“I can evolve?” Sean asked, incredulously. He didn’t let his surprise keep him from putting more distance between them and the necromancer’s abode, but still. “Like, just boop, press the button and I’ll evolve into something else?”
“Of course you can.” Gel replied with his usual cheer. “Do skeletons not evolve where you’re from?”
“No...” Sean responded quickly, trying to keep his attention both on the far-too-celebratory prompt and on where he was going. Feeling a hint of danger up ahead he adjusted course, making sure to give the sickly-grey bush that looked like its vines had hands on the ends a wide berth, before resuming the conversation. “Evolution where I come from isn’t the kind of thing you just see happen. It takes time, and many generations, and an environment to adapt to and–”
Sean leapt further to the side as the hand-vines on the bush he had purposefully moved away from reached out for him. Blackened fingers topping the ends of disturbingly flesh-like vines tried to snatch at his feet, but missed completely. Glancing back, Sean could see the creepy thing still stretching out towards them.
Oookay, keep away from the grabby-bushes. Sean noted as he returned his attention forward. Is there anything in this world that isn’t trying to kill me?
“Oh, weird.” Gel enthused, continuing their conversation. “No wonder you left, that place sounds boring. You have to earn your evolutions here, but all monsters can evolve. A bunch of times, actually. Assuming they live long enough, of course. Which we will not do if we try to evolve now.”
“What do you mean? Is evolving dangerous, or something?” Sean couldn’t help but wonder if the slime meant there was a failure rate to the process, and his imagination immediately treated him to a vision of Gel slowly mutating over a pile of his own shattered bones. Shaking that gruesome thought away, he added. “Can it fail?”
“What? Fail?” Gel sounded confused at the very idea. “You can’t fail at evolution, Sean. Well, I mean, if you count dying before you ever earn one as failing, then I guess you can. But once it’s yours, it’s yours. Just choose the one you want and BAM!”
Gel slammed Sean’s right arm into his chest to punctuate his statement. The slime struck his chest so hard that Sean would have coughed if he still had lungs. As it was, between his thickened bones and the increased durability they offered him, all he really did was stumble a bit at the sudden change in his balance. Getting hit by your own arm had a way of putting you off-kilter mid-run, turns out. Luckily, there were no grabby-bushes near enough to take advantage.
Sean was about to protest the action, but his gelatinous friend picked up on the issue quickly and readjusted the arm. Once it was swinging more-or-less in rhythm with Sean’s pace again, Gel continued.
“The only problem we’re going to have is: we need somewhere safe to do it. Evolving takes a lot out of you, and every monster worth their wobble knows you either need a good friend or a good lair to evolve in. Otherwise you might get eaten when you try, and that puts us right back in the ‘failure’ category.”
“Makes sense.” Sean said, nodding. If the evolutionary process really was sped up on this world, it made sense if it happened in a similar fashion to caterpillars back on Earth. If they were going to butterfly it up, they’d need to pick a safe spot to do it. That did beg the question, though.
“How long does it take?” Sean asked, ducking under the low-hanging branch of a smokey-grey tree that looked to be more ash than tree. Despite its odd appearance, it was still easily twice the size of any oak Sean had ever seen. “We talking days, here? Weeks?”
If so, no matter what benefits evolution offered, Sean couldn’t afford to chance it. It was never very far from his mind that he was still running on a tank of magical fuel that gave him, at best, only a few hours of life every time he filled it up. When ‘filling up’ meant killing something and feeding it to the murder-happy slime in your chest, it wasn’t the sort thing you readily forgot about.
Sean mentally checked his ‘fuel meter’, noticing that his current mana was now sitting at 2.
Damn. Sean cursed internally. He had been hoping to try and time when the cost was paid to get a better idea on what constituted a full ‘hour’ here, and to get a better handle on just how much time he had, but it looks like he had missed the cost being paid.
Two hours left. At least that should be plenty of time to find more. He thought, trying to put a positive on it. Gotta figure out a way to extend that soon. Good thing I don’t have to sleep anymore.
“I’m not really sure.” Gel admitted. “The first one is supposed to be real quick, though. Bancroft’s minions even did it on the battlefield sometimes. I’ve got a memory of one that the villagers managed to kill because of it.”
