Chapter 4: Fighting slimes
Mitch had entered a cold, focused state, his own kind of killing trance. The world around him had narrowed to a single purpose: survival through systematic extermination.
At the outskirts of the massive slime chamber, he hunted down every lone nature slime he could find, one by one.
The chamber’s walls glistened with moisture, and the air hung thick with the acrid smell of decomposing vegetation and something else, something alien and primordial that made his skin crawl.
The slimes weren’t challenging in isolation, their translucent green bodies wobbling with deceptive sluggishness. But Mitch preferred to avoid venturing deeper into the chamber, where the slime density was overwhelming.
Through the gloom, he could make out clusters of the creatures, their bioluminescent cores pulsing like diseased hearts in the darkness.
Inside those deeper reaches, he would’ve had to face up to ten at once, an impossible fight at his current strength, no matter how much his confidence had grown.
Even against single enemies, Mitch didn’t come out unscathed. Nature slimes were deceptively vicious, their attacks emerging from the very ground beneath his feet.
Gnarled roots would suddenly erupt from the earth, whipping through the air with surprising speed and leaving long, shallow cuts along his legs.
The wounds stung like paper cuts but spread across inches of flesh, creating a network of angry red lines that mapped his growing experience with pain.
They didn’t bleed much, the cuts were too shallow for that, but healing them nonetheless drained his energy reserves at an alarming rate.
Each casting of his healing spell felt like running a sprint, leaving him breathless and slightly dizzy.
Mitch quickly learned that the more he healed, the hungrier he became.