Cas exited the other side of the tunnel before she finished entering it.
It was like piping water between two glass plates, a simple squeeze and a handful of her completely filled the miniature confines of the tunnel, rushing out the other side into a chilly cavern below.
50 slimes absorb-
43- 59 slimes-78-absor-99-67 slimes absorb-
34- 19 slimes-69-absor-89-50 slimes absorb-
70- 32 slimes-38-absor-232-45 slimes absorb-
45- 54…
Cas elected not to expand that itinerary of her recent murders, simply taking note of the 22 xp and feeling slightly heavier for it as she compressed her outer layer and squeezed more of herself through.
Crawling, pulling and pushing herself from all sides, Cas’ body on the surface grew smaller, less substantial as it shrunk and shrunk, draining down the fracture until only a small handful of slime remained, an over-sized eye taking up the majority of the remaining space.
The inner confines of the tunnel were astoundingly tight, and her eye – Cas understood – was the only part of her bound by such considerations. So, Cas focused, feeling a soft warmth develop around her crystal, and then.. Cas’s eye dissolved, and the world dissolved with it.
Sounds disappeared, all the background smells she’d ignored became notable for their absence, and the clear sight of Kari’s smiling face scattered out of focus, leaving Cas with only a vague recollection that she was in sunlight, and that her lower body was dragging her somewhere very dark, and very cold.
Cas’s body had spilled out onto what she felt was chilly stone.
In a few minutes, her eye had reformed. She became certain of this when she started hearing again, a chaotic beat of dripping water playing out in the darkness.
Around her she could see… nothing.
It was dark.
Normally, darkness was no impediment to Cas. She had excellent night vision as a sakkari, a small consolation for a lack of color vision, she supposed. However…her ability to see by starlight held no weight inside the cavern, which was gripped by a darkness that admitted no light by which to see, and which was so complete that Cas was certain no human before her had ever experienced.
Her crystal, free of the shimmering illusions human eyes entertained whenever they encountered the concept, saw the darkness very plainly. It was what Cas had imagined the darkness in her dreamless sleep to be..
It was quite calming, actually.
Still, calming or no, Cas couldn’t see. That was a problem for her expedition, considering that ‘looking around’ had been a key component of her scientific process thus far.
Quite troublesome…
As she’d suspected, the cavern was empty of conveniently glowing mushrooms.
So, she transformed into the [Golem v2.0].
Cas had taken into account the user reviews she got from Kari. This version was substantially less horrifying to look at, and quite an improvement otherwise. Better proportioned legs and a stronger spine gave it a more human posture, and it actually had hands now, rather than the stalks she’d defaulted to using before.
And Cas, stretching out one of those hands, changed it, feeling her body morphing as she pumped more material through arm. A long drip of slime extended out from her palm, hardening into a long pole that fit comfortably in her grip.
On the end of that pole, suspended high above her, a large, spherical bulb grew into position, crowning the top of the staff with a jelly-like material.
Eating the glow worm had revealed the usual: it was made of meat, worm blood, salt, and about a hundred different ‘unknown’ materials. Through quite a tedious process, Cas figured out that it was a combination of four of these unknowns that created the Glow Worm’s titular light. She’d named these four materials appropriately, labeling them: glow stuff 2, glow stuff 3, glow stuff 4 and – of course – Lampyridae.
Looking more closely at each of them, she’d been surprised to discover that they each had their own sub descriptions detailing their makeup, and to her great delight, they each had only one necessary ingredient: sugar.
All those ingredients, transmuted from sugar, were pumped through her staff into the crown, where a soft undulation of the slime-bulb mixed them together in a swirl.
…
It was a dim light that tentatively came to life in the bulb.
To Cas’s eyes, however, it might as well have been a chandelier as the cavern lit up like a ballroom. The dark walls, rich with mineral deposits, shimmered like the night sky.
Cas had hung the pole on her shoulder, keeping the light behind her to avoid flashing herself. That decision now stretched her shadow to the forward edge of the cavern, where a large, dull boulder intruded upon the glaring symphony of crystal walls.
This was all background to Cas. Her attention entranced by the spot just in front of her splayed feet, where her shadow fell over the corpse.
----------------------------------------
Cas could still hear the sound of dripping water in the center of the cavern, could feel the dank atmosphere stretching its way in this direction.
The slimes gave her light a wide berth. As they continued their march, Cas noticed they took up every stray bit of moisture they came across.
This explained the dry environment, as well as the immaculate preservation of the skeleton before her. Her first instinct had been to say human, but the extra set of ear-holes identified it as a Nemorian.
