Each time Zanie poked her spear into one of the metal slimes, some type of cohesion, like that on the surface of water, resisted the point for a fraction of a second before giving way to let the blade sink into the bulk of their figure. Then they began to glow and melt away from their cores.
They did not seem to make any sound at all, so that the battlefield was a silent one except for the swing of Hazel’s hammer through the air and the vibrating thud of it against the ground. He needed to exert far more force to use his weapon than Zanie did, and just like last time, sweat began to trickle down the side of his face and his hair became loose in its tie.
Zanie, while not physically exerting herself as much, faced a different problem. She had to keep the heat that she was using to melt the slimes from melting her spearhead and catching the wooden shaft on fire. After a couple of slimes, the edges of the spear glowed red as if it had just been pulled from a blacksmith’s forge. So the metal probably would not melt the way it had when the electricity had been run through it. Perhaps it was of a different metal than the spearhead she did melt last time.
In any case, the white hot metal caught the wooden shaft on fire a couple of times and Jeremy, hoping to be at least a little helpful and allow her to save her mana for directly killing the slimes, sprinted up to her and cast the summon water spell to put the flames out and douse the shaft.
“Can you regulate the temperature down a bit?” Jeremy asked as the ground vibrated beneath them with another one of Hazel’s hits. Opposed to the chaos and desperate fight against the lightning elementals, this fight was like a walk in the park and it was no problem for Zanie to ignore the slow-moving slimes for a moment to consider this.
“Probably,” she shrugged, then turned to the nearest slime and poked her spear into it. It melted away, this time leaving the spearhead the same dully glowing purple that it had been when she poked it. She nodded her head at Jeremy, “I guess I can.”
It seemed like whatever metal the slimes were constructed from had a far lower melting point. Jeremy knew that there were certain metals that could be melted over a regular cooking stove burner, and it seemed like they were more akin to those than to something like steel that required massively higher temperatures.
The fight seemed like it was going to be more about endurance than a quick burst of violence, with slimes popping out of the shadows between the trees at a steady, but slow pace. Jeremy wandered away from the fighting, hopeful that it would continue mildly, and turned his attention to the crystals.
He had a couple of plastic grocery bags shoved into his pockets, which he pulled out and unfurled with a bunch of crinkling that drew Caleb’s attention. He began to turn toward Jeremy, who put a hand up to stop him.
“Keep the light on them while they are fighting,” Jeremy instructed. “I’m not going to go very far, and I’ve got a flashlight if I do.”
Besides, the lantern, when held up high, covered a large potion – perhaps not half, but a decent amount – of the forest. It’s just that it cast stark shadows behind the trees when the bright light splashed up against their trunks. But Jeremy was not too worried about something popping out at him when the slimes plopped along slowly enough that they could easily be walked away from.
“No, we really need to collect as many of those crystals as possible right?” Caleb argued. “We’re lucky that this dungeon has them again. The first two didn’t.”
“Maybe the first two were the exception to the rule and most dungeons have crystals. Besides, Hazel said those might not even have been mana crystals.” Jeremy pointed out, mostly just for the sake of arguing. He also agreed that they should try to collect damn near all the crystals in this dungeon if they could manage. Which wouldn’t be too difficult given that it’s size was limited enough that they could see from one end of the forest to the other. And that Zanie and Hazel’s fight seemed like it would be a long-haul.
“Stop being difficult. Just let me help.” Caleb rolled his eyes and teleported the lantern up to a branch above where Hazel and Zanie were fighting, so that he could also pull out a bag, although his was canvas, and come help Jeremy gather the crystals.
Just like the first one had easily broken away, so did all the rest. They were of various shapes and sizes, from as little as the fingernail on Jeremy’s pinkie to the size of his forearm. The larger ones, they placed into Caleb’s canvas bag, which had the name of a vet’s office on the side.
“Where did you even get this?” Jeremy wondered as he placed a larger crystal into the bag.
“I’ve had it for a long time,” Caleb answered. “I always carry around a re-usable bag for groceries or whatever now that they started charging for the plastic ones.”
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Jeremy nodded in understanding and began plucking the smaller crystals from the cluster he had just gotten the larger one from. He had no idea what the big ones might be useful for, since they certainly were not practical to carry around in some kind of enchanted device, whether it ended up being a bracelet like many of Hazel’s charms or something else. Jeremy was leaning toward something else, just given the complexity and length of the final enchantment. But he was certain that he could find some use for the larger crystals.
“Do you think the crystals show up in dungeons that have like so much extra mana that they have to put it somewhere, so it grows these crystals?” Caleb wondered aloud.
“As opposed to making more monsters or something?” Jeremy asked. He pursed his lips as he thought that maybe Caleb had a point. If the crystal clusters in the other dungeon were mana crystals of some variety, then maybe the coalescence of mana during the storm had been so great that it had to find other avenues besides just the dungeon’s environment and the creatures populating it.
