I opened my eyes to the hollow echo of my own breath. Well, whatever counted as breath now."Haaaaa…" I yawned reflexively — or at least I tried to. It came out as a wet blorp, like someone imitating a deflating rubber toy. Somehow, that felt appropriate.
I pushed myself up, which amounted to a very undignified tumble and then, after a few tries, a wobbling, proud roll. Walking was a concept reserved for people with bones; I had gone the jelly route. Reality hit with the subtlety of a falling boulder: my limbs didn't obey in the way I remembered. They obeyed in the way pudding obeys gravity.
"Okay," I said out loud to the cave wall. "Note to self: do not attempt pirouettes while amorphous. You will look ridiculous."
Practical thoughts followed comedic ones. I flexed whatever passed for appendages and felt a faint new rhythm inside me — a hum of earned power. The title glowed at the back of my awareness like someone had scribbled a very important sticky note on my soul: God of Abnormality. Ridiculous and flattering at once.
"I should find and absorb a human body quickly," I told myself. "Another day, another level — let's go." Yes, my priorities were suspiciously gamer-shaped. If evolution had achievements, I intended to rattle them all.
Outside the cave the jungle breathed and spun. I rolled, hopped, and for the first time tested real movement: a sudden burst of speed that felt like slipping through a seam in the world. Rabbit Speed, the new skill, made my jelly-core tingle in a pleasant way. Poison Bullet followed — a delicate spit of violet that sizzled when it found a leaf. Wind Scythe took longer; the air had to warm, tense, and then cleave like a whispering blade. I tried chaining them together, clumsy at first, and then—gradually—smooth.
A vine serpent slithered up to investigate the noise. I darted, wound a Wind Scythe through its path, shot a Poison Bullet into its flank, and finished with a pebble from Stone Shoot. It collapsed, fizzling like a candle blown out. A fangboar charged a minute later and I used Rabbit Speed to outmaneuver it, then bounced off a rock with a new little trick I hadn't seen before — Bounce — and landed behind the boar, giving it a faceful of sludge.
After a few hours of this, panting in the way slimes do (a lot of wobble, little breath), I admitted a surprising truth: this was fun. Not healthy, responsible fun, but the kind that made your insides hum with forbidden possibility. My gamer instincts, buried under debt and despair in another life, were waking up and grinning.
I followed a narrow ravine after that, curious. Mist pooled like lazy ghosts between the trees and the air smelled faintly metallic — mana, thick as syrup. Floating islands drifted far above, hulks of earth hung by light. The place had the kind of quiet that meant "something important is nearby" or "stay the hell away." Either way, I went in.
A sound slipped through the fog: a human syllable, fragile as glass. "Help…"
My sensors — and I use that term loosely — twitched. It sounded real. Not a trap. Not a beast mimic. Human, or pretending very well. I hesitated. Traps were a thing. Curiosity won. Curiosity always won.
The ground thudded. Trees bent like reeds. A massive shape crashed through the undergrowth and into the clearing: a Dire Ape, larger than any lifeform I'd seen so far, shoulders like boulders and a hide rimed with stone-like fur that threw sparks every time it moved. It smashed the earth like a god's tantrum.
I swallowed. "Oh right," I said to nobody. "Wrong turn. Classic."
Then I heard it again — the cry, much closer, frayed and trembling. "Help… please…"
Beneath the ape's paw, curled and pulsing faintly white, something small and utterly out of place quivered. Another slime. Not gray, not me; this one was pale as milk, with a soft glow like moonlight trapped in jelly. The sound had been coming from it.
Instinct is a strange thing. Logically, I should have watched, assessed, fled. Emotionally, I saw the little pale body and everything in me did that ridiculous thing people do in stories: that warm tightening that made me leap.
I bounced forward, turned my body into a blunt battering ram, and poured everything I had into the fight. Rabbit Speed for dodges, Poison Bullet to cloud the ape's nostrils, Wind Scythe to slice the air and distract. I even used Bounce as a surprise tactic — slamming myself into the ground to ricochet under a swinging arm. The ape was stupidly strong and not very graceful. It howled and staggered, and the clearing filled with the scent of crushed leaves and ozone.
