The corridor was narrow.
Low ceiling, damp walls, rock pressing in from both sides close enough that I could touch them simultaneously if I stretched my arms. I moved slowly, one hand trailing along the left wall, my new senses reading the space ahead — vibrations, heat signatures, faint chemical traces telling me what had passed through here recently and what hadn't.
The air was different from the room. Richer. Denser. It carried information I was still learning to decode — mineral deposits, water sources, something organic and alive I couldn't pinpoint yet. Every step added detail to a map I was building in real time.
I was about thirty meters in when I noticed the first opening.
A fissure in the right wall, narrow, dark, leading somewhere I couldn't see. I stopped in front of it and felt the air coming through — stale, still, nothing moving on the other side.
It could be... — I didn't finish the thought. As if concluding it risked making the thing real.
I kept walking.
The second opening came twenty meters further. Wider this time, almost a proper doorway, the edges worn smooth by years of — something. Water maybe. Or something that passed through here regularly. The air from this one was different. Warmer. Carrying a faint biological trace my senses flagged as relevant without me being able to name it yet.
I stopped. Looked at the opening. Looked at the corridor ahead.
You're being paranoid, I told myself. It's just a cave.
I kept walking.
The third opening I almost missed entirely — a crack low in the left wall, barely thirty centimeters high, the kind of thing you'd step over without looking. But the air coming through it was moving. Actively moving, like something was breathing on the other side, slow and regular and large.
I stayed in front of it for a long time.
Then I kept walking without looking back.
The crack in the silence came without warning.
Not a vibration this time — an actual sound, sharp and immediate, the kind that bypasses thought and hits something older and more animal underneath. I froze mid-step.
The wall to my right moved.
Not immediately — first a deformation, slow, the rock bulging inward like something had been pushing from the other side for too long. Then the tension gave.
The wall exploded.
Wet stone, fragments, and behind it — something translucent. Thick. Moving with a boneless, unapologetic fluidity, immediately occupying every available inch of the corridor with the ease of something that had never lost a fight.
A slime.
We looked at each other — well, it had no eyes, but it oriented toward me with a precision that made the distinction purely semantic.
Drain.
It activated before I finished thinking the word. A pulling sensation originating somewhere in my chest, an invisible thread extending outward — and the slime shuddered. Just slightly. Just enough to tell me it was working.
Then it charged.
I wasn't ready for the speed. Nothing that looks like that has any right to move that fast — a low wave covering three meters in a fraction of a second and I threw myself sideways half a second too late. The slime's edge grazed my left leg.
Cold.
Immediately, violently cold — and something underneath the cold, a dissolving sensation, my skin negotiating itself away against my will, and I pulled back cursing in my head because that was it, Engulf, that was exactly it, and if it got full contact I was dead.
Three meters between us. Drain still active. The thread held.
The slime reformed and came back — lower this time, wider, spreading flat across the entire corridor floor in an arc clearly trying to cut off my retreat. I jumped over the leading edge, landed badly, one hand hitting the ground, claws scraping rock — and there was something humiliating about hopping on one foot through a two-meter-wide corridor but this was not the moment for self-respect.
We faced each other.
It. Me. The corridor.
Think. Twenty-two Intelligence. Use it.
Hitting directly — useless, Adaptive Membrane was building resistance with every strike. Running — the corridor ended somewhere I didn't know. Drain was working but too slowly, I was burning mana faster than I was recovering health. At this rate I'd be empty in two minutes.
I needed something else.
That's when I saw the stone.
Inside. Visible through the translucent gel — dark, dense, roughly the size of my fist, not organic. Something the slime had absorbed and not fully processed. It sat near what I approximated as the creature's center, and as I watched I noticed something — the slime's movements were slightly asymmetrical. Slightly slower on the side where the stone sat. As if everything that passed for its core was clustered there.
There.
I backed up five meters, let it advance, then charged.
Not to hit. To reach.
It adjusted too slowly — the weighted side dragging that critical fraction of a second — and I drove my right arm into its mass up to the wrist.
The cold arrived like a wall.
Not gradual — instant, total, the dissolving sensation jumping from light contact to something serious in under a second, and Engulf triggered automatically, the slime contracting inward, pulling my arm, trying to take the rest of me with it.
I screamed.
