Humanoid Road 10 – Ivy Kraken

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that look promising?” Reysha asked and pointed at something in the distance.

Apexus followed the direction of her finger and spied something that looked a lot like the bramble wall that surrounded the dungeon. Although practically equal when it came to visuals, it couldn’t have been the original wall of thorny wood. They were only a few kilometres north-west of the centre of the dungeon, far away from the wall. Several trees stood inside the isolated area, yellow ivy stretching between not only their branches but also the trunks, creating the look of an oversized cocoon. Out of the gaps poked odd looking stalks of gnarly wood, an eye at the end of each that kept watch over the sky.

“Looks VERY promising,” the slime therefore confirmed, his feet parting ivy leaves with every step.

Walking on the dirt road had been deemed too dangerous yesterday. The hairs were now so frequent that the trio would have had to dodge a tentacle every other minute if they kept walking under the tree branches. Something like that was way too bothersome to deal with. At the same time, that development had put the group at ease. Annoying as it was, it had confirmed they were getting somewhere. Any clue that their strategy worked had been direly wanted. Walking around with a strategy that could have failed, for some reason, felt worse than walking around with no strategy at all.

“I see a healing fountain,” Aclysia announced from up above, as they went further in that direction. The news made all of them feel a rush of excitement. Excitement that was dampened for a moment when a Thornspitter rose from the nearby in the ivy. “Let’s prioritize reaching the safe location!” Aclysia declared and flew on ahead. There was no need to fight outside of food and gaining new ground. With the assumed boss arena just ahead and earlier enemies having been devoured, both reasons fell flat. Apexus and Reysha ran as fast as they could after the metal fairy. A couple of thorns flew around them, but none hit. Once in safety, they hid behind the usual stone pillars and just waited. The outside went quiet again and the group concentrated on what they had found.

“That looks VERY fucking promising,” Reysha grinned when she got up and looked at the gate opposite of where they had entered the stone circle. It was made of stone itself, looking somewhat unfitting in the frame of bramble. At closer inspection, it was starkly different from the actual wall that separated Verdany from the outside, being several times thicker. No amount of plate armour would have allowed the appropriately levelled adventurer to push through. “So, what’s the bet: boss or just enemy that controls the tentacles?”

“Boss,” Apexus answered quickly.

“I concur with my darling,” Aclysia seconded.

“It’s no fun if everyone is betting on the same thing!” Reysha complained.

“Why don’t you bet on the tentacle-enemy then?” the slime wanted to know, kneeling down next to the pool and putting his hand into the lukewarm water. He wasn’t in dire need of new fluid, but he took the opportunity regardless.

“Do I look so dumb that I’ll deliberately lose a bet?” the redhead purred and stretched. Looking at the pond, she considered another bath. Rather than decide herself, she looked to Aclysia. “We going straight in, or…?”

“As we agree that we will face the boss behind this, I suggest a break to make sure we are in optimal condition,” the metal fairy let them know. Which was what they then proceeded to do. They hadn’t been out and about for all that long that day, so they didn’t need to sleep. Just some cleaning, stretching and warming up had to be done, before they decided they were ready.

Apexus led the way, putting his hands left and right of the central crack of the gate and then pushing. Had this been two regular slabs of stone, there would have been absolutely no way he could have opened it by himself, but the mana-drenched creation of the god that put this dungeon into place reacted to the very intent to be opened by slowly swinging inwards.

Pupils widening in response to the dim light inside, Apexus took a first step into the boss arena. No sunrays managed to make their way directly through the ivy drapery, creating a dome of yellowy-green leaves that glowed in contrast to the shadow they cast. All of the eyestalks they had seen from the outside had thick curtains of hair fall from their connections to a central body. Those very same curtains obscured much of the shape of the boss monster in the middle, dividing the arena into separate areas, but enough was visible to the trio to make out the gist of the creature.

It was a large, bulbous mound of intertwined roots and fleshy bits, covered in yet more hair. It looked like a shaggy, mutated mass of joined Thornspitters, with some segments stretching out like the shields of the smaller monsters did. Thick roots burrowed into the ground and connected to the network of tentacles it operated. With its eyes looking for aerial assailants and the hairs for any ground movement, it guided the massive limbs in its designed intent to kill whoever invaded this domain. Much smaller tentacles, ‘only’ big enough to grab a person, rose from the floor directly around it in response to the adventurers who had made it all the way to this centre.

“Free food,” Apexus stated, after having a look at the situation. “Just take care of yourself. There are Thornspitters behind the curtains, so be careful when going through. They shouldn’t fire unless they see you.”

