“We need to go.” Sean said, turning to double-check where the wagon and its guards were before they got the hell out of here. The two furry ones appeared unnerved and were both holding green-tinged swords at the ready, whereas the turtle… the turtle was staring slack-jawed (slack-mawed?) at the battle. None of them were looking their way.
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Gel said, right as the undead monstrosity lifted its blade and pointed it directly at them. “Go! Go now! Go right now! Why are we not going right now!?”
Sean looked up to the sky, trying to get a read on where the owl-man-bird-thing was. The last thing he needed was for them to try and run, the paladins to decide they should run, and for the most likely holier-than-thou knight-whatevers to run them down on their way out.
“Trying to time our exit.” Sean responded, finally catching sight of the owl-man-thing again. It was a bit startling how furious it/he/she/whatever looked in comparison to the poise it had shown earlier. “Now all we need is for one of them to distract it. That way it won’t see which way we went.”
“That’s a surprisingly in-depth escape plan for someone who only just now got on board with the right plan.” Gel said, sounding half-surprised. “If only we had been in the perfect position to do that earlier, hmmm…”
“Not helping, Gel. What we need is–” Sean stopped mid-sentence as a strangled cry of devastated rage brought his attention back to the main fight. The larger paladin had returned from the tree he had been knocked into, and was now standing right in front of his opponent once more.
Only the man in question no longer had a head on his shoulders.
Arterial blood sprayed across the forest floor as the paladin’s armored, headless body collapsed into the grass. His head landed somewhere Sean couldn’t see, and the other paladin – the one who had cried out – began blasting the undead monstrosity with beam after beam after beam while shouting ever-more-furiously with each shot.
“That?” Gel asked in a half-serious yet half-curious tone.
“That’ll do.” Sean said, turning 180 degrees and sprinting away from the hulking undead humanoid as fast as his thick, bone legs could carry them.
“Doesn’t get much more distracted than that.” Gel commented dryly as they ran. “Dibs on the body if that thing doesn’t eat it.”
“You seriously want to circle back and check? After all that fuss you made for us to leave?” Sean should have been surprised, but he really wasn’t.
“Sometimes you just have to let the world know.” Gel responded cheerily. “Who knows? Maybe nobody else called it and we’ll get the chance.”
The shouting from behind them abruptly cut off mid-scream, leaving no doubt as to the fate of the final ground-bound paladin. A shrill shriek split the air from above as the owl-thing decried the fate of its comrades.
“Or... maybe we should keep going.” Gel corrected himself as the slime gripped his ribcage, doing his best to also ensure that Sean’s right arm moved in time with his left. “Can you run any faster? I hate to ask if you’re trying hard enough right now, but you did see that thing just take a tornado to the face, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I saw it.” Sean said, picking up speed. “How about you keep watch behind us and let me know if it’s coming.”
“I’m on it!” Gel acknowledged, before adding a second later. “It is definitely coming our way. Not terribly quickly though. It’s just… walking. Don’t undead chase things? Of course they do, that’s silly. Why is it not chasing– oh, I can’t see it anymore.”
Sean leapt past another pair of trees, ducked the branches of another, and dodged past a grabber-vine bush as he focused his entire being on getting them the hell away from whatever that twisted abomination wanted with them. All the while, what Gel was saying began working its way through his thoughts.
“What do you mean ‘walking’?” He asked, just as they startled what appeared to be half a dozen small, squirrel-ish-looking creatures into darting away as Sean barrelled through another clearing. “Like fast-walking?”
“I meant walking. As in not running. It was definitely headed our way, but it didn’t look like it was trying to catch us.” Gel sounded every bit as puzzled as that information made Sean. “Undead don’t get tired, do they?”
“No, we don’t.” Sean answered, his suspicion growing. He could think of a half-dozen reasons why the creature wouldn’t be running. None of them seemed very likely, however.
“Maybe it’s friendly?” Gel asked, and the slime’s ordinary optimism flowed back into his tone. “It did take down those paladins that attacked us, didn’t it? That was a nice gesture.”
“I’m not risking our lives over a ‘nice gesture’.” Sean replied dryly. “Especially not one that starts out with murder.”
“Why not? Murder can be nice.” Gel insisted. “Some people deserve it. Maybe they deserved it.”
Sean sent the mental equivalent of a nod and hand gesture over to the slime to acknowledge the point, but he still didn’t slow down. Despite his desire to watch the duel up close, Sean wanted no part of it. His instincts were telling him two things right now, and he was in total agreement on both of them:
One: That thing was out of their league.
