Chapter 9 - Impossibility

As the lone frontline fighter, it was Sol’s duty to make the first move. He rushed straight toward the great slime with his sword trailing at his side. His red eyes explored the creature, scanning for the best approach. Surprisingly, it was stationary. It seemed so drunk on its own evolution that its instinct to attack had been forgotten. It only maintained its position, bubbling and squirming as whatever potential existed within it bashed at its walls in an attempt to escape.

The swordsman had reached the beast now, having long since concluded his plan of attack. The plan? To attack. Sol, for all his confidence, knew his greatest flaw was inaccuracy. His limbs moved with too much power for their own good, their fibres bent and straightened like stretched rubber, snapping into position too quick for Sol to exert full control. Luckily, against an enemy so huge, there was no need for control. Just to swing his blade as mightily as he could and to tear as large of a gash as possible into the monster.

All the tension in his muscular arms came to a bursting release as he cleaved the slime’s flesh, ripping through it with ease. Though he and his weapon were small in comparison, his sheer strength managed to open a wound that penetrated almost halfway deep and halfway across the slime’s gargantuan body.

The gash flapped open like a silently roaring mouth as the slime lurched vengefully toward Sol. From its grounded and still position, it struggled to generate momentum, leaving it slow and unsteady, easily avoided by the swordsman.

Luna observed the battle closely. Though Clint had already claimed the kill, she too tried to identify the slime’s core. Despite the huge window into its body that Sol had created, there was still no sign. There was no other option than to expand it, dig deeper until the gem they were after exposed itself.

Her hand crackled and the skin of her palm burned without heat. Channelling mana directly through one’s body was a difficult task, impossible for many. The mana couldn’t just be haphazardly directed into a conduit that drew it, each step had to be directed with intent; it was comparable to willing one’s own bloodstream to flow in a desired direction. Regardless, Luna was more than capable, pulses of mana pumping through her only unbroken wrist and dispersing at her palm, before finally rising in a glowing steam, which then condensed into the familiar shape of Munditia.

With her immense pool of mana, it wasn’t long before the orb was sizable, larger than her own head. She propelled it forth with a combination of a thrust of her hand and a burst of additional mana, firing the orb precisely into the wound Sol had made. It was far weaker than her initial blast that had burst the slime, but with her precise aim, it still did an impressive level of damage, bursting parts of its already ragged body apart and distributing globs of green flesh across the battlefield.

An impressive strike, to be sure, but the damage was secondary. Her primary objective was to reveal the core. It seemed though, that her and her brother’s strikes were still too shallow. Finding the core was like finding a needle in a haystack, and all they had done was shift the hay around.

“Any good?” Sol yelled, looking to Clint. He received no reply, but he could tell from Clint’s focused eyes and furrowed brow that they’d had no luck. “Maybe it’s constantly moving it around.” Sol theorised, stepping back from the recovering creature, shifting his focus to cutting down the slimes that had been separated from the main body, stalling so he could think.

“In that case it’s just pure luck. We have to just keep hitting it and hoping that it works.” Luna joined him, also striking down slimes around her with kicks.

“Maybe. I’ve got a better one though.” Sol grinned, regrouping next to Luna. “We blow it away, all at once, just like before. The core’ll get blown into the air, and with Clint’s crazy precision, we’ll have no trouble taking it out.”

“It’s a sound idea. But without my staff…” Luna muttered.

“You can do it if you get close, can’t you?” Sol contested.

“I can, but… Getting close is…” Luna shivered a little at the thought, the mental and physical wound of her broken wrist still fresh.

“It’ll be fine. If we go off the memory theory, it probably doesn’t see you as much of a threat without the staff. If it simply targets the source of trauma, it’ll go after me. It shouldn’t be able to prioritize in a more complex way.” Sol surmised. “I’ll attack it next anyway, so if it goes by recency, it still won’t be after you. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

“Okay then…” Luna sighed, still not having quite shaken her fear.

Clint watched from a distance as Sol went rushing in. Luna moved in sync just behind him, as if catching his slipstream. Though Clint had intended to keep his attention on finding the core and only finding the core, the movement of the slimes around them was bothering him. They weren’t attacking, nor were they making a direct run towards their giant counterpart. Instead, the slimes spread out, distancing from one another. Once they had, they’d just sit, occasionally twitching, like their larger counterpart had been all along.

