“Okay, so they are made of metal,” Jeremy thought out loud. “We obviously cannot rely on damaging their cores directly, so how can we damage their bodies when they don’t take physical damage.”
The huge slime slammed into the barrier. It apparently was not intelligent enough to go around the barrier, which was really only a big rectangle between the creature and them. That was a relief at least. As was how slow it actually moved. The only reason it managed to swallow up Hazel was because while swinging that huge hammer around, Hazel had also been slowed down. Otherwise, the slime moved at almost a comically glacial pace as it drew back to slam into the barrier again.
That glacial pace would still take it into town where it could wreak havoc, though.
“I’m no use here, but Zanie could try to melt it,” Caleb suggested.
Jeremy snapped his fingers, “Good idea. Zanie, do you think you could do that?”
“I can at least try,” she held her hands up and squinted between them at the slime. As she cast the spell to heat up the metal it was made of, a small area began to glow red. It was only about the size of Jeremy’s palm, however, and did not seem to even phase the conglomerate of slimes. After a few seconds, Zanie dropped her hands.
“That’s never going to work,” she told them. “Even if it was just one of those things, I don’t think I would be able to heat up its entire body to the point that it would melt. And I’ll never be able to heat up that whole…” she waved her hand in the direction of the slime, “mess. Doesn’t heat, like, disperse?”
“I’m sure it probably depends on the type of metal,” Jeremy rubbed his chin.
“Slime metal,” Caleb intoned unhelpfully.
Hazel tapped Jeremy on the shoulder and he glanced over at the elf. One of his hands was held out toward his barrier, which he was maintaining with a constant flow of mana. The slime slammed into it again with a strange reverberation that seemed to ripple through the air. One of the alarms in the trucks behind them started going off, followed by a bunch of cussing.
Hazel was trying to communicate something, despite having apparently sacrificed the mana drain to his translation spell in order to escape from the slimes enveloping him and then continuously maintain the barrier. He pointed emphatically to the sky and then to the ground and then to Zanie.
Jeremy lifted his eyebrows and looked up at the sky, then down to the ground, then at Zanie. She was squinting in Hazel’s direction too. Then her expression blossomed into one of realization.
“Lightning,” she said, “my other attack is lightning. Maybe I can electrocute them.”
“But they aren’t impacted by the power lines,” Caleb pointed out.
“At that low amperage,” Jeremy reminded him, “Zanie, if you give one attack all you’ve got, that might work. I mean, pile the strengthening runes onto it – as many as you can manage.”
She bobbed her head and turned to the slime with a look of grave concentration. “The electricity should move through them and bind them together so the attack will effect all of them, too.”
But before she could lift her hands again, Hazel stepped in front of Jeremy and put a hand on her arm to stop her. She looked up at him in surprise. Her eyes dropped to his hand when he put it up in a universal ‘wait’ gesture and she lowered her arms. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a long spear. It had a wooden shaft, every inch of which was carved in runes, and a thin, elegantly curved blade, which flashed in the sunlight. The blade itself was devoid of any runes, but there did appear to be some on the socket where it connected to the shaft. He held it out to her.
She took it hesitantly, “What?”
“Hey, it’s a spear for you!” Caleb clapped Hazel on the shoulder, but the elf pretty much just handed her the spear and ignored them all in favor of returning his attention to maintaining the barrier. He may have been at a higher level than all of them, but the constant flow of mana required a decent amount of focus regardless. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck, sticking the escaping stray hairs against the back of his neck.
“Remember when we were talking about getting you a spear?” Caleb said, “Now you can stick that into the slime and channel the electricity through it instead of having to do a long-distance spell.”
Zanie looked at the slime with a bit of apprehension. Then she shrugged and flipped the spear over so that the blade was pointed toward the ground and stalked forward. As she approached, the slime finally realized that it could turn away from the barrier and did so in order to meet her attack.
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Before it could something like rear up and swallow her the way it had Hazel, she squared her stance and twisted her hips and shoulders back as she aimed the spear. A couple little arcs of electricity zapped along the blade as the spell’s runes emanated around her. Then she drove the blade into the slime’s form.
Immediately, it seized up. The previously blob-like and soft form of the slime stopped rippling with movement and froze still. The only exception was the little tremble coursing through it due to the electricity. As they watched, a small tendril of smoke began to rise from where the spear was jammed into its form. And a couple of seconds later, the metal around the spear shaft began to soften and ooze like the slow flow of lava.
The longer they watched, the more it melted, until it actually began to drip onto the grass at Zanie’s feet. The air filled with the choking, acrid scent of searing hot metal.
