All the world was a stage, and Cas’s eye was a crystal spot-light which illuminated all the fine details.
Cas still had senses without her eye. Whenever she’d found cause to dissolve her eye, Cas remained able to distinguish light from darkness. She could hear muffled rumblings whenever something particularly loud disturbed the silence. Whenever her eye crystalized and regained its complex structure, however, sight and sound focused themselves into a picture of the whole world.
The crystal eye of a humble slime was an ingenious thing. By flexing the transparent jelly which was all around it, a focused image could be created on the front surface of the eye, and subtle sounds discerned on the coin-like edge. It was rare that nature provided such a singularly useful tool.
Of course, the image provided was monochrome, lacking in any color, and the image was blurry past a certain distance. The sounds, heard through a muffling cushion of slime material, were distant at best.
In truth, sight and sound were quite incidental in the lives of most slimes. More important were the senses of taste, touch, and smell. These sensations were spread throughout the entire body of a slime, and they could be called upon with immense accuracy.
Having lived for decades as a human, Cas had overlooked this as a matter of fact. For her, sight and sound had been most of the world. It was only natural that she mistook those to be her primary senses.
But,it is a matter of fact that mistakes only hold up until reality intervenes, and Cas was a slime now, and this latest meal was quick to make her acknowledge that fact.
The first thing that went was her sense of sight; the world turning dark as the dissolving body clouding her interior with biological material.
Rapid fire updates still shone through that darkness as her stats presented themselves to her.
Contrasted against the general darkness, the colors of her status sheet were especially vibrant.
This body of hers was oddity upon oddity. Cas had hardly even questioned the fact that her status sheet remained colorful. It was the only hint of color she'd seen since waking up in this color-blind body. Perhaps her mind had retained the ability to distinguish hues even if her eye couldn’t differentiate the physical colors.
That curiosity, as well as the deluge of information her sheet presented her with, was quickly washed away by the swelling tide of sensation which her blindness forced her to stop ignoring.
It was dark, but Cas could see the creature as she ate it.
No, that was impossible. It was dark, so how was she able to see it.
Paying more attention, Cas realized that what she'd confused for sight had been her sense of touch. Her entire body was like water, contacting the corpse at every point, and sensitive to every rise and bump of its general shape. Cas had confused it for sight because of just how incredibly detailed it was.
It was an easy enough mistake. Touch wasn't supposed to give this much information, after all. This was just like seeing. No... it was different from seeing.
Now that Cas was paying attention, she was quick to notice that things like brightness were missing from the new repertoire of sensations. Everything was immediately seen to the same extent.
Occlusion was missing as well. Now that she had fully engulfed the rapidly dwindling body, it was like she could 'see' every side of it at the same time.
More than that, she could feel every minute difference in texture. In fact, things like texture didn’t even exist for her anymore, they were all just different shapes patterned on the surface. Different 'shades' of feeling casting shadows upon themselves as she felt the small veins and subsurface structures. She saw new 'colors', too. Well, no, they weren’t colors, exactly. She didn't know how to describe them. But she knew she could feel and sense the minutest details of the creature, as skin and fat and flesh were stripped away, revealing fresh layers of it to her sensitive palate.
The fur was the first to go, cleaning the body and revealing the skin. And… the skin wasn’t smooth. As a human, Cas might have thought so. But her slime material seemed to go everywhere, and she felt the skin as it truly was, as a pockmarked battlefield of pores and bumps and caverns where hair-follicles used to be seated. And even between these larger structures, she saw the layered pattern of bumps and ridges which the mites used to scale before their world ended and they were dissolved.
And then the skin was stripped away, and she felt the dense pack of bubbly structures which made up the fat. After that dissolved into an oily mess, the muscles were revealed. They felt like vibrating strings made up of individual chains, with a hard color that blinked electrically as the monster’s dying convulsions caused it to twitch.
It was like unraveling an artwork, with a million different points of interest that were cataloging themselves to her mind's eye.
New Reagents Catalogued!
[Monster 3 Bone]
[Monster 3 Blood]
[Monster 3 Flesh]
She was now digesting her way to the center of this tootsie pop, and here, as the organs were stripped naked, that intense sensation once again intruded upon her. Again, that terrible analogy to color came to mind. It was something immediately distinguishable but so different. It was something that she could recognize even if she'd never seen it before. It was...
