They waited until night fell over the land before making their attempt. Regardless of how many hunters interested in taking over Aclysia’s quest would be after the group, it was best if people had no confirmation on whether they were still in the dungeon or not. As someone who had followed tracks and stalked prey before, both Apexus and Reysha were unified in their natural understanding that leaving fewer tracks was a good thing.

So, a week after entering the dungeon, they the tiger girl sat down on the large slime. “At least you aren’t too tall,” she noted, the curved back of the blob only reached up to her hips. That didn’t make her position less awkward, she had to spread her legs to an uncomfortable degree in order to sit on the broad back. She wiggled her ass on the wood for a bit. “I expected this to be harder.”

“It’s not the bosses proper armour and even then, it’s just…tree skin… bark!” Apexus voice vibrated out of the carapace. Although still part of his exterior, the Roller’s exoskeleton was not quite the same as this organ Apexus had acquired. “Won’t make for good protection forever. Works for talking, will have to downsize and replace at some point… why are you moaning?”

This was not meant as a complaint, the slime rather enjoyed the feeling of the tiger girl grinding against him. Even if the plates between them made his perception rather dull. The sweet sounds of pleasure coerced his ears undiluted, so he noticed that first. “Fuck, I already thought your voice was sexy,” she groaned and stopped moving, “but these plate are like… buzzing like a bee against my pussy and that feels awesome.”

Apexus couldn’t quite understand how a bee buzzing on her sexual organ was supposed to sound anything but annoying. “Let’s talk about that in safety,” he decided, coercing one more moan from her as the high frequency went out. Then he spread his wings.

He usually kept them downsized while indoors, even if they were at their maximum size, when folded their sheer length went by largely unseen anyway. Now that he was about to fly again,neither of these conditions were true. Carrying something of the slimes size and mass was an almost inconceivable task. Although they had been originally taken from an eagle, the muscle strength behind Apexus’ wings was more comparable to a dragon, a small dragon, but still something that didn’t enjoy the perk of hollow bones. Despite that, his total wingspan still went up to four metres. A grown man could have laid down easily on just one wing.

That size made it somewhat difficult to spread them out, given all the branches in the way, but Apexus barely managed and then began the slow process of approaching the edge. The slime was like a kid jumping from stone to stone along a river and coming across one that seemed just close enough to make it but also far enough to land in the waters or, worse, only reach the edge of the stone with his metaphorical shins.

Still, this was the only way down, so Apexus fastened Reysha’s position by wrapping tentacles around her legs. In response, the tiger girl pressed herself flatly onto his body. She was extra weight and would mess with his balance, but in this way she was as little an obstruction as was possible.

Aclysia looked downwards. They were several hundred metres above the ground. The field below them was empty, brown earth, the Guild building was on the opposite side of the massive trunk. “I hope that this will not end in a catastrophe,” the metal fairy stated.

Rather than give an answer, Apexus decided to take the fall. The nearby branches whispered, the beating of the chimeric creature’s wings whirling up a small current. One, two times the emerald feathers cut through the air, then, at the third time, it carried him and the redhead atop him forwards.

Everything seemed to work perfectly. Although Apexus didn’t quite dare to flap around anymore, their goal was to reach the ground and, in that, gliding was perfectly acceptable. With outstretched wings, their altitude decreased ever so slowly. It was smooth and boring descent. Then the world had to throw a wrench into their plans.

A gust of wind suddenly caught them. The middle of the air wasn’t known to have great cover and although it wasn’t anything close to a storm, it was enough to throw Apexus of balance. Their smooth glide became a tilted, accelerating dive. Having last flown with a way smaller body and without meaningful luggage, the slime overcompensated and then did it again into the other direction.

His body turned, rolled like a barrel and Reysha let out a panicked laughter, the sound of a maniac fully aware that everything between her and a sudden death were half-liquid tentacles around her legs and her fingers desperately clawing under wooden plates.

