Chapter 14: In Pursuit

Days passed, and supplies were getting even lower. There was plenty of meat and edible plants, but not everything they needed could be hunted and gathered. They made another detour to a village further down the line, hoping that this time, they wouldn’t arrive in the middle of a human sacrifice. Unfortunately, there was no one left to throw onto an altar. The entire place had been leveled, every building smashed and burned, and suffice to say, this town had also been emptied of inhabitants.

“What in the world happened here?” Seraph gasped.

“The village must have been raided,” said Shannon.

“I don’t think it was that simple. I’m getting a really bad feeling,” said Valia. Noah climbed off of Shannon and walked around, investigating the scene. The earth, the rubble, they all held clues.

“Noah, what do you see?” Seraph asked.

“It’s strange. All this wood, everything that’s been damaged looks burned, but fire didn’t do this. It looks more like it was corroded, as if by acid. And the ground ... these formations in the dirt are unique. I don’t see any hoofprints from horses, no imprints from heavy boots, or even monster tracks. It’s all smoothed out, as if someone had come through here with a giant broom, or something huge was being dragged through here.

“We need to get out of here, now. This place is cursed,” said Bojena.

Noah picked up a handful of soil. It was blackened, just like the debris of the destroyed homes, and gave an unpleasant sensation against his skin, a toxic sensation he had felt before. “Yeah, it is cursed, Cursed Earth.”

“Cursed Earth?” Seraph asked.

“It’s a Profane ability, one I encountered in both the library and the field. Just as they can corrupt people with their venom to bolster their ranks, they can corrupt the environment to their advantage. The land is saturated with dark energy, making it utterly toxic and draining the vitality of all who stand upon it. It weakens our bodies and magic, while they enjoy a boost in abilities. All of Welindar was turned into Cursed Earth when Kaisen died, and it can never be reclaimed. You can feel it, can’t you? That sensation of cold oil in your stomach, that sudden heaviness in your limbs, that feeling of your mana leaking out of you like blood from an artery? Walking on Cursed Earth is like walking on your own grave.”

“If the Profane are really out here wiping villages off the map, we have to stop them,” said Valia. “We can’t let this continue unchecked, regardless of Lumestada.”

Noah wanted to refuse her. For him, the mission mattered more than the civilians, not to mention two members of their group were magic deficient. However, the threat before them wasn’t something they could just ignore. If not stopped, it would continue to wreak havoc and chip away at Uther, killing its inhabitants and befouling the land. At the very least, they had to identify the source of the phenomenon and assess the situation. With any luck, they’d could pass the job off to someone else. He removed his hat and sealed it in his ring, releasing him from the headband restraint. He had a feeling that whatever awaited them wasn’t something he could face while bound.

“Let’s go take a look.”

They set off from the destroyed village, following the trail of Cursed Earth, with Shannon and the horses trying to avoid stepping on it. Riding up a grassy hill towards a ridge of trees, they spotted something moving in the brush, and it was big.

“What is that thing?” Seraph asked.

“Damn it, I had hoped I was wrong,” Noah cursed. “Be ready. I’ll try and lure it out.”

He took aim with a phantom gun and shot the shaded mass with a mana bullet. Instead of flinching or falling over from the sensation, the creature lunged in the direction of the shot as if it had been waiting for it. It burst into the light, facing the group without a face. It was slime, a common enough monster in these lands, but they could not compare to this abomination. The most enormous slime Noah had ever seen was the size of a beanbag chair, but this black mass was close to a garbage truck in stature, like a mountain of living tar capable of swallowing their whole group at once. Despite its dark shade, it was also translucent, and within its murky depths, the bones of countless people and animals could be seen floating, the multitude of skulls staring at Noah’s group with empty eye sockets. Rather than dissolving the bones, it seemed to be collecting them. The mystery of the missing villagers had been solved.

“They found a way to attach a parasite to a slime core,” Noah muttered.

“Making it just weak enough that it can survive in the sunlight,” Valia added fearfully.

