The next badger went down with considerably less fuss, which Sean was grateful for. They found it mid-meal, going to town on another one of those bright red-raspberry bushes. It had, of course, attacked immediately. But now that Sean knew to expect nothing but unfiltered rage from the creatures – he had made sure to go into the fight not sitting down. That had helped immensely.
Rather than trying to waste time grabbing it, Sean had simply field goal-kicked it instead. His heavily reinforced shoe-esque foot had devastated the creature, going almost entirely through it. At first, he had been elated – victory had come swiftly, and the extra mana point the creature offered would be much appreciated. Sean had felt like everything was finally starting to go well.
Then both he and Gel received a rather… worrying… new title.
Congratulations, you have earned the title: “Enemy of the Badgers”! The badger race is exceptionally unforgiving, even amongst the most vicious and vengeful races of this planet. As you have now slain two of them, any possibility of the first encounter being a mistake is now forever erased. You will now be hunted.
This temporary title can only be earned by receiving the death curse of a badger-type creature and expires automatically within 48 hours (24 hrs multiplied by the total number of badgers you have slain). It grants a rare, but substantial increase to damage against badgers, badgerkin, badger spirits, and all races which evolve from (or into) badgers. Additionally, increases the likelihood that a badger-type race will attack you by 200% (+100% for each new badger slain).
“Uhhh?” Gel and Sean uhhh’d in unison.
“That… did you know that would happen?” Sean asked Gel. He wasn’t exactly worried about a badger attacking him right now, despite what the prompt seemed to imply the two he had fought were pushovers. Reading it again though, a small hint of concern began to form in the back of his mind.
“How would I know? I’ve only ever eaten the two!” Gel sounded hesitant at first, but then the slime got to the end of the prompt. “Oooh, ooh! It says the more we kill, the more they’ll come to us! That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Not unless they swarm us. What’s a ‘badgerkin’, though? Or a ‘badger spirit’? Do badgers even have spirits?” Sean inspected the carcass of the one that had earned them the title with suspicion, wondering if it was about to come back to life and attack.
When it didn’t so much as twitch, he tossed the badger to Gel. Can’t haunt us if you don’t have a body left to haunt from.
Sean wasn’t sure that logic actually tracked, but he liked the sound of it anyway.
“Why would badgers have spirits? That’s ridiculous. Spirits can be something, like a badger, but nobody has a spirit.” Gel sounded like he was explaining something that the slime couldn’t believe he had to actually say. Like he thought Sean had used the wrong words on purpose, and the two of them were sharing a joke. “Unless you summoned one, I suppose. Can you summon one? Imagine how useful that would be. We could have it gather berries!”
“You know I can’t.” Sean volleyed back. “I don’t have any magic.”
“Not yet.” Gel said, emphasizing the last word. “One day, though. One day.”
Sean dismissed the prompt informing him that Gel had absorbed another point of mana from the badger. He still hadn’t been able to sense the heartbeat from that badger either, which was concerning, but there was nothing he could do for it now. Pushing his frustration at that unsolved mystery back down before it could irritate him, he started jogging towards the last pair of human tracks he had seen. He felt like it was time to finally check out that village, and after that they could use the map to go… somewhere else.
Somewhere with fewer badgers, maybe. The last thing that Gel had said stuck with him, though.
“What did you mean, ‘one day’? I can’t believe I haven’t asked yet, but how does magic work here? Is it an ability? Can anyone learn it?” Like literally every person in his generation, Sean had grown up wishing magic were real. Adulthood had crushed those dreams, but maybe his undeath could resurrect them.
“If I could answer how magic works, I would be using it already.” Gel pointed out. “Barry and the others I ate all seemed to think anyone theoretically could do it, but none of those peasants ever did so there must be another trick to it.”
“Bancroft never said anything about it?”
“Nothing useful.” Gel sighed in true regret before his usual optimism returned. “Once we kill and eat him though, I’ll suck out every bit of magical knowledge he has. It’ll be fantastic.”
Sean chewed on that thought for a while as he ran through the forest. The potential promise of magic certainly made the idea of killing Bancroft more appealing. They were a long way off from that right now, but they wouldn’t be forever. Maybe they could even find something in the village that could help them get there.
“Turn left up here, around that pair of trees.” Gel said suddenly, and the slime’s serious tone stirred Sean out of his internal musings.
Worried he had forgotten about pulse sense again, Sean focused on the ability and strained it to his utmost. He looked around, but neither his eyes nor whatever counted as his ears reported anything out of the ordinary.
“Something coming?” Sean asked, angling left once he passed the trees in question. “Is it behind us?”
“No, it’s in front of us.” Gel said quietly, and so it was.