Two: He was currently leaving an incredibly obvious trail through the woods. If that hulking monstrosity had any skill with tracking at all, they would need to take it much slower if they really wanted to evade its notice.
We can do that once we’ve got some distance from it. Sean decided firmly. Doesn’t matter why it’s walking right now, what matters is we take advantage of that while it lasts.
The trees were getting sparser in this direction, which would make obscuring their tracks a little more difficult if that kept up. Sean was pretty sure it would, and he knew why. He had gotten a few glimpses of it here and there when they had crested a hill or when the thickly-growing trees had cleared in places. If this thing kept coming for them, it was going to run them right into the edge of a desert. Sean knew deserts. Had been deployed to them before. Assuming food wasn’t too scarce, they could probably do rather well out there.
These thoughts and more were on the slime warrior’s mind as he plowed past another of those berry bushes towards a heartbeat that his pulse sense had picked up just seconds before. Hoping to surprise another deer, Sean barrelled right at it only to collide chest-to-tusk with a large boar. The fur-covered porker had clearly been napping its morning away in some mud only to hear him coming, scramble to get out, fail to do so, and in the process somehow make things worse for the both of them. The trio went down into the mud a short distance away, falling in a tangled mess of horrified and enraged squeals, clattering bones, and Gel’s raucous laughter echoing through Sean’s mind.
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Their ‘battle’ with the creature was so brief that Sean almost pitied the pig. The impact of their collision had, much to Gel’s delight, shoved the boar’s entire snout into the small hole that remained just below his chest. Between that and the instant of warning pulse sense had given the both of them, the brief disorientation of having a portion of its face literally melt off had given them all the time they needed to take the porker down. A few downward stabbing strokes of Gel’s dagger while Sean kept its tusks from moving anywhere got the job done.
You have defeated a Bramble Boar! You have gained 5 experience points.
Once Sean pulled himself out of the mud and shoved the ‘bramble boar’ out of his chest cavity, he discovered the mastiff-sized pig that didn’t actually have hair. Instead its back, face, and even legs were covered in a mud-soaked vine-like growth that had pointed ends at numerous intervals. Pulling up the battle prompt that he had received when they had first collided with the thing, Sean discovered that the natural defenses of the pig actually weren’t particularly sharp, but they did apparently have other uses.
You have been pricked by a Bramble Boar’s spine for 0 damage (0 total, 2 base minus 2 due to toughness). Due to taking 0 damage, you are not subject to the spine’s secondary effects.
Secondary effects? Does its fur seriously poison things multiple times? Sean wanted to go over this particular prompt more thoroughly with Gel, but they had a more pressing issue right now. Namely, that they were still being chased so this would have to be a meal on the run. Sean mentally directed some gratitude at the universe for their lucky find right before heading into the desert… until he realized that there would be no time to cook it, so making bacon was off the table. He resisted the urge to send the universe another message calling it a dick for that one.
“Breakfast on the GO!” Gel shouted triumphantly, waving his wickedly sharp, clear dagger around in the air. “Woo! Can you lift it? Please tell me you can lift it.”
“I can try.” Sean acknowledged, reaching down and pulling the boar’s body out of the mud. “The real question is whether or not we can eat it while we run, or if we’re going to have to stop first.”
“If that thing is still walking, then we should have plenty of time to scarf this hunk of yum down before it gets here.” Gel said, gesturing at the pig with his dagger as if he wanted to carve it up into chunks right now.
“And if it started running?” Sean asked, pointedly ignoring the ‘hunk of yum’ comment because he did not want to encourage its further use.
“We can’t possibly be that unlucky–”
Gel’s literal tempting of fate was interrupted by the sound of a tree – a whole, entire tree – crashing down to the forest floor a disturbingly not-far distance behind them. Sean glanced back cautiously in that direction, but his vision was obscured by the berry bush he himself had just crashed through seconds earlier. Wherever that undead monstrosity was, he couldn’t see it.
“You can’t just say shit like that, Gel!” Sean shouted at the slime before reaching down with his one good arm to try and shove his arm under its waist so he could heft the boar onto his shoulder. “This is exactly what happens when you say shit like that!”
“How is this my fault?!” Gel asked incredulously. “You’re the one who wanted to stare at it!”
“Pfft.” Sean pfft’d mentally as his grip slipped on the mud-soaked pig a second time. “Quit your bitching and help me lift this thing up before it finds us!”
“I would say it probably already has.” Gel commented as the slime reached Sean’s other hand down to help and the sound of unnervingly close branches being snapped followed by heavy footfalls echoed through the suddenly quiet forest.
