Robert explained to Noah his idea of using the liminal void to train weapon proficiency. Instead of gaining eight hours every day, they could add months or even years of training time.

"I thought about that already," Noah confessed. "We can give it a try if everything goes well tonight. We can add a few hours of training each day but not much more than that. Otherwise, our sense of time and mental age will differ too much from what's expected.

"No offense intended, but you seem to have adapted to your talent very well. Most people would despair if they had to stay without human contact for a single day, much less a week or a month.

"Finally, this detachment would be stronger with the two younger ones in our party. Freddy and Amanda won't be the same if we do this to them. Especially Amanda."

Robert agreed with Noah. He wouldn't say he was very suited to his talent. It was the other way around. He didn't have a choice in the matter. If he didn't use his time in the void often, his talent would activate every twenty-four hours and kidnap him away for three months and a week at once.

"Finish the slimes using your spear," Noah said. "I'll have a one-on-one with Amanda in the meantime."

"Yessir!"

*

*

After everything went back to normal, everything except for Robert's hair length at a quarter of an inch long, they sifted through the puddles to get the cracked slime core fragments. The cores were a valuable crafting material for the runic crystals used to make almost everything humans used, from appliances, and their control panels to the teleportation pads for objects.

That was the only reason this realm had some utility, aside from being a convenient path to other passages and deeper realms.

They only found core fragments where slimes were killed with physical attacks. Those drained by Robert dropped fuck all cores.

Noah wasn't happy. Apparently, he had a quota to harvest from this realm.

Also, Robert realized that since his spell drained the Ether in the cores, it meant the Ether losses with physical attack kills were less than what he first estimated.

"We will need more cores. Way more. Rest up, have a light snack, gather to fill your essence, and we are going to pull more slime out of the river. And for this exercise, Amanda can't use weapons and Robert can only use support magic and the spear. One reminder: you can use the whole tunnel. Slimes are slow but tenacious. Fight them while you retreat. It also carries the advantage of letting the slimes line up."

"Why would they line up?" Robert asked.

“Because the slimes don't all move at the same speed. Give them a sufficient distance and the faster ones will line up in front while the slower ones will line up behind. It will also slow them down because slow ones will collide with each other and take even more time to reach the front and to fight.”

“Does any monster walk around the tunnels?” Amanda asked.

“Sure do. But they often congregate around the lakes. They only take the tunnels when migrating from one lake to another. And the next lake in that direction is ten miles away,” Noah said. “You have plenty of room to kite the snails.”

“Kite?” Robert asked, puzzled by the word.

“An old term that means to make the enemies follow a path of your choosing. You pick the terrain and the rules of engagement. But it requires you to stay mobile. When kiting monsters, you need to be doubly aware of your surroundings. Oh, and a kite is a child’s toy that flies in the wind. You hold a string attached to it and move the kite by pulling and dragging the string. Now, sit down and gather wisps. The three of you. I’ll keep watch.

*

*

Professor Actus threw the stone at the river again. A deluge of water fell down, carrying no aquatic monsters this time. The same process repeated itself. Where the water splashed, it congealed and formed more slimes. But this time, Robert and Amanda were a hundred feet down the tunnel and ninety degrees to either side. They couldn’t see each other because the river was between them.

But it was a necessary precaution to bring the slimes above and around back “down” so none of them would attempt to jump too high and fall back in the river. The geometry and gravitational singularity of the place were mind-boggling, even after seeing it for a few hours.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Robert tossed a rock at some slimes to his left, those on the “ceiling” according to Noah’s perspective. The slimes started to move toward him. He felt tempted to cast drain essence on some of them but held back. He slowly dragged the slimes toward him, while Amanda did the same on the other side, minus the rock-throwing stunt. Since Noah was faster and could escape with his talent, it fell on him to get the majority of the slimes.

Noah ran past Freddy, and barked, “They are all yours now.”

Freddy tilted his head and stared at the teacher. When did Noah learn the Taulusian language? But he had little time to wonder. The slimes were coming and he had to make sure the ones below kept the same pace as the ones being kited by Robert and Amanda.

Slowly, the two human students moved sideways, intending to join up with Freddy in the middle. The slime trains moved at a steady pace and soon the collisions started. Slimes pushed and pulled each other, slowing the train down and causing massive congestion. Yet, they were all focused on the tasty humans and none jumped back into the river.

“I’ll take the point,” Robert said when they joined back. “Amanda and Freddy, you stay on either side. Freddy, since you aren’t going to fight, you pay attention to the tunnel behind us and the river. Some of these monsters can certainly try to reach us here.”

Casting lesser haste on both of them and prescience – which he could only use on himself – Robert readied his new boar spear and prepared to slash the fastest slimes of the bunch. Amanda conjured sharp sheets of slate and attached them to a disk thrower Robert had her buy. She very much wanted him to buy it for her but alas, she never told him that. Since the slate was conjured, it counted as a spell attack.

