Chapter 86: Glassy Chamber
Tyler walked through the thick brush of the monster zone, his footsteps falling almost silent against the give of the short green grass beneath him, the sound dying before it could carry any real distance.
He was making his way toward the slimes he'd spotted earlier, the loose group of them moving together, and from where he walked now he felt certain of the path he needed to take to close the distance between them.
As the gap between them shrank, his footsteps slowed on their own, growing quieter still, until he caught sight of them through a cluster of bushes: four slimes, bouncing about in directions with no clear pattern to them at all.
Two of them stood out as noticeably larger, close enough in size to be near-twins of each other, and when he looked up at the level readouts hovering above them he found both marked level twenty-one, while the remaining two came in lower, one at level fourteen and the other at level fifteen.
All four kept bouncing off in separate directions, scattering without any apparent aim, only to somehow end up clustered back together in the same spot moments later, as if each one had already forgotten where it meant to go.
He tilted his head slightly, caught somewhere between confusion and quiet fascination as he watched them keep at it, until he remembered James telling him once that slimes were brainless things, that they wandered into any territory bouncing around without the faintest scrap of strategy behind any of it.
A small smile pulled at his mouth as he kept watching the little monsters bumble through their aimless path, and he found the whole display more amusing than he probably should have.
He stepped through the bushes toward them, the branches dragging loudly across his armor as he pushed past, and at the sound of it every slime went still at once, frozen mid-bounce as though something in the air had changed.
Only embarrassment came to him now, thinking back on how frightened he'd once been of these same creatures, back when he'd first arrived in this world and a single level three slime had been enough to send him running the other way.
Curiosity was what filled him this time as he closed the last of the distance, plain and steady, with nothing else stirring beneath it.
Whether the slimes were even facing him, he had no way of telling, their bodies rounded and slightly translucent all the way around, smooth gelatinous curves with a round core visible somewhere near the center of each one, nothing about their shape offering any hint of a front or a back.
[LEVEL 21 SLIME ACTIVATED SKILL BASH].
One of the level twenty-one slimes surged forward the instant the words appeared, kinetic force driving it across the ground fast enough that the grass beneath it flattened and scattered in its wake, a thin churn of dust rising up behind it as it closed the distance to Tyler in what felt like no time at all.
Tyler answered with nothing more than a single horizontal swing of his Teara Dagger, the blade cutting a clean arc to the left and passing straight through the slime's body before it ever reached him, splitting it neatly in two.
The halves never even made it to the ground, the whole body incinerated mid-fall instead, collapsing into a fine puff of blue dust that hung in the air for a moment before thinning apart and disappearing.
Two more system panels snapped into place before he'd even lowered his arm.
[LEVEL 14 SLIME ACTIVATED SKILL BASH]. [LEVEL 21 SLIME ACTIVATED SKILL BASH].
Both of the remaining slimes launched off the ground together, cutting through the air toward him with the same reckless speed as the first, and Tyler met them just as simply, one wide sweep of the dagger catching both bodies while they were still airborne.
They burst apart into the same fine blue dust as the one before them, their cores breaking loose from the collapsing haze and dropping into the grass below. Only the level fifteen slime remained now, and Tyler took a single step toward it.
The last of the four moved differently from the others entirely, its whole body compressing and releasing in a steady rhythm, up and down like a spring coiling and loosing itself over and over, though never quite leaving the ground the way an actual jump would carry it.
A small, thin, vibrating sound rose out of it just before it launched itself at Tyler, driving its whole body toward him, though no skill activated behind the motion this time. His dagger vanished from his hand right before the impact, and he caught the creature clean out of the air with nothing but his bare palms instead.
The force of the slam pushed him back a step, though none of it carried any pain with it at all. He felt it press hard against his abdomen, a faint warmth radiating off its surface with nothing cold about it, wet against his skin and yet somehow solid at the same time, or something close enough to solid that the word almost fit and almost didn't.
