Chapter 18: Exile 4

Being sapient didn’t just give Apexus the magical power to kill the Forester Dragon. Although it probably did help with learning magical abilities. Not the point. Apexus needed to prepare a few things for this next step. For that, carrying a nice and polished pebble inside it, the slime took to the sky. Once up there it noticed about half a dozen of the faint smoke signals in the distance.

Forester Dragon’s continuous smoking weren’t just a warning signal for predators, but also served to see each other from a distance. Generally, these lizards were seclusive, but during mating season they had to find each other somehow. The smoke signals females gave off were different enough that other members of the species or experienced hunters could tell.

The slime couldn’t, neither did it care. Instead, it was trying to understand and predict the path these giants took and would take. That was easy, as they progressed on fairly straightforward ways, only course correcting if a particularly juicy tree tickled their fancy. Once Apexus had looked over a fair number of the faux-dragons, it picked the perfect specimen for its plan.

For once the question wasn’t which was the easiest or oldest target, but instead which was crossing certain points the likeliest. Once it picked its target and prepared everything for the ambush, the slime had to wait.

Apexus was really bad at waiting.

Therefore, rather than sit on its below, it went to find the remaining two things required for the ritual. As it had a huge boulder and a smoking faux-dragon as its landmarks, the slime wasn’t too worried about finding its way back.

Finding a deep green-leaved plant was actually surprisingly difficult. Most of the trees that were around, Apexus would have described as light or average leaf green. It even found the white bark before that plant, although it had to eat something with claws before it could scratch some off.

Something with claws was, in this case, a black cat creature that tried to cross the road left by a Forester Dragon at a bad time. Ambushing from the sky was just entirely unfair, the impact force basically transporting the entire cats right into the slimes inner layer. There was a load of struggling afterwards, the slime having a hard time containing the writhing creature within it, but ultimately the cat caught a lungful of acid and died.

In good news, that meant the slime finally had access to some new Growths it could use. It kept the vulture-deer-snake combination active for the moment, simply because it liked the poison and the long neck, but now it could also wobble around on the cat’s legs. Or that was the plan, but the legs proved simply inadequate to reliably support the slime’s weight. Therefore, Apexus opted to not use them after getting some of the bark.

Keeping digestible things inside it with the expressed purpose of not eating them was really weird, not to mention straining. It was like keeping a mouthful of drink and not swallowing. Eventually that turned out to be too uncomfortable and the slime decided to place the piece of bark and the pebble somewhere safe.

Namely, in a tree top that it had given the same treatment as its old den on the mountainside. Within the carved in the trunk, these two items were left securely while it went out to take care of the rest of its stuff.

After a few more days of searching (always keeping an eye on the ever so sluggishly moving Forester Dragon) the slime finally got what it needed. It was more of a stroke of luck than anything else. The white barked trees were at least common within the forest, so tripping over one of them was just a question of time. In contrast, what Apexus picked as its final offering was anything but.

A plant that a bored god had infected with a version of vampirism, the blood-vein ivy was a species found in numerous dimensions of the omni-verse. It was an odd one, its life cycle consisted of attaching to a tree and sucking it dry of any and all sap. Once it had finished one off, the ivy then grew a stilt that anchored on another tree. From there, all nutrients of the old ivy were absorbed into that stilt, proliferating the growth of the new network.

Lucky for forests on all leaves everywhere, the blood-vein ivy in all its forms could not truly procreate. Being a vampire, and as such largely immortal, the plant was practically an undead creature. Sometimes normal ivies got infected by vampirism, but that happened on a fluke. While this forest-eating pest couldn’t truly be eradicated, it also didn’t spread at any alarming rate either. It was just another part of the forests eco-system.

And one of the exemplars was currently being devoured by the slime. While vampirism, being akin to a curse, wasn’t something that the slime could replicate, Apexus was still hungry, interested in growing and in need of a part of the plant.

Might as well eat the display on this tree. With its current size, it could pick the bark clean in a few hours. The hooks, used to draw out the sap from underneath the bark, were something the slime didn’t really know what to do with, but the dark green leaves with the blood-red veins running through them surely qualified for the ritual.

