The morning was overcast when Trixie and Brivaria emerged from their tent. The heavy rains from the storm filled the savanna with water causing waist high pools to form between some of the tall hills. The pair would have to move from hill to hill to avoid the worst of the flooding. Well, Trixie would since Brivaria would just be flying over all of it. The perks of being an angel were truly bountiful or something like that.

She had just finished storing the tent in her inventory when Trixie started barking. The winged girl was about to check the progress on the rain catcher as she stuffed it into her inventory only to turn around and notice the hills were moving. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

She stared at the hills for a long moment as her brain tried to make sense of the odd sight. It wasn’t that the hills were moving, it was the fact that water was moving up the hills in odd ways. At last she realized what she was seeing. There were slimes all over the hills. Dozens upon dozens of the things were wiggling around. A few of them, Brivaria noted with alarm, were sliding toward her and Trixie.

Brivaria pointed a finger at one of the approaching slimes. She used the invocation for Withering Ray and fired a sickly, greenish-yellow beam at it. She then did the same to another one. Both beams struck the slimes and both monsters began dissolving. Their clear, watery bodies dissolved first leaving small red spheres about the size of her fist. Those were the cores of the slimes. The cores were akin to the brains. Once the vapor was gone, the cores began degrading until they crumbled to dust.

A single Withering Ray was all it took to kill a slime which was good. Unfortunately they cost four mana each. Using the two beams reduced Brivaria’s mana from 68 to 60. She could fire 15 more beams but a cursory look at the hills revealed far, far more than 15 slimes.

Trixie’s barking got her attention once more as the slimes she hadn’t killed drew closer. The dog had no protection. Slimes were slow moving but they were dangerous. If one got a hold of Trixie then it could kill the dog by simply smothering her head and suffocating her. The angel sighed and made an executive decision.

“Come here, girl,” Brivaria said to the dog. Trixie stopped barking at the slimes and padded over to the angel. The magical circlet came off and Brivaria stretched it to go over Trixie’s head. It settled on Trixie’s neck and the magic activated. It looked kind of cute on the dog in Brivaria’s opinion. It was as though Trixie had tiny angel wings coming out from beneath her purple scarf. “Okay, be a good girl and don’t do anything reckless. I’m going to kill a few slimes.”

Slimes were absolutely no threat to the angel. They were slow and easy to kill. These water slimes were among the most basic type of slime monster in existence and she didn’t need magic to kill them. Withering Ray confirmed they were relatively weak so Brivaria walked up to the nearest slime and drove her sword into its gooey body and through the red sphere that was its slime core. It died instantly. She put the sword back into her inventory and retrieved the spear her friends had convinced her to buy. She walked over to another nearby slime, skewered its core with the spear, and pulled it out. The slime and core dissolved immediately.

The main way slimes could endanger an adventurer was by surrounding them. The simple and very effective counter to this was moving in a circle clockwise or counter-clockwise. As long as you were always picking off slimes on the outer edge of a group, you were never in danger of being flanked by the slow-moving creatures.

Brivaria was lifting another red core out of a slime with her spear when Trixie barked at her. She turned to the dog. Trixie was standing behind her with her tail wagging at maximum speed. In the dog’s mouth was a slime core.

“Trixie what did you do?” The angel glanced behind the dog at a pile of goop that had been a slime and at the core the dog held in her mouth. Trixie’s eyes were alight with excitement as her tail wagged. The winged girl quickly took the core out of the dog’s mouth and shoved the tip of her spear into it. She looked up from shattering the core to see the dog run over to another slime, grab its core, and start running back.

“Are dogs supposed to do that?” the angel asked no one in particular. She took the next core, destroyed it, and watched Trixie go fetch another one then another then another. This was a battle, right? Trixie was energetically fetching cores from the slimes and bringing them back.

Eventually the angel shrugged her shoulders and acquiesced. Trixie was having a great time. With the circlet on her, the slimes were mostly harmless. Brivaria casually speared the cores of any slimes that got close to her but mostly just let Trixie do Trixie things.

Angel and dog walked across the savanna like that. A small army of slimes emerged from pools and puddles all around the area to follow after them. Trixie ran back and forth between slimes to fetch their cores and bring them back to Brivaria. The angel then poked the core with her spear thus killing the slime.