At one point it grabbed at me with a knuckled fist and I thought for sure I'd be squashed like a forgotten snack. Then, in a moment of desperation, I rolled over the beast's wrist and sunk part of my mass into the torn skin where I'd poisoned it. Slime absorption is undignified but effective: I felt venom and muscle fibres dissolve into me in a rush that was uncomfortably intimate.
The ape collapsed with a final, shuddering groan. I slumped down beside the small white lump and let my core cool.
"Are you—" I began, breathless.
A voice, soft and surprised, rose from the pale slime. It was human, musical, threaded with a nobility that made me blink. "You… you can speak?"
"Yeah," I panted. "Just like you."
Relief flowed from the smaller form. "Thank you. I thought— I thought I was alone."
We spent a few moments in that ridiculous, exhausted silence. The little slime shimmered, then formed the faint outline of a face in its mass. When it spoke again, the words came like memories falling into place.
"My name is Elina," she said. "Elina von Ashborn. I was… I was the thirty-ninth Queen of Elvenheim."
I nearly choked on my own pride. "Elves actually exist in this world. That's… new. My world didn't have much elves. Or magic. Or fancy immortals."
She blinked — or contracted a watery eyelid. "And you? You do not sound like a beast."
A part of me, the part that enjoys theatrics, twitched. "I was Ryuu in another life — a medical student. But that name feels like someone else's coat. Call me Theon. I earned a title recently: God of Abnormality."
"Elina, let me take that surname"
she repeated softly-"You claim von Ashborn?" There was an amused tilt to her tone, like a queen permitting a court jester a comfortable joke.
"I do," I said quickly, the absurdity of it making me grin. "If we're building a dynasty of slime royalty, I don't see why the surname should be exclusive."
She let out a sound that was almost laughter, an airy ripple through her form. "Very well. Theon von Ashborn." The name rolled through her like a blessing. "It suits you."
We traded stories in halting pieces. She revealed the shape of her past in slow brushstrokes: betrayal within marble halls, a coup wrapped in silver promises, an execution that burned like winter. There was a simple, aching dignity to it. She had been a queen who had known power, only to have it wrenched away.
I told her, more plainly than I felt, about debt and falling and the quiet of a room too small to hold the world's weight. We were both reluctant to hang our old pain like flags, but the shared fact — we had been cast off our worlds and deposited here as small, vulnerable things — made words unnecessary after a while.
"Do you have a system?" I asked at last. Of course she did; how could she not.
Elina's glow dimmed with something like reserve. "Yes. It is not like yours. Mine grants form after absorption. After assimilating a being with similar mana signature, I can take its shape. I have not used it. I feared what I might lose of myself."
"Mine's a slaughter system," I admitted, cheeky and blunt in the same breath. "Kill, absorb, level up. The usual moral gray. I'll do the messy bits, you can… do the graceful redecoration later."
She considered that and then, with the tiniest of nods, agreed. "It seems sensible. You are blunt. I am cautious. Together we will be… practical."
We stood — or wobbled — and began to move. Travelling as a pair of slimes is an odd sight. I tried to look dignified and mostly accomplished being infectious goofiness. "So, Elves live long?" I asked, because you must always ask the obvious.
She hummed. "Yes. I was over three hundred years in my previous life."
"Whoa. Granny status. I guess I'm the handsome one then." I puffed out a non-existent chest. She bumped me lightly with her soft surface and said, deadpan, "All slimes look the same."
The world unfolded around us: ruined pillars tangled in roots, mana drifting like pollen, the occasional distant roar that made me appreciate the elastic nature of slime bones. And then, as we crested a fern-tangled ridge, we saw them: a dozen humans in battered armor moving through the ruins below, lanterns and banners bobbing, laughter and the sharp tink of blades on metal.
Elina's color dimmed. "If they see us, they will not think of us as souls."
I watched the humans. Faces, expressions, the way they moved in confident little packs. Something like hunger prickled at me — not for them, not yet — but for the possibility of bodies and names and masks the world offered.
She whispered, soft as wind. "They will kill to survive."
I smiled, small and entirely ridiculous. "Then we'll just have to make them see us as something more. After all, every god starts small… even the slimy ones."
She regarded me for a long beat, then echoed, almost amused, "Every god starts small."
Side by side, we slid down the ridge toward the ruins and the humans below. Two slimes in an enormous world, carrying the ghosts of two old lives and the weird, stubborn hope that maybe this time we could write ourselves better stories.