Zortex faced a problem. Of course the issue was the wall in front of him in the room which had been his home for all his time in AoL. He promised himself that he would leave right away after the fight with the skeleton warrior, but he didn’t know yet how to do it. He had always thought that freedom would lay beyond the iron door, but he found out that passing through it would just widen his cage. His experience in the fight helped him a lot to dampen his anxiety. Now he knew that he may be able to handle other things beyond the slimes in his territory. 

Compared to the beginning, his skills had increased by leaps and bounds, but he had not exactly trained himself to overcome this particular hurdle.

He had wanted an offensive skill to fight against the enemies and Matthew in particular, and he created his tentacle skill. It took him a lot of effort and time and he was still only at the beginning of controlling his partial transformation, but that proved somewhat efficient in his fight against the skeleton warrior. However he still had to resort to many mundane tricks like rock throwing and running around. He needed something more, otherwise he would not survive in a World full of monsters. His first idea was to go to the training center and wizard tower to get some of the basic skills that he had imagined to get when he first entered AoL. Every little thing could help him.

He had wanted to pass through the bars of the locked door to obtained his freedom, so he trained himself to move his slime body as if it was his own. That was his best accomplishment at this point. He could see how useful it had proved when entering the skeleton tomb, or to avoid a certain death by being stabbed. Still he had no easy solution on how to use it to scale a wall. 

He trained to sense the world even in the deepest darkness of the sewers and he had failed in his Sonar ability. He still could not understand anything going on around him. At least now he would not roll on the floor overwhelmed by that sensation, however it was proving to be a waste of stamina. That still grated profoundly at his self-confidence.

In a fit of impatience he activated again the Sonar skill. His body emitted a slight vibration which would be almost inaudible by any other creature and he received the response of the world around him. Once again too many things at once assaulted his mind. Every single details around him answered his call. He could not handle every single piece of dust giving back to him its position. He had to downgrade his ability to a level where only the bigger structures around him could be felt. That required a level of control which looked impossible in his mind, however he had already improved to a point that his past self had thought not feasible. He was sure the World would have not created an ability impossible to master.

He cursed himself for the choice he made that day, but he also lauded himself because there was no way such a difficult skill could be considered a noob skill. He will find out in the future if he had been a genius, a madman or an unskilled idiot that could not accomplish what everyone else could.

Thinking about the Sonar skill always put him in a bad mood.

I was truly an idiot to think I would excel in this game just because I was a bit skilled in the real world. This is a dog eat dog world. I was too naïve. I lost against the first dog who has bitten me. And Matthew isn’t even the biggest dog out there. Here I am thinking about my great plans on how to get my sweet revenge, but there are people out there who could trample both of us with a movement of a finger. Age of Legends has been out for more than ten real world years, which means more than a hundred here. By now there are people with powers I cannot even imagine.

Thoughts like that put Zortex in a depressing cycle.

Apparently Matthew was trying to enter a guild named Malath Brotherhood. The name sounds evil…quite cool. It looks like they aren’t even trying to cover their alignment. To tell the truth I have always preferred to play the bad guy role. What’s the fun in being the hero type. Who wants to enter a guild named ‘Rainbows and Unicorns’? Should I become the good guy just to go against them? No. I will not be either evil nor good. I will just push through everything which stands in my way to get what I want. Although that sounds quite evil….so maybe I am evil.

Matthew would probably have the backing of an entire guild. How could he fight against such odds? And yet Zortex needed a long-term plan to succeed. He needed more information. That was the base for any victory. He had spent too long detached from the outside. He still didn’t know how to get spells or skills beyond receiving them by class or by creation. His level was low and he had barely one way to attack. A noob at the end of trial period would  have probably mastered a couple of attacks already. 

I can see more clearly now what happened. I was really going crazy down here. I could have simply let myself die and I would have respawned outside and started anew. Even my class might be a failing path. 'Shadow Slime Warrior' may be an Unique Class, but so would be the 'Legendary Farting Janitor'. Unique doesn't mean strong. I cannot bring myself to leave it anyway. I would lose Pravin and I would become again something average, and average is not what I have signed for. 

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And that brought him back to the wall in front of him. The tentacle could extend that far to the top, but how could that be useful? He needed some leverage. He could reach there and contract the tentacle to make it hard, but he would just slip down whenever he tried to put some weight on it. He saw only two solutions to the problem.

