Slime Evolution

Chapter 493 - Will You Help Me?

The two of them stared at each other for one long second.

"Hi." Lisa said, over the link, in a voice a little too high.

"Hi." Lohan replied, in a voice that came out a little hoarse.

A wolf, who had understood perfectly that this was the ideal moment to attack, leapt at the fox from behind.

The two of them reacted at the same time, by instinct.

Lisa spun in the air, claws lit, and Lohan extended the invisible hand and sent a fist sized rock flying from the ground straight into the wolf’s snout, throwing it off balance for half a second, just long enough for her flames to reach it.

The animal fell to ashes before touching the ground.

"That was... beautiful," Lisa commented, a little out of breath.

"I’ve been training," he replied.

"I saw."

This was surprising for Lohan. Most of his telekinesis training had come from the real world, where his power was much weaker than in Elysium, and just like Rock Lee trained with weights to unleash his true power once he took them off, Lohan surprisingly felt the same way!

Compared to before he had logged off from Elysium, his current control over this power was much more precise after the training in the real world.

The entire pack, realizing the game had changed, charged at the same time.

What came next was something the two of them did without having to think, and which at the same time felt different from all the other times.

Lohan spread over her back like a living armor, the Sacred Light running through his veins and spilling over into her spirit fire, and the white flames gained a golden core that cut through wolves like a hot knife.

The clones, in silence, closed the circle from behind, cutting off the escape routes, while his invisible hand now and then deflected a bite, a leap, a claw, with the precision of someone who knew exactly where she needed help before she did.

There was something different in the way she moved, he noticed.

She was looser, more confident, with every spin and every leap coming out with an almost dancing ease, as if, somehow, the weight she carried on her shoulders had lessened.

The last wolf fell in less than a minute.

[You defeated a Fang Wolf, Level 20]

[Experience gained: +18,910]

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 20!]

Lisa froze in the middle of the clearing, her tails bristling and her breathing heavy, and a white and golden light rose through her body, in a soft pulse that made the ashes around her float.

"I did it," she murmured. "Halon, I did it. Level 20!"

"Congratulations," he said, and his voice came out more emotional than he intended. "You deserve it. You’ve been chasing this for days."

"I know!" She spun around in place, with a leap of pure joy, and her two tails fanned open like fans. "It was so close, and now there’s only one more, and then I’ll get my evolution too, and..."

She stopped suddenly, in the middle of a leap, and realized she was literally stuck to him, looking at the small head he had formed near her face, with her body still leaning toward him, and her ears pointed at him, and her eyes fixed on him, and she froze.

Lohan froze too.

The two of them stayed there, in the middle of a clearing full of ashes, with the afternoon sun setting behind the trees and the silence falling between them again, not the heavy silence from the beginning, but the other one, the warm one, the one from the car, the one with the pinkies intertwined.

"So," Lisa said, finally, and her voice came out almost a whisper. "This is kind of strange."

"Yeah," Lohan agreed. "A little."

"I don’t know how to act."

"Me neither."

"What do we do?"

He thought for a moment, and the answer he found was so simple it almost made him laugh.

"We do what we’ve always done," he said. "We hunt. We talk. We laugh at silly things."

"And nothing changes?"

"Some things change," he answered, carefully, and felt her light tremble slightly, like a late afternoon. "But I think the good ones stay the same, and probably even get better now."

Lisa looked at him for one more second, and then the corner of her mouth rose, slowly, into a small, shy smile, and she moved closer, and sat on the nearest rock, and let one of her tails slide along the ground until it touched, almost accidentally, his body.

"I hid under the covers for an hour," she confessed, looking at the horizon, her ears trembling. "Before logging in here. I screamed into the pillow. The maids heard everything."

"I hit my forehead on the steering wheel," he admitted. "Twice. And punched the air. Carefully, so I wouldn’t destroy the roof."

Lisa let out a laugh so loud that the birds on the slope took flight.

"You’re a disaster," she said, wiping her eyes, and her tail wrapped, without asking permission, around his body, in a soft, warm embrace that neither of them mentioned.

"A happy disaster," he replied.

"A happy disaster," she agreed.

They stayed there for a few minutes, in silence, watching the sky of Elysium darken from orange to purple, and Lohan realized that, for the first time, Mental Perception showed her light and his almost overlapping, the glows mixing at the edges with neither of them trying to pull away.

"Halon," she said, after a while.

"Yes?"

"There’s one level left."

"I know."

"I want to get there soon," she said, and turned her face to him, and her gaze held a gentle determination, mixed with a tenderness he was still learning to recognize. "Will you help me?"

He smiled, and rose a little higher on her back, the dark gelatin settling against the white fur with a new, calm intimacy.

"I’ll help you with anything," he answered, and the sentence came out so naturally that he realized it was the plain truth.

Lisa was silent for a moment, and then stood up, shook out her fur, and her tail, which was still wrapped around him, pulled him along, with a movement so subtle that no one but the two of them would have noticed.

"Then let’s go," she said, with a wide smile. "There’s a pack of bears up ahead, and I have a lot of energy."

"Me too," Lohan replied, and this time neither of them managed to hide their laughter.

They left the Valley of Fangs side by side, much closer than before, their bodies almost touching with every step, and the forest around them seemed, for a moment, a little brighter.