They were falling like stones now, gravity steadily increasing its grip on them. Aclysia was helpless and doomed to watch, too slow to catch up and unable to do anything meaningful even if she did. It was the height of their starting point that saved them, giving Apexus enough time to, despite the body loosely holding onto him, turn back on the right side.

He beat his wings in an effort to slow their movement, no longer straight down, but still more steep than he would have liked. A crash landing was basically inevitable at that point, the question was just how bad it would be. The sea of dark green under them, canopies lit only by faint moonlight, rushed by. There had to be something that could make this whole thing less threatening.

Then he saw it, a body of water between the trees. He had no idea how deep it was, but even a muddy lakebed would have made for a better impact site than the forest floor. With desperate flapping, he attempted to get the rest of the distant crossed. The tips of tall trees scratched his soft underside, closely followed by the tips of normal trees, then all trees. Immense pain seared itself into Apexus’ consciousness as one of the last trees he had to fly across shaved the entire membrane off his lower body, sending a fair portion of his liquid innards flying down onto the forest floor as a harmless rain.

Then the world suddenly became dark and wet, the remaining momentum forcing Apexus deep under the surface. His body restored the membrane as quick as it could, but yet more of his slime was lost upon impact and mixed with the water of the, thankfully deep, lake. The massive hole in his slimy hide only healed from the rim inwards. Although that was a quick process and reduced the leaking area by the second, that still made the slime feel himself become smaller by the second.

It was, however, lucky that he had taken the brunt of the impact. His slime was much easier restored than Reysha’s bones were unbroken. Inside the water, their movement quickly came to a halt and the tiger girl detached herself from Apexus to swim to the surface. The slime himself had to fold his wings and settle on the floor of the lake, crawling his way to the shore. Since he didn’t have to breathe, this was only annoying with how long it took.

By the time he crawled out of the water, Aclysia had caught up to them and Reysha was squeezing water out of her hair. “Whew, that was fun,” the tiger girl grinned earnestly.

“You almost died!” Aclysia half-shouted, the worry clear in her voice.

“But we didn’t, so that was fun,” Reysha grinned from ear to ear.

Realizing that this was not worth a discussion, the metal fairy turned to the slime. “Are you alright, awakener?”

“Membrane is healed now,” Apexus answered quickly. “Will need to eat to regain mass, but I am not… having… sustaining further loss. I suggest we go look for a hide first… also I want to procreate.”

“Well, lady luck may be smiling on us,” Reysha pointed at something in the distance. Turning to see, Apexus quickly spied what she meant. At the edge of the lake stood a natural formation of rocks that provided shelter from the elements and eyes. Three large boulders, one of them slanted and stuck between the other two, with a depression in the ground that was marked by a circle of stones.

It had every mark of a frequented resting spot, currently it was empty, however. “Not a place to stay long, but for one night it will do,” Apexus agreed when they arrived there. “Do we have procreation now?”

“First, I want to be warm,” Reysha exclaimed, shivering as she was still soaked in cold water and even summer nights weren’t quite warm enough to offset that. Within a matter of minutes, she had gathered some dry wood from the nearby forest, Aclysia lighting it on fire with a bolt of her magic. Stripping out of her lightly damaged, skin-tight suit, and using it as her seat, the tiger girl held her hands close the fire.

Upon that sight, Apexus could no longer withhold the transformation, his remaining, and still quite impressive, mass turning into a bunch of tentacles. Despite feeling the burning desire, he still waited for Reysha and he couldn’t fuck Aclysia anyway until she decided to morph herself.

“By the by, why do you keep saying procreate?” Reysha suddenly asked.

“Because that’s what we are doing?” the slime wasn’t quite sure what that question was supposed to mean.

The tiger girl sneered, “Yeah, okay, like you could knock me up… you are a slime, my dude.” Monsters couldn’t breed with humans. Monstrous humanoids, yes, and some monsters were perfectly able to fuck (more commonly referred to as rape in those situations) adventurers, but that’s where that stopped.