It was collapsed in a reclined posture against the wall. A rusted spear-tip lay on the ground beside its thigh bone. An outline of where the wooden shaft had decayed to nothing discolored the ground.
She moved her lantern to cast her shadow off the skeleton, aiming for a better view.
No trauma on the remains. The way it sat against the wall suggested that it had died exhausted. Starvation, maybe?
Cas left the depressing thought alone. Standing, she moved further into the cavern.
...
Roughly circular in shape, the cavern was empty of all features except the central puddle: a muddy thing that rippled constantly as water dripped from the stalactites in an uneven dribble. Walking forward revealed that the central puddle was surrounded by a wave of slimes that slowly rose from its edges. Stepping over them, she splashed into the bog, ducking under the lower stalactites and standing in the perpetual rain that decorated the center of the cavern.
In such a small space, with so few obstructions, it had been easy enough to trace the slimes’ paths after they emerged from their waters.
Despite their blindness and general lack of ability, it seemed the slimes had an instinct for following well worn paths, and created highways leading directly to three places in the cave.
The first path led by the skeleton.
The second trail of slimes, Cas followed to a large hole in the wall, big enough for a man to fit through.
Crawling into it, Cas traveled for about a hundred feet before she was stopped.
Broken rubble and loose stones piled at the end of the path. A cave in, heavy enough to trap a man, she thought, remembering the skeleton back by the first entrance.
Pausing, Cas could feel a warm stream of air coming through. Reaching forward, she felt for the breeze, found the gap and – squeezing her palm against it -- formed a stalk. Testing and teasing her way through the maze of tight corners and jagged spaces, Cas stopped when she felt the stalk breach into open air. Moving more mass into the end, she grew the bulb and – taking a few minutes – formed an eye at the end of it.
Cas was unsurprised to find herself looking into a dark and hidden corner of her cave.
On the other side of the cave, the fox-bat sat couchant in a makeshift nest, snoring lightly, oblivious to her presence.
Dissolving the eye and drawing the stalk back, Cas crawled back out and followed the final group of slimes to the third exit.
Her lantern danced and swayed behind her with every step. Her shadow swung like a pendulum in front of her, passing like a metronome over the dull, gray boulder which formed the final notable feature in the cavern.
This third exit, by her bearing, was the one that led directly to the Oasis, so she was immediately on the lookout for something amiss.
Walking closer revealed that few of the slimes chose this path. Of those that did, fewer still actually made it to the exit. The slimes seemed hesitant to go to the exit, either stopping and turning the other way or wandering senselessly in confused circles. In fact, in the muddle of confused slimes, it was difficult to tell where the exit was.
Moving closer, she crawled past the rock, leaning against the wall to peek behind the large boulder. There, she found a medium sized hole in the wall. It had smooth edges, as if carved out by centuries of erosion.
The slimes that made it this far had no trouble climbing up the smooth lips of the entrance.
Cas was confused for a moment as to what the problem was, until five seconds passed and the gray stone hissed.
It was the sound of a giant taking a breath, and the stone expanded like the giant’s chest, growing out to press against the wall and sealing the entrance shut. The slimes that continued heedlessly onward, Cas saw, touched the surface of the stone and… absorbed into it.
This series of deaths sent a cascade of panic back to the following slimes before – with another, long hiss, the giant exhaled and the exit became clear of obstruction, and the slimes continued their march onward.
Cas felt a bit of her pride spark up at this realization.
Taking a step back, she moved her lantern to get a better view.
She didn’t want to admit the truth.
Tilting her head, Cas looked deeper into the surface of the stone, and she could see that the stone was changing color.
She wanted it to be some natural phenomenon that she could feel smart about having discovered.
The stone lost its opacity, becoming less substantial.
But this…
The stone was changing color. It grew… not lighter, but less substantial as Cas looked through the dimming haze of the rocky interior, where she saw, floating there, a large, crystal plate that reflected her lantern light.
This was just stupid, she thought.
Alas, the stupid lies one made up sometimes turned out to be the stupid truth instead. Fate was funny that way. Who would’ve thought, out of all explanations, it would turn out that it would be this.
This giant monster was stealing their water!
----------------------------------------
Cas plucked the bulb from the top of her staff and absorbed it into herself.
The chemicals she moved into her off hand, which now glowed even more dimly as she knelt by skeleton.