Jeremy had no idea how the current metal slime dungeon had been created, but maybe that was why the mana crystals in the last dungeon could not easily – or at all – be removed from the walls while these could. The only solution was to study more dungeons.
He and Caleb finished divesting all of the rocks in the circle of light around the slime battle. The carnage was beginning to build up around Zanie and Hazel. Hazel’s slime pancakes were easy to work around, but Zanie had to constantly move on from the very hot metal that her dead slimes left behind, so she left a swath of slime carcasses over a far greater distance than Hazel, who mostly just stood still with his hammer and let them come to him.
“I’m going to collect some of the cores.” Caleb nodded toward the kaleidoscopic spheres dotting the forest floor in the trail of melted metal that Zanie left behind. Jeremy nodded and pulled out his little flashlight to go further out from the center of the dungeon and hunt down more crystals.
He ran into slimes a few times. He just kept an eye out over his shoulder and if one started plopping toward him, he would lead it back to Zanie and Hazel. By the time Caleb had collected all the cores he could and there was a pile of bags by the dungeon entrance filled with cores and mana crystals, Zanie and Hazel were still trying to dispatch the continual horde of slimes.
“Are they ever going to end?” Zanie braced the spear against the ground and leaned on it.
“Well, it is a level two dungeon, so I imagine there would be far more creatures in it than in the level one dungeons,” Jeremy said. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired for sure,” she sighed and glanced over at Hazel, who stood with the hammer over his shoulder, watching a slime plop toward him with a bored expression on his face. Aside from the trickle of sweat on the side of his face and the hair which had nearly come loose by now, he looked relatively unaffected by the effort he was putting forth. Zanie shook her head. “The heating spells don’t take that much mana, especially since it’s pretty low heat and I have the spearhead to concentrate on, but I do think it’s catching up to me.”
“Take it easy then,” Hazel said over his shoulder. He launched the hammer from his shoulder, mostly letting gravity do the work to bring it down on the slime. The ground shook beneath all of their feet and he lifted he hammer back to his shoulder. “I can easily handle all of them and you have collected an entire bag worth of cores, haven’t you?”
“There is a limit to how much we can physically carry.” Caleb pointed out. Hazel had offered his pocket of carrying to them, but thus far, Jeremy had not taken him up on it. Now that they had all these bags of mana crystals and cores, he might actually do so.
So Zanie sat down in the cradle of one of the tree’s large roots and leaned back against the trunk to watch Hazel continue to squash the slimes. Jeremy wandered off to scour the final section of the dungeon he had yet to explore for mana crystals. When he returned, Zanie actually had her head tilted back, eyes closed, and hands resting loose over her legs as though she was asleep. Caleb was fiddling around on his phone.
“No cell reception here,” he informed Jeremy, who just raised his eyebrows. Of course there would not be cell reception. There were no towers in this little pocket world. He could not believe that Caleb had the gall to actually look bored after being so panicked and terrified of dungeons thus far. And he could not believe that Zanie was actually taking a nap as Hazel continued to dispatch the slimes.
Each time he killed one, the mana from them flowed into each of their overlays. Since coming in here, Zanie’s overlay had shifted up two colors from the burnt-orange color it had been after fighting the metal slimes a few days ago to a solid, primary green. Caleb’s and Jeremy’s had shifted far less, probably since they had both been wandering around the dungeon, further away from the fighting. And Hazel’s, curiously, had not shifted at all, despite the near constant flow of mana he was receiving from each of the kills.
“It should end soon.” Hazel told them, sounding significantly out of breath by that point. “I’ve been in other level two dungeons, and this is about how many creatures are in them. Then we’ll just have the boss.”
There were not, in fact, any more metal slimes around. Although, a few more did plop up as soon as Jeremy glanced around to confirm that fact. But they were quickly dispatched and then none followed for a solid couple of minutes.
“Is there always a boss at the end?” Caleb ventured.
“So far there has always been a boss in all the leveled dungeons I have entered,” Hazel said.
Jeremy had just been thinking that they would have to go off and find the final few slimes to kill them and trigger the boss. Then one more slime plopped out of the shadows into their circle of light. It did not look any different than the rest of the slimes, except that it actually had a ring around it, making it a level one slime. And as Jeremy watched in amazement, a collection of familiar runes gathered in front of it – the ones for a projectile mana attack. He was so surprised that he barely managed to throw up a barrier between them and the slime to block the attack before it went off.
“I’ll bet that is the boss,” he said. Nobody else might even be aware that the slime could use magic, since they would not be able to see the ring, nor the runes of the spell, nor the iridescent flow of the mana attack. “It’s a slime that can use magic.”