Realities of the First Adventure (1)

"HOLY SHIT!!? IT'S A SLIME!!"

Slime.

The blue blob with a glittering core in the center wiggled about. It looked like those semi-circular marbles. I don't know if amoeba is the right way to describe it but instead of your usual 'pyon pyon' jumping, the slime extends its feelers slowly, pulling itself closer towards a specific direction. And instead of the 'boing' kind of sound, it's movement made a sound more like slushing.

In this case, this slime was pulling itself to.. somewhere.

"Can we touch it?" Prune was taking photos using the camera widget.

"I believe this species isn't corrosive," Liliath said, moving closer and pressing a finger on top of its jelly body.

You could literally see how the body deformed slightly to the pressure. And it wasn't like Liliath's finger was being corroded or sucked into the slime. Huh, it's more like jello than slime.

I too, went to feel the body of the slime. It was slightly sticky with lubrication, pieces of snow being dragged along with it-- it was cold, and kind of solid. Maybe the slime hardened due to the temperature?

Nine and Prune had their turn to touch the slime who continued to ignore us and move towards 'somewhere'.

"Cool.."

"It's nice and soft."

"But we have to kill it."

"Huh?! Why?!" Prune reacted violently.

"Smack a slime with a stick, you know?"

"B-B-But.."

"Prune's entranced by a slime, if you check appraisal it has [Seduction] skill you know?"

"What?"

Nine was lying. I checked it. This Frost Slime, among many other nicknames, is level 2 with stats around 4 to 12. Wait, 10 points is a multiplier of x1 right? Then a stat of 4 is a multiplier of x0.4? That's like.. reducing the base stat isn't it?

I changed the slime's AGI stats from 4 to 40.

"Oh my gawd.."

"OH SHIT, Look at it go."

The slime's speed increased about 16 folds. Prune started laughing at the ridiculous scene. It's as if the slime had been sped up 16 times the normal playback speed, the way it moved its feelers was disgustingly funny. To put it into normal context, imagine a chicken moving while shaking its head back and forth; speed up that scene 16 times the normal.

"How fun," Liliath chuckled beside me. Man.. reminds me of when we played around with ants. I returned the slime's AGI stat back to 4 before it went on a rampage.

Now then--

We went and found a suitable stick from the ground-- who knew finding sticks could be so hard-- shook off the snow and passed it to Nine. Honestly, it was more of a branch.

Nine changed his STG stats to 200 and walked up to the slime. Liliath, Prune and I watched from a distance. I know, we're being very unprofessional as adventurers here but it's a slime you know? A Slime!

Nine took in a deep breath and-- swung the stick..

The cytoplasmic structure bent inwards.. but when the stick hit the ground (stick still inside its body), it reformed its structure and wrapped itself around the stick. Nine pulled it out in a hurry, the end of the stick now had goo on it. Not only was there this weird smell of sulphur-- the stick was actually corroding.

"Fuck. I missed."

To be honest, I was glad that our first encounter was this slime. It was a non-hostile creature that wouldn't fight back.

Nine did almost sever the slime into two, but because he didn't hit the core, it was still alive and bouncing.

"I think we should each get a try."

And then something like a pinata party happened. We each took turns to smash the core.

The one who smashed the core in one hit was in the end, of course-- Miss Demon Queen. Hell, she's like our omnipotent artillery. I feel bad for having to depend on Liliath every time.

"I'm starting to wonder if I can kill an animal," Prune said, seeing the slime melt into the snow.

The core was crushed into pieces, literally. I don't know if we can sell it but I collected the fragments anyways, luckily the goo on it was not corrosive.

"Yeah, I can believe killing a mere slime would be this hard.. damn, reality is harsh," Nine said.

"But we have to learn to kill in the end don't we?"

"Yeah."

"True. It's just how this world works," Prune sighed-- fortunately, she wasn't sneezing anymore.

We proceeded to the forest.

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Here's the surprising thing I forgot to mention-- did you remember when I said Liliath's world was hella vibrant? Yeah, apparently, trees have leaves even during the winter.

The forest wasn't naked as one would think of it to be, rather, blue-indigo leaves of various shades adorned the tree branches, icicles and shards or snow could be seen on some of them.

That said, the leaves on the trees were much scarcer during winter than any other season. Still though.. fantasy is amazing. The sun had risen to the point where the sky was painted in a nice deep blue.

But here we are.. hunting down these fucking Hoppins.

Liliath got her's pretty quick, a single wind blade using was enough to decapitate it's head. Yes, gore was a thing we had to get used to so everyone burned the image of the dead rabbit into our eyes.

