On The Way to Volcano Village

Page created a bit of water and drank it, his throat getting dry after talking so much.

"Come on, we have to pick up the pace, we need to get there fast. Make your slime cannon."

"Okay." Zeeth got out eight more slimes, four for each of them, loaded them up, and got ready to compress them.

"Wait, Zeeth. You're not touching all five of them."

"Yeah, so?"

"So how are you going to collect them? You're not going to compress them the moment they shoot us out?"

"I've never thought of doing that. I just have the catch up to me as fast as they can. But that is genius. I just wonder if I can pull it off."

"You can, if you're not used to it yet you can just have them stretch out a line to you after."

"No, I think I got this." he compressed the slimes as far as they could go, making him look like they were sitting in the middle of a massive, blue pillow. He then had them all create a small little finger-like tube from the edge closest to him and elongate it until it could touch him. He also had the slimes from page do the same thing, but he had them do it so that it wouldn't affect their launching speed too much. Page sat from the side telling him things that his past self did to try and give him tips on what to do.

It took five minutes to get it all set up, but he was ready to launch himself and collect them at the same time. The hardest part would be to compress them from a single, finger-sized bit touching him. All this time, he had compressed them by swirling their mana into a single ball and compressing the water to match it, but he had always done it using his entire palm, where the magic was the easiest to control. Now he had to do it by simply touching these slimes with his skin and making perfect swirls. And he had to compress eight of them at once.

He pulled out a few more slimes to practice swirling them, but he knew they were trying to hurry, so after succeeding in making them strange jelly bean shapes, he thought it was good enough and that he would fix it later.

"Okay, I think I'm ready. On three. One...two…" He clenched his hands tighter, nervous that he would fail and lose them, the two smallest slimes that they were sitting on wrapped themselves around Zeeth and Page to protect them from the wind and he yelled, "THREE!" They were both fired into the air, holding onto their own slimes that they had been riding this whole time. They didn't go that high since he shot them more horizontally to cover the most distance, but the blurring trees and grass rushing past them still got farther away.

Eight fingers held onto Zeeth arms who tried to compress them. He instantly realized that it was nearly impossible and tried to compress the four smallest ones first, pulling them back into his hand. The only bad part was that they came back in even weirder shapes, they looked like watered down pabbles with a single weird finger sticking out on end. He compressed the other four, but he couldn't put too much time and effort into these either since they were sinking fast. He had to pull them back before they were run into the ground, no matter the shape. Just as they were about to land, he finished compressing them and the slimes that surrounded them shot the ground with a strong jet of water. Page and Zeeth did the same with whatever hand they could pull out to soften their landing. The jets of watered reduced the impact so much that instead of hitting the ground like comets and creating craters, they simply rolled a few more meters ahead.

Zeeth quickly unwrapped his slime a bit dizzy and still nervous about his eight slimes. Page seemed really used to this and calmly brought his slime over to Zeeth. Zeeth decompressed the eight slimes and quickly fixed them back to marbles. They all rolled around on the stone floor, jumping on each other and shooting out jets of water, glad to finally get some stretching done.

"I think they want to play."

"Yeah, I would assume so. They've been stuck inside my armor for so long not doing anything. Alright, I'll decompress them all a bit and let them play around."

"Yeah, that's alright. Were in the middle of nowhere, not many people come here so no one should see these. You could probably decompress them all and be fine. We should still check the surroundings though, just in case."

"Yeah, agreed." they both spread out their magic as far as they could, looking for anyone.

"I don't sense anything."

"Yeah, I think were clear. Go wild, kids." Zeeth opened his arms and let all of his slimes jump out. His armor quickly jumped off and his 100 slimes popped out and decompressed at once, launching themselves all over the place and shooting water everywhere. Thank goodness he still had his robe on, or he would have been naked again. They made sure to recover their water by making more with mana, but they quickly flooded the previously stone floor with water. There was a small group of them in one place, staring at something. Zeeth walked over there and noticed them all staring at a prideful Leaf. This slime had seeds in the center and could shoot out green water, making it the center of attention for many slimes.

But because of their horrible memory, many of them left to play with others and forgot about it. Even Leaf seemed to forget about all the attention and played in the water with the other slimes. Many of them stomped the ground to create craters that they filled with water and jumped in with others to swim. It was a very cute scene that changed the landscape of the area.

After a few minutes, all the slimes seemed relaxed and ready to shill, so he had them all compressed again and slapped them back on, and got ready to go again.

"Let's practice compressing slimes on the fly some more later. Back then, you used to be able to compress all 100 of your slimes and drag them back without even touching them. It was amazing, they all would just finish battling and they would all turn back into beads and fly back to you."

"What, how?! I thought I had to touch things to control their mana?"

"You got so good that you could control mana from far away by linking them. I shouldn't tell you too much, you will learn eventually when we get to our 70th destination."

"70th?!? You have our entire life planned out or something?"

"No, just the next 50 years or so. I will plan the rest on the way."

"No, no, no. I don't wanna just follow some sort of plan, how would you even know if everything will go according to plan? I know you came from the future, but things have already started to take a different path. The tentacon didn't destroy the town, things will just get further and further from what you knew."

"I know, I don't intend to strictly stick to it, it's a guideline of the places that we should be at to learn what we need to learn. Besides, how would you know where to go next if we don't have a destination."

"Alright, I won't question your knowledge of the world, even if you weren't from the future, having a merchant father clearly makes you more experienced, but I just want to go where the wind takes me."

"What if there is no wind? Are you just going to sit around doing nothing, waiting for your chance to be moved by some force of chance? If there is no wind, you have to get up and do things yourself."

"Yeah, I get that, but I want to go wherever it seems I should or want to go. How about this, we will go where it seems we should, and if there is no place calling out to us, we follow your plan to go places?"

"Alright, that sounds like a great plan. After discussion, we will decide where to go to get the most out of it."

"Good agreed." They slapped hands together and gave a mighty shake.

"Cool. Let's start moving again, we gotta go to the volcano village."

"Alright. Let's use another pair of slimes, the other two deserve some rest." Zeeth held out his left hand and threw out a pair of slimes and got to moving again. "Do you have any more tips for moving around or fighting that my future self used?"