'This isn't working!' JJ grumped.

After several hours of trying to force Dwayne's new golem-like body to take a single step, he was ready to try something new. It was like moving your body by manually controlling every muscle to take a step, but in excruciatingly slow motion.

JJ felt fully committed to developing a humanoid form, but the problem was that every time he lost balance and fell over, he had to spend another couple of minutes propping himself upright before he could try again.

Now JJ was no stranger to repetitive, tedious drudgery, as he'd been an avid consumer of cheap RPGs during his youth, but his inner gamer was screaming at him that he was going about this all wrong.

'The key to grinding experience is efficiency. If you're not being efficient, then why grind in the first place?' he asked himself.

'I spend more time picking myself up than I spend on trying to walk! The way I see it, I have two choices to cut down on all that wasted time. I can either switch to a four-legged form for better stability, or I can practice with Aqua instead, who should be much faster.'

JJ quickly dismissed the idea of settling for slime dogs.

He reverted Dwayne's body back into a ball and began rolling towards the lake. He wasn't going to make the same mistake he'd made with Rocky and leave Dwayne sitting out for a goblin to smash.

He spent the slow trip to the lake wondering 'Would slime horses be better? No, no, but perhaps slime centaurs? The best of both worlds, humanoid and four legged? Hmm... No, wait! What about a slime centaur centipede? The best of... Ugh, no...'

Grimacing at the mental imagery he'd just inflicted on himself, he decided to put a base humanoid form at the very top of his list of goals.

As he entered the lake, JJ noticed that the water mana in the environment pushed away most of the earth mana in the muddy lake floor, making it harder for Dwayne to absorb. If he left Dwayne here the growth would be slowed, but if he put Dwayne back on dry land he risked the goblins getting to it.

Unwilling to risk losing another “character” so soon, he piloted Dwayne to Aqua's side and then used earth magic to dig out a small hole in the ground. He found it harder to gather the necessary earth mana while underwater, but the soft lake floor moved aside much faster and easier than the dry, hard ground along the shore.

After excavating a meter of dirt from the hole he could feel a sizable increase of earth mana in the surroundings. Deciding the new bed was good enough for now, he left Dwayne to rest inside and swapped back to Aqua.

As Aqua began the trek back to shore, its body easily shifted into a humanoid shape just like JJ had hoped. Though the body remained quite fluid and lacking in small details, Aqua was able to easily imitate an approximation of a human stride.

JJ cheered 'This is so much easier!' as Aqua practically skipped through the water in joy.

That joy came crashing down, quite literally, as Aqua exited the lake and gravity took hold of its aqueous body. Without the buoyancy from the lake, Aqua's body easily folded in on itself due to a lack of stability. The small enchantments he'd sloppily placed to help him maintain his form shattered without any resistance.

'I should have known it wouldn't be that easy! Water isn't known for its solidity, after all.'

Aqua flopped around on the shore attempting to support itself as JJ tried stronger enchantments. They only helped a small amount, unable to support a truly humanoid body. As Aqua flopped around in an attempt to support itself on watery legs,

Then JJ noticed the two goblin statues off to the side. He recalled the increased durability granted to the second statue when he condensed the mana inside.

'Would that be possible with slime, too?' he wondered.

'But isn't water supposed to be hard to compress?'

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

'Wait, I'm not trying to compress water, I'm just trying to compress watery slime. There's a difference! Real water can't move around. I think. Except with magic. Because who needs logic, when you have magic? Whatever, I refuse to believe I can't magic my way through this!'

His attempts yielded surprisingly positive results. Not only was it possible, it was even quite comfortable. Whereas his attempts to manipulate the slime body required direct control on his part, the act of compressing Aqua's body felt surprisingly natural. While Aqua's physical size decreased, the magical density and physical consistency both increased, without noticeably affecting its maneuverability .

'Do slimes naturally condense their bodies as they grow stronger? That would explain why I've never heard of any giant slimes... Although it's not like I'd heard of many monsters, before I got here.'

Aqua's small legs finally managed to support its vaguely humanoid body after the entire body was condensed to about one-third of its normal size.

With the increased fluidity and control, and quite a few more failures, ahem, learning experiences, JJ finally managed to complete his first steps on dry land.

If there was one problem remaining, it was the lack of any innate sense of balance. JJ still had to control Aqua's movements manually, and even a small mistake could throw off the balance. As a makeshift solution, JJ switched to a sort of falling jog where Aqua would take a few steps forward, fall over, and then reform its body in a standing position once again.