The new, low angle of the light gave the skeleton a mournful expression. It also gave the spear-point a sharp shadow against the ceiling as she held it up, its surface gnarled with rust and flakes of deterioration.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Cas had once asked Elder Korivenna how to kill a slime.
Knocking the blade against the stone wall drew a dull hum from the metal. It was still in good condition.
The answer Cas had received was vague and unsatisfactory.
Cas slammed the socket of the spear-tip onto the now empty tip of her staff.
The staff was a part of her body, and she could feel it changing in reaction, thickening to fill the socket, growing hardened pins where the attachment points had been punched into the metal, replacing the delicate chemistry of its interior with grained hardness that left the staff feeling more like dried bone than the hollow sugar-stick she’d designed it as.
The simplicity of the design also had another advantage, Cas noticed.
No longer dependent on the sugars she fed it through her body to function, and no longer needing intelligent control over the reactions that once occurred within its shaft, Cas was free now to detach from it, letting the spear drop away from her hand like a ripe fruit, allowing her to slide both hands across its smooth surface as she held it up and approached the slime.
Cas grew four feet when she changed into her golem form. The spherical compactness of her slime form drew her down several sizes.
The slime in front of her was taller still. For her own confidence, she elected not to estimate exactly how many tons it weighed.
Taking a deep and unnecessary breath, she trudged forward, feet splashing across the central mud-puddle as she approached within stabbing distance of the creature.
Again, Elder Korivenna’s answer came to her at a time like this.
“It’s hard to say what can truly kill a Sakkari. The sun can take them, but where they go after that…” she let the silence go its own way.
Cas, for her part, had her own ideas as to what else might be able to kill a slime.
Namely, incredible violence.
Kas raised her spear in both hands, thrusting it forward in a series of quick motions, one that punched a hole in the creature, one which followed through to deepen that wound, another that thrust four feet into the creature and slammed harshly against its crystal eye, a fourth that slashed down to flay a slice of hardened flesh.
By the time the fifth strike came, the first four had already healed.
She tried again, and that failed.
She tried to strike faster, and the slime healed the shallow wounds. She tried harder strikes, and they had no effect.
She tried attacking without breaks for an hour, and saw no progress.
Demoralized and tired, Cas took a stroll back. The slime, standing in place senselessly, had hardly registered her attacks.
Cas, looking back at the slime, which by now looked as pristine as ever, started to understand why Korivenna had been so unsure as to the status of their mortality. It was hard to imagine what human efforts might be able to kill something which healed as easily as a human moved.
Then, Cas remembered that she was capable of more than human effort, and went to her second plan.
…
Well it wasn’t her plan per-se. It was a tactic she remembered from watching the Zanzibat hunting slimes.
Cas raised the spear above her head, coiling her body and bringing it down edge-wise like a sword.
The spear had an edge, though not much of one, and it cut several inches into the hardened exterior of the slime. A grip and a wedge jerked it out from the slime. It was already starting to heal, but Cas wouldn’t give it the opportunity to finish. Bringing her spear back down, she slashed at it again, and again, and again like a woodsman chopping through a particularly stubborn knot.
The more she hit it, the more it healed, but, by focusing on a small area, attacking the delicate point where the armor barely hung on by an edge, Cas brought her spear down for the last time and was rewarded with the sound of a wet flop as the slime flesh crashed down onto the carpet of mini-slimes below, sending the confused mass into a buzzing disarray as the disembodied flesh absorbed them into itself.
Cas went through the usual process the fox had shown her.
Reaching down – she remembered that the fox had merely tossed away the broken armor out of reach of where the slime could reabsorb it.
Cas, however, had far better methods of denial. Hurrying, she flashed down and took the disembodied slime into her hand, attempting to absorb it, and failing…
‘Huh?’ was the only word out of her mouth before the message flashed on her status screen, and a searing pain came from her arm.
Foreign material exceeds your absorption level!
Max HP Updated-
Cas didn’t bother to read the rest of the bad news, the searing in her limb told her enough. Looking down at her arm, Cas could see clearly the junction where the slime flesh was absorbing her, and growing further up her arm like a strange virus.
It was… a horrifying sight to her eyes, and she reacted with all the shrill energy of a woman who’d just seen a mouse. The rusty spear head flashed in a fast arc, and the monstrous appendage, arm and all, fell to the ground with a dead flop.
Cas staggered back from the scene, watching as the disembodied flesh finished absorbing her appendage, and as the insensate slime slowly reached out to reabsorb the huddled mass of her flesh and its own.
…
Cas regrew her arm, feeling the rest of her body shrink to maintain proportion.