“Oh yeah?” That was good news. If that Bancroft prick was evolving his minions mid-fight, then it couldn’t take that long. If they could find somewhere safe to duck into for a second, then he would ought to have enough ‘fuel’ in the proverbial tank to give it a try.
“Yeah, right before they were torn apart by the ones that finished evolving. Memory stops there, though.”
“Oh.” Sean didn’t have a positive response to that, so he decided to change the topic back to something more productive. “Where should we go then, you think? We have that map.”
Sean was just slowing his pace down to pull that very thing from their satchel, when his right arm snapped straight out in front of him towards his right, quivering like a bloodhound pointing towards a fresh scent.
“That way!” Gel announced with every ounce of the slime’s usual confidence. “We can hide in one of the villager’s houses. They’ve got walls, doors with locks, and everyone’s dead now so nobody’s using them! It’ll be the perfect spot, I promise!”
Sean shrugged, the motion somewhat awkward while he ran with only one arm fully under his control, and changed course towards the direction Gel was pointing. It’s not like he had any idea where they were or which way they should go and besides, Sean was starting to actually trust the cocksure little slime. On… some things, at least.
It didn’t hurt the slime’s arguments that Sean had felt an instinctual agreement with what Gel had been saying. Nothing so deep as an indication of which parts were right or not, more so a deeper knowledge that Sean hadn’t realized was there before. Now that he was paying attention to it, Sean found he could get a little more information out of the feeling.
Again, it wasn’t words… just feelings. Impressions. He simply felt like they would need to find somewhere safe to evolve before doing so, and that the process itself wouldn’t take overly long.
Wishing those instincts had surfaced before he had had to ask questions about what were apparently common concepts in this world, Sean merely responded.
“Works for me.”
Then, he took off running again.
Within minutes, Sean could feel his cares and concerns about his situation begin to fall away as he ran. It was a little disturbing to realize just how good it felt to run without skin or muscles weighing him down, but since he had already decided to accept this body as his new normal, Sean just went with it. He sprinted over patches of harsh, green grass mixed with a softer grey variant, leapt over gaping holes in the ground, and darted out of reach of every strangle-vine (as he had now decided to call them) that wanted a piece of his bones.
It felt good out here. Like, running under a warm summer rain in his prime, good. A feeling Sean hadn’t had since in years, having grown a bit too accustomed to having some of the ol ‘tub ‘round his middle without the regular threat of a waist tape. He didn’t even care that the cloudy night sky above was filled with unfamiliar moons of various colors. Nor did he care that the forest around him looked like it feasted on passersby more often than sun or rain. It just felt good to finally be out in the open again. Like he was home, even though he clearly wasn’t.
Strange as the literally alien landscape around him might be, there was still a supernatural sort of beauty to it. One that Sean found he rather liked, the more he looked around.
To his orbs, the soft, grey grass he was running over most of the time looked like it was engaged in constant warfare with its harsh, aggressively-green cousin. The nearly seamless transitions between the two made their sprawling battle play out like brushstrokes on canvas across the open fields. Sean purposefully ran through the swirling back-and-forth grey-green patterns and was surprised by how stark the difference in feel was for one versus the other. The former seemed to almost part for, and welcome, his feet whenever encountered a new patch, while the latter felt like running across those fake-lawn Turf-Bro installations that real estate agents used to pretend like a house had a green lawn year-round.
The kind that stabbed your toes almost to the point you bled. Sean couldn’t bleed anymore, but the prickly sensation was uncomfortable enough that he started consciously choosing to run in the darkened patches of grass. This led him towards the ashen trees and even darker parts of the forest where the strangle-vines were more common, but the stationary bushes weren’t that hard to dodge now that he knew what to look out for.
None of the trees actively reached out for him either, a fact that Sean appreciated as he had no desire to get whomped by some random willow.