The slime again lunged towards them, moving with frightening speed, while the ground it rolled across was left tainted. “Everyone, scatter! Shannon, that way!”

The group split up, though the horses didn’t need to be told to flee for their lives. Shannon took off in a gallop, following Noah’s directions and circling the slime from a safe distance. Noah continued firing mana bullets at the creature, but none of them slowed it down, regardless of the caliber. If anything, they seemed to draw its attention, sending it chasing Noah and Shannon with greater and greater speed. Having no sense of fear or pain, this monster was immune to the effects of his guns. Flashbangs were similarly useless, for the slime had no sight and sound receptors, and any clones or illusory animals he sent running off to distract it were ignored, for they put out no vibrations for the slime to follow.

Seraph tried shooting a beam of light, and though it succeeded in burning away some of the slime’s mass, the bones swirling within it, once exposed, helped shield it from his magic, and with his low output, what damage he did inflict was inconsequential. A barrage of wind rings was hurled by Bojena, ripping through the slime like a load of buckshot, but the core remained undamaged, and the slime healed itself instantly. Still not done, Bojena clapped her hands together and separated them, with a sphere of compressed air forming between her palms like glowing smoke. She then raised her arms above her head, with the sphere growing ever bigger.

“Tempest Hammer!”

She threw the sphere at the slime, shredding the ground with wind as it shot off towards her target. It struck the slime in the side, ripping through it like a giant cannonball and spraying aerosolized ooze and powdered bone. Noah conjured a handful of exploding daggers and hurled them at the slime, hitting the wound Bojena had left. They were swallowed whole, and the bombs in the handles went off, blowing open the creature and dumping a truckload of toxic muck onto the ground, but all the damage they inflicted healed in mere moments.

“How do we stop this thing?” Shannon asked.

“I don’t know if we can. We’re ill-suited for an enemy like this.”

With the slime charging towards them, Noah threw a metal spike at the ground. It was a magic tool he’d used before, summoning a wall of packed earth before their foe. The slime crashed into the wall like a runaway car, but simply climbed over it, barely even slowed down. Noah took out one of his tralt jewels, charged with sunlight, and tossed it at the slime like a grenade. The slime swallowed the diamond-sealed gem just as it had the exploding daggers, and within its depths, history repeated itself with a brilliant flash of light. Instead of fire or a shockwave, it was hours of pure summer sunshine collected, stored, and then released in an instant.

Normal people and animals would receive first-degree burns from being near it during the discharge, but for the Profane, it was far more devastating. Though possessing greater resilience to sunlight than upper-ranked Profane, the slime was not completely immune, and almost half of its mass was burned away from the inside, releasing a landslide of its victim’s bones. However, though momentarily stunned, its core remained intact, protected by said bones, and it regenerated instantly, then resumed the chase, leaving behind the tralt jewel like a spent battery.

“Shannon, use one of the scrolls in your ring to slow it down!”

Understanding what he meant, Shannon conjured a scroll from her ring, and Noah jumped off her saddle just before she assumed human form. She turned and faced the oncoming slime, and unrolled the spell across the ground. “Molecular Deconstruction!”

Rather than rearranging the materials around her to create something new, she broke down all of the chemical bonds in the soil beneath her, reducing it to its primary elements and grouping those elements together. A great pit opened up in the ground before her, with all of the heavier substances like carbon left behind as a fine powder in the bottom of the pit and all of the gasses released into the air. The slime fell into the pit, just large enough to hopefully contain it, but Shannon staggered from the mana expenditure, having used most of her mana to make the pit as large as possible.

However, before she could rest, Noah pulled her out of the way. Rising out of the pit, a massive limb reached out for Shannon, made of nothing but slime-wrapped bones. It tried to seize her and add her skeleton to its collection, while more rudimentary limbs reached up to pull it out of the pit. Bojena hurled several wind rings to sever the limbs, and though it dropped back into the pit, the limbs instantly rejoined with the main body and once more swung about. Now Noah understood why it saved the bones of its prey. Not only did they provide added defense for the core, but they also allowed the slime to assume rigid shapes.