He didn’t have time to finish his thought and truly comprehend what he was seeing. There were too many leaps in logic needed to get a step ahead of the beasts, and Sol and Luna were already upon the enemy, preparing for their attack. Clint’s mind slipped away from him, all of his energy and mental capacity channeling into his eyes and hands as he took aim, awaiting a glimpse of the core.

A cross-hatch of cuts appeared on the slime’s surface as Sol cut into it once more, faster and shallower this time. It was only meant to draw the creature’s attention.

The slime came blasting toward him, aiming for his sword specifically. Sol weaved in and out of its strikes, which were now far more precise. It had started isolating specific areas of its gelatinous mass, using them as faux-limbs to strike at the swordsman.

Luna snuck around in what, if it had eyes, would be called its blind spot. Her hand sparked and burned with mana as her spirit pumped more and more energy into it. Focusing it all into a single hand was a troublesome process. Typically she’d distribute it more evenly between two. Nevertheless, her boundless mana supply was an incredible engine, even when running inefficiently.

She could see her brother through the murky liquid body of the slime, fighting his hardest. She admired him, he was everything she wasn’t. For his sake more than her own, she willed herself to fight harder, generating an orb easily three times the size of the one she had created prior. She was only a step or two away now before she could drive it into the belly of the beast. She was in the clear-

It twisted. It twisted like a serpent coiling around a stone, but it itself was the serpent and the stone. The slime contorted into an even more unnatural state, wound around to face her, though it lacked a face. This metamorphosis took great effort, placing the slime’s body under great tension, so much so it looked like it may rip itself apart.

Luna froze, her hands quivering and destabilising the orb inside. Power was shaken loose from it, her focus turned from delivering a decisive blow to retreating from this strange new attack.

Sol too was taken aback, drawing his sword again and aiming for a mighty blow, much like his initial strike. He intended to tear it asunder in a single swing, preventing it from harming his sister. He pulled back, sweeping his leg behind him to assume a wide, powerful stance. In swinging a blade, the power came from the whole body, not just the arms, effective hip movement was essential to create the necessary force to perform a feat like what Sol intended. If something were to prevent such a movement, his attack would be severely weakened.

And of course, the slime didn’t have the mental capacity to understand that, it’d be impossible for the slime to disrupt his movement. It simply wouldn’t think to.

Yet it did. This was only one of three impossible things the slime did in that moment.

The second was something Clint would have realised much earlier, had he not dedicated himself to sniping the creature’s core. If the large slime was mutating and warping physically as a result of its constant fusion, why were the smaller slimes doing the same? The answer was a leap in logic, but not an impossible one; That as the grand slime adopts the memories of its components, the reverse may be true, and offshoots of the original slime retain memory from the conglomerate.

Therefore, if the grand slime retained its memory of being attacked by Sol’s powerful sword swing, each of the smaller slimes would recall such an attack, and would act to prevent it. Of course this wasn’t a full explanation, another assumption would have to be made; The slimes must remain connected to their oversized leader, they still view it in some way as “the self”.

All this theorising would eventually run through Clint’s mind, and Sol’s too. But only after Sol was struck down by the great slime.

The first stage in his downfall was the smaller slimes. From their static, unassuming perches, they all descended upon him, aiming specifically at his lower half, weakening his stance and preventing his movement. Each one weighed heavily on his legs, all compounding on one another and further restricting him. It meant that he could neither run, nor jump, nor even hope to dodge what came next.

And what came next was the most terrifying impossibility of them all. If impossibility could be quantified and measured, it would be double or triple as impossible as the prior two impossibilities.

The slime unwound, all the built tension snapping at once, converting from potential energy to momentum, sending it spinning and winding and screaming straight toward Sol with the force of a meteor.

This wasn’t the impossible feat. Not in and of itself. It was a clever strategy to use momentum in such a way, but was no different to animals charging or swinging their necks, a simple understanding of the mechanics of one’s own body.

No, the impossibility was the trick. The slime had never intended to attack Luna. It feigned the desire to do so, causing Sol to be off of his guard, leaving him vulnerable for the smaller slimes, and later the hammer swing of its own body.

Deceit. Strategy. Trickery.

There is no way to achieve these things without genuine intellect.

With this feat, the slime had overwritten a fundamental rule of this world. “Slimes do not have intellect.” A simple fact of nature was instantly made a falsehood by this action. It did not contradict the world, the world now contradicted it.

Current Party: Clint Morgans, Sol Dragoneart, Luna Dragoneart

Bullets Remaining: 5