First possibility was to slimify only part of its arm leaving the hand unperturbed, so that he could extend it and use his fingers at the same time. The second strategy would be to learn to be sticky.

Slimes in general had the double attribute of being slippery and sticky. They could choose between those two opposite characteristics, even at the same time with different part of the body. For example when Zortex fought with the slime who attacked him while he was asleep, he risked being suffocated because one part of the slime was sticking to him, while the rest of the body was slippery, so that his hands could not find attrition to detach it from his face. If he could learn to be sticky he could simply move along the wall as snails can do.

The first option sounded cooler, but considering how difficult it was for him to even learn the basic tentacle skill he concluded that it would take too long. The second one sounded easier, although he had no idea where to start exactly.

It was easier to simply slimify himself and try out directly in a full slime body. After a few hours of training he saw some effects. All this time he had unconsciously done a bit of sticking while moving around and competing with Pravin. Right now he just had to focus on that part of movement that gave him the attrition to get the maximum speed.

Zortex didn’t try right away to go up the wall. He just tried to stick himself to the lower part of it and struggle to stay a few centimeters above the floor for as long as he could. The more he tried the more he was able to resist.

He repeated and repeated this practice until he was able to actually move along the vertical wall. At the beginning it was difficult and he kept falling downward, but soon he was able to reach half way to the top with enough mana to continue for the rest of the way.

In pauses between practices he was eating slimes which he had baited with some blood. He would regain the mana faster that way and he would not get hungry.

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2 weeks later

Suddenly a thought came to his mind. How long before the 24 hours waiting ends? I want to meet Pravin.

Zortex checked his Summoning skill and found no notification regarding the availability of the skill.

Did something went wrong with the system? Or are the 24 hours already over? It shouldn’t be that long since I fought the skeleton.

Zortex tried to calculate the time he had spent training his escape but he couldn’t figure it out. His life here was all about eating slimes and practicing, so it was hard to differentiate between past and present. His memory could not collect how many times he had eaten or became a slime since his return to the room. He hoped it wasn’t too long.

“Summon Slime” Zortex said as his mana left his body to converge on top of his hand. He let it fall and he was rewarded by a squishy sound. He smiled and hugged Pravin who made a new squishy sound. It was nice to not be alone anymore.

“Here Pravin. Look at what I learned to do while you were away. Soon we will be outside. No more trouble this time. I already know that up there is the way to the exit.” Zortex said his friend.

He talked to his slime friend for a while waiting for his mana to recover to the maximum. He would need all of it to reach the top, and maybe it would still not be enough. Zortex had to admit that he was still very slow and any drop in focus would make him fall back to the floor.

“Ok let’s go”. The Slime Warrior and his slime pet started the climbing at the same time. After twenty seconds Pravin was already at the top making encouraging squishy sounds to his master. Zortex on the other hand had moved barely 50 centimeters up. Minute after minute Zortex struggled to reach the top. He was completely focused on his task and only 40 centimeters away from his goal when his mana bar completely depleted and he turned human again.

Fuck! He thought, but then something happened. His body was reached by four tentacles which ended his fall and after 5 seconds of work he was deposited to the corridor on the top of the dark room.

Zortex was left speechless for a while. Here is another proof of my idiocy. As if I didn’t prove enough times already that I am not as great as I thought to be. All this time Pravin could have just raised me from the bottom to up here. I just needed to ask him.

Zortex introspection lasted for a few minutes. It was bad enough to be told that he was a failure, however finding out by himself that he did one mistake after another left him even more empty than before. He looked in the direction he came from. Once again he felt longing for his safe haven which protected him from the harsh truth of the world out there.

“Thank you Pravin. Yes, I will not back off my promise. In a few hours we will be out and I will show you how small I’ve lived until now.” Zortex told Pravin. If he was nothing more than an egomaniac before, he just had to change. New World, new life Zortex thought.

Zortex threw his old dagger into the dark room, barely more than a deteriorated handle by now. It made a clicking sound when it touched the floor. “Maybe in the future it will be helpful to some unlucky noob like me. I hope he will be smarter than I was”.

He turned away and started to move along the corridor touching the wall, step after step increasing his dread but also his determination. Pravin was following him, happy to explore his surroundings.