Drip-Fed

Above Mount Estania, the easternmost peak of the disk world leaf of Ctania, soared a creature. It was beyond strange to look at, even seasoned Branchers, the highest and most dangerous adventuring profession, would have stopped to look. Even the gods didn’t erect such mockeries of nature that often.

Yet, there it was, a chimera of the strangest design. The most inoffensive parts of it were the large wings it carefully navigated the air with. Except there were four in total. The main body, however, was even weirder. Two pairs of vulture legs stuck out of a translucent body, which was stretched into the shape of an elongated egg. The wide tail end sported a sudden growth of feathers, a wide fan the slime had found necessary to properly navigate.

A long neck that seemed like it was a return to normalcy extended from the front. The grey pelt of a vulture leading up to the head and beak. Sadly, lowering one's eyes to the ears of a deer, surrounding the base of the neck, would make one realize rather quickly that they still weren’t looking at a normal vulture.

They may not have liked it, but this was what current slime peak performance looked like. The slime was just too heavy to be lifted by one pair of wings and to make a stable landing and pick up enough speed it had found four legs much better than two. Feeling the air in them, the slime made a quick correction on the position of the deer ears.

It was nowhere near as nimble as other airborne creatures, but it could fly, and travelling via air was way faster than crawling. Also, it had found that its new, freakish appearance caused other animals to straight-up run away.

“This is certainly entertaining,” a surprisingly light metal fairy announced, sitting on the slimes back and holding on to its current neck. Although it could now clearly discern what the words were, it still had no idea what she was saying.

The question of how that communication of hers worked had to be delayed until the slime felt it was safe. Obviously, it needed to go somewhere else before the metal-skinned one returned. Either that, or get strong enough to face that thing, which the slime doubted it could do in a short span of time.

However, just relocating at the current point felt like a waste. It had gnawed itself through most of the local food chain. True, it had never succeeded in eating a bunny, but if it just managed to get to the top here it would get another scaling attribute, a True Growth, whatever it should be called. It was direly needed as well, as the slime had a hard time remembering how to construct parts it acquired a while back.

Not consuming the source of something for a long time would eventually lead to the slime forgetting about how to replicate it. A very frustrating thing but ultimately it made sense. After all, the blob was aware that it was only borrowing structures, to truly make them its own it needed to keep on improving and strengthen its nucleus through becoming the apex predator of numerous biomes and risking danger every time. Just amassing lots of stolen attributes would do it no good in the long term.

In other words, to keep evolving it had to keep challenging itself.

Maybe because it was its nature, but the slime kind of liked that idea. It was rapidly developing a daredevil persona. It wasn’t bad yet, however, nobody could know what kind of path the monster would eventually be walking down.

For the moment, it wasn’t daredevil enough to challenge the eagles that dominated this area. Particularly the one whose beak the slimes acid had damaged was something it wanted to take out. Not out of vengeance, not mainly at least, but just to realize how far it had come since leaving its birthplace.

For now, it was hungry and its vulture eyes looked around. These things were criminally good, it could see better than the previous axolotl eyes by an order of magnitude. They were so good; the slime was happy again that it didn’t choose the eyes of the axolotl. Then again, as they would have scaled with the slime, those wouldn’t have been to terrible at the current time? Either way, the pheromones would certainly be good for something someday.

All of this and more crossed the slimes mind as it looked for food. It spotted something moving in the grass a kilometre below and began its dive. Well, dive was putting it quite harshly, more like four-winged sailing.

At first it thought it was approaching a rabbit, but it soon turned out that this was an entirely different creature. Something that that slime found to be quite odd indeed, if it was even allowed to think that. It was just… yeah, it was basically just a head on a tail. No legs, no arms no nothing.

“Awakener, you are not planning to crash again, are you?” Aclysia asked, she had seen the slime half-splatter against various surfaces at least twenty times over the last few days, trying to learn how to fly and figuring out which Growths it did and did not need.

Her human quality eyes were not quite good enough to spot the snake until the slime was already upon it. In turn, the snake only noticed when the two front talons of the slime were already nailing it to the ground. The flexible creature, even if pinned, had enough room to lash out at the slime.

Who now had its first meeting with the concept of toxins. It was not a happy first date.

Instinctively going for its assailants’ neck, the snake’s twin fangs appeared only once its mouth was wide open and quickly vanished inside the flesh at the base of the long neck, where the Growth and the translucently green main body were melding together.

While the loss of a Growth was essentially non-important to the slime, it could just replace them after eating something new to replenish its mass, there was something very different about this time. A liquid was pumped into its body, not a lot of it, but something, and because the fangs had penetrated the neck at a downwards angle, the toxin was delivered to both the Growth and the slimes main body.

The effect in the main body spread quickly, being one liquid mixing with another. The slime developed a rather sudden and brutal nucleus-ache. It felt like its whole membrane was expanding only to collapse again, while at the same time not moving at all. Hot and cold washed over it and a sluggishness overcame it,the kind it hadn’t known before.

As quickly as all that came, it was gone again. The acidity of its inner digestion fluid also made for a pretty good neutralizer of natural toxins, purely because it quickly dissolved them into less dangerous parts. A feeling of bodily apathy remained, as if the slime’s body just didn’t feel like moving, but the pain and pulsating were gone.

The Growths, on the other hand, reacted like their proper biological sources would and went increasingly numb until the slime could not control them anymore and they simply limped to the floor. Now blind, without functioning ears and noses, the slime pulled those Growths back into its body.

An incredibly unwise decision, as it delivered into itself another batch of the noxious substance and, together with it, another wave of torment. At that point the slime was 90% sure it knew what other animals felt like when trying to eat it and understood why the eagle had quickly discarded it like its own waste.

Afterwards, it felt just bad. Like, physically ill to the literal core. On one hand it wanted to get away from this odd, worm-like creature. On the other it was already done with the suffering and this toxic stuff looked incredibly useful.

“Oh!” Aclysia made a sudden sound and, her hand on her awakener’s back, began gathering magic. She felt a bit stupid for not realizing immediately what the limping of the slime’s ‘head’ meant, especially with the snake still lodged in place. “You have been envenomated. I can fix that…if it is just a natural toxin, at least.”

The slime felt something cool starting from the metal fairies hand and from there travelling through its entire body like a slowly unfolding ripple. It perked up, reinvigorated and freed from the sluggishness. Now it wished it hadn’t pulled the Growths back in.

Whatever, the slime decided that it was time to eat this pesky thing and then give its helper some more slime cuddles.