You have reached level 15.

Gained +1 Physique, +2 Arcane, +2 Spirit, +2 Presence.

When the level notification came, the angel was incredibly pleased. She was wondering whether she was getting anything from the slimes. This not only confirmed that she was getting something but it took the sting away from how slowly they were traveling.

Considering all of the slimes still around and the growing train of the things behind the pair, the winged girl wondered if she couldn’t get another level out of them or maybe even two. Well, two more levels was probably wishful thinking. At least she couldn’t complain about the speed now. With practice came perfection and Trixie was getting much more adept at zooming around the hills picking up slime cores and bringing them back. The dog barely gave Brivaria time to take them before zooming off to grab another. The more she thought about it, the more she laughed. Her pooch was power-leveling her. Brivaria stared at the dog with a wide smile. It was just another reason to be happy with her decision to adopt the dog.

Brivaria’s joyful smile turned to confusion as she heard a crackling sound. Her eyes scanned the area for the source. She saw arcs of lightning flickering from one of the pools. Instinct took over and she moved. The angel pushed mana into Tailwind and flapped her wings hard, burning both mana and stamina to move as fast as her level 15 body would allow her.

Trixie came to a halt as the angel shot toward her. The dog’s tail stopped wagging, not understanding what was happening. From the crackling pool Brivaria had been looking at less than a second earlier came a glowing blue slime core which shot a bolt of lightning toward the confused dog.

“Holy Bulwark!” the angel screamed internally, not realizing she was saying it aloud as well. The blue bolt of lightning broke against the angel’s shield. It glowed with golden light as it took the hit. Ironically, this was the first time since arriving on Zlithia that the angel used the shield skill for its intended purpose—blocking powerful blows. Some of the electricity still managed to bleed through the skill despite how much mana she put into it. Her health ticked down.

Health was a creature’s System-granted regeneration. When someone was injured, their health began dropping in order to heal the wound and regenerate the damage. If someone suffered a life-threatening injury then, with enough health, they could instantly heal the lethal damage and survive. When someone’s health reached zero, it wasn’t instant death but it meant their body could no longer regenerate wounds. Brivaria’s lowest attribute was endurance so her health was a meager 43 points at level 15. Just losing 7 points to a lightning attack, that she blocked no less, was a serious problem.

The angel put her spear back into her inventory and fired a Withering Ray at the electro slime. All the little slimes no longer mattered. This extra large electro slime was a far, far bigger threat. That was a fact it quickly demonstrated when it opened up a hole in its slimy body to let the ray pass harmlessly through.

“Trixie, be a good girl and stay back. Stay right there and let me handle this one,” Brivaria said to the dog. She then realized she was talking to a dog. Trixie wouldn’t understand. “Trixie, stay,” she tried. When Trixie didn’t move, the angel advanced toward the electro slime.

The slime fired more lightning bolts at the angel and her shield blocked each of them with a friendly assist from Holy Bulwark. Brivaria was extremely thankful for her faithful shield. She would have preferred to dodge attacks than take them head on due to low endurance but she wasn’t dodging lightning-based skills or spells with 31 physique. Angel physique had always been middling and the oddities on her status screen hadn’t conspired to improve it. Even if she could get out of the way, she wanted to keep herself between the electro slime and Trixie.

The only time the monster stopped attacking was when Brivaria swung her sword. It was a low slash that was made more to judge its reaction than do any serious damage. As it turned out, the slime did have an instinctual reaction to the strike and that reaction was to get out of the way. This was good. A smarter creature might have thought to grab the sword and channel lightning into it. This one was not particularly smart and she would exploit that.

The angel made a second lunge but stowed her shield in her inventory and cast the spell Bolt of Decay with her off-hand. The slime dodged the sword swing but was hit by the sickly, greenish-yellow magical bolt. The monster was a large, transparent gelatinous thing with a blue glow. Upon being struck by the bolt, not only did the glow dim but the slime shrunk in size.

