Another relay node was a problem. If it had just been a large monster, he could fight it and not have too much interference. Other monsters tended to stay out of the lairs of the big ones. But Ander could now make out hundreds of small slimes climbing the walls of the gallery. With the energy provided by the relay node, there was a much larger population of monsters around the boss than would otherwise exist. But Ander had some ideas about how he could go into this.
To start ander commanded the wind to rush to the left. He had access to a pretty large volume of air, and he extended his control into the open gallery as far as he could. It took a few minutes, but the air in the gallery was starting to move in a clockwise direction. He pushed harder and harder until the wind was rushing past the window he was standing at. It didn’t get to incredible speeds, the air he was controlling was too far away for that. At best it was fast enough to make someone want to hang on to something.
But Ander wasn’t out to create a tornado. He might be able to with some more skill levels, but not quite yet. Instead he started summoning water, and sending water bullets to spin around the mini cyclone he had created. The process was more taxing than he would have liked, which meant he couldn’t keep it up for long. When the water bullets grew dense inside the cyclone, he relaxed his control allowing all the water bullets to come crashing into the walls all at once.
Ander looked out the window to observe the damage. Slime covered the walls from floor to ceiling, but it didn’t seem to be moving like before. Ander took several minutes, and found a few slimes had survived, along with the boss which was quivering on the ground floor. It was then that Ander saw that the boss was absorbing the slime, and that all the slime on the walls was slowly travelling toward the big guy. That was interesting, but Ander couldn’t have that. As an experiment, Ander threw a concussive fireball at a particularly large clump of slime. The slime was blasted away in a great spray, and some of it seemed ‘cooked’ in an odd manner, turning a milky white. The problem with his new fireball was that the heat output was far less than a normal fireball, courtesy of his legendary abilities. What Ander wouldn’t give for a true flame spell at the moment.
That said, while successfully acquiring a flame based spell was dubious at best, there were other kinds of energy spells that should work well with his legendaries. Namely, lightning spells. Ander didn’t have too much time. He didn’t want to see what would happen when all the slime rejoined the main one, but if splattered slime simply rejoined the boss again, he could fight and fight and never win. Even now the burnt slime hadn’t moved, and Ander was convinced that was the only way to permanently defeat the thing.
And so Ander sat back and nervously started up Minds of the Void. He experienced a short piece of the life of a man at a mage’s college as he learned the skill version of Lightning Bolt rather than the true spell version. He was laughed at and ridiculed by the other mages, but the truth was that while the skill versions might be less flexible, they were quicker and easier to use, and so the college mage stuck to his convictions. And so the college mage, along with Ander, learned lightning bolt.
By the time Ander came back to the real world, the slime had retreated nearly half way down the wall, and the boss slime was way bigger.
Giant Ooze
Level 52
Boss
Shit. Ander had expected a power up, but actually gaining levels? That was three in just a few minutes. It was likely the slime would gain at least another three, but if boss fight mechanics applied at all, it would be far worse. And it was already at the edge of his ability to fight the thing. But there was nothing he could do about it. He would have to go in and do what he could.
And with that, Ander jumped out the window. As he fell, he moved the air to speed him forward as he summoned his spear, and several dozen water bullets to slam into the giant slime all at once.
The results were not promising.
Ander himself managed to clear all the way through the slime, but the water bullets barely did any noticeable damage. Even the hole he made closed up immediately afterward. And now he was covered in itchy, stinging slime. Genius move. And so, standing on the bottom floor 100 feet from the slime, Ander moved to cast his new spell. But he had forgotten that he was facing a real enemy as several dozen pseudopods struck out at him all at once. His Lightning bolt went askew, hitting the wall and frying some slime there, but not damaging the main body of the slime.
Meanwhile, Ander dodged the pseudopods, summoning his sword to intercept them along with water bullets to disperse them. As Ander fought, he threw a Concussive Fireball at the slime. The fireball exploded, causing over half the pseudopods to disintegrate all at once, and splattering tons of slime over the walls. Ander followed quickly with a lightning bolt, which left a line of cooked slime straight through the centre of the boss. It was less effective than Ander would have liked, but it did seem to slow the slime down as it worked to expel the dead matter. All the time pseudopods kept coming for Ander, multiplying like the heads of a hydra. Ander answered with a hail of small fireballs, working to disperse the giant slime until it couldn’t fight back.
For 10 minutes Ander fought this way, dodging Pseudopods and firing fireballs, but the thing was too big. He needed something better. While he fought he looked at his notifications.
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Congratulations! Skill: Way of the Wind has levelled up!
Skill: Way of the Wind is level 23.
Congratulations! Skill: Fireball has levelled up!
Skill: Fireball is level 14.
Congratulations! Skill: Lightning Bolt has levelled up!
Skill: Lightning Bolt is level 6.