Cas paid closer attention. She focused on a major artery next to the creature's freshly exposed heart, which was gushing warm blood, now.
The blood tasted like water, for the most part, lacking the intense tang she might have expected with a human tongue.
In it were a hundred different subtle flavors, however. Feeling, tasting and drawing in, Cas dissolved the blood and realized that there were just too many colors packed together in such a small space. Cas couldn't even count them, but it was like she could taste every grain of salt on a french fry.
It was impossible for there to be this many different tastes in blood unless she was tasting the individual cells.
image [https://i.imgur.com/mIb5kCP.png]
No way…
Amazement aside, Cas was still stopped from thought by the onslaught of sheet taste.
The whole creature had the taste of something half-bodied. The bones added a sharp, aromatic insertion but, overall, eating the monster reminded Cas of her experience drinking a bottle of vitamin water.
It was almost sedating with its flavorlessness, and it left Cas feeling like a wine-taster as she managed to assign a thousand unique characteristics to such a bland meal.
It felt like reading through a book in two seconds, for that had been about how long such an intricate process of digestion took.
Cas was almost surprised by the speed of her digestion. [Rapid Processing] was more than living up to its name, as it flashed repeatedly across her status screen and the creature just… turned into a swirling dust devil inside of her, carrying small bones in the tornado that were themselves dissolved before the two seconds were up.
It was an explosion of digestion that Cas could see every detail of, and the shrapnel was rapidly dissipating. With her body rapidly processing the muddy oils that smoke-screened through her insides, Cas was able to catch fleeting glimpses of the outside world whenever a clear spot through the crud made itself apparent.
The woman had collapsed onto hands and knees, retching, and the monster’s hadn’t fared much better. Their cries sounded like a medley of cries and howls and deranged laughter as they overlapped with one another.
“OoohOoohOoohAkkkgh! Aghh!”
“OoohOoohAghh!OoohAkkkgh! ”
“Ooohoooh!hOoohOooh!Akkkgh! Aghh! Akkgh!”
A cacophony of scared noises and threatening growls orbited around her as the creatures abandoned their prey to circle around her, hopping back and forth over that invisible line they’d all decided was, quote on quote, ‘close enough’.
Cas had made her eating process messier than strictly necessary, and she kept up the lightshow of frothing blood and exploding guts long after she’d finished digesting. It seemed to distract the monsters. More importantly, it bought her time.
Her new stats flashed like a banner parade across her eyes.
image [https://i.imgur.com/urnDe1D.png]
The creatures had grown a bit bolder since last she saw them. They were circling closer now, barking and yipping at her with threatening postures.
Three left.
Cas would have to be smart about this. She was eighty pounds heavy, now. Far too weighty to fly unless she wanted to abandon most of her newly acquired body mass.
Flying had worked once as a killing tactic, but that had been with the element of surprise. Looking now at the ever paranoid and howling creatures, Cas doubted that trick would work twice. It was quite a risky maneuver, in any case,, putting yourself so close to an enemy that outweighed you four times over.
[Human Figure] sat temptingly high up her character sheet as the answer to all her problems.
Her human form had the best overall stats, particularly strength. Not to mention how easily she would be able to wield the dagger in hand. However… at the end of the day, eighty pounds of material would only get her a twelve year old body, and – as the creatures had proven – they were more than a match for an adult. Dagger or no.
Still, as she saw them cowering away with terrified noises, afraid to approach her closer as they reached the limits of her caustic splattering, Cas felt an undue confidence.
Human figure was her strongest form, yes, but it was almost funny how terrified they were of her basic slime form. Who’s to say she couldn’t twist thing in her favor?
Cas suddenly leapt up in dramatic fashion. She rose high like an erected wall, a carpet of slime that sent the hyenas scurrying for ten feet before rounding back, growling and hissing.
Cas quickly transformed. And, unlike her usual transformations, her body leapt to fill the commanding mold with agility. [Create Structure] flashed intensely with a steady beat.