The stench of red oozing blood, guts and rigor mortis. Yeah, this aura of death is unpleasant alright. I'm not sure if it's specific to demon lords but it's disgustingly intoxicating. Prune was strong enough to face the scene head on. She even used her hands to touch the blood and guts to really let the reality sink in. She properly washed her hands with the water Liliath created using water magic of course.

Nine used the lapiz-alloy sword to cut the horn from the corpse. It was a single short horn protruding from its forehead.

I get how there might be some value to selling the meat but.. considering the hassle and our lack of knowledge, I think we should move on to killing 3 more Hoppins and harvesting the 4 dozen frost thorn plants.

Instead of conveniently using the map to locate all the Frost thorn plants, we decided to properly use our eyes to seek out the herbs. We'll depend on the map when it's too much of a hassle. As for the Hoppins, we have no choice but to depend on the map for now, it's damn hard to locate the damn rabbits that keep fleeing.

I honestly wonder how beginners go about completing the simplest of G-rank quests. This is like.. work. Seriously. Novels make it sound so easy, but I'm here actually feeling the nitty gritty of it.

Liliath used gravity magic to hold down a Hoppin. The second kill was Nine's. Saying sorry, he swung his sword to sever the neck-- except he missed it's neck and sliced it's body instead. The Hoppin flailing about.. convulsed.. before falling limp.

Dead.

"Wow, this sucks.." Nine said while gritting his teeth. He glanced at the bloodied sword. "We should clean up the blood or something right?"

"I don't know, we didn't even prepare much for this. There's a lot we don't know."

"I suppose I will clean it with magic as of now, though, If I'm not wrong, proper maintenance is necessary," Liliath said.

With this, we got our second horn of the day. Moving to the next Hopppin Liliath pinned down, we noticed a peculiar group of plants with sky blue leaves, almost crystal like, with large thorns. Bringing up the BookReader UI to check the image of a Frost Thorn plant, it looks to be one.

For harvesting.. you know, we never really thought of how to go about it. But Nine dirtied his gloves and pulled up the plant together with the roots. You can easily pull it up it seems.

Liliath swept a dozen or so with earth magic.. magic is convenient. I have never felt so useless.

Damn it Noel, control your thoughts. You suck yes, but use it as fuel to get better, don't self-sabotage.

The third Hoppin was killed by Prune using the lapiz-alloy sword, the blade properly dug into the flesh, but stopped just at the spine area. Prune was shivering quite obviously after the kill, but was able to sever the horn herself, but with some difficulties.

The fourth Hoppin, was killed by me. I impaled it directly through its head. It died just like that. I took a deep breath to calm myself.

Sorry.

Blood oozing out of the skull, the fur tainted in red-- the smell of iron, dizzying pool of crimson..

I killed..

I killed something..

But oh well. I'll just think of it as butchering a chicken or something. If I'm not wrong, I think my late grandmother used to kill live chicken for Chinese New Year. Though, I never really got to see how she drained the blood in the bathroom. All I knew was that she sliced the neck and let it bleed out.

"Noel?"

"I'm alright," I said.

To be honest, I think there will be an aftershock once I cool down from the adrenaline. My mind may be suppressing my true feelings about this at the moment, so I better prepare for some mental repercussions later.. I'm not sure about Prune and Nine, but their expressions looked rather dull. Liliath was concerned for all of us.

Anyways, after collecting the horn-- which proved to be much more difficult than I thought-- we left the corpse and went on to collect the quota of Frost Thorns. Along the way we encountered various large insect monsters, blue globlins and snow wolves. Though.. most of them ran away when Liliath directed bloodlust at them. The stupid ones that set up ambush that we fought against with an ambush of our own, of course, got severed by wind blades.

Nine actually tried to fight against one of the two wolves, but it didn't turn out too well even though he made her average stats over 1000, excluding her strength which was left at 200. No matter how good your stats were, it means nothing without the proper skills.

In the end, Nine did manage to kill the wolf. Just that..

"Fuck, fuck.. I need to get used to this.. damn it. It's so.. so hard.." Nine said, breathing raggedly.

"You did well Nine," I said.. or tried to at least.

"But this isn't shit ain't it? It's a fucking wolf with stats many times lower than mine. Fuck. I'm so weak. Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Nine stabbed the body of the wolf again.. and again.. and again, and again.

Prune started tearing up after his nth stab, Liliath went over to console her.

I can understand his frustration.

Even with all these cheat skills, we could still die at any time.

It's hard to imagine the reality the heroes must be facing compared to us.