Mounds of earth and grass dotted the field in front of them. Dozens, maybe hundreds, all lined up in tidy rows on the other side of a short wooden fence. Desiccated flowers, urns, and other items lay atop the center of each mound. There were no grave markers, and no signs, but there was only one thing this place could be.
“Is this a–” Sean began, but Gel finished his thought.
“Cemetery, yes.” Gel was silent for another moment, as if the slime were trying to arrange his thoughts. “Do you mind if we, uh, head in? Before we head into the village?”
“Sure.” Sean said respectfully, easily picking up on the fact that whatever this was about, it was clearly important to his friend. “Something you want to talk about?”
“Something I’d like to see.” Gel corrected softly, and the slime didn’t elaborate any further.
Sensing the gravity of the situation, even if he didn’t entirely understand it, Sean headed into the cemetery. As he crossed the fenceline, easily stepping over all two or so feet of it, a great sense of solemnity settled over him. Similar to the feeling of calm that had permeated the air next to hundreds of other undead warriors, and yet with every step forward, noticeably different.
The air here was old. Ancient. Some of the mounds before him had short, withered trees the color of twilight growing out of them. There were at least a dozen of them. None were taller than he was, and each had only a few branches. As he got closer, Sean realized that each branch held a memento – as the other mounds did. Urns with faded paints and twigs that must have once been flowers hung from thin, almost scraggly branches. There was even a weathered book, though a quick glance confirmed any writing on its cover had long since faded away.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Sean didn’t flip through its pages. He didn’t even want to touch the book. Just the thought made his instincts scream at him. Perplexed at the adverse reaction strengthening as he got closer to it, Sean examined what his instincts were telling him. They weren’t warning him of danger per se, but they did want him to move away. There was concern there. Fear, even. Pushing past what his proverbial gut was telling him, Sean got even closer to the tree. He stopped when a grim, ancient voice rasped words directly into his mind.
Do not disturb our rest.
That was it. There was nothing else. Silence continued to reign in the cemetery, thick as a rolling fog.
Sean had the distinct impression, though he couldn’t have said how it came to him, that the voice was coming from the tree. Up close, it didn’t look so withered. What he had thought were deteriorations in the wood actually looked to be the results of subtle patterns carved into its trunk and branches. Carvings that resembled symbols.
Softly glowing symbols.
Yup. Not fucking with that. Sean decided, turning abruptly away from whatever voodoo hijinx nonsense was involved with that particular grave. Not getting cursed today. Nope.
Gel didn’t give him any more directions, but the slime was peering around from inside his chest, so Sean continued wandering around. He was careful not to actually step on any of the mounds. He felt the same compulsion from his instincts to stay away from those too, though to a lesser degree. Thankfully, no further prompts appeared. When he was nearly to the other side, where the mounds were clearly covered in fresh dirt instead of grass or other overgrowth, the slime directed him towards one of the newest graves.
Covered by dozens of individual flowers in a range of colors, each weighted down by rocks at the stem, the mound they were looking for wasn’t hard to find. As Sean grew closer, he saw that the flowers formed a picture of a smiling young girl. It wasn’t the best depiction. Whoever had made this clearly knew about as much about art as he did, and yet they had still clearly put significant time into the illustration. Most of the flowers had lost their petals since being placed. Some had been torn, others were simply missing. Even the rocks appeared to have been carefully selected for specific shapes.
The whole thing felt incredibly personal. There was grief here that Sean couldn’t begin to process, and it was evident in every bloom and in every stone.
“Who was she?” Sean asked, his mental voice barely above a whisper.
“Sarah.” Gel said, and the slime’s voice was actually trembling with emotion. If Sean didn’t know better, he would think Gel was on the verge of tears. “Her father, Jerin, dug this out for her after Bancroft killed her. Her body wasn’t developed enough to raise again, bones were too weak. So she’s here, but her mother Mala is… not in the one next to it.”
Sean looked to the adjacent mound that Gel was indicating, and saw that it had a similar motif. Many flowers depicting the face of an older woman, each held firmly in place by a rock that complimented the overall picture. Again, it was amateurish at best… but who could look upon such a display and find that a reason to judge its creator? The man had done his best.
“What happened to him?”
“He wasn’t here when the attack came. Was out on a hunt looking for some giants that had been bothering the village. They had to go into the desert, so they were more than a day away. By the time they got back, they saw the smoke first.” Gel now sounded more like he was reciting something that had happened to someone else than to himself, but sadness still ran through his voice. “Jerin swore revenge, same as the rest of them… but he buried Sarah first. You can probably guess the rest.”
