The Capture Unit

Zeeth kept turning corners and flicking the gems in Gul. He was mostly waiting until Gul had absorbed the mana of these stone that these walls were made of and started bashing it, but no matter how much he looked Gul didn't seem to be making any gray stones like these walls. The only thing that was remotely gray were the gems that Gul created by combining all three gems to create one super dense, super hard gem that shot out.

The gems that he created by merging the three were strong and fast, but they were like iron. With enough force, they just crumble and break into shards. If it was facing something strong enough, like these gray walls, they simply bounce off and sustain a ton of damage. Another good throw and they would break to pieces. He wanted to make them more flexible, this way they wouldn't break as easily.

The first thing Zeeth tried was changing the shape. Maybe if it was thicker and shorter, it could hit harder. It became harder to break, but it also became slower. If he tried making them too long and thin, they would snap apart. He had to keep it at a perfect proportion or it would be basically ineffective.

After many hours on both ends, they both made huge progress. The gems on Gul began to grow some kind of grey layer to them. It had finally started to take in the magic from the walls around it, making all the gems one step harder and because the layer was so thin, the light could still be seen perfectly. Instead, the grey layer seemed to spread the light more evenly around.

He could even choose whether or not the gems needed the layer of grey or not. The smaller ones on the inside began mixing with some grey stone, like mixing gems with cement, making a totally new gem. This one had the general shape of the normal, sharp gems but the edges were smoothed out a little, making it look like a small, fat javelin with grey and purple mixed together.

He could combine this with some yellow and blue gems to make it harder, but this was finally strong enough to pierce the walls. He held Gul under his robe so that it looked like the gem would shoot out of his palms and fired a gray-purple, lightly glowing gem at the wall. The gem sped at the wall, Zeeth fully expecting a hole to be made from the gem. But the javelin simply collided with the wall, creating a loud echoing of thunder-like vibrations and simply clattering loudly to the floor again.

"What the hell? Why didn't it break?" Zeeth went up to the wall, feeling the smooth wall where the gem had hit, "The gem should've been hardened." he picked up the gem on the ground and noticed the tip had been rubbed flat from the force. There was no cracking, but the tip had been destroyed from a spear-like tip to the back end of a pencil.

Page was complete with his decoding and had found that the teleporter had sent him directly to the volcano, deep underground near the base of the volcano. He couldn't reuse the teleporter to send him where Zeeth had gone since he didn't know if it was a trap or not and the teleporter had lost its power. He knew he needed to get there physically. But even from within the village, even the food of the volcano was far and his current body didn't have the fire affinity he had in his past life. He needed to get there slowly enough to get accustomed to the heat, but still as soon as possible to get to Zeeth.

"I can use Mag! Mag has a fire affinity far higher than mine, what if Mag rode me there and wrapped around me to protect me? I think it should work, Zeeth did that before. Wait, wheres Mag?" Page jumped up from the ground, where he had been working all this time, hunched over the teleporter written in the ground. He cracked his back a little and went looking around for Mag, hoping it wasn't too far away. Just as he turned around, Mag was jumping its way back as if it had caught on fire. It seemed to had gotten too close to the volcano in its arrogance that no amount of heat was a problem and bounded back to safe land where it wasn't nearly as hot.

"Perfect! Mag, I need you to send me here!" he pointed at a point on a map that he had pulled up on his screen and showed it to Mag as if the slime would understand. Without Zeeth, he needed to manually control and steer the slime, something he hadn't done in at least 50 years.

"Mag, calm down!" he made some strange sound, somewhat similar to the sound slimes make when they move around. Mag and all the other slimes stopped moving and looked at him with focus, ready to take in anything he said. Too bad they wouldn't remember it in a few minutes anyway, but the noise had gotten them to focus.

"Mag, let me jump on, we need to find Zeeth." at the sound of Zeeth's name, all the slimes began moving in a frenzy, bouncing around looking for him. The lack of his presence had made them all a little uneasy, where had their master gone all this time? What happened to him? Was he having fun without them? Could he possibly have done the worst thing possible, began playing with other slimes without them?

Mag crouched down for Page to jump on after a few more gestures and words and Page directed him in the direction where the teleporter had told him. Mag had formed a deep red outline from the dust and the heat and the inside was a little ball of pure white steam forming. There were small whisks lightly whipping off every now and then, but it mostly just stayed the same, a little ball of tightly packed mist. Mag wrapped itself around Page as it had been instructed and kept Page at a cool level, only allowing a certain amount of heat in to allow him to get used to the heat.

"Thanks, Mag. I'll make sure to bring Zeeth back. With you guys alive, he surely is still alive as well. All you other slimes, just stay here. We'll bring them back."

His 98 other slimes, outside from Mag and Gul, were staying at the first volcano house. Page had tried to condense some to a bit smaller size so that others wouldn't notice them and left. He couldn't condense them as Zeeth did, he only ever learned how to do this once just in case something happened.

Zeeth tried combining a grey stoned gem with another yellow gem and fired it, but all that did was make the spear dent less and crack more. The wall stayed steady. He kept trying a combination of grey gems and other gems, even combining a grey purple gem with another grey yellow gem, hoping combining two gems with the grey stone in it would make it strong enough to pierce the wall, but none of that worked either.

He slumped down in resignation and tiredness and randomly combined gems to create a cool look in the slime. He even tried forming a block made only out of the grey stone that was forming from within Gul and made a weird, ovular disc. Like all the other gem mashups, this one got really unstable and shot out of Gul the moment it was made.

The disc hit the wall opposite of Zeeth and created a huge cracking sound, hurting his eardrums like someone had hit a loud gong right next to his ears. He jumped up to look at the wall and found the disc lodged tightly within the walls, a dent holding it nicely within itself.

"Of course! It needs the pure grey stone to break the grey stone, simply having a gem reinforced by it doesn't make it as strong as the wall! It just helps make it sharper and take the shape of a spear."

"Test subject 24 has damaged the stone walls, 1950 damage. Send in the capture units."

He heard a loud clicking noise from a distance that turned a few corners that were getting louder and closer. He turned around and ran after the sound. He wasn't keen on running into danger, but he wanted to get closer to the exit that this thing had come from, whatever it was. Minutes later, he had come face to face with a massive robot. All of its limbs and heads were all boxy and made completely of simple geometric shapes. Its arms and legs moved with creaks and odd pauses. Its head was a round sphere that moved so that its single red eye could look at Zeeth.