Advent of Eternity - Chapter 107 (Patreon)

The ground started to rumble, and the Rose Pirates took several steps back, raising their weapons. Green, goopy flesh erupted from behind the door, ballooning out into the room as a massive slime squelched its way inside the large, open area. The monster took up nearly a fourth of the room and blocked off the door entirely. It was almost completely translucent at the edges, but grew to a darker, opaque green as it got closer to the center.

Its gelatinous sides wobbled with every movement, and long tendrils writhed at its sides, searching for the intruders. Cyll brought his sword down on one of them as it grew too close to him. It popped off with a squeak and the cube writhed in pain, lurching toward him.

He cursed, diving out of the way. The slime slapped down to the ground, melting a small hole into the ground. The material that it destroyed floated within its body before getting spat back out. Sliding forward, the slime passed over its chopped limb, reabsorbing it. The cut appendage reformed, whole once more.

Doesn’t eat inanimate material. That explains the city streets.

“Uh, Knell?” Cyll asked, keeping his sword at the ready. “On your orders. My previous strategy when fighting slimes has been to run.”

“How often have you fought slimes?” Stix asked, leaping back as a tendril whipped out to grab her.

“Often enough to know that they aren’t worth the effort,” Cyll replied. The slime lurched toward him, and he dodged out of the way.

“Stop talking so much,” Knell snapped. “It’s got no eyes or nose, so it’s obviously using sound vibrations to track you.”

Even as he spoke, he used Exhume on himself to bring his leg back into its whole form for just an instant, throwing himself to the side. The slime lunged, sliding past him and splattering against the wall.

It peeled itself free, twitching in apparent anger. Actually, it was pretty difficult to tell what exactly the slime was thinking. It had no features or even a mouth to show emotion with. For that matter, Knell was perfectly happy not knowing what the slime thought of him. He wasn’t certain he wanted to know if it was even intelligent.

Knell raised a finger to his lips, sending a very pointed glare at the rest of his team. They all nodded their understanding and remained still. The slime slurped along the ground, its tendrils waving in the air as it attempted to figure out where its prey had gone.

While it searched, Knell racked his brain for the best way to defeat the monster. They could always try to escape, but that would have meant giving up on finding any trace of Stix’s brother. He now had almost no doubt that the man was likely dead, but if he had been carrying anything on him, the slime likely had it. He owed it to the moon elf to find whatever it was that he’d left behind.

Knell pressed his lips together. Ideally, the best way to deal with a soft-body creature like this would have been a large amount of salt. There were two very glaring problems with that particular method, though.

The first, and most obvious, was that he did not have a copious amount of salt on him. The second was that, if dealing with this monster was so easy, Rosewood would have done it long ago. For some reason, they hadn’t. That meant that either the slime was resistant to salt by some means, or they wanted it alive.

Stix took a careful step to the side, leaning backward as a tendril passed near her. A rock scuffed beneath her boot and the slime lurched. Cyll grabbed her, throwing the girl out of the way and slapping the slime’s tendril with the flat of his sword.

It blurred into motion, enveloping the man almost instantly. Instead of fighting back, Cyll hurled his sword as far as he could. The blade crashed to the ground on the far side of the room, skidding several feet across the stone before coming to a stop.

“Cyll!” Stix yelled.

“He can’t die,” Knell snarled. “Move! Start shooting the slime. Aim for its center. If we break its core, the whole thing dies. No small arrows.”

Cyll tore into the slime from within, but his clothes – and he – were disintegrating at a rapid rate. He locked eyes with Knell for a moment. The skin on his face was already gone, and red was mixing into the green liquid floating around him. Giving Knell a small nod, Cyll turned and dove deeper into the monster. He swam through its body like it was the ocean, ignoring the trail of red he left behind.

Knell drew his flintlock and slid one of the blue crystal bullets into it, taking aim at the center of the slime. His finger wrapped around the trigger. Then he paused, gritting his teeth and lowering the weapon.

If I shoot and miss the core, the monster might figure out we’ve got a way to hurt it. I need Stix to figure out the location of its core for me. Her arrows probably shouldn’t pose this much threat since they aren’t magical, but if it hits the core, the sound will be different. That’ll show me what to aim for. I might only have one or two chances to do this correctly.

The slime was still writhing around, seemingly content with its snack on Cyll but still in search of the other intruders. Knell remained stoic as the monsters tendrils flicked around, his foresight showing him exactly where they would be in time for him to make sure he was a safe distance away.

Knell pointed at Maya, then to the door behind them. He gestured to his eyes, then pointed upward. Before she could move, he raised a hand and shook her head. He nodded down to his feet.

‘You want me to watch?’ Maya mouthed. ‘For other people?’

‘From here,’ Knell mouthed. ‘No walking. No noise.’

Maya swallowed nervously and nodded, craning her head back to keep an eye on their exit. Knell turned back to the slime, his brow furrowed and the flintlock feeling heavy in his hand.