Then a core – glossy and metallic, yet somehow see-through and iridescent to Jeremy’s eyes – melted out of the spot. As soon as it was uncovered enough, it slipped out of the slime’s form and plopped to the grass, then rolled several inches to the left of Zanie’s foot.
Jeremy glanced at Zanie in concern. It had been a solid twenty seconds or so, which was a long time for her to be channeling electricity that was strengthened several times over. But by the time he tuned into the flow of mana from her into the spear, there was a deafening crack. She dropped the shaft of the spear and stumbled back on unsteady, twisting ankles.
The spear dropped to the ground and bounced a couple of times before rolling to a stop in the grass. And the huge combination of slimes fell apart. Their individual forms separated back out and rained down onto the ground, plopping like balls of clay that had been dropped from great heights so that they ended up as nothing more than asymmetrical splats.
They were not completely melted like the one closest to Zanie’s spearhead, but their metal bodies were extremely soft and oozed a bit. In contrast to most of their forms, in some places the metal had fused together and created strange shapes. And in the center of each one as they flattened and oozed into a big mess of melty, strangely shaped metal, lay a completely shattered core.
Zanie’s legs gave out and she tumbled to the ground, stopped only by Jeremy and Caleb both surging forward to catch her. Their shoulders bumped and Jeremy grunted and stepped out of the way because Caleb had a better grip with his arm around her shoulders. He lowered her to the grass and they both leaned over her in concern.
She was still breathing just fine, chest rising and falling. Jeremy crouched down and picked up one of her hands to inspect for any damage to see if she had received any backlash from the spell. Caleb put two fingers to the pulse in her neck, probably listening to the rhythm of her heart for the same reason. But her hands were unharmed and her heartbeat was strong. Caleb sat back in the grass and turned his face towards the sky, letting out a relieved exhale.
She had simply passed out from overexertion since it was such a powerful spell that she had maintained for nearly half of a minute. Hazel, who had also been pouring mana into a spell over time, let his barrier drop and came over to join them. There was a slant to his shoulders and heaviness in his steps that betrayed the fact that he had also used a decent portion of his mana, perhaps nearly to the point of exhaustion.
Jeremy imagined there had to be several spells involved in being able to wield the hammer as effectively as he had. And he had cast several spells over the course of the fight, despite having told them that he was not a mage, and thus was likely not as efficient at casting them as he could be. He rubbed a hand over his face and then zoned out while staring at the slime carnage with a thousand-mile stare.
In opposition to their group’s adrenaline-crashing silence, the power company workers and cops behind them were whooping and hollering even more than they had while Hazel was whacking the first few slimes.
Jeremy lifted a hand to shade his eyes so he could watch as they jogged over. Behind them, Atticus lay in the shadow of one of the cars. At all the commotion, she simply lifted her head and flicked her tail, but remained in place rather than actually come and see what all the fuss was about.
“That was crazy,” Matt had his hard hat off and was running a hand through his sweaty hair, “Are you all okay?”
One of the cops came to a stop and knelt down beside them, “Do we need to call for an ambulance.”
“She’s fine,” Jeremy said, “If you use too much mana at once, you can exhaust yourself and she put everything she had into that last spell.”
“So cool that it worked like that,” Matt toed at the metal slimes’ remains, which were already beginning to reharden into the shapes that they had fallen apart into. He knelt down and poked at one of the shattered cores. Caleb watched him for a second, then leapt up and looked around at the ground.
“Nobody move,” he ordered and everyone immediately went still. He started walking carefully around them all, putting his toes down on the ground gently before actually moving his weight onto his forward foot.
“You’re acting like you lost your contact, dude,” one of the other power company workers said, “What are you doing?”
“I know it’ll be around here somewhere…” Caleb’s face brightened and he surged forward a few steps, no longer watching beneath feet, “Haha!”
He held up the in-tact core that had rolled out of the melted slime. It shimmered and glistened in the sunlight, metallic, yet also somehow glass-like. Despite all his care not to step on the core while looking for it, he casually tossed it into the air and caught it a few times. “I bet this is a pretty cool thing to have.”
He glanced at Hazel, who just shook his head and gestured to his mouth. He probably needed to rest up before casting the translation spell again.
“You sure she doesn’t need an ambulance?” the cop kneeling on the ground asked again.
Jeremy nodded, “But maybe we could put her in one of the trucks with the a/c on instead of just letting her lie out in the sun until she wakes up?”
They nodded and he helped the cop lift her up into his arms so he could carry her to one of the flashing SUVs and set her up inside where she could cool down a bit. Jeremy wiped the sweat from his forehead and watched as he put her in the passenger seat. Before he could shut the door, Atticus leapt up into her lap, which made Jeremy feel a little better about Zanie being in someone’s car while passed out. Hopefully she would come around again pretty quickly.