Monster Rat

"We are an intelligent species. We ought to be treated as your equal. Yet with your devilish powers you have robbed us of our dignity and treat us like animals. The only way we can restore our pride is to wipe you from the face of the Earth"

- Monster Rat rebel

“Monster Rats”, also known as “Queerats”, and Homocephalus glaber are a eusocial sapient species in the world of the anime Shinsekai Yori, who first appeared about 500 years after a mutation caused .001% of the human race to develop psychic powers, leading to a world war between normal humans and psychics that killed millions on both sides and ended 21st century human civilization. After about 500 years in which at least East Asia was ruled by slaver empires ruled by powerful psychics, a group of scientists emerged from their hidden communities and intervened in order to prevent further atrocities committed by the psychic ruling class, modifying the human genome to cause any human who kills another person to biologically “self-destruct”, killing them instantly in what became known as “death feedback”. In so doing the scientists, all of whom were psychics themselves, realized that the “death feedback” only worked on those with psychic powers, essentially rendering them vulnerable to attack by non-psychics. Ironically, in their efforts to prevent the atrocities of the past, they committed one of their own, psychokinetically modifying the genome of all non-psychic humans by combining them with the DNA of the naked mole rat, creating the Monster Rats, whom the psychic ruling class could kill without suffering “death feedback”.

For the next 500 years, the Monster Rats were used as manual labor by the humans, as well as to eliminate children they suspected would become dangerous “fiends” or “karmic demons” - types of humans who could not fully control their psychic powers and posed a threat to others. All the while, the Monster Rats were kept under tight control by the Department of Exospecies Control, who enforced the obedience of the colonies under pain of the extermination of the entire colony. The Monster Rats lived in this slave-like status until a point about 1000 years after the breakdown of pre-psychic society (~3011 AD), when a Monster Rat known as Squealer, or later Yakomaru, led a change in their society, deposing the queen of his colony and relagating her role to repoduction only. After his colony was slated for extermination, Yakomaru led an uprising making use of firearms, ambush tactics, specially bred creatures, and his secret weapon: a psychic human raised from birth believing she was a Monster Rat, meaning she could kill humans with impunity.