The mass of the arm itself wasn’t an expensive loss. However, the limb did contain many bones, each of which had been hardened with a lot of her tougher material… so it was that Cas decided to make up for the losses with tactics she wasn’t too proud of.
Looking down at her chest, the skull floated in the space inside her rib-cage, looking up at her with what she considered to be a judgmental look before dissolving. The various other bones she'd taken up soon followed suit until:
Absorption level insufficient to take up all material.
The message appeared once she’d saturated her body’s ability to take up the harder minerals. The remaining bones still broke down, but didn’t dissolve – instead floating as an opaque cloud that muddied through her upper body.
The rock-slime stayed where it was, not caring to pursue her or move the slightest bit from its perch.
It was a strange thing to see. The slime was obviously higher level than her. At least, it had a higher absorption level.
But it was so lethargic. To Cas’s eye, it didn’t even seem to be eating the other slimes intentionally. It had simply gotten stuck in an inconvenient place and – fed ever larger by the blind mass of its brethren as they ran into it – couldn’t muster the energy to move.
Cas felt she could relate to it, in some way.
Cas – mainly through her own bad decision making – had become water heavy multiple times. Every time she loaded up on too much water she always felt… lethargic. It wasn’t a feeling of sickness per say, but without the salts and actual sustenance she so relied upon, it felt as if she could never find a reason to move unless it was to eat something with actual substance to it.
And this slime, stuck in the darkness of this cave, fed on a diet of slime water for five years straight, didn’t seem to have much motivation left to move.
This cavern was the perfect trap for a slime, in a way.
Young slimes were more water laden than adults, but they stilled maintained a proportion of minerals that would keep the slime from instinctually purging itself of the excess water that would built up inside of it.
And here, it couldn’t eat more minerals to fix the deficiency because there was nothing in this room resembling food.
Cas looked down into her body, and into the slurry of bonemeal that was now mixed out through it.
Or, rather, there hadn’t been any food that it could smell in the perpetual darkness of the cavern, she corrected herself.
This gave her an idea...
----------------------------------------
Cas took a moment to bask in the sunlight as it streamed into the cave.
The Zanzibat looked at her, confused.
“Hey, buddy,” she waved with her golem arm, “it’s about to get messy in here, so sorry in advance.”
The fox, recognizing her voice, simply closed its eyes and tried to catch some shut eye.
Cas, looked around at the arena, and took out her spear head.
In the daylight, the flakes of rust that crusted its surface had a translucent quality to them. It was bent and chipped, and not all of the damage was from age Cas recalled with a wince, as she remembered all the dings and scratches the thing had endured as she forced it through the claustrophobic spaces of the cave in.
Taking out her arm, she reformed the spear-shaft and molded it into the socket of the blade. Cas was surprised to find how much harder this shaft was. It was all thanks to the sacrifice of the skeleton, she supposed, rapping a knuckle against the thick shaft of hardened slime and finding it produced a dense, thudding sound.
This spear shaft, in addition to the better grip, was also much shorter, handling more like a sword as she gave it a few practice swings. Satisfied with the performance, she placed it on a high perch of rock and descended back down into the cavern.
Taking a few minutes to regrow her eye, she changed into a golem and activated the glow-worm solution in one of her hands.
In her other hand, she concentrated the slurry of bone, forcing it through her surface and producing a soft handful of dry bone powder in her palm
Gently, she sprinkled the dust at the foot of the larger slime.
The slime, tentative at first, stretched out, snorting the powder eagerly like it was an underpaid supermodel.
This was a promising start, for Cas had been planning to lead it out to the surface with a trail of the stuff. Then, the promising start became a little too promising, as the slime’s surface warbled, and it let out a horrific, inhuman, inanimate shriek that filled the cavern completely with its overwhelming noise.
It was a disturbing thing to hear, but Cas wasn’t left much time to process it as the slime – with surprising rapidity – shot out a thick stalk that the golem was barely quick enough to dodge. Cas could see the caustic surface of that stalk bubbling. Apparently, it had developed a taste.
Again, it lunged at her, attempting to absorb. This time, Cas jumped to the side, and made a bee-line for the cave entrance. The slime followed, and the race was on.
----------------------------------------
Cas, in her golem form, was laughably faster than any slime. Leaping up into the hole and army crawling to the cave-in, she’d built quite a substantial lead over her pursuer, who was only just now crawling into the entrance of the tunnel.