At first, he had planned to run straight towards their goal, but even with his two-hour time crunch Sean found himself getting caught up in the natural scenery. There was a massive silver tree that resembled an elm from earth, only it was at least four hundred feet tall with bark the shade of midnight in its twisting branches. Beyond that were a series of fruit bushes with berries as big as apples, though each were plump with juice and looked more like pastel-white peaches. A rushing creek of almost perfectly clear water ran alongside them for a time, the mud beneath the same color as the empty space between the stars above.
Sean paused for a time under the silver tree, admiring the way it seemed to shine in the moonlight, and the way its branches curved into shapes and patterns he had never thought wood could take. Gel urged him on, but the slime’s own attention was soon caught by the fruit bushes.
“Ooh, ooh! We have got to try one of those!” Gel demanded as soon as they got close. “All the memories I have of seeing these things, the person was too afraid to try one. Can’t imagine why, they look fantastic!”
“I didn’t peg you for a fruit slime.” Sean quipped. “I thought you were all about that meat.”
“I am all about that meat.” Gel responded quickly. “More importantly though, I’m all about food. Just look at that round shape. Look at it! That’s what perfection looks like, Sean.”
“Perfection is round?”
“You bet your bones it is.”
The second Sean stopped in front of the bush, the arm Gel had control over shot forward to grab the biggest one within reach. It resisted being pulled off the bush for just a moment before finally releasing with a satisfying swish as the branch it had come from shot back to its original position. As Gel shoved the fruit inside the open space between his ribs, a thought occurred to the skeleton.
“Can you get mana from fruit?” Sean asked, suddenly excited about the possibility of having a ready alternative around in case they couldn’t find anything to hunt down soon.
If Gel could, then Sean was fully prepared to stuff as much of the fruit as could possibly fit into their satchel.
Hell, I might even keep some seeds. There’s a bunch of these things. Sean thought, looking around. If we make it far enough, I could even start my own farm! … assuming Gel doesn’t eat everything, first.
“Only one way to find out.” Gel said, already grabbing another as the first fruit began dissolving quickly within the slime’s jelly. “Mmm…. Tastes like–”
A sudden bubbling emerged from within Sean’s chest, one loud pop followed by several more smaller pops. Looking down, Sean could see an inky dark stain spreading out inside Gel’s body.
“You okay down there?” Sean asked his friend.
“Blegh.” Gel responded simply, then shivered. The inky darkness inside the slime began to dissolve as well. “Tastes like flesh on the outside, but the core has a bunch of really sour juice inside. No wonder the villagers didn’t want any, this stuff is definitely poisonous.”
The slime promptly threw another one of the pastel-white poison-peaches into his formless gob.
“And you’re eating more because…?” Sean couldn’t say he was surprised, given that the slime was just as ‘immune’ to poison as he was, but… “If you didn’t like the first one, why try another?”
“Maybe I’ll like the second one.” Gel said hopefully, before another series of pops bubbled up. “Bleghh… Okay, that’s a no. Hard no.”
With zero hesitation, Gel shoved another one of the fruits into his mass.
“Third time’s the charm?” Sean asked, amused at the scene playing out before him.
“Yeah–Hgnhh...” Gel’s voice started out optimistic, but was interrupted by the fruit erupting once more. “No…”
Just as Gel was about to reach for his fourth, Sean held up a hand to stop his own… hand.
“How about we leave this patch alone.” Sean suggested. “Maybe these ones aren’t ripe yet.”
“Maybe, but how am I going to figure out which ones are ripe if I don’t eat all of them?” Gel asked. “Bad food is still food, and I’m still hungry. Maybe the next one won’t be so bad?”
That last sentence sounded like Gel was trying to be optimistic, but the slime clearly already knew the fate awaiting whatever counted as his taste buds. Still, Gel didn’t hesitate. Another fruit was consumed before the skeleton carrying him could even respond.
Sean rubbed his skull and jaw with his remaining good hand. “Alright, fair enough. How many of these do you want before we keep moving? And, more importantly, are they giving you any mana?”
“Nope.” Gel responded promptly. “Not a drop. I still want all of them, though. They may taste like week-old turned foot, but mass is still mass.”
Sean couldn’t help himself. “Turned foot?”
“Yeah, you know. When the foot has already rotted before the rest of the body, and it gets all black and stuff.” Gel responded, before shuddering at another popped peach. “Tastes horrible. Fresh foot? Delicious. Rotfoot? Not so much.”
