Chapter 56 - Testing On The Slimes

"Well, there is no point wasting our precious ammunition on them," Tom said, letting go of his rifle. Thanks to being strapped around his neck, it didn't fall to the ground but dangled on his chest instead. 

"How do you intend to kill them, then?" Claudia asked, puzzled by Tom's peculiar decision. "With your bare hands?" she added another question, this time filled with irony. "Remember, we are no longer just controlling our avatars! What if they have some kind of acid effect?"

"It's nice to see you worry about me," Tom smiled as he pulled out a military-grade knife from his backpack before unsheathing it and taking his first step towards slimes. "But we still have to kill them in one way or another, don't we?" he posed the rhetorical question before walking towards the monsters. 

The slimes looked just like most of the games throughout the games described them. The four blue blobs of some kind of liquid unknown to mankind with a solid core inside were currently making their way towards Tom. 

'Just how do they move?' Now that he was in the dungeon with both his body and mind, Tom couldn't help but ask himself this question. They didn't appear to rotate, nor were they jumping by squishing their body and suddenly springing it up. Yet, they continued to push forward despite not having any obvious means of doing so.

"Well, it doesn't matter," Tom summed the situation up just as he stood his ground roughly two meters away from the monsters. And then he waited. 

And waited. 

And waited. 

A minute later, he couldn't be bothered anymore and made the step forward, closing the distance between him and the monsters. 

"Come here," he said as he reached with his left hand and squished the outer shell of the slime before bringing it up. Then, with the monster gently wiggling on his palm, he brought it away from the rest of the pack before dropping it on the ground. 

"What are you doing?" Claudia asked, puzzled by his actions even further than she was before. 

"Just some light testing," Tom replied as he sank just the tip of his knife into the monster's outer membrane. But just as expected, it bent inwards but refused to split open. 

"Just like in the game," Tom muttered before placing his left hand on the back of the knife and then pushing it all the way in by pressing on it with most of the weight of his body. 

"Plop!" the sound of the membrane giving up was strangely close to what Tom heard many times over on the sites that always required one to confirm his age. 

"Well, that's one thing you didn't hear while playing," Claudia commented while averting her suddenly reddened face. 

"Don't even get me started on that," Tom replied, hiding his own slight blush as well. 'Isn't this what I always read in the recounts? The heat of battle and the feeling of being on the line between life and death always made people quite horny, didn't it?' Tom could easily recall that this was one of the few common elements in his father's brothers' in arms written memories from the time of war. 

'The problem is, we didn't really encounter any life-or-death situation yet, so I guess it's just a matter of our age.' So Tom concluded as he manipulated the tip of his knife to finally pierce the solid core inside the monster. 

"Crack," this time, the sound of the core breaking didn't produce any unnecessary thoughts in either of them. As soon as the tip of the knife touched it, a small rift appeared on it before the entire thing dissolved in slime's own insides. 

"Looks like this liquid it's made from is actually slightly corrosive," Tom said in a low voice, observing the slight marks left on his blade. "Well, it would be for the best to find some kind of stick to deal with them," he added, already figuring out a way to deal with those low-level monsters without wasting away their precious weapons. 

"Wait, why do you even want to kill them?" Claudia asked as she brought up another smile before holding it up in her arms as if it was some kind of puppy. "Now that I think of it, couldn't we use them as some sort of pillow?" she proposed before shrugging her arms and throwing the slime away. "All in all, they are too slow to be of any danger to us," she said, throwing a long look at the slime she just threw aside. 

And just like before, it charged forward with all its might... Which amounted to a speed that only a snail could be proud of. 

"Well, you are right here," Tom shook his head before raising from his knees. "I don't know what made me feel like we need to get rid of all the monsters we encounter," he lied smoothly. 

'It's the game habits,' he thought to himself, perfectly aware of the reason that he didn't want to reveal to the girl. As someone who planned the entire trip to the real dungeon, it was hard for him to admit that he wasn't all that well prepared for it. 

'Looking at her situation, it will be better if she thinks I have everything planned out,' Tom thought while stealing a quick glance of Claudia's face. Right now, she was watching with amusement how the slime finally reached her leg before mounting it, as if it demanded some cuddles. 

"Can you kick it over?" Tom asked while readying his rifle. 

"Huh? You want to kill this one as well?" Claudia leaned her head over her shoulder before obediently swinging her leg forward and sending the slime flying towards Tom. 

"Didn't I tell you earlier?" Tom shook his head. "We need to test all sorts of stuff before moving forward," he explained before kneeling on one knee and taking aim at the slime. While it was just a few centimeters away from the front of the barrel of his pulse rifle, the core was too small to just randomly shoot it without aiming. 

"Bzzt!" Small holes appeared all over the rifle's barrel as soon as Tom pressed the trigger. With one-shot mode on, only a single pellet would leave the gun. As it was a perfect fit for the barrel's rifling, the pellet pushed out all the air out of it. 

The inbuilt mechanism of airing the barrel was there to reduce the stress of refilling it with the atmospheric pressure after each shot. 

"Strange," Tom muttered, watching how the core dissolved in the slime's insides. For some reason, contrary to what happened when he killed it with a knife, rather than dissolving, the slime remained completely stationary as if it just hibernated. "I wonder what does that means?"