Squeezing through the rubble would require a more primordial form, however, and in that state she held no advantage, so, not wasting any time, she threw herself bodily into the exit, squeezing herself quickly through the maze of broken stone, at times splitting her body to take multiple paths at once before converging back up at the surface.
She could feel the slime nipping and dissolving at the trailing edge of her body when she pulled through, appearing in the warm, surface air in a blind, deaf and quite helpless state as she tried to form the golem.
Idiot!
Berating herself, she crawled forward blindly.
Having not expected this to turn into a chase, the few minutes it took for her to reform her eye hadn’t seemed so important!.
So, Cas, in a panic, reached out to the ethereal body stamped in her mind, and activated [Human Figure].
The change crashed into her body as always, and her eyes formed in seconds, appearing just in time to watch everything happen all at once.
Skeleton, organs, muscles, feet, torso, legs, arms… all these changes and thousands more flashed by like the racing frames of a slide-show, and Cas stood in the middle of the cave, gasping for breath.
The slime, to the displeasure of her paranoia, was barely halfway out of the rubble wall, taking its time.
Cas, reached out, and picked up her short spear, taking a few practice swings in nervous anticipation.
Because, you see, that was the thing about [Human figure]. Cas could make it, but it was a construction done without understanding, like a student who’d memorized the answers to the test.
The slime was fully out in the open now, and its eye, a large crystal about the size of Cas’ palm, reformed within seconds.
And, like a student who didn’t truly understand the material, Cas was therefore unable to change her human figure. Unlike the golem, which could grow new limbs, and make lightbulbs to see in the cavern, and stretch its stalks out to climb trees, the human figure -- built without understanding -- was much too complex for Cas to manipulate. It had none of the utility options of the golem or any of her non-human transformations for that matter.
The slime approached.
However… up here in the light, where creative problem solving had reached its limit…
Cas raised the spear and swung. It came down in a flash, projecting a loud whistle as it sliced through the air and cut half way down into the body of the slime with a loud squelch. The slime's armor exploded, splattering the nearby walls with the slime’s innards.
...the human figure was really, really good at exerting its strength.
A slight step back was enough to extricate the weapon, and a flashing motion brought the rusted blade back down into the slime.
That had been enough, and a large slice of the slime the size of Cas’s forearm flopped into the ground.
Cas picked it up.
No warning message came, and Cas laughed as the disembodied flesh struggled vainly to absorb a body built using – in her status screen’s words – ‘level 60’ slime feats. Yeah, she doubted this slime would be pulling level rank on this body; and, chucking the slime armor 15 feet into the desert outside, Cas smiled, took up her blade, and started hacking.
…
The slime was a shadow of its former self by the time Cas was done.
Violent splatters of viscous material and scattered debris of hardened armor lay in a chaotic mess around the tiny, marble sized figure that sat gripping onto a large grass stem.
Sharon and Tara, shivering, huddled together in one corner of the cave, apparently not liking the show.
The fox lifted its head up from its tent, blinking sleepily to see what the commotion was all about.
And Cas… Cas was breathing heavily.
She never really felt out of breath as a slime, but it felt good to be able to express the intensity of her emotion, to put physical form to her exhaustion as she looked down at her defeated enemy, which now only looked confused as it attempted to crawl off the grass stem which wobbled underneath it.
Cas wondered whether or not she ought to spare it.
After all, it hadn’t been killing the other slimes on purpose, and she doubted it wou–
Nom-nom
The fox’s tongue licked up against its chops with a delicious motion.
Huh… guess the decision was made for her.
Cas looked all around.
The ants were having a field day with the mess that had been left inside the cave, and, outside, the slime remnants were already beginning to desiccate.
There was… really nothing left of the problem, it seemed.
A glint of crystal caught her eye, however. The slime’s crystal eye, looking like something between a silvered mirror and a mollusk shell, sat in perfect condition on the ground.
Cas picked it up…
----------------------------------------
Cas could be quite loud when she wanted to be. Her 'lung' was dedicated solely to speaking, and could be expanded quite generously, as could her vocal chords, and air channels, and trachea. Everything could be supersized to fit the purpose, and at this stage -- with the modifications she'd made -- even the slightest whisper from her could sound like it came from a speaker system.
Despite all of this, Cas was silent, at a loss for what to say.
Cas was perched atop the low hill this town used as a soap box. She recalled the lack-luster speech she’d given here last time, and was determined not to repeat the mistake.
So... Cas paused, took a deep breath, and -- with a subtle, yet confident voice that filled the air with its volume, announced:
“Ladies and gentlemen… we got him.”
And the crowd went wild.