The hammer was well over half his height with the head included. The head was double-sided and cast so that there were intricate designs on the sides. When Hazel rested it against the ground, the butt of the handle nearly reached his shoulder. He propped his forearm on it and leaned casually.

“I thought hammers were a dwarf thing,” one of the cops said as they all looked at him in amazement. Probably because he had just pulled that thing out of the front pocket of his jeans. But Jeremy was more impressed with the fact that he had moved it as though it weighed nothing more than a pen - which it most certainly had to. Some of the designs on the hammer head or carved into the handle must be an enchantment or something like that to make it easier to wield.

Zanie was whispering something about the pockets in men’s jeans being unfair while Caleb chuckled. Hazel just rolled his eyes at them all and ignored the comments, to turn and look at the metal slimes.

“It’s difficult to tell their level just by looking at them sometimes,” he said. “We should get closer so you can take a look at them, Jeremy.”

“We can use the scan spell, too!” Zanie dropped her bags off her shoulder and pulled out her phone. She must have taken a picture of the paper at some point last night, because Jeremy knew that she had not entered the spell into the book yet, waiting for it to be more complete before she did. He chewed on his lip and turned to Matt.

“You said they are aggressive?” he asked. If that was the case, they did not really have time to cast scan once they approached them. It was not exactly combat efficient yet and they knew that it worked from testing it on themselves, so it didn’t make sense to try it quite yet.

“Not unless you are right on top of them,” Matt assured him. “You can get a few feet away and be alright.”

“What do they attack you with?”

“I really depend on the type of slime,” Hazel said. “Low level ones like this likely don’t pose too much of a threat unless you come into direct contact with them, and they are corrosive of something. Once they get to a higher level they attack with spells. That and their resistance to physical damage are what makes mages most useful when facing them. But we should be able to make do.”

“Okay,” Jeremy ducked under the strap of his bag and set it on the ground beside Zanie’s, “Let’s head over there before they get too close to the trucks, yeah?”

The four of them marched closer, while the workers and cops shuffled along behind them, but stopped a safe distance away. They remained close enough to their vehicles that they could quickly run back and move them if needed. Currently, a bunch of slimes were swarming up one of the poles, while a few of them chomped their way up the last downed wire. A couple still lingered on the previous pole, having just finished on that wire. They tossed themselves off the top and plopped down to the ground and started inching their way over.

“Go ahead and cast the spell, Zanie,” Jeremy said. “To me they all look red with no rings. Just basic, unleveled creatures.”

She cast the spell and nodded in agreement. “No rings, spectrum level 1.”

“No problem, then.” Caleb smacked his hands together and rubbed them in anticipation. Jeremy crossed his arms and hoped he was right. There were quite a lot of them – maybe thirty or more. Because these creatures were opaque, they could not really see their cores the way they had been able to with the lightning elementals. Which meant Caleb’s attack was essentially useless. They didn’t seem impacted by electricity, so Zanie wasn’t too effective, either. He wasn’t sure how effective pure mana would be, but Hazel said mages were usually useful against slimes.

“Will attacking them with pure mana do anything?” Jeremy asked as they watched the ones on the ground come toward them. Hazel widened his stance and swung the hammer to rest his against his shoulder, at the ready.

“Not unless you get a direct, concentrated hit on their core.” Hazel told him. Jeremy rubbed his forehead and began to wonder if just using mana was actually a good idea. I looked like Hazel was going to have to play whack-a-mole with them all by himself.

“Do you have any more of those hammers?” Caleb asked.

Hazel shook his head, “No, but this number of low-level slimes should be fine.”

“Well, we can at least try to funnel them for you,” Jeremy suggested. That way it would be less whack-a-mole." Zanie, can you help me with that?”

“Sure,” she slipped her phone into her back pocket and held her hands at the ready.

“Caleb, just keep an eye on them and if any try to go around the outside edges of the barriers, stop them from doing that.” Jeremy said.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Caleb crossed his arms, “Got it.”

Now was as good a time as any, as most of them were still on the ground making their way to the next pole. Hazel led the way in approaching them, and when they got a couple of feet away, the slimes skidded to a stop and changed their trajectory to come at them. He and Zanie both tossed up a barrier, funneling them toward Hazel. Zanie’s zapped and arced with electricity, while Jeremy’s – in his eyes at least- shimmered with mana. Where they came together, there was only about a foot of space, so the slimes which were only a little bigger than that in diameter could only squeeze through a few at a time.

The first few whacks of Hazel’s hammer were incredibly effective. He squashed the slimes flat as pancakes, where they lay over the grass like thin, oddly shaped sheet metal. Each time the hammer struck the ground, it shook a little behind their feet. Each time he crushed one, Jeremy watched the mana from them filter through the air and into their overlays.

