Birdsie
The God-Emperor of Mankind
_Line 213
Noble Scion
SoftSmile
BackSet
Axel The Englishman
Kylesar1
GamerKitty205
Rage
Hanarei
CerpinTaxt
Blackrose7
simj26
Reinhardt
CactusJuice
Kloudy
EquinoxLeonidas
Fable
Adventurers are like individual organs.
You have the party tank, who acts as the skin and muscle of the party; soaking up all the damage and slightly helping in motor function. But he is useless without the healer, who is the bone and heart, providing a framework for practically everything and pumping blood which is necessary for the party to operate on any level; if the blood stops going, then the lights go out soon after.
The simile is messy and breaks down quickly if you dwell too long on it, but it works. The mage or fighter are, in a certain way, the digestive system. Less in taking the material and converting it, and more in the way of being the source of energy which is used to punch things.
Alas, the brain.
Perhaps being the party's conscience and rational thought wouldn't be bad if your entire body didn't suffer from severe cancer.
Despite his contradictory desire, Eridan seemed to have been the unfortunate victim of being the brain, at least for now. The party as a whole was uninterested in intricate bureaucracy and selecting quests mostly came down to giving him insistent suggestions.
"Honestly, what a pain..." Eridan cursed quietly, looking at the corkboard with quests. Everything was noob-level.
And while the statement that they were a new party of rookie adventurers held true, their sheer numerical value suggested that the body they created together was like a mutated super-human with redundancy organs for redundancy organs, with some organs capable of fulfilling several roles at once.
He could take several quests, yes, that was an option. But the Adventurer's Guild might have complaints about hogging all of them.
Eridan took the biggest, plumpest extermination quest he could get. A wizard wants three mutated poison slimes captured for research and the rest exterminated for security. He also wants the adventurers to find out who is creating these monsters and if possible, put an end to his shenanigans.
A quick look at the price-tag unveiled the pay for this contract was five-thousand gold pieces. Divided by the entire party, that would amount to around three-hundred for each person. That was a lot of money; not a fortune, perhaps, but a lot.
The curious eyes of his comrades washing over him from behind didn't help, but he made the choice.
He turned to the reception desk. "We accept this quest."
***
And lo, they walked.
Across a small, calm countryside community. A vast and verdant expanse, the land was a patchwork of autumn-hued fields, dotted with homes, veined with snaking roads and rivers.
Then, the path forked and led them through woods. The leaves quickly grew to form a dark green blanket overhead, disrupting the sun's incandescence.
And then, it seemed like they had arrived near the location where their targets were spreading, judging from a head-sized blob of purple jello slowly slithering across the ground. But something was stuck inside of it, frozen. The slime was very slowly absorbing what seemed to be the body of what was once probably a raccoon, half-melted by digestive acids.
It grew as it consumed. Gradually, with pace, but it grew and it would keep growing, until its abilities to move and lure in prey were hampered by its size. Then, it would split in two, smaller parts, independent of each other. And the cycle would begin again. Its lack of a brain compounded this process. Its 'mind' was alien, primitive, encoded in its body unlike the cognizance of humanoids.
It wasn't creative. It couldn't be. It was incapable of abstract thought, or even thought as we understand it. More like an automaton, which only has two commands programmed into it: to survive and to devour.
In addition, it was different from normal slimes in its hunting method. Normal slimes simply bashed their bodies against a helpless target to weaken it, then enveloped it with their bodies and digested. These poison slimes were more dangerous and far more effective as far as predators went. Their touch was poisonous to a living organism; glancing skin contact with the slime's body meant, at the very least, a strong fever and temporary muscle weakness.
It moved slowly, but not as slowly as one may believe slimes to be. In a dormant state, when not seeking food, it moved at a snail's pace, but it could rapidly speed up to slither almost as fast as a human jogs when it attacked.
Speaking of which, the slime pounced in the party's direction.
Eridan stepped back thrice, behind the likes of DOOM and Solana, expecting them to take care of the poisonous little monster.