That extrapolation wasn’t terribly difficult. If Gel was relaying the story, it meant the man had both died and had his brains fed to the slime by the very same necromancer Jerin had gone after. Sean remained silent. It felt like Gel had more to say, and Sean was going to let him say his piece.
“I don’t–I didn’t have a lot of memories at first. It took a while before they started really settling in. When they did, those memories were all I had. Before you came around, I couldn’t even see. All I had, apart from that irritating prick’s voice, were the experiences they gave me. I didn’t get everything, but recent memories are the most fresh.” Gel went quiet for a moment. “I watched him put every piece of this together. Watched him dig it. Watched him swear revenge… and then watched how he died.”
“Memories don’t have a filter. The clearer they are, the more I get, Sean. The more I understand. The more I feel. I don’t know these people. Didn’t know them. They probably would have attacked me if they saw me when they were alive and don’t get me wrong, I would happily eat them all if they tried that now.” Gel’s voice began to sound like the slime was searching for answers even as he spoke. “But Bancroft has killed me through them a hundred times. A thousand, maybe. I stopped counting how many times I went back through them… and even though I hate it, even though I know humans are food… Delicious food, even! I just… I feel like I can’t let this go.”
Gel sighed, and the silence that followed was long enough that Sean felt like he should say something– but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the words. He had been deeply invested in movies and books back home before, which appeared to be how Gel treated the memories he gained from others. The deaths of his favorite characters in those stories had always hurt him. The wrongs they suffered could burn him, and some had even stuck around for a while – there was a particular Mountain he was still mad at to this day – but none of those had been real.
It had been easy to turn off the tv or close the book and get back to his life. He had never felt the emotions directly. Gel had, and the slime had been given however long in the dark on a shelf to rewatch the same scenes over and over. Sean couldn’t begin to imagine what that would do to someone’s psyche – much less the effects it might have on a nascent, all-consuming slime monster experiencing those things as its first tastes of the world. He didn’t know how similar slime and human psychologies were, but Sean had his own fair share of trauma hiding in his closet. He may literally be the skeleton in it now, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t empathize.
“That’s why I want to go back.” Gel said, and the slime’s old voice returned as he spoke, marked by traces of hot anger. “I want us to go right back to that bastard’s house, kick down his front door, murder his face off, eat it, and then have you burn the whole place down to the ground with all his precious books in it, just like you did his stables.”
Sean was about to confirm that was still a plan fine by him, but Gel cut him off.
“You’re supposed to be upfront with your friends, and you’re my best one.” Gel said, sounding more sure of himself. “I wanted you to see this. You were tossed out just like I was, but you never got to see what a prick that guy really is. I can’t show you their memories, but I wanted you to know I’m not just some crazy slime with rejection issues. Bancroft isn’t my dad. He’s dinner. Dinner I want your help serving up. So, are you in?”
Gel’s voice had slowed on that last question, almosted halted. As if the slime were unsure whether or not Sean would agree, even though he already had. Clearly, they weren’t going their separate ways anytime soon – maybe not ever, if they stayed symbiotes – but Sean could feel just how important this moment, and his response to it, would be for the normally unflappable slime.
That didn’t mean he had to think about it, though.
“I’m in. I’m in till we slay this son of a bitch for what he did, and I’m in for whatever comes after.” Sean promised. He knelt on one knee by the mound, and put his left hand in the dirt before it. It was the closest he was willing to physically get without touching the grave, and he didn’t want to accidentally disturb the display atop it. Even for what he was about to do next, that didn’t feel right.
You will be avenged, Sarah. As will your mother and father. I swear it.
A sudden breeze shot through the cemetery as he finished his pronouncement. It rustled the nearby trees and grass as it passed by, though not a single flower petal twitched on either of the mounds. Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. Nor did the potential for his vow here having been officially recognized by magic he didn’t understand sway him. There was always the chance it had been a coincidence, after all.
If that was actually a coincidence, I’ll eat my other arm. Sean thought, though he remained kneeling for a moment as it felt like the right thing to do. He wasn’t terribly religious, and had absolutely no idea as to what counted for the divine in this world, but Sean sent a few words of prayer to the universe on the fallen girl’s behalf anyway. It never hurt to wish someone well, even if they were dead.
Gel seemed to either understand what he was doing, or be lost in his own troubled thoughts. When Sean finally rose several minutes later, inclining his head to the grave in respect, the slime didn’t say a word when Sean turned and left. It wasn’t until they were outside the cemetery, on a clearly delineated path leading towards some buildings in the distance, that Gel finally spoke up.
“Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Sean didn’t respond further. There was nothing more that needed to be said.
United in solemn purpose, and both feeling more in tune with the other than ever, the two companions made their way into the village.