*Just what is this thing made of?* Tyler thought, turning the question over as he held it there against him.
A quiet softness ran underneath the whole of it that he couldn't quite explain to himself, like holding a water balloon stretched right up to the edge of bursting, where give and tension seemed to exist in the exact same place at once.
The slime strained against his hands, trying to twist free, releasing that same small vibrating sound again, thinner now, carrying an edge to it that made it sound almost frustrated.
Tyler only tightened his grip until the struggling beneath his palms went still. A small chuckle slipped out of him as he stared at the creature.
"You can't really do anything, can you now?" he muttered, still curious in spite of himself what it might reveal the longer he kept holding onto it. It looked almost harmless now, cradled there against him, closer to an angry puppy than a monster.
It vibrated once more, releasing that same sound, only louder this time, loud enough that it climbed toward something almost piercing and set his teeth slightly on edge, and then it cut off all at once, gone so completely and so suddenly that it might as well have been silenced by some outside hand.
"Damn, what did I ever do to you," Tyler muttered, and just then a new sound reached him from the bushes ahead. Slimes came pouring out of the leaves a moment later, bouncing toward him in a loose, uneven wave, and his eyebrows rose despite himself at the sheer number of them, small ones and larger ones scattered through the group, with one considerably bigger than the rest leading them out in front, easily half a meter across in both width and height.
"Wow, so you were calling the others?" Tyler said, and counted them where they stood, thirteen slimes in total. He grinned and glanced back down at the one still held in his hands. "I had no idea you can do that." A chuckle escaped him. "I should grab you guys more often."
The slime vibrated once more in his grip, gathering itself as if to release the sound again, but Tyler clapped his hands together before it could, crushing it flat between his palms in a single motion. It burst apart into the same fine blue dust as the others before it, leaving nothing behind but its core, solid and still in his hands where the rest of it had been a moment before.
The remaining slimes broke into a charge all at once, bouncing forward across the grass toward him, and Tyler took a moment to read the levels hovering above each of them: all of them sitting somewhere above F-rank and below C-rank, with only five marked out as D-rank among the whole group. He charged forward to meet them, his Tearra Dagger materializing back into his hand as he moved.
After what felt like only minutes of easy combat, the last of the slimes went down, and Tyler stood alone in the middle of the battleground. Cores lay scattered across the ground around his feet, glassy and catching what light filtered down between the trees, dozens of them in every size the group had come in.
He hadn't run out of breath once through any of it, though he hadn't expected to, not with the kind of stamina he carried now.
He took his first step toward the largest of the cores, the one resting off to his left, and the system panel appeared before he'd even reached it:
LEVEL UP!
LEVEL UP!
His skin lit with a faint green glow for no longer than a single heartbeat, and he felt whatever energy he'd spent through the fight come flooding back into him all at once, rejuvenated and leaving him more energetic than before.
A little more strength settled into him along with it, though a thread of confusion ran through the whole feeling that he couldn't quite shake off. The panels disappeared in front of him. "Huh, I thought I'd level up more than that. I killed seventeen of 'em."
He took a few steps forward before crouching down to pick up one of the slime cores scattered on the ground in front of him. It felt slightly warm against his hand, the glassy surface smooth against his palm, though the warmth did nothing to loosen the tightness sitting low behind his ribs.
*Is it because they don't have much XP? I thought that would get me to C-rank.* He let out a slow breath and stood back up, the slime core shimmering and disappearing into his inventory as he did.
He moved on to the rest of the slime cores next, working through them steadily, picking each one up in turn and letting it dissolve away into the same shimmering light before reaching for the next.
A system panel materialized in front of him without warning, the text within it reading: [Achievement Unlocked: The Strongest D-Rank. Congratulations! The user has reached 200 points in strength: +5 points]
*Ah, I actually forgot about that,* Tyler thought, one corner of his mouth pulling up faintly. "Nice," he muttered under his breath. *All right, craft ten vials.* The panel faded away, replaced almost instantly by another, this one reading simply: [Crafting].
