Day 29, continued. 12:56 p.m.
I killed six slimes that morning and felt nothing about any of them, and I've written that down already, and I stand by it. Six wet walnuts in a bag on my hip. It was work.
This was not that, and the difference is not that this one was bigger.
The difference is that this one was trying.
* * *
It came up the ramp and I set the shield across the narrow part where the walls come in to about six feet, and it came up and put itself against the face of it, and then it pushed.
Not rolled. Not spread. Pushed, with something in it that had a direction and a purpose, and my boots went back four inches on dry stone.
I have a 12 in Strength and I was braced on a slope with a wall on either side of me, and it moved me.
Then it did the thing that told me what I was actually dealing with, which is that it stopped pushing.
It backed off about two feet, and it went low, and it came at the bottom left corner of the shield where the rim has gone thin, on the side my knee had already given out on.
It was looking for the edge.
I could see the light inside it turn over while it did it. Slow, all the way round, and then settle. I don't know that it was thinking. I know that's what it looked like from eight inches away, through the gap between the rim and the wall, with my own breath coming back off the ply into my face.
Tom was above me somewhere. I couldn't hear him. I couldn't hear anything except my boots and the shield creaking where the tape was.
* * *
Everything Coach taught me is about a person or a thing that comes at you in a line. Watch the shoulder, watch the hips, the pipe is the last thing that knows where the pipe is going. Have it there first.
None of that is any use against something with no shoulders that can go around a corner by becoming a different shape.
I did what I had. I got the rim down and took the low angle and it came over the top instead, and about two gallons of it went down inside my collar, and the sting that had been a lemon on a cut all day turned into something with actual teeth in it, across my neck and my right ear and down under my shirt.
I have a burn there now in a shape like a hand. It's the only part of this I'd rather not have.
I got my head down and shoved up with the shield and threw it off and it landed heavy and came straight back.
Then it took the corner again. Same corner. It had tried it once and it had worked once and so it did it again, which is a thing no slime in that portal did all day, because a slime cannot remember four seconds ago. I felt the hair go up on my arms under the wet sleeves, and my hand tightened on the hammer before I'd told it to.
That's the entire reason I stopped thinking of it as a slime, and I'd like to be able to say I thought it through, and what actually happened is that I was frightened in a completely different way than I had been ten seconds earlier.
* * *
The shield broke at 12:58.
Not the rivet. Tom's tape held, for whatever that's worth, and I hope he knows it.
The ply.
The ply's got a season in it, maybe two, then you'll crack the core and you'll want steel through and through. Marguerite, on a stool on Grand, with a leather punch in her hand, ten days before.
It went with a sound I felt in my teeth more than heard, a short dull crack somewhere up under the canvas, and the whole face of it went soft in a way a shield should never go soft, and then it folded along the crack about thirty degrees and stopped being a wall and started being a piece of wood I was holding.
Six hundred dollars. Sixteen days of hallway.
Thirty-eight minutes of actual blocking.
* * *
So I hit it with the hammer.
That's the whole plan. That's the sum total of the tactical thinking of Miles North at 12:58 in the afternoon on Day 29. I dropped the shield off my arm because it was worse than nothing and I took the three-pound engineer's hammer off my belt and I hit it.
The core was up high, about at my chest, and it was moving, and a slime core is a walnut in a bag of water but this one was a fist in a bag of something thicker, and the first swing went through and glanced and did nothing except put my arm inside it up to the elbow.
Which is how I found out that if you get an arm in there it does not let go.
I am not going to be able to give you a clean account of the next nine seconds. I've tried. There's a part where I'm on my back on the ramp with it on top of me and most of my right arm inside it and the sting has gone from teeth to something white behind the eyes, and there's a part where I got my left hand on the bottom of the rim of a broken shield and used it like a spade to open up a gap, and there's a part where I am hitting something over and over with a hammer at a range of about eight inches while lying down.
Then it cracked.
It went wetter and lower than a knuckle, and it took four hits, and on the fourth one my whole arm went through to the stone underneath and the light in it went out the way a bulb goes out, all at once, from everywhere.
And then about eleven gallons of it came down on me and ran off down the ramp and I lay there in the dark green wet with my ears ringing and my arm on fire from the elbow down.
* * *
The screen came up while I was still on my back.
─────────────────────────────
Kill registered.
Anomalous specimen — classification pending.
Level 2.
─────────────────────────────
Level 2.
I'd had a picture of this, too. Everybody does. You think about your first level the way you think about a birthday.
What I did was roll onto my side and throw up on the floor of a portal a hundred feet under a self-storage place on Bell Road, and then keep doing it after there was nothing left, which went on for a while.
* * *
Tom came back down.
Of course he did. He'd gone up the ramp a little way and stopped, because he is who he is, and when the light went out he came back down at the one speed he has.
He put the maul down on the stone first. I remember that. He laid it down flat, carefully, like it was something that could get hurt, and then he knelt in all that water and said my name twice, once normal and once louder.
"I'm here," I said. "I'm okay."
"You're not okay. Don't move yet."
He got me sitting up against the wall. He looked at my neck and my ear and my arm, and his face did something and then stopped doing it, and I was grateful to him for the stopping.
He had a rag in his back pocket, a red shop rag, and he wiped my ear with it, very light, and then checked the rag and folded it over and didn't do that again.
"Can you walk."
"Yeah."
"Say it again without lying."
"Yeah," I said. "Slow."
"Slow's fine. Slow I can do." He got a hand under my good arm. "Colby's got the water up top. You can make it to the water. That's all you've got to do, is get to the water."
"Okay."
"Don't say okay. Stand up."
I stood up. It took two tries and he didn't count either one out loud, which for Tom is something.
He picked the shield up off the stone, folded along the crack, canvas hanging, and looked at it for a second, and then carried it out under his arm along with everything else he was carrying, and did not ask me whether I wanted it.
I got about four steps before I had to stop and put my hand on the wall.
"That was the whole population of a slime hole going into a hallway that isn't on a map," Tom said, beside me, not looking at me, giving me the thing to hold onto that he knew I'd need. "And one of them came back out different. You know what that is."
"No."
"Me neither," he said. "But we're going to be the ones who tell them."