Seraph attacked in with his knight hammer, charging it with as much holy magic as he could. “Seraph, don’t!” Noah shouted, but the prince had already committed himself to the attack, and his body moved against his will.

He jumped up and swung the hammer upon what could be loosely called the front of the creature. The blow of his hammer caused a messy, and disintegrated much of its mass with his holy power. However, though Noah and Shannon were safe, Seraph got splattered. Immediately, the slime’s fluid burned through his clothes and began ravaging his flesh, with his veins darkening as his blood was contaminated.

Howling in agony, Seraph collapsed, being burned on the inside and outside. He put every drop of mana he had into trying to purge himself of the corrosive infection and heal, but it was not a fight that could be quickly won. Noah grabbed Seraph and tried to pull him away from the slime, as it was already free of the pit. However, Shannon was still dizzy from her earlier spell, and without her, there was no chance of escape. Noah unleashed his full chemical arsenal on the slime, throwing everything from acid to monster repellent, but nothing was working.

As she watched the slime close in on the three of them, Valia could tell that the situation was dire. If the slime was smaller, she could slice the core without needing magic, but with all that toxic ooze between her and its vital point, killing it with simple technique simply wasn’t possible. She had only one option, and as much as she didn’t want to use it, she couldn’t allow Noah, Shannon, and Seraph to be devoured.

“Bojena, take my horse! Zodiac: Rakshon!”

At that moment, darkness swept across her mind’s eye with a constellation of black stars bearing down on her with a crushing weight. She wanted to retch, feeling like her blood had turned as black and toxic as the slime they were fighting, and pain shot through her nerves like she was being struck by lightning. However, she could also feel mana flowing into her from the cosmos. It was agonizing to absorb into her body, but she didn’t have the option to be choosy. Bojena took the reins of her horse, but she was alarmed by her condition, seeing the pain evident on her face. She jumped off the saddle and ran towards the slime, but her steps were unbalanced.

“Zodiac: Baol!”

The pain doubled in intensity as she allowed more malignant energy into her body, nearly making her spit up blood, but the power of her flesh was unquestionable. Her steel form and super strength felt far more intense than ever before, for while the mana scoured her body, it felt like nothing else could hurt her. If she wasn’t careful, she felt like every step she took could potentially toss her into the sky. She charged towards the slime, grabbed Seraph’s dropped hammer, and struck the abomination with all of the force she could muster.

Unlike Seraph’s hammer blow, which simply caused an omnidirectional splatter, this hit held enough force to make the slime burst in one focused direction like a claymore, spraying black sludge across the area. She had only meant to blast off enough mass to expose the core while directing the spray away from Noah and others, but instead, she practically reduced it to mist. Bones and ooze fell from the sky, and mixed among them was the slime’s core with a parasite wrapped around it. Already, new slime was starting to form around it, but a ring of wind from Bojena flew through the air and sliced them both in half.

Noah raced over to Valia, writhing in pain like Seraph. Though that hammer swing was the strongest she had ever inflicted, the blowback was severe. Whatever power she channeled, her body was rejecting it, and whether she was winning or losing the battle could not be determined. Crouching down, Noah held her in his arms and tried to give her a healing potion, hoping it would help her, but she spat it out like it was poison.

“Noah!” he heard Bojena shout. He looked where she was pointing, seeing more than a dozen identical slimes emerge from the tree line, all equal in size and deadliness. There was no way they could win, not against this kind of force.

“Fall back! We’ve got to get out of here!”

As Shannon put Valia on her back, Noah lifted Seraph onto his horse and retrieved his tralt jewel. He took Valia’s horse for himself and they set off back towards the destroyed village. The slimes were hot on their trail, with the bones inside them swirling like clothes in a washing machine. Shannon and the horses moved at full gallop, but maintaining any kind of lead required everything they had, and Valia and Seraph were in no condition to control their mounts. Knowing fiends, there was little chance that they’d tire and give up.

“What’s wrong with her?” Bojena asked, riding alongside Noah.

