Slaying the creatures in groups at a time because of his shadow magic was difficult but possible and occasionally he did have to find a place to recover his mana.
While traveling and gaining experience he kept his eye on that giant slime just waiting for a sign of its strength.
Glancing back and forth what he saw was interesting though.
The slime moved like a machine and no matter what damage it took it kept moving forward to its prey.
The slime would catch prey pretty regularly but rather than its own efforts being the cause it was actually betrayal.
Occasionally one of the other creatures would attack the slowest of the bunch which would lead to it inevitably being caught.
When this happened it would slow the slime down enough for the rest to flee which only made the slime look for the next closest source of prey which began the cycle all over again.
With each kill he saw his experience bar growing closer and closer, he could feel how close he was to whatever happened at lv20 and he was ready.
He did not want to fight the slime until he hit lv20 anyway.
As he burned another pack of wolves to death it finally happened
~~~~~~~~~~
Belial
Mage lv20. (Novice)
Shadowfire Devil
Affinity: 32% fire, 37% shadow
Mana Core: 0% fire, 0% shadow
Strength: 5
Vitality: 5
Agility: 83 -> 91
Wisdom: 116 -> 122
Intelligence: 116 -> 122
Bloodline: child of the void.
Titles: n/a
Skills: Mana Control lv1 (E), Mana Sense lv8 (A), Mana Core lv4 (E), Spell Mastery (E)
Defenses: Fire Resistance lv1 (N)
Spells:
He kept casting as fast as he could and thankfully he had reached lv1 mastery with his bolt spells a long time ago.
He was using mana rapidly even with his reduced mana costs and increased mana pool.
He soon got a few notifications about assisting in the kills of the creatures consumed by the slime but the experience wasn't enough to bring him to lv21.
As the other creatures began to get away the slime stopped its chase... and began moving towards him.
He knew how fast this thing could be so he began to run.
What he quickly learned was the slime had a higher speed than he did and it wouldnt take long to catch him.
Thinking quickly he began to run towards the players.
Running towards the players would force them to help kill the slime or they would have to act as additional bait.
No matter what they chose Ezekiel would benefit.
"Hey is that horned freak coming over here?"
"Yeah i think he's coming this way."
"HE'S LEADING THE SLIME, RUN!"
The various players all began to flee with some of the range focused players firing at either him or the slime.
With his high agility he could dodge the projectiles but he was clearly a lower level.
This slime was chasing him down and aside from the agility focused players he was outrunning the rest.
While outrunning a few players to let them act as bait he cast a few more shadow bolts to hopefully scratch away a few more health points.
When he took a moment to check the slime's hp it was resting at a comfortable ~40% which was excellent!
What wasnt excellent was how low his mana was.
This slime must have easily had over a hundred thousand hp since each of his spells would be doing quite a bit.
Over time he had figured out that not only was his intelligence stat what decided his spell damage but affinity did as well!
With an intelligence stat of 122 his spells would naturally do 122 damage before defense was applied.
Shadow affinity at 37% surprisingly increased the damage of his shadow spells by 37%!
With his total spell damage he was dealing 167 damage before any defense was taken into account.
Against this slime it was only doing 134 damage but he had a very large mana pool currently.
He had cast this spell dozens of times by now and each time it hardly did anything but each instance of consumption did 16 damage as well.
With how much he had cast this spell he knew that eventually the slime would die but what mattered right now was that if he wasnt careful he would run out of mana while fleeing this creature.