First, her base widened out, creating a stout, four-legged pedestal upon which she planned to sculpt the rest of her designs. Growing thin, the base spread it out into a three foot square that cleared her over the grass. Atop it, the rest of her gelatinous mass molded itself into an open mouthed cylinder.
Defeating three monsters at once had seemed quite a problem.
The solution became obvious once Cas reformulated the question, however. She stopped asking herself how she could defeat these creatures, and instead decided to consider: she’d just picked up 65 pounds of high quality mass… what could she do with it?
And the answer to that, once run through Cas’s imagination, was: quite a lot.
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The cylinder expanded further, flanging out to create a bell-shape that funneled back to a solid cube of gelatin. This solid cube of gelatin was the smallest piece of the entire design, yet – unlike the hollow bell and thin stand, it held the vast majority of her mass and future expectations.
She called it the reaction chamber. A grandiose name for such a simple structure, but – as Cas had learned so recently – few things were simple in life, and fewer still in a slime.
In the reaction chamber, she connected a hose to the belly of the bell, and huffed in like a bellows, sucking in gallons of air.
It was a familiar enough process. She’d done it every time she wanted to create a false lung for her vocal chords. The scale was new, however. The gas pocket expanded until the reaction chamber was double the size of the bell. And from there it just kept ballooning like an over inflated tractor tire, walls thinning as it grew to oversized proportions.
The creatures leapt back at the sudden change in size, but quickly regained a threatening posture, emboldened now that their enemy had taken a more corporeal form. Solidity made the opponent more real, Cas realized. And real enemies were less frightening than ghosts.
[Rapid Processing] activated.
Cas never grew tired, but she could feel exertion, and right now it felt as if her entire being was in explosive motion. A halo of Aura filled the entire clearing with the splendor of her efforts, glowing like an explosion as all that energy concentrated itself in her reaction chamber.
[Alchemy 101 Level Increase: 15 -> 16]
The air pocket inside of the reaction chamber made up most of Cas’s current volume.
However, being an air pocket, it was also an empty space. To Cas, the air pocket was where she wasn’t; it felt more like an object in her grasp rather than a part of her. It felt like she was holding a gigantic marble of air.
Air was a strange object to be holding. Cas had taken breaths as a human, but the insides of her lungs were a senseless material, at best she felt a tension at her chest during such times.
Now that she was a slime, however, and one with such a newly expanded sense of touch. The sensation of holding the gas pocket was an intense one. It was like… holding a ball of living, roiling energy, one that was the size of a small refrigerator yet only weighed as much as a wine bottle. It felt like a living creature that wanted to explode out of the confines she’d trapped it in, pressing out like a spring against every surface of her air pocket.
Aura flushed into the walls that held the air marble, focusing, breathing, and holding there until Cas suddenly slammed the fridge sized air pocket down to the size of a wine bottle. It felt something like closing her hand on a rock, as the air crushed down until it just simply refused to yield, leaving her with a pill-shaped pocket of intensely hard air that pressed back against her.
The process surprised cas with how suddenly the taste of the air intensified. Cas hadn’t even known Air had a taste. It was a spritzy flavor, with hints of acidity in it. Those subtle flavors were soon overpowered, as [Rapid Processing] lived up to its name and charged the pressure walls with aura and energy.
[0.5ml of Ant Acid] Created
[0.5ml of Ant Acid] Created
[0.5ml of Ant Acid] Created
[1 ml of Ant Acid] Created
[1 ml of Ant Acid] Created
[1 ml of Ant Acid] Created
[1.5 ml of Ant Acid] Created
At first it was invisible, but quickly, within seconds, an opaque, pill-shaped cloud roiled within the confines of the pressure chamber.
Cas squeezed harder, she felt her body changing without instruction – coiling dark bands of muscle around the reaction chamber to aid in forcing it to compress just those last few inches..
The air inside turned misty, growing hot as aura and chemistry and pressure combined to fill it with a cloud of poison.
The reaction chamber was almost burning hot, now, and as hard as steel.
[Max HP Reduced By 12]
[Max HP Reduced By 8]
[Max HP Reduced By 6]
[Max HP Reduced By 5]
Cas could feel herself losing water. A dark mist of steam up from the surface of the reaction chamber. Droplets of caustic dew were condensing on the interior walls.