— Let go —
Not at it. At myself. At my arm that wanted to pull back and that I forced to stay, fingers searching blind through gel, cold rock under my feet while the slime pulsed and squeezed and my skin melted in layers.
My free hand found the wall. I pushed with everything I had in the opposite direction, the slime stretched, resisted, and my fingers touched something hard.
The stone.
I closed my fist around it.
The slime convulsed — a full-body shudder, something panicked in the movement, like an animal realizing for the first time that the thing it was eating was eating back. I struck its mass with my free arm on loop, open palm, fist, heel of the hand, driving the stone against the corridor wall, again, again, again —
The first crack.
— Break —
Again.
The stone split.
The slime stopped.
Not slowed — stopped. Completely, instantly, like a machine with its power cut. The gel lost cohesion all at once, the carefully maintained surface tension simply ceasing to exist, and what had been a living creature a moment ago became a spreading puddle of translucent liquid across the corridor floor, seeping into the rock, draining into cracks, gone.
My arm dropped.
The adrenaline took a few seconds to fall.
Then the pain arrived.
Really arrived — not the dissolving sensation from the fight, something far more direct and far more honest than that. My right arm from shoulder to fingertips was eaten through, abraded, the skin in places reduced to something that looked like what you get when you submerge a limb in acid and wait slightly too long. The claws on my right hand were partially dissolved at the tips. I could see rock through certain sections of my forearm in a way that had nothing reassuring about it.
I slid down the wall and sat on the corridor floor.
The pain pulsed. Regular, deep, the kind that makes no effort to be forgotten. I held my arm against my chest and stared at the ceiling waiting for it to become bearable.
And ironically — genuinely ironically — I thought about the Stillborn.
Not feeling pain, I had thought a few hours ago. A walking corpse. That's even worse than what I already am.
I looked at my arm.
Yeah, I thought. Honestly. The undead option wasn't looking so bad right now.
The notifications came while I was still holding my arm trying to calm the pain.
[ You have defeated Demonic Slime (F) — Level 0 ] (+94 ED)
[ You have gained a level ]
[ Your skill Drain has reached the next level ]
I read them without moving.
Then something happened.
Not gradually — all at once, like a wave starting from the bones and rising to the surface. Heat first, dense and total, passing through my entire mass in a few seconds. Then something harder to name — a new solidity, a presence in the space I occupied, as if the edges of this body had just gained a few extra millimeters in every direction. My stats climbing, not just on an interface — in the flesh, in the muscles, in something fundamental I could feel rebuilding itself in real time.
I stayed still and let it do its work.
My arm still burned. But less. The edges of the wound pulling back slowly, skin reforming with a visible but real slowness.
I breathed heavily, still holding my arm, and thought about what had just happened.
Sloppy. Reactive. I had run, stalled, and won on a gamble. Drain had worked but not efficiently. And I had screamed. Out loud. In a cave full of things that could hear me.
Not glorious, I thought.
But I was alive. The slime wasn't.
I stood up.
I allocated both free stat points to Mana.
Then I looked at the corridor.
Long. Really long. And I looked at the walls differently this time.
Three openings since I had come out. Three holes in the rock where something had pushed through from the inside. Crumbled stone, irregular edges — the same work I had done myself a few hours ago to get out of my room.
Not geological accidents.
Exits.
And if those three holes corresponded to three creatures already out — how many walls still smooth, still intact, were hiding something building itself on the other side right now ? This corridor was long. The smooth stretches of wall between each opening could be concealing dozens. Hundreds maybe. Creatures that hadn't broken through yet, that weren't there yet, waiting in their room the way I had waited for seven days.
A hypothesis. Not a certainty.
But a hypothesis that held.
I looked at my half-dissolved arm.
Not glorious. Not heroic. Not even particularly elegant as plans go.
But logical.
These walls were going to open. Creatures would come out one by one, level zero, freshly evolved, with no idea what was waiting for them in this corridor. And I was here — level one, Drain at level two, with exact knowledge of how to kill at least one of the five pathings.
Spawn kill.
I would slaughter every last one of them. Every creature coming out of a wall in this corridor, I would take it down before it had time to understand what was happening. Every ED stacked would make me stronger. Every level gained would push me further from the bottom of the ladder before I even set foot in the cave beyond.
No mercy. No regret.
I positioned myself against the wall, back to the rock, and started moving slowly down the corridor.
I would wait.
They would come to me.