The skeleton paused, unable to stop an academic curiosity at why Gel had that particular preference.
Did the villagers have some kind of foot-fungus before they died? He wondered. Something that ate through their feet afterwards?
Sean glanced down at the dirt, black mud, multicolored blades of grass, and dried horse excrement that had all mixed itself together between his toes and suddenly felt an intense relief at his own lack of skin to infect. The bacteria on his feet alone was probably enough to kill a man. Suppressing a shiver of his own, Sean got back to the task at hand.
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“Tell you what, how about we strip this bush down, then we can grab a few for the road.” Sean offered, using his unbroken left hand to start grabbing more of the things.
“I’m not sharing my food with the road, Sean.” Gel said immediately. “Not a chance. Also, there’s only one road I know of out here and I am 90% sure it doesn’t eat fruit.”
Sean groaned internally. “I meant we can grab a few with us, so you can eat them on the way.”
“Oh.”
The pair were quiet for a second, and the forest around them began to fill with an ever-increasing amount of popping sounds as more and more fruits were jammed into the slime. Amusingly, there didn’t seem to be an actual limit on how many of them Gel could eat at once. As long as there was room in his gelatinous mass, more could be shoved in. Sean was making a personal game out of how many he could stuff in there at once, similar to when he had shoveled grapes into his own mouth as a kid, when something Gel had just said echoed back through his mind.
“You’re ninety percent sure the road doesn’t eat fruit? Do roads eat people here?” Sean joked, trying to lighten the mood as he felt kind of bad for making Gel eat so many things the slime clearly didn’t enjoy.
Gel didn’t respond at first, his entire mass quivering as the inky poison of the peaches almost turned the slime opaque for a second. When the last of it had just about drained out however, Sean almost wished he hadn’t asked.
“Some do!” Gel said, almost coughing out the words though Sean still didn’t know how the slime managed to do that mentally. “I have a memory of a story about a yellow brick road that supposedly eats your brain if you walk on it without paying the proper toll first. No idea if it’s actually true or not, but Stephen seemed pretty convinced it was.”
“Is the ‘proper toll’ a heart?” Sean asked, a hint of amusement in his voice as he placed a few more fruits in Gel’s hand and turned to leave.
It was hard to be afraid of any story that reminded him of The Wizard of Snozz, even if it did feature cannibal roads. The fact that even the very roads of this new world could be magical though, was potentially concerning. Especially given how reactive just the grass had been to him already.
“Actually, yeah.” Gel asked, suddenly curious. “Why did you ask if you already knew about it?”
“Oh, I haven’t heard that one.” Sean responded, jogging away from the small grove of poison fruit. “Heard a similar one as a kid, though.”
“Ooh, mind sharing it?” Gel asked. “I have literally nothing else to do while you’re running us around.”
“Sure, ma–” Sean caught himself right before he called the slime ‘man’ again and quickly amended his statement. “Sure thing. It all starts with this weirdly green witch…”
Sean lost himself in explaining the plot of The Wizard of Snozz as they ran, and was pleased to discover that Gel was actually an attentive listener when it came to stories. The slime never interrupted, though he did ask several pointed questions that challenged his ability to remember a movie that Sean had originally seen on VHS. Even so, time passed steadily on as the pair moved closer and closer to the village Gel was leading them towards.
Small, rolling hills came and went as he regaled the slime with the parts that he could remember – and some parts that he flat-out made up on the spot – until Sean figured they had to be at least several miles from Bancroft’s estate by now.
The night air was pleasantly cool as he ran through the breeze. Sean found that his thickened bones hardly even noticed the satchel bouncing against them, and it didn’t chafe at all despite the bowstring literally wrapped around his vertebrae. There was enough sensation for him to notice its presence, but no irritation whatsoever. Even the heavy, overstuffed satchel registered less against his shoulder than even a shirt might have.
Guess I don’t have to worry about rug burn anymore. Sean mused as his retelling of a childhood fable finished. Unexpected side benefit, but I’ll take it.