“Roger that,” Reysha responded, her cat ears turning and confirming what Apexus had felt through his tremor sense. Both her and the metal fairy kept close to the wall and just watched the slime walk towards the boss. They were ready to join at any moment but, unless the boss showed an unexpected ability, this would be a tremendously easy encounter.

Some of the boss’ shields drew back and then launched thorns at the advancing slime. They were weaker than the average Thornspitter, fired with less optimized limbs, but it hardly mattered anyway. Apexus took the hits in stride, expanded his slime in the areas to pull the projectiles inside and devoured them. When he was close enough, the boss’ tentacles attempted to grab him.

Apexus let his arm be grabbed and his body be pulled closer. If the boss revealed any threatening magic or a dangerously strong set of teeth, the slime would have needed to change his tactic. Escaping the grasp would have only cost him the arm. Thinning out the membrane at the shoulder and simply pulled backwards would have let the limb be simply pulled off. There were no muscles or sinews that kept the bone attached to the joint after all. A hand also wasn’t exactly necessary to maintain the core threat the chimeric slime posed, so he was more than willing to give it up to gather information that could win the fight in an instant.

The boss only wrapped more tentacles around Apexus. First his limb then, with the slime deciding to let it happen, around the rest of him. Several more thorns were unloaded into his immobilized form. Apexus didn’t mind and started to expand. Expand and expand until the skeleton and the tendrils were swimming inside a blob of slime three-metres across, his current maximum size. The boss pulled his tentacles away, feeling them getting dissolved. That cost Apexus a bit of biomass, but he didn’t care.

Slowly, methodically, Apexus spilled over the boss. That it was much larger than him wasn’t an issue. That it could fire thorns wasn’t an issue. That the tentacles could have crushed the windpipe of the normal adventurer wasn’t an issue. Because he wasn’t a humanoid. He was an intelligent slime against an instinct-driven, immobile opponent. There were few match-ups more in his favour.

The proper way to beat the boss would have been to weave through the projectile attacks, dodge the tentacle grabs and take out the fleshy centres one after the other. Once all the centres in one area had been destroyed, the group would have needed to pass through one of the hair curtains, face whatever Thornspitters were behind, and repeat the strategy. Once all cores were destroyed, the tentacles shielding the core of the boss would unwrap and reveal a vulnerable centre that had to be destroyed while dealing with all of the tendrils. Ranged attacks, nimble melees and armour would have been especially valuable, as had been true for dealing with the dungeon in general.

Apexus just melted his way through the defences and, after about ten minutes, had reached the core. If the boss could have screamed, it would have continuously roared in blind rage. No part of its biology allowed it to resist this hunting strategy. Bored, Reysha and Aclysia circled through the room and took out the isolated Thornspitters. Without backup by the boss, they were even easier to deal with than those in the open landscape outside.

“At least I get to eat something,” Reysha grumbled as she gnawed on a Thornspitters stem. Like a dog with a bone, she was less actually eating it than she was keeping her teeth in use. Putting on an incredibly sweet voice, she shouted out. “Honey, do you like your dinner?”

“Yes,” Apexus responded. “Dry tentacles, but very nice fleshy bits and centre. Still eating.” The boss was dead at this point, but a lot of his carcass was still to be devoured. The slime already felt that promising tingle of a new permanent Growth.

“Technically it should be categorized under second breakfast,” Aclysia chimed in. “Given the time of the day.”

“Didn’t know it was ‘useless facts’ o’clock,” Reysha retorted.

“There is no such thing as a useless fact.”

“Really? You really wanna go ahead and assert that?”

“Knowledge is highly versatile. At some point it will serve you to know something.”

“What would you do knowing that female hyenas have big dicks?”

“…question what a hyena is?” Aclysia answered.

Reysha blinked a couple of times. “Wait… you seriously don’t know what a hyena is?”

“I have retained the knowledge to blend into the average Summer Leaf without issue. A hyena seems to not fall into the area of experiences my father deemed to be necessary.”

“Well, I guess that’s fair?” Reysha tilted her head, still somewhat confused. “You do know what a scorpion is though, right?”

“An arachnid with a stinger, present in forests and many other biomes, often venomous,” Aclysia responded, as if she was reading from a dictionary.

“Anteater lion?”

“A particularly shaped mammal with a long snout feasting on ants.”

“Crocodile?”

“A large lizard and ambush predator, living in shallow waters. Has an incredibly strong jaw and tail.”

“Sounds interesting,” Apexus noted from his position. “Life is very diverse. I like it. Very tasty as well.”

“I don’t think crocodiles are tasty… although I wouldn’t mind eating one as revenge,” Reysha mumbled.

“Revenge for what?”

“Almost got caught by one when I was bathing one time. I was… twelve at the time?” she looked up and tried to remember. “Maybe thirteen. I didn’t try to bathe in that river again.”