“She ran all the way from Welindar to Colbrand to warn of the fiend attack, a feat that even most elves would keel over and die from, and it did a lot of damage. Though her body had fully healed, her magical abilities haven’t. She basically just tried to run on a broken leg.”

“You saw that attack. You don’t get faster running on a broken leg.”

“What do we do?” Seraph asked with a wince of pain. It seemed the worst was behind him, but he was far from fully healed.

“None of us are the type of fighters that can overcome this combination of abilities. It’s a bad match-up, but there is hope. If we can buy enough time for me to write an adequate spell, Bojena can cast it, and it might be able to stop them.”

“How much time do you need?”

“More than you can give me, and I’ll need to be stationary while I do it. We need some kind of major obstacle that’ll slow them down, like a gorge with a bridge we can cross and then cut.”

They reached the village and turned north towards Rorik. Nothing they had passed by so far would serve as a sufficient obstacle to hinder the slimes, so they could only hope there was something on the way to their destination that would work. However, the slimes refused to quit, tracking them with the violent obsession of killer hornets.

“I have an idea! Through the woods!” Bojena shouted.

She sent them riding through a forest, each waiting for that one root, rock, or pit that would trip up Shannon or one of the horses and doom them. Bojena then threw wind rings at all the surrounding trees, felling the forest around them and amassing a continuous barrier left in their wake. She kept the effort going, cutting down every tree they passed, even the trees ahead of them, betting that they could race ahead before the crash. Regardless of her determination, the slimes could not be bested so easily. They slipped past every fallen tree, and what they could not simply slide under or over, they allowed to pass through them. Every tree they touched was disintegrated, with the path of Cursed Earth behind them ever growing.

Noah looked over to Valia, unconscious on Shannon’s back, and spotted something on her arm. There was a large gray mark, like a bruise. It could have been contamination from the slime, but it looked different from Seraph’s wounds.

“Noah?” Valia mumbled, slowly opening her eyes.

“How are you feeling? Can you fight?”

“Something tells me I don’t have the luxury of saying no.”

“The situation is far from ideal, but at least you’re alive. However, I don’t want you using any magic. Something is definitely wrong.”

“I’ll stop saving you when you stop needing to be saved.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. I told you I loved you, and I don’t say those words lightly. If you’re in danger, I will help you, no matter the risk.”

“And I told you I loved you as well, which is why I’m now telling you not to use magic. I won’t have you dying on me just to take out one stubborn monster.”

“Depending on how things progress from here, we may not have a choice. Unless you’re going to pull out a new trick, I’m the only one who can kill them.”

“We’re using the oldest trick in the book: running away.”

With the dire situation weighing down on them, Noah considered his options. Thanks to his training, he could conceal himself and two others, but only while remaining stationary. His ideal choices were Valia and Shannon, but that would mean sacrificing Seraph and Bojena.

If he sent them racing ahead and leading the slimes away, there was little chance they’d live long enough to meet back up. He had no moral qualms about betrayal, but they were too valuable as assets to discard. As for the slimes, Seraph had shown the folly of close-range attacks, rendering concealment useless for both offense and escape.

He also kept thinking back to his harkonen gem. Ideally, he’d like to send a message to Cyrilo and, by extension, Tarnas, and have them launch the most powerful holy spell they could through the gem, but unfortunately, he’d reached the limit on its range the other day, so magic couldn’t pass through.

The sun moved across the sky as the group moved across the land, fleeing for their lives. Any monsters that tried to attack them were evaded and ignored, only to be swallowed by the slimes. Shannon and the horses were pushed as far and fast as they could go, but how long they could maintain this pace was uncertain. Healing potions could be used to restore their physical stamina, but they had a finite amount, and though Noah could compound more, just like with runecraft, he couldn’t do it while on horseback.