They passed fewer of the darkened patches of flora and the sometimes ashen, sometimes silver trees as they went, though there were still plenty of regions blanketed in the now-familiar dark grass. In one of them Sean thought he might have even stepped on a bone instead of a twig, but after he stopped to examine it, he dismissed that possibility. What he had found instead was a thin, silvery branch about the size of one finger that almost looked like it had been polished. It gleamed in the moonlight, and had almost certainly fallen from one of the silver elm-like trees nearby.
Without even thinking about it, Sean stuck the branch inside their satchel. He immediately felt better with it in there, though he couldn’t have said exactly why. Sean also wasn’t quite sure why he had felt the need to bring the stick with them, other than that he wanted the thing. That sort of logic was apparently good enough for his slime companion to act on though, so why not him?
To his surprise, Gel didn’t even question the gesture. Simply waited until Sean was done, then looked ahead when they picked their pace back up. Several minutes later, just as they were about to stop at another one of the last few oddly entrancing silver trees in the area, Gel’s voice cut through Sean’s zoned out mind.
“Oooh, hey! Right there! There!” Gel blurted out, pointing off to their left at a small, wooden shack that had been built seemingly in the middle of nowhere. “We can use that!”
“That?” Sean asked, turning his attention from the tree to the structure. “That… looks like an outhouse, Gel.”
Indeed, as they drew closer, it became increasingly obvious that Sean’s initial assessment of the building’s purpose was accurate. Even in other worlds, it seemed, humans still needed a safe place to poop out in the woods. The design was a little different than the ones Sean had seen back on earth, but there was no mistaking it – not the massive amount of flies buzzing around the back end of the building.
A back end that they were rapidly approaching.
“What’s wrong with an outhouse?” Gel asked, still clearly pleased with himself for having spotted it. “I have tons of memories of humans hiding in here for up to an hour or more!”
“I…” Sean started, then immediately dropped that particular subject. “Okay, but this is where you want us to try and evolve?”
“Sure, why not? It’s got four walls, a roof, even a door!”
“An unlocked door.” Sean corrected, swinging said door open to reveal the outhouse’s interior.
The inside looked… exactly how one might expect an abandoned, yet apparently fully-utilized public outhouse in frontier lands to look after given time to fester. Sean was suddenly very glad that he could no longer smell and now lacked any sort of gag reflex. He was also glad that whoever had built this particular building had chosen to dig two separate holes.
He just wished the contrasting splatter patterns of the colors between said holes wasn’t so… vibrant.
I do not want to know what these people’s diets looked like. Sean thought. Also, why is it always on the walls? Who does that to walls?!
“There’s also supposed to be some kind of magic spell keeping monsters away from here.” Gel said, blessedly turning Sean’s attention away from the gastrointestinal horrors his orbs were showing him. “At least, there was. But whatever powered that is probably long gone.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” Sean said, swinging open the unlocked door to reveal the inside. “Considering we are monsters and it’s not keeping us out.”
Pushing down his internal disgust and reminding himself that he no longer had anything to fear from the nightmare of disease that no doubt coated the outhouse floor, Sean took an experimental step inside to prove his point.
Nothing happened.
Sean found that actually relieved him somewhat. He had never really been squeamish, and was now even less so. If this was the safest place to try and evolve, he would man up and make use of it. Stepping fully inside, Sean shut the door behind him. Darkness fell across the room, now that the moonlight could no longer shine in. His ability to see in the dark made that effectively a non-issue, but at least Sean had one wall to look at that hadn’t been… painted.
Shaking his head, Sean was about to pull up the evolution prompt again when his pulse sense reported a small, approaching heartbeat. He immediately opened the door and strode out, raising his one remaining good hand up defensively.
“What? What is it?” Gel asked. “Did you hear something?”
“Yeah… there.” Sean pointed, with his hand this time, at a patch of bright green grass near where they had approached the outhouse from.
A patch of bright-green grass that was currently being crushed under the segmented legs of a greenish-brown scorpion roughly the size of a small dog. Both of its claws were raised, and its tail arched as the thing charged forward.
Must have seen us earlier and decided it wanted a piece. Sean thought, as he felt a glimmer of excitement spark deep within. You’re going to regret that, little guy.
