"Go on, then. Hit me with your Phase Three while you're at it."
"Taking a human shape simply makes it easier to walk among primates," Svelten replied, entirely unbothered by the mockery. He gave a nonchalant shrug, or at least, the bulging mass of muscle where his shoulder used to be shifted slightly.
For a monster, he had an infuriatingly mild temper.
"I originally planned to bring you back breathing. I was quite fond of that delicate little boy form you had earlier," Svelten sighed wistfully.
He raised a hand, revealing a glowing, pulsing sigil carved into his flesh, a direct magical tether to Altrouge.
"But we've been playing for too long. The Princess is getting impatient."
Svelten tilted his head, his elongated fangs glinting in the sickly green light. "Well. I suppose a corpse can always be revived later. Wouldn't you agree?"
As he spoke, the ghost ship in the distance finally gave up its struggle against the storm. Its rotting crew began hurling themselves over the railing.
But instead of sinking, their spectral boots hit the churning waves and stuck.
They started sprinting across the surface of the ocean, swarming toward them like a tide of glowing green ants.
"…"
Rimuru stared. The urge to scream obscenities was overwhelming.
"If your ghosts can literally run on water," Rimuru snapped, "why the fuck did you let them sit on the boat watching the show for so long?!"
"To drain your mana, obviously," Svelten chuckled, as if it were the most natural tactical decision in the world. "Plus, I genuinely wanted to see how you handled a one-on-one."
But you're a summoner! Play your damn class!
Rimuru felt a deep, spiritual exhaustion wash over him. With a mental flick, he canceled the massive whirlpools and the torrential rain locking down the galleon. He fell silent. He really had blown a massive chunk of his reserves on that crowd-control stunt.
But he couldn't complain. The mental warfare had started the moment the Reality Marble deployed.
This was how high-level combat worked. It wasn't about who could scream the loudest or throw the biggest fireball. It was a chess match.
You probe. You bait. You burn your opponent's resources while holding onto your own lethal trump card.
It was exactly like Diarmuid hiding his cursed spear during his first duel with Artoria, you don't lead with your ultimate move because if it misses, you're dead.
You chip away at their health, hoard your passives, and force an opening.
Svelten had traded some blood and taken a dunk in the ocean, but the vampire clearly felt the trade was worth it. He thought he had mapped out Rimuru's limits. Now, he was moving in for the checkmate.
"Ugh, damn it."
Rimuru exhaled sharply. His shoulder throbbed with a burning, localized agony. Slimes were supposed to be immune to physical trauma, but Svelten's blood claws and the nasty little curse laced into them were entirely conceptual. In this specific matchup, the White Knight was a hard counter.
Splash! Splash! Splash!
All around Rimuru, the ocean surface erupted. Hundreds of semi-transparent figures rose from the waves, water clones, perfectly mimicking Rimuru's current disguise, each gripping a watery greatsword.
Under the Great Sage's flawless micromanagement, the clone army charged forward, forming a physical barricade to intercept the incoming ghost crew.
Rimuru had no idea what kind of debuffs or insta-kill gimmicks those spectral sailors carried. He wasn't going to let them get within ten feet of him.
"Oh my…"
Svelten's eyes widened, genuinely impressed by the display. "I must admit, your mastery over Magecraft is staggering. It's no wonder the Princess has taken such a profound interest in you. But a magus of your terrifying caliber shouldn't be a nameless nobody."
"I'm not a nobody," Rimuru said, lowering his eyelids. "Your boss clearly recognized my style or heard the rumors. You're just ignorant."
He adjusted his grip on the black greatsword. "I like to think I'm actually quite famous… in the magus world."
"Ah, is that so? Then please forgive my ignorance," Svelten smiled. Even with a face stretched into a monstrous, fanged gargoyle, his unfailingly polite demeanor somehow gave him a bizarre, rugged charm.
But that unwavering politeness just proved one thing: Svelten was absolutely, one-hundred-percent certain he was going to win.
Rimuru closed his eyes, cutting off the banter. He raised the demon sword.
Let's finish this.
He wasn't entirely out of lifelines. He had one final, absolute trump card: his other self. The clone currently sitting in a comfortable office back at the Clock Tower.
It wasn't a familiar. It wasn't a projection. It was exactly as Rimuru had told May: Slimes can split.
Over the past month, inspired by Touko Aozaki's puppet magecraft, Rimuru had figured out how to create a true biological phylactery. He had severed a piece of his core.
But to prevent permanently damaging his foundation and magical potential, he couldn't split his power evenly.
The London clone held only a minuscule fraction of his true strength, acting merely as a soul anchor.
If his main body died here in Germany, his consciousness and soul would instantly snap back to the Clock Tower clone. He would survive.
But the cost was steep. To regrow his mana capacity and physical specs back to this current Lord-class level, even with his High-Speed Regeneration, would take at least five or six years of agonizing recovery.
Five or six years of weakness. Five or six years added to his timeline before he could even think about finding a way home.
Rimuru gritted his teeth. His crimson, mechanical eyes flared with renewed intensity. Unless it was truly the bitter end, he refused to taste death today.
Even if the odds were absolute garbage… he had to fight like his life depended on it.
…
Crack! Splash! Crack!
A sickly green ghost sailor fired a rusted flintlock.
The bullet tore through the chest of a watery Rimuru clone, exploding the construct into a shower of sea spray.
A second later, the water gathered itself, bubbling back up from the cursed ocean to re-form the boy's image.
The phantom army was an endless meat grinder. They were perfectly cordoned off by the clone barricade, but they were doing exactly what Svelten designed them to do: bleeding Rimuru's finite mana dry.
At the center of the Reality Marble, the atmosphere was suffocating.
The low, wretched sobbing of ghosts echoed through the dense fog.
A torrential, magically saturated rain beat down from the darkened sky, yet it did nothing to wash away the swamp-like miasma hanging over the sea.
Within that gloom, two blurs, one clad in black, the other wrapped in the gale, clashed repeatedly.
The sharp, ringing shriek of steel hitting steel was frequently punctuated by the wet, sickening sound of a blade tearing through flesh.
"ROAR!"
Without warning, the ocean floor erupted. A colossal hand made of churning, hyper-compressed water breached the surface, followed by the towering form of a hundred-meter-tall water giant.
The shockwave alone flipped dozens of ghost ships and sent spectral sailors tumbling into the abyss.
The spray soaked Svelten's golden hair. A flicker of genuine caution crossed his pale face, but the polite, unnerving smile never left his lips.
He raised his empty hand. Blood gathered, condensing into a massive, crimson crescent.
Slash.
BOOM!
The giant's hand never even reached him. The blood blade sheared cleanly through the elemental colossus, parting the ocean itself in its wake.
….
+20 chapters on my p@tr3on: Kazuma_trash
you can join my discord server: https://discord.gg/5Y7uZ2kN2Y
Or in short just click in join via invite link in your discord and enter this code: 5Y7uZ2kN2Y