Through woods, across fields, and over rocks, the slimes pursued them without rest or second thought. Such simple creatures, but they were such an insurmountable wall. All the moves that Noah could use against more complex opponents, even just to escape, had fallen short. The feat of knocking out the knighthood with the basilisk illusion meant nothing when cornered by foes like this. As the sun began to set, their luck seemed to turn when they stumbled across a river. It was at least a meter deep, with ample width and a decent current. They crossed the bed of stones, splashing through the water, but once they reached the other side, Noah gave the order to stop, with the slimes just seconds away.

“What are we doing?!” Bojena exclaimed.

“Slimes track their prey based on vibrations. If we stop moving, maybe the river will throw them off our trail.” The slimes appeared on the other side, having caught up, and they rolled into the river without hesitation. Slimes were aquatic beings, and their skin, thin though it was, could repel water like oil. Though the group remained still, the slimes closed on them.

“It’s not our vibrations; they’re tracking something else!” Bojena exclaimed.

“Move up the river! Don’t get out of the water!” Noah shouted.

They rode back into the river, fighting against the current and heading upstream. Shannon helped convey the plan to the horses, ushering them forward. The slimes remained behind them, trying to resist the coming water. They should have had an advantage in the river, but try as they might to make themselves more streamlined, their overbearing bodies offered more surface area for the water to push against, slowing them down, not that Shannon and the horses were fairing much better. The rapid chase had turned into a crawl, slow but unstopping.

“What now?” Valia asked, having recovered from earlier.

“Seraph, I need you to consecrate the river.”

“You think that’ll work?” he asked.

“It worked in Welindar. We need to find a chokepoint, where they won’t be able to escape, and then you saturate the water with holy energy and let it wash over them.”

They continued up the river, leading the slimes on their slow pursuit. Each of them was cold, wet, and tired, yet fear kept them going. Shannon and the horses struggled to walk through mud and over submerged stones, but they continued until they reached a higher altitude, where the water had carved its way through rock and formed a corridor with sides that the slimes could not easily climb up.

“Seraph, your turn. The rest of us need to get out of this water, and I’ll try writing a spell.”

Mustering his courage, Seraph wordlessly nodded and dismounted from his horse, splashing down into the water. The slimes were approaching as he charged up his mana. “Lumendori, watch over me,” he whispered.

He then began venting holy magic from his body, saturating the water as it flowed towards the slimes. With the loss of the sunlight, the water glowed in the dimness of dusk. The effect was instant, the slimes stopping their approach as the holy water hit them. Their flesh was burned away, and their liquid innards followed suit, with smoke billowing from their bodies as they melted like ice. Meanwhile, the rest of the group climbed onto one of the rocky ledges running alongside the river.

“It’s working!” Valia exclaimed in relief. However, neither Seraph nor Noah could share in her joy, as both were focusing with everything they had.

Noah was writing a spell to finish them off, doing his best to keep the runes eligible and not ruin the ink or parchment with excess moisture, all while making runic calculations in his head. Meanwhile, Seraph downed a mana potion and continued releasing all of his recovered energy into the water, but the strain was immense and his limit was short, like holding his breath. The slimes had lost most of their original mass, but once again, they were using the bones they had gathered to protect their cores, and as long as their cores remained intact, they seemed able to regenerate almost limitlessly.

With each passing moment, their usage of the bones became more elegant. They began pulling themselves forward with amorphous limbs like before, but now they were sealed in a protective exoskeleton formed from the hard calcium, with all the gaps and joints protected by a continuously growing layer of scar tissue. They were forsaking their original shape and mass for a more concentrated and animal-like form, allowing them to survive in the blessed river and advance.

“It’s done! Bojena, your turn!” Noah exclaimed before passing her the scroll. “It’s called Light Nova, a holy spell. Put everything you have into it!”

Bojena raised the scroll above her head and gathered all of her strength, but before she could announce the spell, there was a splatter of blood and the sound of tearing flesh, with her severed arms and the shredded remains of the scroll falling to the ground. Bojena looked at the stumps where her hands should have been, instead seeing blood spraying, and screamed in agony and terror. Noah just barely saw something flying at her from the herd of slimes. Valia hurried to Bojena’s aid and helped reattach her arms with a healing potion, while Noah turned to the new threat.