By controlling the falls in the forward direction, Aqua could maintain a decent pace while JJ continued to practice how to better control the slime's body.

After a couple hours of practice, Aqua was practically flying around the lake, at least compared to the pre-magic sensibilities JJ had built up over his life. The speed still couldn't come close to matching the guard who'd thrown him into the lake, but it was definitely catching up to his old body's top speed.

With every moment of practice he became more capable of maintaining his balance, though he found that he could cheat a bit by slightly reforming Aqua's body in a more stable position when he began to fall.

By the time he finished his first lap around the large lake a few more hours later, recognizing his starting position by the landmarks that were his goblin statues, he was already taking dozens of steps in a row without a problem.

Nothing could dampen JJ's mood as it seemed like the entire world was coming together to support him.

Nothing, except for the dense mass of mana that suddenly appeared and hurtled towards him like a fastball from a professional pitcher.

Instinctively recognizing the mana as some type of attack, he attempted to steer Aqua out of the way, but only barely managed to turn the potential direct hit into a glancing blow.

When the mass of mana collided with Aqua's body, it exploded into a riotous mass of red colored mana, instantly evaporting a third of the slime, and blowing off another third from the final section that held the core. JJ felt he still held a small bit of control over the separated chunk of slime, but rather than experiment with that now, he immediately fled towards the lake with the part holding Aqua's core

That turned out to be a wise decision, as just when Aqua dove into the water, another mass of mana sailed overhead, once again exploding when it hit the lake.

'Holy crap' he thought 'My main character almost got merked!'

He felt frustration bubbling up inside him as he was once again painfully reminded of his slime's lack of long-distance vision. As soon as he was sure Aqua was safely settled on lake floor, JJ took to his astral form to find out what had just tried to kill his favorite slime.

He rose above the water to find the shore overrun with goblins.

In the middle of the pack stood a large, scarred goblin in a feathered headdress, waving around a sturdy-looking staff and yelling at the others.

Two goblins off to the side beat on JJ's statues with a pair of sticks. The first statue quickly crumbled, while the second goblin broke his stick in half on the other statue's head. He comically began trying to wrestle the statue while gnawing on its neck as his comrade came over to help him whack it with his stick, hitting his friend just as often as he hit the statue.

Three pairs of goblins spread out inland, each wielding spears that looked less likely to fall apart than any goblin spear he'd seen before. They surrounded any earth slimes they could find and slowly, methodically whittled down their defenses by stabbing the slime when it stopped focusing on them.

Another five spread out on the lake's edge, waving the usual trashy goblin spears at any water slimes that came close, and drawing the attention of many more.

JJ watched in awe as the large goblin in the middle formed fireballs on the tip of his staff before flinging them in the direction of the water slimes. Some fireballs missed entirely, some caused glancing blows, significantly reducing the slimes' mobility and allowing them to be easily dispatched by the goblins on shore, and some directly hit a slime's core, causing instant 1-hit KO's. One fireball nearly even singed the ear off of a startled spear goblin.

JJ's awe quickly gave way to irritation, as he saw the goblins pick up more and more vanquished slime cores. 'Not only did these little creeps try to kill Aqua, now they want to wipe out my character selection pool? Let's see how they enjoy having fireballs thrown at them!' he raged.

He approached the goblin with the staff, a shaman if his gaming meta-knowledge could be trusted, with the sense of a child approaching a new toy. He couldn't deny he was looking forward to trying out some fire magic on a bunch of rowdy goblins.

What JJ didn't expect was for the shaman to suddenly raise its head and stare directly at him. After locking eyes with each other for a moment, the goblin moved first, raising its staff and creating another fireball on the tip. A voice in the back of his head screamed 'Move!' as he finally recognized the danger coming his way.

The fireball only barely grazed JJ's form as he moved to the side, aided by the goblin's poor aim. Even still, he felt a burning agony come from the left side of his spectral form where it had touched him.

He flew back into the lake before the shaman could conjure any more fireballs.

JJ felt a cold sweat come over him as he realized his “god-mode” wasn't as perfect as he'd believed. He knew his astral form wasn't immortal, but this was the first time something had consciously attacked him in it.

As JJ's fear faded, anger began to well up inside him. If these goblins were a threat to his precious “characters” before, now they had become a direct threat to his very existence. He had no doubt that those fireballs were a mortal danger to him, and the goblins had proven themselves as capable enemies.

'At the very least, I have to get rid of that shaman.' he vowed to himself.