As Sean prepared to attack, a brief internal struggle played out inside him.
What remained of Sean’s human instincts told him that charging headlong at a scorpion literally the size of a cocker spaniel was about as close to ‘nope’ as one could get to decision-making without lava entering the mix. Scorpions were infamous for taking down prey larger than themselves back on Earth, and the ones in this world were almost certainly built to do the same.
His new skeleton instincts however, the parts that Sean had been identifying with more and more as the night went on, didn’t see anything wrong with that decision at all. They reveled in the fact that a clearly inferior foe had decided to challenge his claim to this territory, and demanded the upstart be crushed for its insolence. Out here, away from the flesh pit and Bancroft’s other minions, Sean could actually feel the life force running through the scorpion’s body in a way he had never been able to with the rats or the crabs.
It was a sensation that was both provocative and infuriating. Its life felt like an affront to the natural order of things. An affront against the world, and all creatures within it. Life that the undead part of him could not suffer to exist, and wanted to snuff out just for daring to be.
The war inside him lasted only an instant, but Sean had made up his mind before it had even begun. He was starting to learn what it took to get by in this new world, and Sean wasn’t about to let fear get in his way. Shrugging off their satchel and untangling the bow free of his neck, Sean dug in his feet as he prepared to leap at the creature the second it got within range.
He only had one question, now.
How the hell do you fight a scorpion? Sean wondered, tilting his head as he looked from the monstrous arachnid’s twin pincer’s to its whip-like curled tail. Where do I even start? Do I just go for its face? The body? Or…
Sean suddenly had the unpleasant mental image of the scorpion’s wickedly sharp tail lashing out and puncturing through one of his legs. An injury that would no doubt leave Gel in charge of that limb as well if they wanted to get around anywhere. That particularly unfortunate possible reality was then brought starkly into range when the scorpion leapt straight at him from more than ten feet away, its pincers lunging for his face.
“Woah!” Sean rolled off to the side, berating himself – again – for not having been able to buy ‘pounce’. He sprang to his feet, dodging to the side as the creature rushed towards him again.
The scorpion’s attacks were oddly reminiscent of the crabs he had fought not terribly long ago. As such, Sean found it rather easy to just keep dodging out of range. Given their difference in size, and the fact that the scorpion actually appeared to be a little bit smaller than he had first guessed, the fight soon opened up an opportunity for him to strike back.
Sensing that opening the moment it came, Sean dove forward and brought his good arm straight down on the creature’s head in a hammer-fist blow. The attack immediately triggering a bright-red prompt.
You have struck forest scorpion for 2 damage (3 total, damage reduced by target’s natural armor).
Crap, it’s still ali– Sean barely had time to process that he hadn’t killed the thing yet, when his other arm flashed forward from underneath and did just that.
Gel shoved the silver dagger they had found straight through the scorpion’s face with his right arm. The forest scorpion tried to screech and reel back, only to gurgle on its own neon-green blood as the weapon sunk even deeper into its inner organs. Without hesitation, and even as the creature was exhaling its last breath, the scorpion flashed its sharp tail right into Sean’s chest.
Lingering reflexes made Sean attempt to close his non-existent eyelids to brace against the incoming pain. To his surprise, despite the fact that he had literally watched the strike land dead-center, the expected pain never came. There was no battle prompt reporting that he had taken damage.
Glancing down, Sean realized why.
The blow had landed dead-center alright. Dead center… right into Gel, who was now happily devouring the jets of venom being squirted into him from the scorpion’s dying attack as if they were just unexpected additions to a new favorite snack. As the creature’s stinger began to dissolve, the slime started wobbling in a way Sean had come to associate with pure glee.
“I have to say, I really love it when my food comes to me!” Gel crowed as the last of the creature’s tail rapidly disintegrated. “I’m really starting to enjoy how many things have an unbridled hatred for you, Sean. All this trouble is delicious.”
“Glad at least one of us is enjoying ourselves.” Sean said, though even as he yanked the last of the dissolving tail out of his chest, he had to admit that it had been a pretty fun fight.
Quick, too. I’m getting better at this whole ‘hunting with your hands’ thing.