All of this took a few split seconds.
And, at the end of those split seconds, Cas was left holding tightly onto a grenade.
image [https://i.imgur.com/RseBcBH.png]
[Max HP Reduced By 3]
[Max HP Reduced By 4]
[Max HP Reduced By 7]
[Max HP Reduced By 2]
Another burst of stream broke the standoff.
That sudden interruption of the brief silence seemed to grant permission for others to do the same, and hyenas took full advantage, howling madly as ready legs and springing spines launched them forward with inhuman speed.
Despite their lopping gates and flared shoulders, they moved like balls of tense energy, everything about them almost painfully contracted as they dug their hindlegs into the dirt and sprung forward, clearing half the distance with three strides.
Cas, finding herself holding back a bomb, was in the exact opposite position. All she had to do was connect the pressure vessel to the bell, and relax...
[Max HP Reduced By 53]
The chamber emptied violently, all the gas exiting in a single, great hiss that kicked her back several feet. The inner surface of her bell was stripped away by the force of the blast, ablating 53 hp worth of her body into a fine mist.
The air itself was particularly reactive as it shot forward, turning almost incredibly cold as it expanded, and condensing suddenly as it slammed into the atmosphere and braked to a sudden halt, depositing everything in a sudden, freezing condensation as with a snapping poof a dense fog of white gas drew a line to the edge of the clearing.
“Ugh! Gugh!” The woman, at the far edge of the clearing, coughed violently, bloody hands wiping at her tears as she tried to scramble away in a limping retreat from the teargas. The monsters, hidden in the hazy heart of that sudden cloud, were in a worse condition. Inhuman screams of pain and agony shook the air, and three panicked figures scurried out from the horrid, acidic center of that fluffy white hell Cas had created.
The creatures were undoubtedly intelligent. Even their routing retreat was orderly enough, considering they all went in the same direction.
Perhaps they were merely heading to the same exit, or maybe they were following eachother’s cries of pain.
It didn’t matter too much, Cas considered. After all, they were blind, and – much as she had learned to admire her sense of touch, she was still of the opinion that becoming blind in a fair fight was a death sentence, and Cas was happy to play the bit of executioner.
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The first creature was a laggard, disorientated as it slammed head first into a tree-trunk with a painful crack, barely managing to shake away the confusion before her rusty blade exploded out the side of its throat, gushing darkly into the underbrush like heavy raindrops.
[3326 XP]
[Level Increase! LVL 7 -> 8]
It screamed like a pig, a cry that seemed to carry for miles and encourage its compatriots to get away.
Cas had gained another fifty pounds by the time her new, trundling, ‘bison’ form caught up with the second. It wasn’t the stealthiest of forms. Even blind, the creature sensed her presence easily enough. Ah, yes… this was the one with the ‘Sensor’ skill, she recalled. Its eyes were squeezed shut, fluttering was it trid to force them open against the tears.
It suddenly reared around to face her, muzzle scrunching with hatred as it bared black fangs and lunged, just in time for her curved horn to swoop up like a fishing hook through its esophagus, muffling its noises with the gurgles of its own blood.
[2482 XP]
Cas, by now, had reached her maximum weight for this level.
All 165 pounds of her planted deep footsteps into the black soil.
By the time she’d reached it, the third creature had already regained its eyesight. It was breathing heavily.
It stared at her.
Cas could kill it easily enough. Her bison form was a mirror of it, in a way. Upward sloping back, large forelegs that held up a barrel like chest.
Inside of her chest, all around her floating eye, colorful chemical pathways trailed throughout her interior like a subway map; a dozen reagents were shunted throughout and delivered to her reaction chamber… it was a logistical operation that felt more intense than any gun-fight, and it all occurred in a few split seconds.
Soon a miniature bottle of explosive tear gas was ready, and her bell-head pointed at the creature like an air-raid siren.
It would be simple enough to blind it again, and dead-easy to kill it afterwards. All she would have to do was stop holding that death back.
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Rock Jaw was dead.
If words could be put to the thoughts of the monster that called itself Spitter, that was the sentiment which ran rampant in its mind like a dreadful loop.
