Chapter 3: Forgetting Something Very Important

So, why am I not scared of angering the mom of the 'bubblehead squirrels'? Simple, I can use [Charm] on these baby bubbleheads and lure them out of their lair, somewhere far away from the tracking of their mom. Though there's the problem that the alligator with a rotating head may see me doing things, I can just limit myself away from the river for now.

Well, I guess [Charm] is so useful that I have to break my initial plans about it. Use everything at your disposal, as they say.

Slightly nodding to myself in agreement with my own plan, I proceeded to raid the giant hole wherein the baby bubbleheads reside while still sliding through the shadows to remain unseen through [Stealth]. When there are no more shadows and the gap between me and the hole of bubblehead squirrels is already illuminated by the sun, I jiggled my whole body and hopped towards the hole. In this body, I am a rather good leaper despite being absolute ass when I'm still a human, before, or so I observed. With one leap, I'm able to shoot myself into the hole, startling the huddling bubblehead squirrels.

They seem to be training their headbutting skills against each other as they used their necks to stop their head from bobbing up and down and charged against each other repeatedly. Or at least that's what they were doing before looking at me with confusion. I stopped observing them and immediately used [Charm], which caused the golden hexagon atop my head to glow a beautiful golden light that, for a moment, made all people, or monsters inside the giant hole, dazed except me.

I'm not gonna lie, even if it's just a plain gold color, I am somehow able to understand why I called False Angel Slime with how captivating the light is. If I were to describe the look of the young squerrils, they look like they have seen a god that descended in front of them, it's not even those chilche that would make them horny or something, they just look like they have seen an 'Angel'.

Well, strictly speaking, they did see someone with an 'angel' in his race's name.

I went and experimented a little, now learning that even when the golden light desipated, the bubblehead squirrels still looked at me in a daze for about a minute (not very sure about the exact time), based on the principle of scaling, I would assume that stronger monsters like their mom will be affected less than her kids. I'm quite glad, because of this, I won't attract anything that I don't want to.

After the many experiments, I jumped out of the hole whilst the 'charmed' squirrels followed me willingly. While hopping about, I realized that while they look normal at first glance, if you knew that their 'normal' is having their head bob up and down repeatedly, you would see their stiff heads as some kind of anomaly.

_That's a sign that something happened to them... perhaps a 'debuff', but the system doesn't give me a message that a charm debuff or some shit was inflicted on the target..._

I'm not 'walking' quite fast right now as I'm still afraid that the shuffling of tree branches may include their positions, making me lost, so when I get in a place far away from both the nest of bubblehead squirrels and the river at the same time, it was already the afternoon, if I were to estimate from the sun's position, I transversed until 4 pm.

_That means I'm at least 2 hours away from the nest and the river, which also means it's around 8 am when I became a False Angel Slime..._

I sighed at this thought, realizing just how fast things can change in the span of a few hours as I looked at the squirrels in front of me; their heads were still not bobbing up and down before finally snapping out of their trance.

_That's quite long..._

While they're not the standard, I can partially confirm that weaker beings can be controlled faster while being controlled by [Charm] just means being dragged towards my direction in a 'respectful' manner for a period of time, as I said before. I activated [Charm] once again to make these bubblehead squirrels stay still as I activated the other skills I want to experiment on, first I used [Self-Division], which just divided myself into a much smaller chunk of about 1 inch in size, I activated it several times making them of different sizes, some bigger some small and some even just as big as my pinky nail in my past life as I got lessened to a 1/4 of my total body mass.

It's just a small amount, but the height of my view obviously lowered, so I knew what happened.

_Ugh..._

As I was about to activate [Parasitism], I suddenly saw as my 360 degree vision waned and for a moment, the forest's soil seemed to bob up and down repeatedly as my 'brain,' if I even have one, seemed to get shrouded by a hazy mist. This vision seems to not stop no matter what.

[You have been inflicted with [Dizzy].]

_The fuck... that's not the damn forest at all, it's the core inside me that seems to suddenly catch a 'brain fog' of sorts... Ugh, I got inflicted with a debuff even_

As I diagnosed myself and again focused my mind into my surroundings to make sure that I'm not affected by anything or anyone, I finally confirmed another effect of the [Self Division] skill: brain fog, or at least a feeling of being drunk. It doesn't go away, seemingly as long as part of my body is detached, which is a big discovery, as that means that one of the drawbacks of [Parasitism] is something like this as it needs a small part of my body to function. If it doesn't go away as long as that part of my body is not reattached to me.

... Wow, talk about one hell of a bullshit drawback, I now need to make myself get accustomed to the feeling of being drunk while also resisting the visions every time I divide myself. It's a given that I'm not confident enough to survive without this skill, so I will stubbornly hold on to it no matter what kind of things I have to endure to wield it properly...

But still, I wish this weakness doesn't exist, or at least make the weakness a hard limit or something.

Thinking that there's no point in crying about such a thing, I decided to go to the next experiment which is to see how does [Parasitism] works, of course outside of what the system already said. Nothing really strange happened to my other selves as I activated [Parasitism], except them becoming a tad bit energetic in their instinctive squirming. I commanded these selves to enter the Bubblehead Squirrel children amounting to about 10, for now, I tried the [Parasitism] skill on 5 of them, using varying sizes to see what effects it would cause.

