Master Of None

”Me too, I want to know what you saw.” Calen was bouncing with excitement since she wanted to solve the muster. It was surprising that she had resisted the urge to run after the arrow and look for herself. 

Su and Remey held their curiosity in while they looked towards the direction Midnight was coming back from. She was huffing slightly while the sounds of dragging were made on the forest floor. The leaves were pushed apart and Midnight’s tail broke through the brush. 

”YYousaw a chameleon!?” Alma shroud in delight. She had only seen them a few times because they were so hard to spot in the forest. 

”We need to deal with it before the poison wears off.” Gil pulled his dagger and brought it down with an even force on the neck of the green creature. The knife pierced through it and after a short moment it revealed its full form.

The chameleon was about half the size of Midnight. It has scaly skin that was fading from grey without its mana flowing through its body to change its color. The curled tail was tough and used to hold on to trees while it waited for prey to pass by and catch with its quick moving tongue. The skin was a very valuable material for any system user that needed to sneak and the meat was considered a delicacy for its incredible tenderness. 

”Thanks for getting this for me Midnight.” Gil gave her a pat on the head before returning to the field dressing the chameleon so Walker could more easily store it. Midnight just raised her head higher, she was very proud of her easy job to grab the prey hunted by Gil. Her excitement was evident in her eyes as she wanted to dig in to the future meal now. 

”We should save some of that for Mrs. Hilda. She would find it very interesting to cook.” Su had instantly thought of Walker’s mother. She most likely had never cooked with such a rare ingredient. 

”Good idea, there is only so much we can do with it here in the forest. If we save some it will be a delicacy when we get home.” Walker’s mouth was already watering at the thought. 

”It was a great shot. I wish I had noticed it. I would earn a decent amount of favors from some cuts of that meat.” Wade lamented his poor luck in not seeing the chameleon move before Gil had. If only he had his head turned more to the side. 

”We can share some. I doubt we will need all of it. Food tastes better with more people anyways.” Remey volunteered some of the food to be given to their new elven companions. 

”We aren’t that greedy, we would have shared it even if you didn’t want it.” Gil laughed a little as he set so,e of the meat aside for the elves. Walker took the cuts and stored them away making sure he would remember to hand them over when they were done with what they needed to do.

”Yessssss” Calen ran in a circle full of energy when she heard they would have it for themselves as well. 

”Now that we have this all cleaned up, let’s see where the slime was heading.” Wade looked at the trail of decay that Alma had started to straighten up. The damage seemed to be strange shaped. Some places had large circular areas of decay that suddenly shrank down then expanded again. The trail did not make any sense at all. 

”This trail is like the slime is growing and shrinking randomly. Or like something is dropping from the sky and infecting the trail then flying away and dropping something  smaller.” Calen had run a little ways ahead and found that the trail was more or less like this the entire way.

”Why does that make me feel more anxious?” Remey was looking at the decaying branches Alma was pushing to the center of the trail while trying to make heads or tails of the path they were walking down. 

The group was going to try and debate the reason the path might look like this but before they could they started to come upon some small slimes that were slowly building cores. They were not able to do any damage yet but if they were left for a few more hours they would become small purple slimes capable of spreading decay. ”Cover these up with dirt to suffocate their rotting. They won’t for cores.” Walker said this but the elves were already doing so. He realized he had said something too basic for them. 

  ”So since we are finding these soon to be slimes, we should be close to the massive slime right?” Calen was poking Wade to get him to spill how close they were, she was eager to deal with the problem and get back to her normal running about. 

”It could have passed through here yesterday and those slime puddles are just now starting to gather their own cores. You can’t tell how long it takes for them to begin to form until you actually see it. We still don’t even know how these slimes were created in the first place. 

”That’s where we come in. We are here to research and gather the materials. If we can find the massive slime and gather some of its body we can bring it back to our kingdom to learn exactly that.” Walker kicked more dirt over a slime trying to form a core before following the path more. 

”The slower it takes them to form a core the better. There is a lot more decay the longer we follow the path the slimes have carved out of the forest.” Alma was visibly annoyed at the fact that things did not look to be improving. She hated that the forest was so easily taking damage. 

” The faster we move the faster we can find the problem.” Wade gave Alma a firm look, he was going to make sure that the forest she was whispering to would not be in pain. 

”Well, we are n the right trail.” Remey pointed out a medium sized slime eating away at a tree stump ahead of them. Calen had not run ahead to check out this portion of the trail yet and they had not realized there would be an enemy. 

”Wait. there are more.” Alma held up a hand to the group who was about to jump in to action. She had whispered to some of the trees nearby and gathered that they had felt multiple slimes nibbling on their roots. 

While they were stopped the group witnessed a small slime move toward the medium slime. The medium sized slime reached ut part of its body and snagged the small slime. The medium slime completely encompassed the small slime body and spit out its core. The cores went dormant immediately and the medium slime had gained a larger body. The core looked to glow with a denser amount of mana. 

”Leader, are slimes supposed to cannibalize each other like that?’ Su had never heard of this happening in the slime species she had read about. 

”Not that I have read.” 

”I’ve never heard of slimes dong that either.”

”I have been told that the slimes kept as pets by alchemists will fuse together but they would take in the core of another slime and combine it to grow. They wouldn’t completely throw out the core.” Remey was the only one with some form of knowledge on this since the old master alchemist had once kept a pet slime during an experiment. 

With Remey’s input, they were all put on edge, if they were acting differently than any other slime it made them all think that there was an outside force controlling them. ”I think we should proceed much more carefully.” Calen had lost a lot of her energetic bouncing after seeing this. 

While they watched there were more and more little slimes drawn to the medium slime and many more cores thrown out in to a dormant state. Before their eyes, a medium slime had become a much darker purple giant slime. It proceeded to consume the entire tree stump in a few minutes before starting to move towards a sapling nearby. 

”That was not good.” Alma looked at the newly grown giant slime in their way. Every single one of them was wearing faces of distress. If they were able to grow in such a way then the massive slime had the potential to grow similarly. 

”We need to get rid of that thing. I don’t know how many more slimes it needs to consume before it becomes another massive slime.” Wade tested his bow string and looked ahead. He didn’t care about the core of that slime or the research, he wanted to end this problem as fast as possible. There was no more time to move slowly, they had witnessed the largest threat in this purple decaying slime problem. 

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