Obligatory Slime Episode!

Airi whirled, scanning the lumpy snow piles. Was she seeing things? The piles all looked the same, and none of them were moving.

“Airi?” Nestor was waiting for her to finish her sentence.

She turned back to Nestor. “Well, uh... a snowman is supposed to look like a person, and—”

The snowman moved again. This time, Airi was fast enough to see which one it was. It was an especially large snowman, with two blobs of snow stacked on top of each other. Its hollowed eyes glared emptily at them.

“What’re you looking at?” Nestor turned, and the snowman froze in place, no longer moving. “That doesn’t look like a person.”

“Get the kettle spell ready.” Airi took out her fabric scissors. “Hurry. I think it’s a monster.”

Apparently realizing it had been caught, the snowman bounced towards them. The mound that made up its head rolled off the body, and Airi saw that it was really two snowy slimes stacked on top of each other: one large, one small, both with hollow eyes.

“A monster!” Nestor squeaked.

“Okay, here’s the plan. I’ll take one, you take the other.” Airi shoved Nestor towards the bigger slime, but he only trembled with fright.

As the smaller slime charged, Airi yanked Nestor out of harm’s way, behind a mound of stones. He dove behind her and buried his face in her cloak. All his courage seemed to have deserted him.

Airi snatched the spellbook out of Nestor’s hands. “Repeat after me. ‘In the land of kettles, there was a naughty little kettle who never did as he was told...’”

“In the land of kettles, there was... there was...” Nestor repeated.

Airi could hear the slimes coming closer. It was terribly impractical, having to read a whole fairytale every time you wanted to cast a spell. Whoever had invented this magic system must have a twisted sense of humor.

The slimes converged, but Airi and Nestor had reached ‘The End’. Airi looked up, expecting the slimes to melt instantly. Instead, there was a faint hiss as a sprinkle of snow evaporated into the air. Even the slimes looked puzzled at the pathetic display.

"What was that?" she yelped, pulling Nestor into a run. The one good thing about the slimes was that they were relatively slow—but their strength allowed them to crush several piles of stones at once.

"I'm nervous, okay?" Nestor wailed, stumbling over a stone. "I can't control my mana when I'm nervous!"

"Well, don't be nervous! We just need one good spell to melt them! I know you can do it!"

"I can't, I can't!"

“Think, think, think!” Airi closed her eyes, trying to conjure a speech to motivate Nestor. “Imagine you’re Nestor the great mage, Nestor who invented the best water spell in history. You, uh, you’ve saved the world and your mom is super proud of you—”

The slimes steamed into puddles of water... with eyes. The puddles blinked angrily up at Airi and Nestor.

“W-what now?”

“I thought that’d kill them!” Airi cried. The two slimes were already reforming from the puddles, rounding into watery blobs. “Don’t you remember reading anything about monsters?”

“Monsters have cores made of mana!”

Airi’s eyes snapped open. “Okay, so we destroy the cores. Melt them again!”

While Nestor cast the spell, she reached into the satchel. Her fingers jolted against the star piece. She wrapped her hands around it, adrenaline temporarily muting the pain, and raked it across the large slime as it charged at her.

The slime recoiled and tumbled backwards through the air. The shallow gash she’d inflicted was already melting back into its squishy, liquid surface. Liquid...

“Nestor! Switch to River Runs Away!”

Nestor looked startled. “Wh—”

“Just trust me! You can make water balls, right? Can you manipulate the water around the slimes? But don’t make them round. Pull them into snakes. Long, thin, snakes!”

“I’ve never—”

“Do it! I believe in you!” (That was a total lie. Nestor was cowardly, impulsive, and six years old. Airi had zero faith in him.)

But the lie did the trick. Nestor cast River Runs Away, pulling both slimes into ribbonlike shapes. His hands strained from the effort. “Hurry! It’s really tiring!”

The shorter of the two ribbon-shaped slimes slithered towards Airi across the snow. She swung the star piece down, slicing it in half. The slime fell to the ground, both halves hardening to black. The inside of the slime was peculiar: it looked like a geode, dull on the outside with green crystals growing inwards. But before she could look closely, the slime exploded in green light that zipped towards the star piece in Airi’s hand.

She didn’t have time to drop the star piece. The mana crystallized on her skin, coating her thumb—and the moment it touched her, the green morphed to sky-blue. She scraped at it with her fingernails, but it wouldn’t come off. She scrunched her hand into a fist and found that she could still move the thumb normally.

“Your hand!” Nestor cried. “Are you okay?”

Airi gave him a thumb’s-up with her sparkling blue thumb. “I’m fine. Let’s get the other slime!”

When Nestor finished his chanting, Airi sliced the longer slime in half. It, too, emitted a flash of light that flew towards her hand. Now her entire right hand was coated in a sky-blue crystal growth. The crystal smoothed as it crept up her hand, softening like butter until it fitted like a silk glove.

Nestor reached to grab her hand. "It's cold."

Airi poked the star shard from the dragon’s wing. It no longer hurt to hold in her crystallized right hand, but when she touched it with her left hand, pain stabbed through her heart. She gripped the star shard in her right hand like a knife.

“Here. Hold my left hand,” she said to Nestor. His skin was warm. Her right hand could no longer feel much; it was tingly and numb, as if it had been injected with anesthetic at the doctor’s office.

They left the cave through a narrow tunnel. This time, Airi found herself looking forward to the next monster encounter.

But there was no monster encounter. The tunnel sloped upwards, the purple flowers dwindled, and the air became warmer and sweeter, until they finally emerged into the sunlight, gasping like fish. Airi’s eyes streamed.

They had crossed the Wrath Mountains.