“You should get things to hit you more often.” Gel added. “It’s really working out for us.”
“Yeah, hah… I’ll get right on that.” Sean said, while simultaneously thinking: Not.
The scorpion didn’t even try to resist as Gel pulled the dagger out, it just gave one final shudder before slumping to the ground. Sean knelt next to it, scooping the slime from his chest quickly before any other potential predators could arrive. The second Gel landed on it and began to feast, the prompt Sean had been waiting for finally appeared.
You have defeated a forest scorpion! You have gained 1 experience point.
‘One’ point? Only one experience point?! Sean thought, staring at the prompt in outrage as if it were deliberately lying to him.
“Gel, what-- why didn’t we get more experience for that kill?” Sean demanded of his still-snacking friend as he leaned back. “I would have easily bet on that thing winning against those rats.”
“Wasn’t a threat.” Gel mumbled, clearly more focused on his food than on providing a full response.
“What? Not a threat?” Sean looked at the exoskeleton that was rapidly becoming the only remaining part of the creature in disbelief. “What do you mean it wasn’t a threat? Its stinger is nearly a foot long!”
“And?”
“And…” Sean didn’t quite have an answer ready for that response, but he felt like he should so he just pressed on. “Wouldn’t that make it a threat?”
“Well, sure. To someone, probably.” Gel gulped audibly in Sean’s mind as he finished his meal, a feat Sean once again had no idea how the slime managed to pull off. “But not to us.”
“‘Not to us’?” Sean echoed back. “That matters?”
“Of course it matters. You don’t get stronger by taking down something that can’t fight back against you, there’s no challenge in that.” Gel’s voice took on the note of recitation it always held when the slime was directly quoting a line from his memories. “And without challenge, there can be no growth.”
“Uh-huh.” Sean uh-huh’d.
Guess I can’t argue with that. He thought, pushing down his irritation as he looked over the scorpion Gel was rapidly deflating from the inside. Scary as this little guy might look, he didn’t put up much of a fight.
It didn’t take Gel long to finish his feast, and in no time at all the slime was settled comfortably back in his chest. A second later, and his broken arm began to move again as Gel got back into position. It was only then that Sean realized having the slime in control of the limb didn’t bother him anymore. On the contrary, he felt a little relieved to know that both of his arms could now be used in their defense.
Fight together, stay together. Sean thought, repeating a mantra he had once heard from an officer back in his military days.
Turning his attention back to the real world, Sean got another prompt informing him that he had gained another point of experience and a single point of mana from Gel absorbing the scorpion’s corpse. Pulling up his ‘mana tank’, Sean frowned. He only had two poin–
The point he had just gained immediately vanished, bringing him down to one. Apparently, he had lost track of time on the trek over here. Which left him with just under 2 hour’s worth of life left in the tank. Two hours before he started rolling the dice on how many minutes he had left to live.
Two more hours. Sean thought, trying to stay positive at having less time left on the clock than it could take to properly baste and bake a turkey. Plenty of time.
The skeleton stared off into the distance for a few seconds, though in his vision, all Sean could see was the bold number on his status screen. The floating digit a stark reminder that he had a tax to pay if he wanted to keep exploring the beauty of this new world. A tax that was both unforgiving, and unavoidable.
Just like back home. He mused, before shaking his head and getting his mind back in the game. Taxes are inevitable even for the dead.
“Alright, Gel. Decision time.” Sean began. “Do we want to go see if there’s a nest of those things before we evolve, or just go in and get it over with - then go hunting.”
“Hmmmm.” Gel rotated in his chest as the slime gave the question serious thought. “Ordinarily, I would be all about hunting down more of those things now. You know that.”
“I do.” Sean acknowledged, before prompting. “But…”
“But… In this case, I vote we evolve first. No matter what we pick, it’ll let us kill more things faster. Which means we’ll get to eat more, and more often.” Gel seemed to be explaining his logic more to himself than to Sean. “Looking at it that way, I feel like you already know what I’m going to say.”
Sean chuckled soundlessly, his jawbones clattering softly in the relatively open clearing. He began walking towards the outhouse.
“I do.”