ALL NOVEL Chapter 56 – the second evolution trial part 2/2
Now that I had gotten used to my slime body I easily won the next two fights, moving on to the tier two slimes ten minutes later. I was almost halfway through the trial after only half an hour and without losing a single match, so I was feeling more confident about the remaining ones. As the type of mana that filled my body changed I realised an issue I had just thought of.
None of the remaining slimes had a physical element they created so it was going to be much harder to figure out which slime I had been turned into. Since I had no way of figuring it out, I just decided to go with my instincts and follow what the mana said what it wanted to do. This took me two whole minutes to figure out, during which time I was struck eight times, but eventually I realised that the mana inside of me wanted to be used in a positive way, either by healing or buffing.
The only kind of magic I could think of that would fit that description was light mana. As soon as I figured it out, I started to make the mana in my body start to make me lighter and faster. This had an immediate effect as I started to travel twice as fast as before, and all the other slimes were travelling so slowly relatively that it was like they were travelling in slow motion.
I then started using the same technique as my first fight with the standard slimes where I bounced behind a slime and hit it until its core smashed before moving on to the next slime. The only difference is that I coated my tendril in light mana to reinforce the strike. The slimes also were able to heal themselves, although not as well as the life slimes could, so they were a bit tankier and took ten minutes to finish off.
As soon as the final slime fell I was once again filled with a new type of mana. This time it took me only a minute to figure out that I was a force slime. This was faster partly because walls of mana kept on appearing in front of me, trying to trap me. Thankfully it never worked and as soon as I figured it out I coated myself in a protective layer that stopped all of their attacks well before they could even reach me.
I then did the same to the other slimes except the layer was constrictive instead of protective as they slowly shrank, forcing the slime’s goo into a smaller and smaller space until the core couldn’t take the pressure anymore and imploded. It wasn’t easy as they tried to use their own magic to break the shell that I had placed on them but all it managed to do was delay their inevitable demise.
With two of the tier two slimes finished I got into a groove and quickly finished off the next two slimes. The death slimes were the fastest as they were practically glass cannons, so it didn’t take much to kill them, I just had to make sure that their attacks didn’t hit me. The psychic slimes were the hardest as psychic attacks are impossible to dodge, although this went both ways so the fight turned into a match to see who could deal more damage the fastest, which was me thanks to my higher level.
So, with just under half my time remaining I moved on to the life slimes. The fight started as usual, we exchanged blow for blow, and I was managing to hit them more than they were hitting me but as soon as I felt like one of them was close to dying the rest would all start to heal that one until it was back at full. This went on for twenty minutes as I slowly started to use more and more force in my attacks, trying to outpace their healing.
I even stopped defending myself in my attempt to kill just a single slime, in the process my health got low multiple times but each time I just healed myself back to full. Unfortunately, nothing worked and the fight turned into a stalemate that would last until one side ran out of mana. This could theoretically take hours, so I decided to give up on getting the evolved life slimes and instead go for the null slimes.
I had managed to win all my other fights so losing one wasn’t too bad and I didn’t know how long the fight with the null slimes would take. With my decision made I stopped healing myself and five minutes later my core shattered, and I moved on to the final fight. I would come back later when I could do the trial again so that I had a full two hours just to fight the life slimes.
The feeling of my core shattering was a weird sensation, the best way I could explain it is it felt like what I imagined my brain shattering while still in my body would feel like. As the trial rebuilt my body I was foolishly expecting it to fill it with some mana. Instead, it was almost like my new body was a mana void that sucked the mana around it into itself to sustain it.
A few minutes later I was starting to wonder if the trial had messed up somehow because I didn’t sense any slimes be spawned in when something struck my side, sending me flying. I sent a tendril out in the direction that I had been struck, but it didn’t hit anything. This made me realise that since I could only see the mana around me the other slimes were practically invisible to me.
There must be some way to figure out where they were as I had just been struck, I snuck around the arena confused until I remembered the first party that had gone through my dungeon mentioned that they noticed something strange where the null slime was hiding. They may not have done anything with that and eventually fell into the trap, almost failing the boss fight, but I could use that now.
Instead of focusing on where the purple fog was the thickest like I had in my previous fights I instead looked for places where it was unnaturally thin. As I was doing this, I was struck one more time but this time I noticed that it came from a spot that fit what I was looking for. Not waiting to land I immediately struck the ground behind me so that I flew to where the spot was.
As soon as I was close enough to have a clean shot, I sent a tendril shooting through the air at where I thought the null slime was. My goo reverberated, telling me that I had struck something. It turned out that the null slimes were quite weak, most likely relying on their camouflage to protect them instead of a high constitution like most slimes, as the fog around where I had struck started to go back to normal levels, telling me the null slime was dead.
Now that I had figured out the trick to defeating the null slimes, I quickly killed the remaining four slimes over fifteen minutes, ending the trial with just seven minutes to spare. I was upset that I didn’t manage to evolve all my slimes, but I could always try again another time. I assumed it would give me two whole hours to defeat the life slimes and I doubted that they had enough mana to last that long.
I soon was transported back to where I was before I started the trial and was presented with a notification when I opened my eyes. Reading it surprised me as I wasn’t expecting a new skill to go with my patterns but I was still happy about it. After doing a bit of research I found out that apparently I got the skill from a combination of doing so well and using the skill in the trial.
As I activated it the same purple fog appeared in the room and everything received a purple tint to it. It was very similar to how it looked in the trial except the fog was much fainter and it was much more detailed. I planned on spending the rest of the day getting used to my new skill but before that I looked at my new patterns, starting with the unattuned giant slime.
It was pretty much exactly as I expected, a stronger version of the slime. [Improved Physical Resistance] just increased the physical damage resisted from 50% to 75%. I was much more excited about [Split] though as it caused the slime to split into up to five smaller slimes upon losing half of its health. It could do this because the giant slime was essentially just five smaller slimes that had merged together into one monster.
This meant that the giant slime had five cores that could each control one body once it split, the only thing stopping that is if any of the cores were destroyed before it could split. With that done I then moved on to the elemental slimes.
The Giant Elemental Slimes were the same as the un-attuned slimes except they had a few more points in the mental stats to help them cast their magic. This left the last pattern, the condensed null slime.
Instead of merging with four other slimes the null slime specialised even further into camouflage and ambushing its prey by becoming slightly smaller as well as gaining [Chromatic Goo]. This lets it change the colour of its goo similar to how an octopus changes the colour of its skin to hide. I was unsure how it would be able to tell what colour the goo should change into so I looked it up and apparently as part of the skin the surface of the goo gained primitive photoreceptors that could tell the colour of things within a short distance.
Happy with my new patterns I spent the rest of the day practising my mana sense as spending almost two hours fighting non-stop had been mentally draining.
