You have defeated a Level 4 [Slime].
"Aha! Retractable claws!" Vespera exclaimed.
She jumped back, avoiding a small explosion of goo from the rapidly deflating slime, but unfortunately for her the landing was rather awkward. We pretended not to notice, giving her time to right herself up and find her balance, but there was no hiding our amusement through the bond. Still, her ability to pretend everything was fine was commendable, and by the time we looked at her again, she was grinning ear to ear.
Then she took off, finding another field of slimes and slicing at them with abandon. Nodding, I let Elyra join her while I busied myself with the dirty work of collecting the latest batch of shattered cores. They sold for less money than intact ones, but they were much easier and quicker to gather.
A beam of light from Elyra sniped a slime, and then Vespera jumped at another. Her claws plunged into it and she vaulted away just in time to dodge the spurt of goo, but no kill notification appeared.
"Aw, cmon!" she said and then cursed, looking at her own hands. The magic was flickering. "They worked once, why aren't they working now?"
She jumped back in, but again she failed to reach the core of the larger slime and, this time, she also failed to dodge the shower of slightly acidic goo. It landed on her skin and made her growl in annoyance, revealing her sharp fangs.
Before she could dash in yet again, Elyra quickly killed the slime with a precise beam of light.
"Hm," the angel in question said, acting aloof. "It seems that I too need to work on my magic some more. I am beginning to understand the concept Sol called decoherence, but I struggle to put it into practice and transform my beam into a coherent one. Perhaps it really is not just light as I thought, but some of that plasma matter he talked about."
Vespera stared at her, then at her own flickering claws. "You tryina be smart, huh? Wanna throw hands, angel?"
This made Elyra's facade crumble, and she descended into fits of laughter. By then, I had reached them and quickly dealt with the last remaining two slimes by simply flattening them with rocks. My Strength made it rather easy to do, and the slime's goo offered them little protection against crushing force. The moment the rocks touched the cores, the little crystalline balls shattered into a million pieces.
A whine reached my ears. "Sol! Elyra is bullying me!"
I chuckled. "You're a grown demon, Vespera. Deal with it."
She pouted and lightly punched my arm. "I'm hungry, gimme some jerky."
I fished the food out of the backpack and handed her a strip of dried meat, then crouched down to gather the shattered cores.
"Perhaps the rocks were a bit too big," I said.
Vespera perked up and joined me. The moment she saw what was left of the slimes, she laughed. "You don't say?"
"I do not think we can sell these pieces, Sol," Elyra added, staring right at me. "Maybe you should leave it to me, despite my still decohered beams of not-light."
I matched her stare. "I see how it is. You do want to throw hands."
She made a face. "Me? I would never. I am a weak little girl. What makes you think that?"
I blinked, shaking my head. "Vespera is having a bad influence on you. Anyway!" I said before the banter could continue. While I was enjoying this, and a lot at that, the sun was already slowly setting and my guild token's BTNO readings were going crazy. "I want to try something."
I placed all the shattered cores on the ground, stacked in a little pyramid. We had hunted many slimes, and the stack of broken cores reached almost to my knees.
"What's the plan, spacer boy?"
I grinned at Vespera. "Wait and see."
I placed my hands on the cores, and cast [Matter Reclamation].
Magic immediately flowed out of me, like a veritable torrent of arcane energies leaving my body all at once and draining my very being. The skill kept pulling, and I knew it wasn't enough. My hands glowed, as did the cores on the ground, but then the magic unraveled. I was out of mana, and my body felt empty, tired and spent.
"Impressive, you made them glow!"
I glared at the demon woman, but she didn't even give me the satisfaction of looking away.
Elyra was pensive. "I… did feel something through the bond," she said. "A tug, maybe. Vespera, do you think we could share our mana with him?"
"I didn't feel nothing," Vespera replied.
Unfortunately, time was running out. We gathered the cores and headed back towards the city. The backpack wasn't even a quarter full, and we felt like we were going back empty handed, but the sun was setting and we were all beginning to feel a strange sort of urgency.
We sighed in relief when we crested a hill and saw the ugly sight of the stone city walls and the smooth lithos blocks inside of them, but the relief lasted all of two seconds before a deafening screech tore through the silence.
We turned around in a split second, and that's when we saw it. The tide. The sounds reached us all at once. Hooves, feet and powerful bodies tearing the forest up. The stampede was so powerful, that it tore everything apart in its path. Trees toppled to the ground, boulders were turned into gravel, and a storm of dust trailed the black tide of creatures. The myriad of shapes blended together with one another, filling the ground with a moving mass of darkness in the fading light of the day.
The ground shook with the sound of great drums of war beating out of rhythm and tune. The sky wasn't any better. Shapes like a swarm of locusts almost blotted it out. I knew they weren't small insects, though, just far away. And yet, their cries and shrieks reached us all the same.
"Guys," I said, turning around and assessing the distance to the city. "How about we make a run for it?"
We did. By the time we were at the gates, the monsters had reached the hill where we stood, and were spilling over into the valley below. We saw one worker stumble and fall, the only one still outside save for us. Before the thought of helping him even crossed our mind, the monsters had torn him apart. His screams were lost in the chaos.
"We are sealing the gate, get in!" a guard cried, beckoning us inside.
We didn't need to be told twice. We ran in, past the guards, and didn't stop until we were a fair distance away from the small door. It was quickly sealed, and magic sprung up from the ground, surrounding it and the larger central gate.
Then the monsters hit. The magic flared, but held, although it did nothing to mute the sounds of many bodies hitting the stone.
"Can you hear it?" Elyra said in a low voice, getting close to Vespera and I.
I thought she was talking about the pounding on the gate, but no. She looked up and around, in the smoky darkness of the lithos's roof. That's when I became aware of how silent everything was. For a moment, all life inside the city had stopped, everyone holding their collective breath.
We heard the beast wave engulf the city. First from the direction of the gate, then from the sides, above and finally in the narrow passageways between the various lithos blocks. The walls boomed with impacts of the greater monsters, shook when the birds dove from the sky like kamikaze bombers. The whine of claws against the outer stone reverberated everywhere, each sound amplified and transmitted everywhere until the whole city was a cacophony of sounds.
After a while, the first few people resumed walking. The merchants haggled. Slowly, life ground back up to normal. And yet, the voices felt fainter even though they were actually louder so that they could be heard through all the noise. People kept an ear to the walls, flinching when a particularly strong impact rattled them here or there or far away. Outside, through narrow gaps in the stone, guards and workers were flinging their magic against the larger and more dangerous monsters. Every time they opened one of the gaps, the booming sounds of battle invaded the city.
It was like being inside a blender, a thunderstorm, or my hauler when it passed through a debris field.
At the guild, we went straight to the Workers Exchange and traded the slime cores for 57 copper bits. Not even enough to cover the daily interest on our debt.
"Looks like it's a going to bed without dinner day today. A great classic." I said as we reached our room.
It was supposed to be just a joke, because we did have enough to eat, I thought, but the girls cringed.
"Did you do that often, Sol?" Elyra asked, worried.
"When I was tight on money, sometimes it came to choosing between a drop of Green and food. I needed the Green to stave off old age from all the cryo-sleep, so…" I trailed off.
She hugged me. "No more. Okay?"
"Actually—"
I caught myself when I noticed two very dangerous sets of eyes staring at me. "Ehm, I was saying… even though my high Vitality helps, I am a bit hungry. We still have some silver coins and some leftover jerky. In my old life, there were restaurants catered to haulers, where the food was plenty, filling and cheap. I'm willing to bet the Guild has something similar with all of its workers. Let's go ask Bib, shall we?"