Unfortunately, whether due to nerves or the fact that they were literally trying to find purchase on the skin of a mud-covered hog, it was becoming abundantly obvious to the slime warrior that they were wasting precious seconds here that they may not actually have.
Fuck it. Sean thought, wriggling his hand free. We’ll just have to find another one.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Gel demanded as Sean started to back away from the porcine corpse, his slime-controlled hand still grasping at its body. “We can’t just leave it!”
“We’re not about to die for some free-range pork, Gel.” Sean reassured his friend, though he could feel his skeletal nature pushing down his own panic at their inability to locate the monster that was clearly headed right for them. The fact that it didn’t have a pulse he could just listen for somehow made that worse. “I’ll get you another one, now–”
This time, it was Sean’s turn to trail off as the same berry-bush he had just barreled through parted its branches to reveal the hulking form of the undead monstrosity that had only recently slain those two Gold Spire paladins. Its dark eyes gleamed, and Sean noticed the wisps of darkness trailing off of them for the first time. He also noticed the fact that its lips appeared to have been melted shut, briefly reminding him of that scene in the ‘Hatrix’ where the main character had unfortunately experienced the same thing.
What Sean’s attention found more captivating than all of those facts however, was the nearly obsidian black blade the hulking thing was carrying loosely in its hand. A blade with chunks of silver tree bark still embedded here and there along its edge.
A hundred different possible reactions blurred through the slime warrior’s mind as it tried to calculate a way to escape. Sean had about settled on his top three choices when the larger undead’s sword-free hand gripped the tree next to the bush as it stepped fully through… just as Sean’s right hand whipped out.
“That’s my boar, you rot-sack!” Gel shouted with affronted defiance. “Back off!”
Normally when Gel shouted, Sean heard it in his mind. The pair never actually spoke out loud, mostly because Sean quite literally couldn’t. But the slime’s harsh voice had just echoed around the clearing like a hammer blow, shattering the usual silence of the forest like it was made of brittle glass. Sean didn’t have to look down to know that Gel had used his ability to mimic body parts to create a lungs and a mouth – that much was obvious. What Sean was curious about however, was the fact that the slime hadn’t spoken in the strange new tongue of this world.
That outburst had been in English. The slime warrior’s mind filed that fact away for later as it refocused his attention on the more survival-relevant happenings right in front of him. Like what Gel had just thrown.
For a second, Sean thought it had been the slime’s clear dagger. A quick distraction they could use to make their escape. It was only when a sound like the cracking of a giant iceberg slammed into him, followed by a sudden rush of impossible cold tearing through the clearing, that Sean realized what the slime had actually done. If he’d still had eyes, Sean would have blinked. Instead, however rude it was, he just stared as his jaw dropped open.
The icefall potion had not struck the undead, it had shattered against the bark of the dark-brown tree next to it. Sean only knew that because the trunk of said tree was now the epicenter of a massive boulder-sized crystal of sapphire-tinged ice that gave off a frigid aura even he could feel to a degree. The ice fully encased the entire right side of the hulking undead, though it had managed to move its head at the last second. Its left half – notably, the half still holding its sword – didn’t seem to be entirely impeded, and the disfigured creature was now swinging said black blade in his direction.
“Gel!” Sean all-but-shouted at his friend. “The big-boom-pot! Can we kill it now that it’s stuck?!”
“I don’t know what it is! Maybe? I don’t know, but I do know that if you toss that then we will die!” Gel’s hand lifted, as if the slime were preparing to swat Sean’s own away from reaching into the bag. “We’re too close! There’s no way we throw it ourselves and survive the blast!”
Sean growled inside his mind. He looked around the forest for ideas and then took a rapid mental inventory of what they had on hand. He could potentially build a sling to throw it – but he had never used one, and if Gel was right about the big-boom potion’s yield then he would only get one chance. Some kind of launcher, maybe?
The creature smashed its blade into the ice, and to the slime warrior’s great dismay he saw a tiny crack begin to form under the impact. It was deep under the crystalline prison’s surface, but it was there.
Sean’s mind went into overdrive. He processed a few more ideas in a fraction of a second, factored in his odds of finishing the monster off without getting chopped to bits by a blade that could bite through entire trees, and rapidly revised his list of possible reactions to their situation. Then he chose the only one that made sense. The one most likely to keep them alive versus a powerful creature that still wasn’t done-in despite being half undead popsicle. The thing he most likely should have done first instead of trying to lift the muddy pig one arm at a time.
Reaching down, Sean grabbed their precious and only source of food by one of its tusks, turned, and ran off towards the desert. Dragging the boar’s hide through the grass behind them the entire way.