The selves pounced on the 5 Bubblehead squirrels I choose, making them and their siblings to snap out of their trance as they felt danger that threatens their lives, making them immediately stop bobbing their heads and charge in opposite direction. Or at least that's what they would do as I see them lower their stances and their muscles bulging out, however I once again used [Charm] to make them stay still as the 5 was hit rather smoothly by the 'selves' that I have divided.

The moment I did, the 5 once again got out of their trance whilst my divided selves infiltrated their gigantic heads through the openings of their face, slowly entering their mouths, eyes, ears and noses. This made the Bubblehead squirrel lost their control of their heavy heads, dropping it to the ground and turning themselves upside down.

"Squeeeee! SQUEEE!"

These experimental subjects that got their ridiculous builds turn against them squealed while their brains are being invaded by my selves, something that I instinctively knew and also can see as the 5's sclera started to be invaded by a black go of some sort and after some time, even the blacks of their eyes are now covered by my selves as they were replaced by a golden line forming a hexagon.

_Huh, cool design..._

I feel quite impressed as I saw how did the skill marked everyone I parasitized as I received a notification.

[You have successfully parasitized Bubblehead Squirrels (5x).]

_So, as expected size affects speed of parasitization, the longest to parasitized is the one that's a fourth of an inch while the fastest is a half bigger than an inch. The most optimal ones that can be used for normal times that I can use normally are the one a half of an inch smaller than one inch... let me test it out again, after that, I can use the last 5 whom I tested it as my 'avatars' for now, their headbutts seem to be quite strong with how big their heads are._

And so I did, retrieving the parts of me inside of the 5 parasitized squirrel that still hadn't lifted their heads up due to me not giving an order, which is quite simple as they just slithered towards me in a moderate pace, which is rather anticlimactic. As I regained my soberness, I made another 5 [Self Division] selves, which is about half an inch and made them enter the remaining 5.

While it doesn't really matter if its an inch bigger or smaller, size also decides how much 'drunk' I would get, so finding a middle line between the shortest time possible and the least amount of dizziness I would feel during the process of [Parasitism]. Obviously, I'm not willing to limit my number of avatars just because I feel drunk while I have them, thus I need to do a tedious experiment right now and follow it up with another series of experiments on the go against bigger monsters.

As I saw the eyes of the squirrels finally gaining a golden hexagon, I sighed, quite thankful that I have some time to spare to experiment and have some grasp on this strange power that was given to me for the sake of amusement by the god of mischief, whoever that is. It makes me think that I may have forgotten to consider something very important, but that's impossible.

After all, my emotions of panic and fear of the unknown have already been quelled by the person who put me in here... such are my thoughts as my metaphorical eyes froze in what suddenly lay in it without even a hint of sound or a splash against air resistance. It was a furious monster with a very muscular feet and legs as its calves look like it's twice of my current mass each, it has a tail as big as its half a meter body while its hands has small claws on them whilst a pair of canines teeth are protruding out of its mouth. However, this is not the most intimidating feature of the monster but it's giant and bobby head that seem to be sturdy enough to crack the toughest of boulders as well as its crimson eye that looks at me with killing intent and hatred.

Right, I... seem to really forget something important. Bubblehead Squirrels are carnivores, meaning that they have the cliche built in senses of predators: strong smell, strong hearing, good silencing ability and a very overprotective mother.

I forgot that their mother can track them down through their scents!

As I lamented, the mother bubblehead squirrel made a resounding battle cry that sounds like a 'squeeeek' but in a growling way, it's very strange. It stopped the bobbing of its head as it lowered its knees and aimed its head towards me, and as if activating a skill or something, the veins of the legs of the bubblehead mom pulsated despite all the fur. There's nothing that happened on its head, though I'm sure that there's some changes as well. All of these happened only but a split second and the mother immediately pounced towards me with tremendous speed fueled by her superior skills and rage.

I don't have the time to retrieve my mass that I used to parasitize the children's bubbleheads as I did my best to jump upwards, dodging the straight line headbutt of the enraged mother. However, as expected, a level 1 like me is unable to dodge on time, specially when the proximity is just about 2 meters, even when I did survived, 40% of my mass got grazed and splattered all over the trees, even my core was affected, producing small cracks all over.

"ARRRGGGHHH!"

I shouted, or anything that can describe the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life, I even saw my HP bar suddenly decreasing to 50%! This is a big statement because I experienced being pierced by steel bars in the temple! As I flopped down weakly, I saw as the mother's headbutt directly cracked a tree behind me, making it fall. As I shuddered at this strength, it was as if my adrenaline kicked in as I was able to regain my presence of mind as fast as possible and endured the pain as I jumped to the parasitized children of the mother that's currently reloading her charge and retrieved some of my mass.

"Time to escape!"

I declared, not even retrieving the splattered mass or eating the bubblehead squirrel for it will only make me lose precious time before activating [Stealth] and using all my PP to dash as fast as I can towards the shadows.

At this moment, I heard another bullet-like sound and the sound of a tree falling and cracking.

_God help me..._

Such is my prayer.