Chapter 53: Pieced Together 4

“Can you hurry it up?!” Reysha groaned, licking her hands clean of the third meal she had taken while Apexus was busy trying to gnaw on the dungeon structure. “You have been working on that branch for like four hours now.”

“Is dense material,” Apexus answered. “IT is dense material… Keep… I keep forgetting the first word in sentences.”

The tiger girl yawned, to show just how little she cared about the slimes imperfect speech patterns. “Gimme an idea of what you’re doing then, so I can share in your plight,” she requested, a sudden curiosity coming over her.

“I need to get the exterior… the bark under my exterior… my membrane,” Apexus had to stop twice in the sentence to find the correct terms. “I can’t properly digest things just on my body. They need to be in.” All the while he spoke, mandibles of the local creatures were working on a branch and slowly chipping away on the surface.

This was the second outgrowth from the main, broad path of wood that extended out of the giant tree dungeon, that Apexus was munching on. The bark was the real problem, since the mandibles were meant to eat the somewhat softer core-wood of the three and thus had little problems once past. Little problems meaning that it still took way too long to tear into the wood, there was a reason why Archwood Maggots were staying inside one burrow for the majority of their lives.

Apexus had taken on quite a bit of mass already. If Reysha, herself a pretty tall humanoid, laid down next to him, she would havee been only about one head longer than him. Since he was also quite a bit broader, not to mention one massive ellipsis compared to the many segments the tiger girl’s body was separated into, it was fair to say that Apexus had outgrown her by now.

If he would have copied her rough outline, with four limbs and those egg-shaped tops humanoids had, Apexus imagined he would have been taller than her by quite the margin. Well, depending on how broad or slim he made himself. It was just a thought experiment, he didn’t find that shape particularly convincing in use. At least as long as he didn’t have hands, feet and, most importantly, a bone structure. If he even wanted one of those.

Open questions, very open questions. For now, Apexus’ personal next goal was a proper mouth. Not for talking, but to have a more reliable biting and ripping tool. On the topic of questions, Reysha had another one.

“So, wait, if you need to have things inside you, how did you eat the boss then?”

“You mean when he was dead or when alive?” Apexus asked, then stopped to ask Aclysia something. “Can I drop the second when in that sentence?”

Stopping in her somewhat paranoid watch of the surroundings, the metal fairy flew over, “Yes, that is not a required piece in the sentence to keep it understandable.”

“For the record, I mean alive,” Reysha kept them on topic. “When its dead and not squirming around, I get it. You can just search for a spot that is convenient and eat it from there…” She suddenly started giggling, “Like you did earlier.”

What she was referring too was Apexus trying to eat a branch from the tip downwards. That was the logical idea, just wrap himself around some thin part and dissolve his way down. The last time he had tried something like that, it had worked perfectly. Last time, he had also been a lot lighter. Rather than the easy eating Apexus had hoped for, he indeed had the branch bend under his weight until he fell downwards like a massive drop of water.

Fortunately, he caught himself and flew back up before he could splatter on any surface. The slime could only imagine the amount of force behind an uncontrolled impact his current size would bring with it. After landing back on the safe wood, he had instead opted to cut the branch off piece by piece and digest those. Immensely more work, but way safer.

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“Did not really… didn’t really… I didn’t really!” The wooden plate let out a frustrated groan after Apexus realized he needed three attempts to formulate a normal sentence start. Since he was a beast that grew through continuous efforts, rather than gaining sudden explosions of power, he had the patience to continue regardless, but sometimes it got annoying to be inept at new things. “I didn’t really digest it, just managed to dissolve enough of the abrasive surface to make it too weak to sustain its own weight. Would be like making the bark smooth. Small meal, not helpful right now.”

“Ah, okay,” Reysha nodded and then looked at the remainder of her own remains of food.

“You always leave a mess,” Apexus noted. “Can you not eat innards?”

“I guess I could search for the liver,” Reysha noted, looking at the bird corpse behind her. The Woodsharper had decided to do its dirty work in the wrong corridor and was now, as Apexus has rightfully pointed out, a mess. Most of its feathers had been ripped out and muscle fibres all stripped of the bones, partly broken, leaving a bunch of organs scattered on the floor, still loosely connected and bloody. “But I am not going to fill my mouth with bile, stomach acid or literal shit… did you ever eat shit?”

“When I was a drop,” Apexus told her, much to the tiger girls amusement as she began laughing. Loudly, in an immensely shrill tone that could probably be heard four branches over. Which was why Aclysia was quick flying up to her and held the redheads mouth close as best she could. The slime was still talking without caring about this, “First thing I ever ate was a small insect that survived off… well, wasn’t exactly shit, was matter settling on the floor of a small pond in a state of decay. Pretty sure there was defecation amongst it, though. Tasted awful, I went on to hunt and eat moss instead.”

“Right, I can ask you this now,” Aclysia flew over and settled on her usual spot on his back. Although her eyes still were on the look-out for any sudden adventurer attacks, “Can you actually tell me where you are from? The description you gave me and Gizmo was rather short and lacklustre.” To be fair to the slime, it had been one of his first extended writing assignments ever.

Reysha, biting her lower lip in an effort to keep down her laughter, a gesture that looked purely accidentally sexy, nodded. “Might help you… hihihi,” she started talking, only to immediately giggle insanely, “Whew… sorry, bad at controlling myself. Might help you get better at talking, is what I wanted to say.”

“Well…” Apexus started, “I cannot tell you much. There was a flash and then I just was. I came into consciousness and needed to eat. Then I knew how to copy. Then I ate different things. I grew, I ate bigger things.” The slime took a moment off his work to point at a drop of rainwater that was hanging from a nearby leaf, “Was even smaller than that.”

Aclysia hummed, this sounded entirely different from being created by a god. When she had been created, she had actively felt her soul forming and slowly growing stronger, a body being added later at the behest of her creator. “Does this match up with the usual mortal experience?” she asked Reysha. Not that she was actually that uneducated about the basic mortal reproductive cycle, it was just better to ask.

“Oh hells to the no,” the blue-in-grey-eyed woman waved off. “We need like 14 to 18 years to grow up and basically nobody remembers being a baby… even if many people still are giant babies… speaking of that, how old are you anyway? Sheer curiosity.”

The crunching of wood underlined Apexus’s words, he had finally made it through the bark. Now he had to carefully take hold of that segment of the branch and separate it entirely. Aclysia had the decency to help him, flying underneath it and holding it up. If it fell away, it was just lost. “Impossible to say accurately. There was no sun in the cave. I know I spent like half a year with Gizmo… at least that...and time has passed since. Maybe two years now?”

“We should give you a birthday sometime,” Aclysia decided, then let out a stressed sound as she felt the weight of the wood genuinely on her arms. She wasn’t a divine creation designed for physical labour, a small one to boot and the wood was, as Apexus had said, dense, which made it heavy in turn. It only took Apexus a moment to take proper hold of it and pull it inside him, however.

“If you want to,” the slime had no concept whether this birthday thing was any use or not. What was it going to get him, delicious food present with an awesome hunt? The wood dissolved inside him with an earthy, rich sweetness with a heavy aromatic undertone. “Seem to have gotten all I can out of this,” he let the duo know, Reysha kicking the Woodsharper corpse off the branch with an ecstatic shout.

“Finally, movement!” she threw her arms into the air.

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