All of them were dead.
Being the last survivor was perhaps the most dreadful fate. Knowledge of your death was an additional burden, and death was here, now, for him.
The figure hunting him was a large one.
Size had never intimidated Spitter, but, as he stood frozen, staring at the latest form the creature had taken, he was able to tell that this creature had no eyes. It had an empty face, and a scent like ghostly remnants of the rest of his pack, and that hollow, horrifying face was changing now, warping into an impossible and familiar shape.
Spitter knew the futility of running. He’d been on too many hunts from the other end.
So, he stood, tense like a statue, as he stared over at the beast.
Most of its body was hidden behind a high bush. It was just that soul-less head pointing in his direction. It was just that mountainous silhouette standing there, it was just the smell of empty death all about it.
And then, turning around, it walked away.
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Cas retreated on stiff steps, lengthening her stout legs before transitioning to a trot.
Cas had only been chasing after them because of the threat they might have posed. That last creature, she realized, was unlikely to pose much of a danger, or even to threaten as much. There was really no point in killing it.
If she bothered to interrogate herself, Cas couldn’t be certain why she spared that last creature.
Maybe because it looked frightened. But, that was senseless, they’d all be scared. Every animal she’d killed had been scared before she ate it. That hadn’t stopped her.
Of course there was no point in killing it. It was no threat to her or to the woman anymore. But, given that, there was also no point in keeping it alive. Killing it would have been a simple matter, and it would have given her valuable XP.
In the game, she’d killed monsters by the thousands simply because of their title, and because the plot told her to.
But, that creature had seemed more like an animal. It had emotions and intelligence behind the eyes, and a certain inability to overcome its instincts.
Why hadn’t she killed it?
Maybe it was because it could see in the dark. It could look at her. It could look at its own killer and… Cas didn’t feel any pity for the monster, far from it. But… it did lead her to question herself. Was she really the kind of person that would kill for no reason? Was it already so natural for her to kill something because ‘there was no point’ and for nothing else?
Cas turned her trot into a gallop. The ground rushed beneath, and the treetops whirred above.
She needed to get to the woman quickly, she decided. And, besides, running helped her escape her thoughts.
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Despite her best efforts, her suddenly depressive mood persisted as she ran into the clearing.
The woman looked tired, lying back against a spot of ground that was clear of bones, face streaked with bloody lines where she’d wiped at her eyes.
Cas had hoped that the sight would distract her from her earlier doubts, but it only brought them into sharper focus. The dying woman, the blonde hair, the terrified look etched into her delirious expression and squinted, nightmare eyes.
Kari… she remembered.
Cas almost laughed at herself as the terrible memories stabbed at her. She laughed at her own idiocy.
What, had she honestly expected to be able to forget her failures forever? To be protected from their horror by endless distractions.
She ran away. Cas had abandoned a girl she promised to protect in a murderous village and, because of her own stupidity, ruined everything.
Not a single good deed.
The phrase that had been bubbling in Cas’s subconscious frothed over her, now.
She hadn’t done a single good deed since she’d gotten here. She could have helped the villagers, but had spent all her efforts trying to play scientist and satisfy her own curiosity. She could have helped Kari, but couldn’t even think outside of her own needs for one second to realize the girl was hurting!
She could have, she could have, she could have… and she didn’t, not once, not at all.
Not one single good deed.
Maybe that had been why she’d spared that terrified creature. Maybe it was some desperate attempt to do something human.
The woman shifted suddenly, coughing as a dark shot of blood squeezed out of the fabric of her dress. Cas’s eye drifted out from the wound, seeing the liters of thick blood that pooled about the woman.
She was a lost cause. That much was obvious. The amount of blood she’d lost… stopping her bleeding would only serve to prolongue her suffering.
If… if Cas had done more, could she have saved her?
The thought scraped along her hackles like a cool blade.
‘Could have, could have, could have,’ the taunting voice twisted the knife.
It was hard, seeing a person die. It didn’t cause Cas any panic or fluster, but… that perhaps was worse. Without the haze of fear, the terror of the situation was crystal clear:
The woman was dying now, and Cas just didn’t know what to do.
She just didn’t know.
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