Starlight Necromancer

Chapter 59 - Slime Puddles

Foster carefully peaked forward as he stepped into this large open room. Immediately, a flurry of slimes attacked him, trying to cling to his legs. But of course, their outer layer immediately dried up and Foster touched them with the torch that he was holding, causing them to splatter open. He crushed the bubbles in the center of their bodies and moved on. He soon stopped underneath the corpse stuck to the ceiling, and crossed his arms.

"Alright. Now how the fuck can I reach that thing?" Foster asked himself with a wry smile. The ceiling was probably five meters high, so there was no way he could just reach it. He turned his head to the side and grabbed a small bundle out of his bag, while crushing another one of the slimes underneath his foot, and quickly pulled one of the throwing-knives off of the bundle.

He grabbed it tightly inbetween the tips of his fingers and threw the knife up at the orb, trying to, if possible, hit right into the center of the crack that this black slime was leaking from. But instead of him hitting that magical orb, the knife pierced that mummified corpse's forehead, seemingly stuck in the bone without any chance of it coming back out.

"Well, shit." Foster looked back at the bundle of knives and tried to grab a second one off of it, a little annoyed that he already lost one of them, and got ready to throw the second knife. However, right as he was doing that, Foster started to hear some cracking and groaning above him. Dust dropped down onto the ground in front of him, and instinctively, he jumped backward with the knife tightly clutched in his hand.

"Now that's just grand." With a wry smile, Foster looked up at the mummified corpse, watching as it was trying to rip itself loose from the dried roots that were tying it to the ceiling. Its flesh, which had partially fused with the rock, began to rip.

Foster looked up at the moving corpse, and soon saw it drop down from the ceiling. Clearly, some of its bones had been broken in its fall, but the undead didn't seem to care in the slightest. It tried to push itself off the ground, crawling over toward Foster.

"At least I can reach it now." Foster shrugged, walking up to the undead. With a light smile, happy that he was getting his knife back after all, Foster kicked down onto the back of the undead's head. As its forehead was pushed to the ground, the throwing-knife was just pushed further into its skull, clearly doing quite a bit of damage. The undead's body went limp for a few moments, but it didn't take long until it started to move again, albeit a lot slower and far more sloppy, as if it was struggling to get its body under control again.

"You know, this dungeon is kind of fucking dumb." Foster pointed out to himself, as he kicked the side of the undead's body to turn it around. Of course, the undead couldn't control its body well enough to stand back up from that, and Foster just leaned down, lodged one of his knives in the orb's crack, and then kicked down on said knife. With incredible ease, he managed to destroy the orb, and the undead that was biting down on it immediately died for a second time. Foster got a bit more experience, and he happily squatted down and grabbed his two knives out of the corpse. Luckily, this undead had no sort of blood or pus in its body to speak of, so they weren't too dirty. There was just a little bit of dust stuck to them.

Curious if this was going to be worth anything, Foster pulled the magical orb, which had cracked clean in half, out of the corpse's mouth. In the center of the orb seemed to be some kind of black gemstone, which was clearly the source of the slime. Foster was actually quite surprised that he managed to crack it in half so easily, since he thought gemstones should be a bit tougher than this.

But he didn't really bother to think about it too much, and just pushed the whole thing in a jute bag that he then tied to his regular bag again. And somehow immediately, Foster noticed something happen to the slimes all over the room. They didn't die, but they just stopped moving, slumping down into a puddle. Or rather... they looked like someone filled a plastic bag with water, tied it up, and then placed it down on the ground. They flattened out, but everything still stayed together.

Curiously about what was happening, Foster approached one of the small slimes and picked it up. Its surface layer immediately dried up, since Foster still had the holy aura covering his body, but the slime didn't try to escape at all.

"Huh. I guess it's gonna be pretty easy to get through this place after all." Foster said with a grin on his face. That gem had created these death slimes, and for some reason, they became unable to move now that it was broken. If Foster searched all the floors with these sorts of monsters on it, then he should be able to take out all of the death slimes that they came across. Kyla said that the death slime version on the other floors were probably created in a similar way. With a slight smile on his face, Foster kept holding onto the slime, and walked back through the dungeon. Soon, he heard the voices of Lynol, Octer and Kyla talking to each other, just trying to do a bit of smalltalk here and there while still staying vigilant of their surroundings. It seemed like they noticed that there were suddenly less slimes coming at them from the direction that Foster headed to.

"Yo guys, I'm back." He exclaimed with a slight wave, and they all seemed immediately relieved, "I've got some good news for you guys. One, these things are really fucking easy to destroy. The undead that the orb was in was still 'alive', but its pretty weak, so y'know, nothing to worry about. Anyway, after I destroyed the orb, these little guys stopped moving." Foster stretched his hand forward, showing that he was holding onto one of the slimes. Its surface was dried up and slightly crumbling away, but more importantly, it wasn't moving.

"Wait, what?" Octer asked, "It just stopped moving?"

Kyla looked at the slime, leaning in a bit. Probably a bit too close for Foster's comfort, since he still had the image of a person literally rotting into nothingness within seconds in his mind, but she seemed to have an explanation for it, "Well, if that setup was really something like a 'trap', then that... makes sense. You disabled the trap, and so the slimes don't function anymore, I guess~?"

The second that Lynol heard the explanation, his arms slumped down, and the tip of his sword scraped over the ground, "So that means..."

"That means that we can clear this dungeon after all.." Foster grinned.