Chapter 79: Cave slimes
Alex Sandclaw’s POV:
The slimes were round and had a skin—no,a membrane—like stone. It was about the size of a small boulder, only barely coming up to my knees. Rocks jutted out of it in a way that reminded me of a riverbed. If it weren’t for the bones, I would’ve almost called them cute. But they weren’t cute.
With a quick thought, I inspected each of them.
[Cave slime(lvl 9)]
[Cave slime(lvl 11)]
[Cave slime(lvl 9)]
Those levels were manageable. Below ours.
I looked at the un-cute creatures and readied my sword. If these slimes were anything like the slimes I’d seen when Felix and I had gone down to the training grounds, this would be an easy fight. They had done nothing but eat grass. They’d been harmless.
It would be a dangerous assumption to think these slimes would be harmless, too, though. For one, they had bones sticking out of their rocky membranes. Secondly, they were hopping towards us at a high pace, squelching each time they did. It was a horrible sound—like dropping a heavy wet towel filled with rocks on the bathroom floor.
They were almost near us when Tiki loosed an arrow at one of the monsters. The projectile hit its rocky membrane at an angle, making the clanging sound of metal hitting stone, and skidded off.
I stepped forwards and did the same with my sword. I slashed at the closest slime and gouged a small chunk off it. The slime, unexpectedly, let out a shriek and I stumbled back in surprise. When I looked at the slime again, it had already reabsorbed the part I’d cut off.
“This is pointless! Fall back!” I called out to the others.
They listened and we retreated further down the tunnel. The slimes, though they were fast, were much slower than we were, giving us time to plan.
“They’re cave slimes,” Felix said. “The best way to kill them is blunt force, or to pierce their cores. Tiki, can your arrows penetrate that deeply?”
Tiki looked at her bow with uncertainty. “I’m not sure. Maybe if I hit the slimes at just the right angle so it doesn’t bounce off? I’ll try.”
Felix nodded and turned to me. “You need to hit them, or stab the core. Slashing or cutting pieces off only really slows them down.”
“What will you be doing?” I asked.
“What you guys suggested, of course. Use my weight. Alright, here they come. I’ll take the middle one. Yell if you need help.”
There wasn’t time to say anything more as the slimes had finally arrived. I quickly glanced over at the others. Tiki had her bow drawn and was aiming while Felix drew back to pounce. Then I had to focus on my own slime.
Once it got within range, it darted forward unexpectedly. It rolled like a boulder coming down a steep mountainside. As it rolled, the bones jutting out were crushed and splintered, ground to dust by the slime’s weight. With a quick sidestep, I barely managed to get out of the way in time. And while it passed, I kicked it with the flat of my foot. A painful jolt raced up my leg as I’d basically just kicked a boulder, but my increased Attributes gave me the strength I needed to send the boulder off its course.
So, instead of rolling further down the tunnel, where it could’ve slowed down and come at me again, it smashed into the wall with a deafening thud. At first, it looked like the slime would fracture, but then its solid, stone-like membrane rippled and it absorbed the impact mostly unscathed. Annoying.
By the time it had recovered, I was already upon it. With my sword raised high, I jabbed down towards the stone bastard. It took strength, but my sword pierced through its membrane with ease. After that, the blade sunk through its gooey insides like a hot knife through butter, until I felt my sword glancing against something hard in the center. With a quick pull to the side, I shattered the fragile core and the slime lost its integrity, its insides becoming its outsides as it oozed through the cracks of its rocky membrane.
[You have slain Cave slime(lv. 10)]
Then, as I felt my boots sizzling beneath my feet, I realized I’d fucked up. With a yelp, I jumped away from the dead slime and shook my feet to get rid of the acidic liquid. Even in death, these things were annoying.
With a well practiced motion, I pulled a flask from my belt and let a few drops fall on my feet and sword. We’d known there would be slimes in the caves, so Tiki had prepared potions that would neutralize their acid. It was especially important for her, since she didn’t have scales protecting her skin like Felix and I did.
With that problem dealt with, I turned to my teammates. To my surprise, I was the first to finish my slime. I’d really expected Felix to kill his one first. Instead, it looked like he was toying around with it. Playing with it like a cat might play with a ball. Bouncing it from talon to talon and chasing after it when he missed. Then he noticed me looking at him, and with a sheepish smile, crushed it.
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Tiki was having a lot more trouble with her slime, though. Her arrows just wouldn’t penetrate, and her dagger didn’t have enough reach to destroy the core. She’d have to whittle it down, but that would spray acid everywhere, and while her armor was pretty resistant against it, her skin was not. She’d be able to hold the acid off for a while, and would probably be mostly fine afterwards, but this wouldn’t be our only fight. She couldn’t let herself get injured like that at the beginning of our stay here.
So she tried stabbing it with her arrows instead.
