Chapter 313: The Immortal Slime
Technically Kai was supposed to be thinking about how to kill the immortal slime, but mostly he sat at the edge of the abandoned town and ruminated. It was unusual to run into a monster that so totally resisted brute force - instead of being frustrated, he was more intrigued than anything.
What captured his attention was the way that monsters at the Frontier were subtly different from others in a manner that seemed to stand outside the normal hierarchy. They distorted the world, twisting out of the way of some attacks and resisting others. When he'd been younger, that was just the way things were, but now he wondered if he couldn't figure out the underlying principle.
It was possible that they had some advantage that lay outside conventional power, or that they inherited something special from the abyss. He wondered if it had anything to do with phases and had spent a while trying to attain a power phase, but it was just too early. Despite all his training, phases were still beyond him.
But they were running out of time, so he needed to find some way to kill the damn slime.
Abruptly it popped up in his path, beginning to vibrate and shoot pain into his skull. Kai fixed it with Void Gaze, even though he knew that wouldn't work: if he kept the slime pinned long enough, it eventually died on its own, burning up in his gaze. And then it popped up somewhere else as if nothing had happened. That had been one of his first attempts to eat it.
Soon it burned away again, leaving him in peace. The vibration actually wasn't too painful now, because Behemoth's Heart had somewhat adapted his body to it. That had been one of his only areas of progress in an assignment that had otherwise been frustrating.
Chopping the slime only produced more, which could rapidly become a threat. Blunt force had no effect unless he brought enough of it to bear, in which case the slime was crushed but reappeared later. Torching a whole region of the town with Baleful Breath had made the slime disappear for much longer and he'd almost started to hope when it popped back up again.
For a day he'd attempted stranger solutions, such as trying to find some source in the town or lure it away. As far as he could tell, its persistence didn't have any gimmick and it only lurked in the abandoned town because it felt like it. The thing just seemed to exist no matter what.
Maybe the best answer was the simplest one: consuming the slime. Isulfr's Bite had always been his most potent technique, piercing through defenses that resisted his other skills. The only question was how to get close enough.