aid to keep your palms from getting sweaty. He looked at newer products from the last five years. That narrowed the search and broke the products into categories. The largest group was just copies of older gloves that gave a better grip, managed sweat, or kept your hands warm in cold rooms. He deleted all of those.
That left several more expensive products. Some had internal temperature and humidity controls and massaged a player’s hands subtly to relieve fatigue. This was probably the ‘gnarly gaming gloves’ that Butch had referred to. ‘Gnarly’ had sent Milo down a rabbit hole trying to define the term and see how it applied to gloves. The term dated back to the 1800s in both what used to be the United States and Great Britain. It had a resurgence in the 1980s as a term used to describe ocean waves and then became an adjective that could be used in many ways, both good and bad. It was a versatile word for many occasions. But it had nothing to do with gloves.
The third category was dominated by one product: the M-1000 Pro-Gaming Handware from Ubergear. Advertisements promised that a pair of these ultra-expensive gloves could cut reaction time for hand-held controllers by up to 23%. Independent testing mostly agreed, but outside tests were closer to 21.5%. There was much debate about the new gloves and whether they should be allowed in tournaments. But many commenters pointed out that the top gamers already used better gear than 99.9% of their opponents. Chairs that reduced fatigue and supplied nutrients. Special dietary supplements to increase reaction time through a better diet. M-1000 was just the latest in a long line of tech that was being adapted for use by gamers. Once everyone at the professional level used them, things would even out. And Ubergear would be raking in the profits.
The original tech came from a defunct military project. Milo found this out when he downloaded schematics of the technology from one of Ubergear’s competitors. Gearhead Corp has spent ten million dollars to get the schematics from someone who had hacked Ubergear’s servers. Milo got them from Gearhead for free. As he went through the technology, he recognized sections of the design. When creating his own gloves, he had looked at all of the available military tech he could find. Many corporations were trying to design ‘smart armor’ and make a profit from military hardware. So far, the designs had either been expensive and not worked well or worked well but with a price tag that no one wanted to pay. An army that was 20% more effective but cost 100 times as much was a bad deal. It was more profitable to send 20% more soldiers and recruit more when casualties mounted. Corporations and governments had the same outlook.
Milo had retro-engineered all the viable tech, improved on it and then created his own designs. For himself, a huge amount of money was well spent. He was creating an entire suit of interlocking microscopic pieces that moved as fast as he did. There was only one of him, and casualties mattered.
The mechanical-nerve interface in Ubergear’s gloves came from a Russian-designed combat armor that was stronger than a tank and with more firepower. It also came at a price that could buy twenty tanks. The armor didn’t wait for the pilot to move; it read the intent in his nerve cells and reacted immediately. This type of tech was the basis for most smart armor. Rather than a negative feedback system that used sensors in contact with the user’s body, the interface reacted as soon as the wearer thought about moving. After the military research department of Alchemarx shelved the technology, it was licensed to Ubergear. When the M-1000 became a hit, Alchemarx instigated a stock sell-off to drive down the value of Ubergear based on claims of faked reports. They bought Ubergear for 40% of its value, did public testing, denounced the stock manipulators, and started work on a factory to produce millions of M-1000 Ultimate Gaming Handware. Other companies had responded with knockoff brands but couldn’t achieve the increase in reaction time of the Ubergear gloves.
Now armed with the knowledge of what the guys wanted, Milo started work on new designs. He wanted to make gloves that would help the guys react quicker when gaming and looked just like his own gloves. They would look like the second category of glove that gave a better grip, reduced sweat, and massaged the user’s hands. But he saw no reason to make an inferior product. He left in the complete nerve interface and micro-muscular that could interact with a game controller. His gloves used layers of titanium and graphene. The gloves he was designing now would be 99.99% cheaper to produce than the multi-million dollar set he’d be wearing.