He’d never considered himself an overly compassionate person, but he didn’t want to think about what Cyll was feeling right now. Immortality didn’t give any way to become immune to pain, and judging by the rate things were melting away within the slime, it wasn’t anything close to a comfortable experience.

Stix had taken her huge bow off her back and had already unwrapped it, but the weapon was still folded up. There was no way she could put it together without making any noise at all, and the slime would be upon her before she could move again. If they started fighting once more, it would be for all of them to stop moving quickly enough to avoid getting eaten.

Knell gritted his teeth and cast Exhume on himself again. He needed his leg fully functional for this if he wanted to avoid getting turned into a meal. Pointing his staff, he then cast Slow on the monster.

Its movements decreased and its tentacles ground to a halt. Knell snapped his fingers and took a step to the side as the slime shot back to its normal speed, lunging for him. Knell jumped to the side, catching himself with his staff and making another scuffle along the floor.

The slime slurped after him. It was the oddest, yet one of the most uncomfortable fights he’d ever been in. Aside from the sound of his boots on the ground and the slime squelching, it was completely silent. There were no screams or even battle cries. Just… odd, sticky burbling.

Stix’s huge bow let out a loud click from the other side of the room as she pulled the string back and slotted a large arrow in it with a single, smooth motion. The slime lurched toward her, but Knell cast Slow on it once more.

He clapped his hands as the spell wore off, bringing the creature toward himself once more. Blood trickled down his face as he strained to push his foresight to the max, giving himself every possible second he could get to react to the monster.

It was disturbingly fast for something without any muscles or bones. None of its own, at least. Cyll’s were floating around in there, somewhere.

Stix took aim and fired. Her bolt – nearly the thickness of Knell’s forearm – hurtled through the air and bit deep into the center of the monster. It flew true, punching deep into the slime’s body and vanishing into the deep green. Judging from the lack of noise, it hadn’t made contact with the core.

“Again! Aim at a different spot near where you just shot,” Knell yelled, rolling to the side and nearly losing his staff in the process. His efforts saved him from getting grabbed by a large tendril of goop that shot out from the Slime’s center. “It’s a damn good thing this thing is too stupid to think.”

The slime lurched toward him, this time moving so much of its considerable mass that Knell nearly didn’t have a place to dodge to. He threw himself to the side, behind a pillar, just in time to avoid getting sucked in.

He scrambled to his feet, using his staff reflexively even though his Exhume-enhanced body didn’t even need it. Stix’s crossbow fired again. The bolt sailed past Knell’s pillar and thunked into the Slime, once again passing through the monster without making any noise.

Stix didn’t have to be told a second time. As Knell darted around, he cast Slow on the slime once more, halting its movements for just long enough for Stix to string another bolt. She fired once more.

The slime slammed back to normal speed, moving forward and largely out of the bolt’s path, causing it to enter the back half of the monster rather than its center. The bolt sank deep and let out a deep thud as it struck something heavy.

After taking an instant to process the noise and make sure it didn’t sound like wood striking wood, Knell raised his flintlock once more. He cast Slow on the slime one more time, then pulled the trigger.

A flash of brilliant blue light lit the dim room, and the bolt pierced deep into the monster, crashing into something within it. Knell didn’t wait to see if it had worked. He was already slotting a second bullet into his weapon. By the time Slow had worn off, he fired once more.

The second bullet followed the same path as the first, crashing into something and sending reverberations through the slime’s body. All of them quickly backed up as the gelatinous monster slumped, liquid pouring off of it into a slickly pool on the ground.

It started slowly, but quickly accelerated. Within a minute, the entire monster had sunk into a puddle. Stix’s ballistae bolts floated in the acid, one of them lodged into the only firm part of the monster that remained – a thick, murky cube the size of her head.

Two bullet holes ran along the cube, and faint blue light still shone around it from where the bullets had struck home. Knell finally lowered his flintlock, letting out a sigh. He heaved his weight onto his staff and released Exhume, ignoring the wave of pain and exhaustion that washed over him.

I really need to stop using that spell so much, or I’m going to have a head of fully white hair by the time I’m twenty three.

“Cyll?” Stix asked, her voice trembling, as she rose to her feet, her huge bow still on the ground at her feet.

As the sludge continued to spread across the room, thinning out and dribbling through some cracks in the floor, its depth reduced. A part of it near the core twitched. Particles started to gather, moving through the sludge, and red muscle tissue begun taking shape.

Maya turned slightly green as Cyll’s body rebuilt itself, piece by piece. Despite the relief on both her and Stix’s faces, both of them looked disgusted as the immortal man arose from the monster’s body, completely naked aside from his long beard that, mercifully, covered most of what Knell didn’t want to see. Cyll promptly hopped into the air, letting out a storm of curses as he bounced around before sprinting for dry land, shaking off his feet as he ran.

“Well, that was a right shitshow,” Cyll said, holding his beard in place. “I don’t suppose anyone has a spare set of clothes on them? I’ll even settle for a sock, so long as you don’t want it back.”