The crowd watching from behind whooped and called out encouragements. None of the mana seemed to be reaching them, which meant they were standing too far away to benefit from the fight.

Zanie and Jeremy had cast single-use barriers, rather than ones sustained by a constant flow of mana, because the slimes weren’t really attacking them as much as just running into them. But they both stood at the ready to cast another barrier immediately if the pressure from them banging into the existing ones caused them to fall. If they could withstand a couple of attacks from the lighting elementals, though, Jeremy figured they could withstand these creatures butting up against them.

It seemed to be working very well, until they began to pile on top of each other in their attempt to get through and ended up blocking the opening completely. Hazel stepped back and rested the hammer against his shoulder with a slightly winded, ‘huh’. It seemed like whatever enchantments were on the hammer weren’t enough to keep him swinging it around from being at least a bit of a workout. They had made it through about ten of the slimes.

“You okay?” Jeremy took the moment of reprieve to ask Hazel.

He sniffed and nodded, “This isn’t exactly my usual weapon of which, but I’m just fine. Maybe the barriers aren’t such a good idea.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy agreed. “We can make two more that are a little further apart.”

But before he could do so, there was a sudden rapid popping sound. His mouth dropped open as he watched the slimes suddenly coalesce into one giant slime, looking like beads of water combining on a car windshield. They became one giant slime, or well one giant form made up from lots of the slimes. There were still individual overlays all over the huge metallic blob, which meant they had not actually metamorphosized, but just temporarily combined.

“Oh shit, you really pissed them off now!” someone called from behind them. Jeremy glanced over his shoulder to see that all of the onlookers had backed up to their vehicles, and most were standing with the doors open to watch them.

“Well,” Hazel said, drawing his attention back, “I have never seen that before.”

Then the slime drew back and surged forward, crashing through the barriers. Jeremy did not immediately try to throw a new one up and held a hand up to stop Zanie as well, because Hazel leapt forward with his giant hammer, which was now unfortunately smaller than the slime. He brought it down on the creature, which just enveloped the hammer into its form.

He drew back and tried again, presumably attempting to find some of the cores and crush them. But this time, when he tried to withdraw the hammer, the slime would not let it go. It was made out of metal after all. Hazel yanked on the handle a couple of times. His hair, which had already been loosening due to all the activity of swinging the hammer around started falling around his face and it began to redden with his effort.

Then he adjusted his stance, squared his shoulders, and a few runes swirled around him as he cast a spell that knocked the slime off of his hammer. He managed to withdraw the weapon before the slime closed back around it. Then he cast another spell and Jeremy watched with interest as the runes from this one seemed to be absorbed into the hammer. It was obviously an augmentation of some kind, but not actually an enchantment.

When Hazel swung again, there was a small barrier around the hammer, which meant that the slimes were still impacted by the hammer, but that they could not close around it. Unfortunately, Hazel did not seem to be making much of an impact at all. He was not actually managing to hit any of the slimes’ cores, which were practically impossible to aim at now. Jeremy cast a few mana spells, just because he did not want to be standing there doing nothing. They had no visible impact, either.

Then on one swing forward, the slime just surged upward and down on top of Hazel. Manipulating the hammer around was not the most efficient fighting form, so by the time Hazel saw this, he was already locked into the downswing with the hammer and did not have time to dodge away. Apparently, he was unwilling to part with the hammer and dodge away too.

The slime enveloped him. Everyone shouted in surprise. Jeremy’s immediate reaction was to attack the creature, but Hazel was literally inside of it and he wasn’t sure how that would go. He might injure the elf as well, if he even did manage to harm the slime.

“Okay, fuck,” he muttered under his breath, then again, because, well, “fuck.”

But apparently, they need not have worried too much, because a moment later, the slime flew apart in some crazy abstract-looking splash of metal. Hazel quickly stepped away from it, dragging the hammer with him. He managed to get away from the spot just in time as the slime’s form collapsed back down into its baseline round blob.

Then Hazel threw up a barrier himself to stop it from immediately rolling him back into it, and shoved the hammer into his pocket, apparently having given up on it. Jeremy lifted his brows as Hazel stumbled toward them. He kept one eye on Hazel’s barrier to make sure he did not need to cast one himself if the creature took it down. But Hazel’s barrier seemed to be able to hold up better as the slime slammed into it than Jeremy or Zanie’s had. Which made sense, given all of the modification runes Jeremy could see slapped onto it.

“You okay, man?” Caleb asked when Hazel reached them.

Hazel grimaced and nodded, but when he opened his mouth to speak, what came out was not English. Damn. Jeremy listened to the strange sounds and cadences and came to the conclusion that the translation spell was no longer in effect. He frowned and turned back to the slime, ignoring whatever Hazel was not managing to communicate in favor of putting his own thinking cap on.