We offered her help, but she wanted to do it on her own. And while it took a while, she managed to do it in the end. Afterwards, we decided she’d hang back for any next fights with the slimes, though. It simply took her too long to kill one, and that was time better spent hunting other monsters instead. Though she didn’t like it, she did agree. It was a bad match up and she could admit that.
“Good job,” our guide said, and I startled. I’d completely forgotten she was here, too. “Don’t forget to update your map before you continue.”
Tiki nodded and did exactly that while I helped clean up the acid from Felix’s scales and to distract him. As soon as the fight had been over, he had started glancing around nervously again. I couldn’t really blame him. I didn’t like the tunnels either. Being so far from the sun, down in this damp cold tunnel, wasn’t fun. He had it worse, though.
But we both pushed through it. It was something to be proud of, I thought. Especially Felix. He could’ve asked to go back as soon as he realized his claustrophobia, but he didn’t. Instead, he continued pushing on. It was brave and I liked it. It made me want to be brave, too. To face my fears and worries head on. We’d have to talk about it all later—at the very least, understanding what exactly about the cave made him anxious would help me reassure him when we went back tomorrow. But I would be sure to remember to drive that point home. Being brave was something to be proud of.
Soon, we continued walking down the tunnel. While we walked, Felix and I continued chatting about the book. Our opinions about the main character differed, but they differed in a good way. It wasn’t like the arguments dad and mom used to have, where they just wouldn’t listen to each other. Then again, this was a much different kind of argument. With mom and dad it was more a fight, while this was more a friendly discussion. But still, we listened to each other and could understand why the other thought what they thought, even if we didn’t quite agree.
That was already a step up from my parents. The only thing they seemed to agree on was finding me a girlfriend and being angry and upset when I had no desire for said girlfriend.
I sighed as I thought about them. The more time I spent here at the Academy, the more distant they felt and the less their acceptance seemed to matter. Between my friends accepting me as I was, the support group, and now the fact that I had a boyfriend, their complaints just weren’t as significant. Before, I had no one to drown out their words with their own. I was glad that wasn’t the case, anymore.
But still, I wanted them to accept me for who I was, and not for who they wanted me to be. I knew I was getting my hopes up, but I really wanted a letter back, saying they were sorry and that I should come back home. Felix had said that it was entirely possible I would still get a letter back, and that the mail system was just very slow towards some places. I could believe that. No, I needed to believe that.
Despite all their awful words, I couldn’t imagine them not writing me back. Whether their message would be positive or not was an entirely different matter, though.
“So, right or left?” Tiki asked, breaking me out of my thoughts. I looked up, confused for a moment before I realized we’d arrived at a fork in the tunnel. I shook my head to clear my remaining thoughts—I couldn’t get distracted now. Not down here. I’d think about it all later.
“How about we go right?” I asked. “Then with the next split, we’ll take right again. That way we’ll know we always need to take the left turn to get back.”
Felix nodded. “I was about to suggest something similar. On top of having the map, we should pick a route that’s easy to remember, like always going right. We shouldn’t get lost nearly as quickly, then.”
So we went right, and this time I paid attention to where we were going. We quickly ran into a few more packs of slimes. Herds of slimes? Groups of slimes?
“A group of slimes is called a puddle,” Felix said when I asked him.
The puddles of slimes were easily defeated now that we knew how to beat them. Felix just crushed them like before, while I just baited them until they hurled themselves towards me, after which I would kick them into the wall again and stab them before they could recover. It was a remarkably effective strategy, though it didn’t translate well to multiple slimes. I could dodge one just fine, but two or more? It got difficult. Luckily Felix was there to help me, and Tiki to distract them while we killed the rest.
I leveled up again twice, too, bringing me up to level fifteen. Sadly, Tiki didn’t level even once. Hopefully we’d face some monsters she could kill too, soon.
And so we did. We soon came across a totally different kind of enemy. It looked like what would happen if a dog fucked a mushroom, and the mushroom somehow had babies. It walked on four legs, but instead of a head, it had the cap of an ugly brown mushroom, and instead of fur, its body was covered in white, softly twitching and moving fungal roots. Maybe its entire body was even made of the material. I felt queasy just looking at it.
It didn’t make a sound as it walked down the tunnel. All three of us went quiet as the mushroom dog didn’t even seem to notice us. None of us did anything as it walked by. Maybe we were all curious if it would just not notice us, or maybe we were all shocked by how gross the thing was, or maybe we were all scared and didn’t want to provoke it. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. The result was the same—we let it get way too close.
Only when it was almost past us did it stop and look back. It didn’t have eyes, but I felt it staring at me anyway. The edges of its mushroom head rippled, then flared. My eyes widened as I realized what was about to happen.
We’d all read up on the various monsters that roamed these tunnels. From the sturdy cave slimes that were hard to kill, to the strange blind lizards with eerily sharp hearing. By far the worst of them all was the wandering cave mushroom, with its spore attack that could fill a tunnel with deadly toxin in mere moments.
And we’d let it get close.
Fuck.