She had to be precise with her shots. Unless she severed the area struck completely, the attack might as well have missed. It was no good. She aimed at the pseudopods and fired. The shot went straight into the mass of slimes and sliced across three or four of them before losing enough momentum.

“Keep shooting. You might hit a core,” Robert encouraged.

The slate disks were cheap to conjure. The real issue was the concentration required to make them sharp, durable, and thin.

Her second shot struck the lead slime. The disk somehow spun and slammed into the slime flat-side-forward. The slime staggered, causing the others behind it to crash into it. Before they could untangle their pseudopods, Amanda fired her third shot. This one also struck the mass of slimes but stopped halfway. The struck slime blew up in a shower of dirty water.

“Got one!” Amanda cheered.

“Keep shooting!” We still have three hundred and ninety-nine slimes to kill,” Robert joked.

Amanda poked her tongue at him. He didn’t see it because he was focused on the slimes.

Sensing an opportunity, Robert approached the still-entangled pack and lunged with his spear. Some slimes tried to jump at him but they were still wrapped around the others. He slashed one free with several strikes of his spear, causing the slime to lose half of its mass. It still came at him, attempting to jump. Robert dodged and sliced it in half again, then slashed another time at the half that didn’t lose cohesion. His spear caught the core but it was a grazing blow. It only pushed the core away, not doing enough damage to it to kill the slime.

The tiny slime, now a sixteenth of its original size, was only a layer of ooze around the crystalline core. It was still impossible to see the core, as it didn’t distort the light when passing to and from the ooze. He stabbed at the center mass and found some resistance. Next thing, the core split in half, and the slime died.

“I wanted the first kill!” Amanda bemoaned from behind him.

“Get good, then. Go ahead, shoot!” He replied. She wouldn’t hit him even if she tried because of prescience. That if he managed to dodge the shot. Still, he thought better and moved out of the way.

For the next ten minutes, Amanda depleted her essence pool by shooting dozens of slate disks at the slimes. She managed around one kill for every three or four disks. While that wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good either. But which physical attack would kill a slime was unpredictable like that.

“Tapped out!” She shouted.

“Three hundred and twenty-seven to go!” Robert shouted back.

He darted in and out of the pack, slicing the slimes. The boar spear’s blade length was two feet so he could get around two-thirds of the cutting surface of his sword. Yet, swinging the spear was back-breaking work. Each swing demanded way more stamina than the sword. True, the spear wasn’t meant to be swung all the time but stabbing a slime was a shot in the dark. And Robert didn’t like the odds of this gamble. Half an hour later, he had fewer kills than Amanda. His arms and legs felt like they were on fire. His star throbbed painfully with each kill as it absorbed the aura from the dead slime.

When one of the slimes jumped at him and forced Robert to use his talent to dodge, he knew he was also tapped out but on stamina. He returned a few hours later, feeling almost as tired as when he entered – minus what he managed to heal with lavi flows. Physical recovery in the liminal void was hard and expensive if not impossible.

“Out of stamina too! Going to spam essence drain!” Robert called out.

“Freddy, mark twelve slimes for me, with ten-second intervals,” Robert barked. “Space them out!”

Arrows pointing down appeared on top of some slimes and Robert tagged these with essence drain. The same thing as before happened. The cursed slimes became agitated and started to slam pseudopods into their neighbors. Soon, they entangled themselves in a mass of writing gel. The next arrow appeared a bit further. Robert did the same thing again. Over and over until his essence hit rock bottom.

It didn’t take long for the first slime to die. Robert thought that if he spaced his casts thirty seconds apart, he would gain enough essence to keep on casting and cycling his energy. But that meant the other two hundred and eighty-three cores would be wasted.

Did Robert care? No. He just wanted the kills. He wanted the aura, to make his star full to bursting and then ascend. The painful feelings his delayed ascension caused were driving him mad.

He didn’t wait for slimes to die anymore. Every time his curses filled his essence pool with enough energy for another cast, he would curse another slime that was further apart from the churning mounds. Moving this much Ether around his body started to tire his metaphysical body as well.

“That’s enough,” Noah said, appearing from behind a tree. He walked toward Robert and tapped him on the shoulder. “Put that spear away, you did a good job here. Let’s walk and wait for your curses to run out.”

Was he there all the time? Robert doubted it. The teacher surely had some stealth power or just skill. Then again, nobody was paying attention to him.

They walked with their backs to the slimes, catching up to Amanda and Freddy. Robert felt pooped out.

“Okay. Now, sit and watch,” Noah said, grinning. His ears were perking up on both sides of his mask.

With a flourish, professor Actus drew a flaming rune in the air, then punched it with an open palm. As his hand connected with the rune, he shouted.

“Natural disaster: Volcanic eruption.”