Now it finally only needed the antlers and then it could head back to revive Aclysia, the anticipation positively reverberated in its body as it sat atop the boulder and slowly brought it out of balance.

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The reason why sapient creatures were great at hunting big game was quite easy. The larger a creature was, the more they relied on their defences and power. The best way to counter that combination was intelligence.

If one lacked the capabilities to slash through fur, why not to try stabbing with a sharpened piece of wood? If one was afraid of the counterattack from mighty claws, tails or whatever else a giant could be armed with, why not try throwing the piece of wood? If one had no idea how to make tools and was faced with a foe that had impenetrable scales, what was a slime to do?

Wait until the prey made the unwise decision of eating its way by a cliffside and then drop a giant stone on it, that was the conclusion the slime had come to. The boulder tipped past the point of no return and slid off the edge. The slime flapped its wings franctically, having used its own bodyweight to set this into motion.

An unpleasant, wet sound, like somebody slapping their hands around a patty of fine mincemeat, and the green and brown forest had a whole lot of red added to the canvas. The brutality was both disgusting and entirely ethical, as the fifteen-metre-long creature had the middle of its body crushed and thus splattered out underneath it, killing it pretty much instantly.

Small birds all around were flying away, rodents running even further from the walking deforestation, all of them chased by a small explosion from the Forested Dragons fire bag. It was too weak and short-lived to catch onto anything anywhere.

Apexus nodded its snakehead to itself, deciding it had done good and swooped in to grab one of the many broken off antlers. The clean kill thoroughly reimbursed it for the many hours spent digging away at the dirt that had kept the boulder in place. Hells, it had even accidentally caused another one before finding the correct balance with that second one.

After stashing the antler away in its nearby den, the slime returned to the sight of its kill. Surely, once it was done eating this thing, it would be granted another permanent evolution.

A process that took another two days. Of course, the slime couldn’t just envelop all of the beast, it was way too small for that endeavour. The red scales also turned out to be almost indigestible, being made a large part from iron. After losing hours on a just three of them, the slime decided to concentrate on the meat and bones instead.

The Forester Dragon tasted, quite frankly, bad. The meat was stringy and tasted almost entirely like burned wood. The bones made for a tastier treat, but also suffered from needing three eternities to be eaten. In the end, the natural garbage dispenser of the forest struck and began dissolving the rest of the corpse, which began to rot in the summer heat. At that point, the slime decided it had eaten its fill and backed off.

Like it had hoped, there was another permanent evolution available to its nucleus and so it began to rack its mind. There wasn’t a whole lot available right now, but hesitation, it just knew, would leave this rush of magic it currently felt fading and ultimately wasted. The permanent evolutions were, after all, not a blessing by any god but a peculiar feature of the slime’s unique bio-magical composition.

If the rush of conquest faded, so did the surge of power. It had already been a wonder that it was able to wait a week during the Aclysia situation.

Cat paws would have been a decent choice, but Apexus had already made its choice to take the route of finally getting at least one sense permanently affixed to itself, so legs and the kinds were out. Having wings, it also didn’t feel the immediate need to upgrade its mobility.

As it could only pick between Growths it could currently remember, its selection of sensory organs was rather limited. As a flier, it best go with eyes as well. Those were by far the most important senses in the air.

And there it only had two choices, cats and the Forester Dragon. Apexus already had gathered some experiences with cat eyes the past few days and they were pretty good, particularly at night. The Forester Dragon’s singular eye was also quite good, but it was specialized on short-distance tree-analysing. Ultimately still a predator, no many how many plants it ate to grow larger, Apexus went with the cat eyes.

And so, two colourless cat eyes grow on the elliptic shaped slime’s front and slowly blinked before curiously looking around. They were worse than the vulture eyes from up in the air, but the slime also didn’t quite need the insane view distances those were capable off. It didn’t make a habit out of flying that high.

With its third acquisition squarely attached to its shape, the slime turned took of the ground and towards its den. Once there, it would scoop up the materials and make bee-line back to Gizmo.

It didn’t want to be tempted to eat the resources inside it for any longer than necessary.

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