I threw myself to the side, the damp earth scraping my skin as death narrowly missed.
Splat!
The fluid struck the tree I had just used as cover. The bark hissed, white steam billowing with the stench of sulfur. If that had been my skin... I would have melted.
The creature landed, rebounded, and readied another leap.
No time to think. Running was suicide.
My eyes caught something in the center of its gelatinous mass. A solid core. A dimly glowing crystal the size of a golf ball.
Its heart. Or its brain.
As it lunged at my face, I didn't dodge.
I thrust forward.
My right hand shot straight out, plunging through its mucous membrane.
"Ghh!"
Heat.
It was like dipping my hand into boiling water. My skin blistered instantly. But my fingers kept pushing deeper, searching, grasping...
Got it.
I gripped the crystal.
Thump.
My world stopped for a fraction of a second.
As my blistered skin touched the cold surface of the crystal, the pain didn't vanish, but it... shifted. Something flowed into me.
Not electricity. Not magic.
It felt like an injection of pure glucose straight into the bloodstream. Faint, subtle, but enough to dilate my pupils. My heart beat once, stronger than before.
I wrenched my arm out.
Splat.
The slime lost its cohesion, collapsing to the ground as a puddle of murky, foul-smelling liquid.
I panted, staring at my hand. Red, blistered, trembling.
The crystal remained in my grasp. Its glow faded, as if I had just siphoned its life away.
The stinging in my skin was excruciating, yet beneath the pain, there was a strange sensation. The muscles in my arm felt denser. The fatigue from my earlier walk had partially evaporated.
Evolution? Adaptation? Or was I just becoming a parasite?
Crack. Snap.
Slither... slither...
The forest around me came alive.
Not one. Not two.
They emerged from behind roots, from atop branches, from behind rocks. Dozens of them.
Starving.
"Damn it."
I ran.
My feet pounded the earth; my lungs pumped the humid air.
They pursued. The sound of transparent bodies launching through the air resembled a soft meteor shower behind me.
Crash!
A tree to my left was hollowed out by a splash of acid.
I slipped, tumbling down a small incline and crashing into a muddy puddle.
At the bottom lay a dead end. A limestone cliff face.
And in front of me, a giant slime—an amalgamation of three or four individual ones—was already waiting. Its body undulated, firing off a liquid tentacle.
There was no time to dodge.
The tentacle wrapped around my waist. A searing heat burned through the fabric of my pants. I was hoisted into the air, suspended helplessly, drifting toward a gaping 'mouth.'
Dark. Green. Searing.
The world went black as I was swallowed whole, plunging into a suffocating abyss of digestive acid.