The creature simply ceased to be a cohesive thing in the moment of contact, the collision producing the kind of result that physics produced when a very hard object moving very fast met something that was neither hard nor prepared.
It became a spray.
In the direction of the second creature.
Which was the part Damien had noticed immediately after identifying the approach pattern, the specific geometry of gliding creatures maintaining their distance and angle producing a distribution in the airspace that meant one impact's direction pointed naturally toward another target.
Luton ricocheted.
Not cleanly, not with any particular precision in the ricochet's direction, but the cord was attached and the cord was his to manage and he pulled, hard, feeling the slime's mass at the end of the cord resist the pull for a fraction of a second before the attachment held and Luton's trajectory curved toward him.
The slime returned to his hand.
