Slime 2

~~*~~

The slime didn't want to seem whiny but he had a hard life and it never got easy. He never expected things to get better and he was right. He was killed and was reborn as a slime. The final 'screw you' from the universe.

Excellent.

Marvelous.

Forget what he said before. If he ever saw God or anyone from the universe's executive board, he would punch them in the face. The slime sighed and let his anger go as he realized it was pointless.

He went through the five stages of grief pretty quickly. It was odd though. He never before blamed someone else for his problems like this. Perhaps he was just more irritable?

The slime was thinking this as he trekked further upwards, rolling along with his slime body. The distance to the light was longer than expected. Because of the abundance of nutrients on the cave surfaces, he could maintain energy for the journey. The cave was hard and filled with stalactites and stalagmites.

The organic nutrients that covered the surfaces gave the cave a shiny glow. The temperature of the cave grew colder as he made his way up. As such, he saw fewer slimes the higher he climbed.

When he arrived at the light source, he found it wasn't sunlight. It was a campfire. Using his three-sixty vision, he could see the group of four people was heavily armed. He hid in a corner. Three were sleeping as one person in the party kept watch.

Thank goodness! He thought. The slime had his first human contact and on the first day of his life no less! Though he didn't have a good sense of time yet, that was beside the point! There were humans in this world! A sense of hope for a life in this world was born at this moment.

Anyway, it was unwise for him to just appear in front of them. He was unlikely to be able to communicate with them and even if they spoke English or Chinese, he had no mouth to speak from.

Also, if they classified him as a monster, they could kill him. Damaging his slime wasn't the problem, but if they broke his crystal inside of him, he didn't know if he'd live.

From the look of things, the party of four were in their teenage years with the old-timer on watch. They slept in their strange armor made of hard fibers. It looked uncomfortable. Included in their bags and equipment were the weapons they had within arm's reach. They had swords and rifles.

Swords and guns. If they had guns then why would they need swords at all?

As he was thinking this, a random slime unwittingly waddled close to the old man on guard. The slime was the size of his boot heel.

WHAT?! He screamed on the inside.

Comparing the size of himself and that slime, they were nearly identical in size and color. He didn't realize he was so small. He figured the cave was just really big. He was surprised he didn't notice this sooner. Denial, perhaps?

The small slime then bumped into the old timer's boot. Not realizing the slime was there, the old man looked down from sitting on a rock. The old man didn't look to put much thought into it and simply stepped on the slime, almost out of habit.

If he had a spine, he would've shivered at the sight of that poor little slime being crushed under the boot. But the old man wasn't done. He lifted his boot to reveal the slime innards stuck to the ground and his boot, and the tiny pebble of a crystal. The crystal did the same as he did, it glowed a light pattern and it flowed into the veins of the slime body as it attempted to reform.

The old man then brought down his boot again and—in one swift motion, scraped the slime and its life-crystal off his boot—shattering it. The slime then laid there motionless. It was dead.

He knew it was dead. It wasn't just him imagining it in his panicked state either. Something told him that the small slime was as dead as a doornail. Within his three-sixty vision, the last light of the slime's life faded into nothing.

Despite being reduced to the status of a cockroach, he resolved to carry on. So much so that he hadn't moved from his hiding spot for another few hours. Around the corner were his former species and they would kill him on sight, not even as a threat but as a nuisance.

His consciousness came back to his present situation as sounds of activity from the campsite were heard. Good, the slime could hear. He was so lost with everything going on that the echoes of the cave made it hard to distinguish actual noise from white noise.

He silenced his thoughts as he heard the party speak. Exactly as he thought, their dialect was unintelligible to him. That was another mystery solved. Out of all the languages, he became accustomed to hearing back in his old world, it didn't sound like any he heard before.

No, that wasn't technically correct.

Although it wasn't entirely the same, the intonation and basic sounds they made fit the pattern of speech used by a language derived from Latin. Impossible. With just one look, the party was clearly from another world entirely different from his. They were very primitive. Yet, they were here. Nothing was making sense to him!

The language sounded funny but the more he listened, the more he understood. Just barely, though. He still couldn't know the content of their conversation. He could understand some phrases and nouns he heard as he connected the words he heard to their actions such as 'pot' and 'fire.'

Cayden never learned a whole language from scratch before but he had an amazing memory and cognitive reasoning. Some said it was to his detriment.

The elder slime killer made several torches from the campfire and handed them to the others before extinguishing it. It seemed like they were packed up and were about to move. Squeezing between two rocks, he tried to hide as they passed by. As he formed his body to get between the rocks, he caught his crystal in the small space.

Great pain surged through his entire body!

Every fiber in him was on fire!

He was grateful knowing he didn't have a voice to shout with because any sound from him would surely alert the party to his blood-curdling scream. Quickly, on reflex, his slime shifted the crystal inside of him out of the grip of the rocks.

His slime was sweating to cool down his warm body turned hot. His three-sixty vision was reduced to his immediate area. Before, when he went splat on the ground, his own slime must have cushioned his crystal.

Panting, the crystal within him started nulling the pain and the pulsating soon stopped. It was the most painful thing he had experienced in this world so far. It was certainly no way to live if his crystal would cause him such great pain every time it was love-tapped, but compared to the pain of dying, this was nothing.

Again, he resolved to carry on and followed the human party. He wouldn't follow them to anyplace that was dangerous for him. If he was fortunate enough, the party could lead him to the surface. However, the party seemed to be descending. He had to roll quickly because of his earlier heartache to catch up to them.

He soon spotted them again. Doing a headcount, it was one old slime killer, two guys, and a girl. The girl was holding a staff-like weapon, like a fusion of a staff and pole-arm. He thought of something and then rejected it just as quickly. If there was magic in this world, he didn't know how much more of this he could take in just one day or so.

When they arrived at his spawning pool, the place of his birth, their faces filled with disgust and the girl quickly screamed and raised her staff-arm. 'Fire', one of the words he knew, was chanted and a flame came down on the spawning pool as she swung her staff-arm towards the ground.

She was like a maiden afraid of insects, he thought.

The area was set on fire and as the flame went out, all that was left were crystals without their bodies to support them. As the nutrients on the surfaces were also burnt, they couldn't reform. Thousands of tiny crystals laid on the floor and the party simply stepped over and shattered them as they left.

He was at a loss for words. Not only did he saw all of his siblings roasted alive but he also saw magic. Genuine hocus pocus magic. Great, another way to kill me, he thought and sighed to himself.