Slime Evolution

Chapter 471 - Harvest

Lohan looked around.

Almost fifty bodies lay scattered across the platform, some intact, others reduced to pieces, and all of them still wore the same frozen expression, showing they hadn’t understood how everything had ended so fast.

Honestly? Even he was surprised at not feeling anything all that special about it.

Don’t get me wrong, the feeling of having enough power to kill more than 50 players with only one person at his side was incredible, and the satisfaction of managing to achieve that was wonderful.

Knowing that a power like that was in his hands, instead of under the control of some adversary, was very comforting.

But still, eliminating that large number of weak Players brought no triumph, no pity. Just a weary realization, that an entire guild had been destroyed over a decision any one of them could have avoided.

’Time to clean up,’ he thought.

Several clones detached from his main body, small blue masses that rolled across the floor, each one heading toward a different corpse.

The digestion began in parallel, at dozens of points at once, and the wet, muffled sound filled the chamber while the floor gradually went back to being clean.

It was a different sensation from digesting a monster. There was no richness there, no peak of energy, no memory worth feeling. The bodies were poor, their Bases were weak, and each digestion yielded little more than a small improvement to a skill he already knew.

But there were dozens of them.

The notifications began piling up in his vision, small, discreet, one after another.

One more level in a membrane skill. A little more digestion efficiency. A minimal improvement in reflexes. He counted, at a glance, more than forty small improvements, most of them tied to unremarkable things like reflexes, resistance and mana control, none of them worth noting on its own. But added together, they formed something he hadn’t expected.

Among the small improvements, one of them was different. A faint trace of healing energy, coming from one of the healers who had prayed minutes earlier, so small he almost didn’t notice it.

When that energy entered his body, especially when it came into contact with the Sacred Light, it created an incredible resonance that, although not very powerful, since it came from a Player with a base of Uncommon at most, still improved the total power of his Sacred Light by almost 10%!

When the last clone finished, Lohan did the math and was surprised.

’Even though the quality is pretty bad...’ he thought, ’the quantity made up for it really well. I grew more than I imagined.’

For the first time in a good while, he felt his entire body a little denser, a little faster, a little firmer, as if the gelatinous mass had gained a new structure beneath the surface. It was nothing that would change the course of a battle, but after so many digestions, it was a very pleasant feeling of direct progress that he hadn’t felt in so many days.

It was an irony he restrained himself from laughing at, that the spot those Players had built to get stronger had ended up, in the end, making him stronger too.

"Done?" Lisa asked, approaching with her fur already much smoother and neater, something that, even in a body like that, her vanity wouldn’t let her ignore.

"Done."

"Great."

The two of them turned, at the same time, toward the center of the chamber.

The offspring were still exactly where they had been.

All that time, through the explosion, through the acid, through the screams of fifty Players dying a few meters away, they hadn’t stopped for even a second. They were still piled around the mother, stacked on top of one another with red, glassy eyes and open mouths, completely oblivious to what was happening in the world around them.

None of them had lifted their heads, nor noticed that the floor was covered in blood.

’They didn’t even notice,’ Lisa said, and there was a strange bitterness in her voice. ’Fifty people died here and they didn’t notice.’

’They’re not here,’ Lohan replied. ’Not really, only their bodies are.’

He looked at that agitated mass, at the sweet, sickening smell still hanging in the air, at the mother’s faint breathing beneath all those thin legs, and felt whatever hesitation remained inside him disappear.

Those creatures weren’t enemies, and they weren’t victims he could save either. They were gears in a machine someone had built, and the only way to stop that machine was to shut down each part.

There was no point trying to understand what went on inside them, or asking whether anything remained in there. If anything did, it was better for it to end soon.

’Let’s finish this,’ he said. ’Fast, and with no suffering for anyone.’

’Agreed,’ Lisa replied, and her claws extended again, slower this time, and with no fire.

They started at the edges.

The first offspring died without even noticing, with a clean cut at the nape, a filament tightened around the neck, a body falling without making a single sound.

Every time one of them fell and Lohan left a clone behind to digest that corpse, the mental hum in his head grew a little quieter, like a radio being turned down bit by bit, as if the signal were getting cleaner and better tuned.

And despite all of that, the others beside them didn’t even turn around. They kept up the same blind agitation, and when their bodies fell, they were replaced by another that climbed up to take the empty space.

Lohan and Lisa worked at an unhurried rhythm, almost without exchanging a word, their movements already in sync.

She moved among the groups like a white shadow, using precise strikes and calculated movement to never touch the mother. Lohan, meanwhile, extended his filaments beneath the piled up bodies, lifted the offspring that were on top of her one by one and moved them away before Lisa reached them.

It was meticulous work while they showed a strange gentleness, because every offspring that came off the mother was one fewer touching her. With each body removed, the weight on her thin chest eased a little, and Lohan noticed she was breathing a bit more easily, even without saying anything.

’It’s the first time killing feels almost like a kindness,’ Lisa commented, softly, as she cut the throat of another. ’I don’t know if I like that.’

’Me neither,’ Lohan replied. ’But I like leaving it the way it was even less.’

The experience came in good waves, yielding 10 to 15 thousand points per monster, give or take.

Seeing how fast these monsters were born, it was easy to understand why that group of Players loved the farm they had built so much.

If even for Lohan that amount of experience was very good, imagine it for Players with Common bases who struggled to kill any normal monster of the same level.

But that didn’t matter. They kept going, unhurried and without pause, until the floor around the platform turned slippery.

During the massacre, the mother laid more eggs and the sperm that had been inside her.

Lohan saw it happen out of the corner of his vision, noticing the slow convulsion of her thin body, the small rounded masses falling onto the stone, and the shells breaking almost instantly, fueled by the heat and the saturated air.

Each egg that hatched was a new Level 11 offspring, born already completely mad, already completely lost.

He didn’t wait even a second.

A quick filament wrapped around the egg, another crushed the newborn before it finished opening its eyes, and the viscous puddle that remained was digested by a clone passing right behind.

’Forgive me,’ he thought, not knowing who he was saying it to, and right after he extended his filaments toward the next egg, because there was no time to stand around thinking about it.

More than fifty offspring died in the following minutes, and then ten more, and five more, and the circle around the mother kept shrinking, shrinking, until only the last ones remained, the most agitated, the ones still desperately trying to get to her.

Lisa took down the last two with a single movement, and their bodies fell without making a sound.

The silence that came after was different from any other that night.

After digesting the corpses of so many monsters like those, Lohan’s mind was going through an insane process of improvement.

There was no more mental hum now.

There was no more pressure on his mind, and his body, even being a mass of jelly, let out a sigh that seemed to come from deep down.

The entire chamber felt lighter, as if someone had opened a window in a room that had been shut for a very long time, and only the sweet, heavy smell of the air still recalled everything that had happened there.

Lisa approached Lohan slowly, her body covered in blood and ashes, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

"She’s still breathing," Lisa said, finally, her voice low.

"I know."

In the center of the platform, lying on the stone, held by the chains, blind, motionless, her breathing so faint it barely lifted her chest, she was the only one still left.