What he needed was to evolve lightning bolt, or get it to a far higher level. The damage it did to the monster was impressive for its level, but Ander needed more than it could currently do. Ander felt at his legendary skills. They had caused a number of his other skills to change, so why not this one? The problem was he felt nothing between it and Way of the Wind, which was the normal culprit of his skill changes. He tried bringing the skill close to his legendary skills in his soul space one by one, and finally felt a sort of resonance between Lightning Bolt, and Aeolian Vitality. Ander was leary of allowing the healing skill to effect his best offensive spell, but then he realised that it wasn’t the skill itself that resonated, but rather its divine component.
Congratulations! Skill: Lightning Bolt has evolved!
Skill Lightning Bolt is now Skill: Elysian Thunderweave!
Elysian Thunderweave
Rare
Level 6
The weapons of the gods in mortal hands. You have the ability to craft lightning effects to your specification. Power increases with level. Control Increases with level. Power and control greatly reduced with distance from the caster.
Ander nearly stopped as he stared at the new name of his skill. It was rather pretentious if you asked him. As he narrowly dodged three pseudopods that came at him all at once, he realised it didn’t matter. He could feel the difference. In the new skill immediately as the lightning didn’t just go away immediately after firing. He swept it back and forth, creating huge swathes of cooked slime within the slime boss. The Slime Boss shuddered in response, before doing something it had never done before. A large lump started to form on one side of the slime, before falling off and becoming another slime twenty feet across. As the Pseudopods kept attacking, the new slime jumped straight at him.
It put Ander in a bad position as he had to defend from an onslaught of pseudopods at the same time, and several landed heavy blows on his body. It wasn’t too bad, as it was the first damage he had taken, but he couldn’t survive if too many of those came in at once. Ander cast out his lightning in a ball at the new slime, but when it touched the new slime, the slime jumped away. And so Ander sent the ball lightning at the big slime instead. It tore a huge path through the big slime, but the big slime simply made two more of the smaller slimes. The Slime Boss was noticeably reduced at this point, but far from done. Ander realised that if the fight went on like this, he would lose. The three slimes and the horde of pseudopods were too much for him to dodge for long. His fears were realised when he lost track of a slime just for it to slam into his back at full speed. They then slammed into the wall. Hard.
Ander blacked out for just a moment, but came to when he felt the slime start to ooze around him. Ander struggled against the mass of slime, but there had to be thousands of ponds pressed against him. Worse, it was slowly giving way to engulf him and eventually eat him. Ander tried to cast lightning at the thing, but all he could see was stone. A fireball spell would surely kill him as much as the slime if he tried that. But then he tried casting lightning again, guiding it across his armour and skin. He had to be careful to not allow it to hurt him, but using his skin, he could guide the lightning without seeing it. The acrid smell of burnt slime invaded his nostrils as the weight pressing him up against the wall fell away.
It wasn’t over yet however, as several pseudopods used that moment to pound into his back and slam him against the wall three more times. Ander dashed away from the continued assault, and cast a blanket of lightning over the floors where the small slimes were about to land. As they landed, converging on the spot where he used to be, the lightning burst outward, frying each one badly enough that they slopped to the floor. Ander followed that with several more concussive fireballs to get the big slime to back off while he crafted his largest bit of lightning yet.
Ander was running out of mana, and his stamina was not looking good either. If this final spell didn’t work, he would have to run away. Ander threw his hands outward as a net of electric arcs burst out from his hands and sped toward the giant slime. Pseudopods were cut as the lightning flew and slammed into the bulk of the creature. It was a sight. The Slime Boss had managed to rid itself of the dead matter from the previous burnings, but now it was dissected and entirely cut off from itself by large planes of dead slime.
Everything stopped. Ander, the slime, everything. Ander stood for a moment as the giant slime started to sag, then collapse. The next hour was filled with Ander burning slime as dozens of new slimes were spawned from the wreckage of the Slime Boss. Oddly, they did not seem to care about Ander as much as they were interested in eating each other. Ander didn’t care. They would all die anyway. Eventually, Ander came across a lump in the cooked white slime, and cut into it to retrieve the Relay Node.
Ander, satisfied, walked off to find a clear spot to make camp for a few hours. He was exhausted, and needed a bit to catch his breath. As he rested he summoned a stove and a pan. Curiously, he smeared a thin layer of slime in the bottom of the pan and set it on the stove to cook. It cooked quickly, and Ander soon removed a thin slime pancake from the bottom of the pan. He looked at it for a moment and took a bite.
It was not nearly as disgusting as he had feared.
It had the consistency of a crepe, but the flavour was quite different. It was sour and bitter, but had a surprising amount of flavour. Ander figured that a skilled chef could likely make something really good out of this, but Ander wasn’t a skilled chef. Instead of experimenting himself, he gathered several buckets of slime and stored them for later use when he found a good chef. After that, he pulled out the carcass of a lizard which he promptly butchered and set to cook.
Dinner was good, but Ander ate far less than he was expecting. That was good. It seemed that his quickened growth buff was starting to come to an end. Finally. Ander had been eating a truly absurd amount of food. He stored the rest for later, glad that he might not need to cook for his next meal.