“Were there a lot of crocodiles where you grew up?” Aclysia asked.

“If you went looking for them, sure,” Reysha shrugged.

“What are hyenas?” Apexus brought the discussion back around to the initial animal.

“Uh, imagine if you crossed a wolf with a very angry cat and injected it with liquid mockery,” Reysha tried her best at a description.

“So, it’s like a fox?” Apexus wanted to know. “Except that the females have dicks?”

“No, they don’t look like foxes at all… they, uhm… they have more in common with boars when it comes to looks, really, now that I think about it. Spotted boars. But they are also pretty thin, by comparison.”

“You describe something that looks very odd in my mind,” Apexus told her, now unable to make any sense of what a hyena was supposed to look like.

“That coming from the human skeleton swimming in a large blob of dark blue slime,” Reysha laughed. “With cat ears, wings and all other kinds of oddities.”

“Yes,” Apexus responded in an equally joking tone, before flowing off the remains off the boss and pulling back into his usual shape. There were a bunch of eyestalks still poking out of the ceiling and Apexus hadn’t bothered to eat all of the tentacles. Neither did he feel the particular need to munch his way through the entire underground network. What he had eaten was enough to get what he wanted and there was something in there he couldn’t eat even if he tried. “Nothing good.”

“Nothing good?” “What do you mean, darling?” Reysha and Aclysia asked at the same time.

“Mean- I mean that there is nothing good. The boss is basically all Thornspitter parts, with hairs added in,” the chimeric slime responded. “Could grow a tentacle, but I think that’d make blending in a bit harder.”

“It would indeed…” Aclysia hummed and thought for a moment. “If you took on the hair, could you make it dense like it is on the eyestalks?” she wanted to know.

“I’m certain I could do that even without making it permanent, so yes,” Apexus said. The suggestion worked for him. Albeit not a particularly interesting addition to his current Growths, hair would be useful in blending in. He had seen bald people before, but they seemed to be rare. He had also seen people that would have looked better if they were bald.

“You are certain there is nothing else you find useful, darling?” the metal fairy asked, just to be certain. The prospect of him gaining hair did please her. Although she loved Apexus as he was, him slowly progressing towards a more humanoid standard of beauty catered to more shallow parts of herself. With that said, her analytical mind was stronger and she wouldn’t have wanted him to forego something practical in favour of some hair.

“Yes,” Apexus responded, similar thoughts going through his own head. He wanted to look more pleasing to them, being well aware that a visible skeleton and his completely untoned body was rather unnatural. “Any favourite on the hair colour?” he asked. “Usually, when I acquire a permanent Growth, it changes somewhat depending on my thoughts at the time. Otherwise they just become blue.” He spread his wings a little bit to show what he meant.

Aclysia blushed a little bit, knowing their emerald colour came from him thinking of her eyes at the time. It had been a while before they had fallen in love, but looking back at it had her embarrassed regardless. That embarrassment allowed Reysha to speak up first.

“I think black would be best,” the tiger girl said. “Either that or blue. Make it opposite of either one of us.” She pointed between herself and the white-haired Aclysia. “Makes for a good team look.”

“I think blue would not look particularly good. Black, however, is a natural hair colour and would be aesthetically pleasing indeed,” Aclysia backed up that opinion. "However, one must consider the colour of your ears, so perhaps blue is better?"

"I could combine the Growths once both are permanent," Apexus pointed out, rubbing his ears with one hand. "Make the fur the colour of the hair. Should work. Black, then?" The two girls nodded and Apexus went through the process.

A single follicle grew, basically invisible, on top of Apexus’ head. Then, a conscious choice later, it changed from a simple addition to being a proper part of the slime. Looking at Aclysia and checking with his memory, he created more and more of them until they were spread over the appropriate area of his skull and the space above his eyes. He remembered that Reysha also grew hair around her genitalia, but those seemed more trouble than they were worth. With the locations done, he started feeding the follicles energy. Had they not been permanent, their function would have been limited to the natural capabilities.

He didn’t go for a lot of hair and it still looked odd to the two girls to see hair just appear on the slime. Eyebrows and short hair grew out, while the fox ears went from primarily blue, to black with a hint of blue (the white tips remained). On one hand it did increase the humanoid features the slime had, on the other it did increase the uncanny valley effect. Especially the unmoving brows, lacking the muscles for proper facial features, were quite odd. Either Apexus would learn to move them as he spoke or the girls would get used to it, just as they had gotten used to the slime communicating so many emotions through movements of his head.

“I suppose that means we only got to look through the loot,” Apexus said, pointing at the chest in the middle of the monster’s corpse.