Seeing the effect the decaying magic had on the beast, Brivaria tripled down on it. She began emanating Bleak Radiance and infused her sword with it as well. The electro slime attempted to strike her with a pseudopod but was met by the magic-infused sword. Both suffered from the collision with the angel reeling back from the surge of electricity that flowed down her sword and the slime from the additional spike of decaying magic that came from the sword wound. Brivaria came out the victor in the exchange by a wide margin. Not only was her sword’s natural enchantment mitigating the lightning but the addition of the light infusion made it more resistant to hostile magicks. The result was a very mild zap to her and yet more degradation for the slime.

The lightning-charged core of the electro slime quivered as its body grew slower, smaller, and weaker. When it shifted around to run away, Brivaria cast Luminous Desecration. The casting time was the longest of any spell to date but her fingers knew the spell gesture required to shape the mana by virtue of the magic skill. She dramatically flunk the spell into the ground beneath her and was shocked when it radiated out from her not ten, not twenty, but nearly thirty feet. It was a really wide area of effect considering her low level.

The electro slime did not make it. It was oozing away as fast as it could go but the entire earth beneath it changed from the life-giving water to deadly life-stealing light the angel wielded with ease. It collapsed onto the ground and its body disintegrated leaving only the core whose glow gradually dimmed.

You have reached level 16.

Gained +1 Physique, +1 Endurance, +2 Arcane, +1 Spirit, +1 Awareness, +2 Presence.

Gained one new skill selection.

The System notification was a welcome thing because not only did it mean that slimepocalypse was actively helping her level quickly but also likely signaled the defeat of the electro slime. The winged girl sat down, wincing at the squelch from the wet ground beneath her. She took stock of the situation.

The other slimes had not stopped coming toward her during her battle with the electro slime. In fact, they had steadily gotten closer to her without her noticing. That didn’t matter because the Luminous Desecration spell was too much for the little monsters. Each slime stopped in its tracks upon entering the desecrated area and dissolved. Only the cores were left on the wet grass where the slimes had been. Trixie was hopping around and jumping on them. The cores didn’t behave like rocks when the dog landed on them, rather they behaved like water-filled bags and popped.

It wasn’t even a fight now. Dozens of slimes simply wandered into the desecrated area, collapsed, and were popped like balloons by an over-eager dog. Sensing the danger was past, Brivaria closed her eyes and relaxed. Her brief bit of serenity was disturbed by a wet tongue. Trixie had gotten tired of popping slime cores or, as Brivaria now saw, she’d run out. Well, almost run out.

Trixie gave Brivaria a doggy grin and then bent down to pick up one of five cores she’d brought over to the angel. She held it in her mouth, tail wagging with anticipation. Brivaria looked at the core then the dog then sighed. She smiled. She couldn’t help it. The winged girl took the core and threw it. The dog chased after the little rolling core. The truth was undeniable—the adorable golden pooch had endless reserves of energy.

The two played fetch with the cores for a while until Brivaria realized she could store the inert cores in her inventory. She tried it on a whim and was surprised when it failed not because the core couldn’t be stored but because her inventory was full. Oh right, the water collector. It had been active all night. The tent had just barely fit and everything else had been in her inventory prior. The angel emptied some rain water out to make room for the slime core. It worked.

The electro slime core was right where it had been when the monster collapsed. Brivaria stood up, walked over, and nudged it with her foot. When the System indicated she could store that core too, she made room in her inventory and did so. She played fetch with Trixie a little while longer as a reward for the dog being such a good helper. It was a shame animals didn’t gain levels in the way other creatures did. Trixie squished more slimes than Brivaria. The adorable golden was due.

The pair resumed their travels a little later. Both were covered in mud but it was an absolutely delightful price to pay for a couple fast and easy levels. They were probably the most fun ones the angel had ever gotten even including the levels from before the incident.

Name: Brivaria

Race: Angel

Class: Decaying Lightbrand

Level: 16

Stats: Health 25/44, Mana 11/74, Stamina 27/54

Attributes: Physique 32, Endurance 22, Arcane 36, Spirit 37, Awareness 22, Presence 39

Active Skills: Healing Touch, Holy Bulwark, Tailwind

Passive Skills: Inventory, Lesser Flight, Lesser Shapeshifting, Rest, Traits (Angel)

Magic: Light of Decay

Unspent Skill Points: 1