The circular loading bar skipped over entirely this time, the panel shifting straight to: [Crafting successful].
*Great. Now that I have as many vials as I need, I just need to go get those flowers, then I'll have lots of potions. They'll give me a massive advantage over the monsters.*
He rested his hands on his waist, turning slowly on the spot as he took in the forest stretched out around him in every direction, the canopy overhead breaking the light into long, uneven strips across the ground.
He wasn't certain which direction would carry him toward the Hexhorn territory from here, the trees offering no clear landmark to orient himself by, but something in his gut kept pulling him steadily toward the right regardless.
He turned and had barely taken his first step forward when he stopped himself.
*Right, how can I forget?* He turned his attention back to the small clearing surrounding him, taking it in with a slower, more deliberate sweep of his eyes this time.
*This is actually the perfect place to check out that skill.* He took a step back to give himself more room, and the system panel materialized in front of him, the skill's description settling into view the way it always did.
*...Can copy any material... And I can dismantle it whenever I want,* he read, the words settling into place in his mind.
The panel disappeared a moment later, leaving him standing there with the thought still turning over in his head. He put his hand to his chin, brow drawing in slightly as he turned the same handful of words over again.
*Any material. If I have the right idea, I can actually use this thing to maybe copy more metals to craft with. That'd be great. But it didn't say it was only limited to metals. It said any material. Does that apply to everything?*
He opened his palm, and a medium steel ingot materialized into it a moment later, the weight of it settling heavy and solid against his skin, cool to the touch in a way that pulled a faint chill up through his fingers.
This was the first time he'd ever used the skill.
The Tearra Dagger that had been resting in his left hand vanished the instant he opened his palm out in front of him, both hands moving through the exchange together, one emptying as the other filled.
It was almost like he instinctively knew exactly what he was doing, the same way it always was with every skill he'd ever used, some deep, wordless certainty guiding his hands before conscious thought ever caught up to it.
It was almost like the knowledge had been embedded into his very DNA from the start, though he carried no memory of ever having used this particular skill before now.
The whole of it felt strange and natural in the same breath, both sensations pulling at him at once without ever quite resolving into one or the other.
His eyes glowed with a faint blue light, the glow catching faintly across the ingot's surface, and right as he was on the verge of letting the skill activate fully, he stopped himself short, the glow fading back out of his eyes as quickly as it had come.
He looked down at the ingot still resting in his hand and frowned.
*Can it really copy everything?* The steel ingot shimmered a faint blue and disappeared from his open hand, drawn back into his inventory, and a moment later a small blue enhancement crystal materialized in its place, resting there in his palm, small and cool against his skin.
His heart hammered a little harder in his chest, the uncertainty of whether any of this would actually work sitting heavy behind his ribs. "Let's see how it works."
His eyes flared with a faint blue light at nearly violent speed, the glow snapping into place almost too fast to track, and the system panel appeared in front of him a heartbeat later: [CHAMBER SKILL ACTIVATED]
Ten meters ahead of him, a light began climbing up out of the ground, rising steadily until it had traced the shape of a standing rectangle against the air, a wall of pure blue light burning so bright that the shadows pooling beneath the surrounding trees seemed to deepen and darken by contrast.
Just as quickly as it had risen, the light vanished all at once, collapsing in on itself like a cover being pulled back from whatever lay hidden beneath it. Something remained standing there in its place.
Tyler's eyes went wide at the sight of it, his mouth falling open as his jaw dropped along with it, the reaction rolling through him almost before he'd had time to process what he was even looking at.
Standing there in front of him was a rectangular box, its surface made entirely of a slightly blue, translucent crystal that caught the sunlight filtering down through the clearing and threw it back out in every direction at once.
A small, breathless chuckle escaped him, the sound of it catching in his throat before he'd even fully found his footing again.
*It...it actually worked.*