“I can,” the slime insisted.

“Yeah… sure…” Reysha’s dismissiveness slowly crumbled, as she realized that she wasn’t talking to any old slime here. Normalcy may not apply.

“No, I mean it, I can,” Apexus stated and then tilted his body to express his confusion more understandably. “That’s the purpose of sex, isn’t it? Procreation, I want to procreate, like all other living beings. My instincts say I can only do it with humanoids. Other lifeforms are too weak.”

There was a moment of silence around the campfire. “…What the fuck, Apexus?!” Reysha suddenly grabbed a knife and dangerously wiggled it in his direction. “I was doing this for FUN and because I was HORNY, I am not looking for some half-liquid cat to crawl out of me!”

“Oh,” Apexus blinked in a honestly surprised fashion. “I was… under the… impression… no, too weak a word… conviction that the pleasure was a nice side effect.”

“No, no, no, no, NO, NO, just NO, okay,” the redhead growled, her claws extended. “I am twenty, I am not looking to be a mother yet and I certainly don’t want to be pregnant while running away.”

“We could solve that when we come to it,” Apexus stated, still wondering about the prospect of her not wanting to breed. He had seen life in two categories so far, being ‘things done to keep living’ and ‘things done to have offspring’. Well, with his recent decision to do what he felt was right rather than what was safe, those were compromised anyway. “Are you sure you don’t want to procreate?”

Reysha rammed the knife into the ground close to where one of his tentacles was currently hovering. “Is that clear enough?” she asked in a sharp tone.

Carefully, he slithered that tentacle elsewhere. Getting those cut wouldn’t hurt, it would just make him wish he was able to put himself into a coma to escape the torment. “Very clear,” he stated in a tone of respect.

“If I am pregnant already, I will murder you,” the tiger girl stated with absolute clarity. “I will pull your nucleus out through your gouged-out eyeballs. Okay?!”

“Rather you not,” Apexus felt his horniness quickly quiet down as this whole thing took a very different turn than he had thought.

“If you would let me, I could see whether you are pregnant or not,” Aclysia informed the worked-up cat, her bushed-up tail stopping in its movements.

“You can do that?” Reysha asked.

“It is a relatively time-intensive spellwork, but yes, us healer classes have means to tell whether or not somebody is carrying a life within them,” Aclysia informed her.

“Alright then,” Reysha gripped her weapon closer, but sat still, “Do it. Might as well check yourself while you are at it, since splurge-master here apparently put his seed everywhere.”

“That will not be necessary, I cannot have children,” Aclysia said.

Apexus was not sure how to put this next part across. “Actually…”

With a deeply flabbergasted expression, the metal fairy looked at her awakener. “Don’t be silly, Apexus, I don’t even have a womb.”

A sound between rubbing bark and clearing one’s throat echoed from Apexus, “Actually… yes, you are… have… yes, you have.”

Silence, once more. The metal fairy didn’t seem angry at that revelation, but not particularly psyched either. “Oh, Hashahin, divine father of mine, what the fuck?” the whisper cut through the swirl of emotions she felt at that moment. Jubilation, annoyance, shock, a sense of wonder, all deeply drenched in confusion. “…I will just cast the spell now,” she said, this was something she had to do either way.

To Apexus, the whole thing looked rather unimpressive. Simply resting a hand on both of their midriffs, the metal fairy stood there with closed eyes. A sun-like glow of gold extended from her palm. The slime was more focused on the blue cat eyes that continuously stared at him, laying in darkness despite the flickering campfire, ready to descend on him should their owner get the wrong news.

“Neither of us are carrying anything,” Aclysia announced after ten minutes of silence, causing Apexus to relax as Reysha’s mood immediately swung back to her usual, overbearing happiness. The knife left her hand and landed in the nearby dirt.

“That’s good, very good, yes, very good, I don’t have to stab a bitch!” the tiger girl grinned from ear to ear. Apexus was actually not that surprised to hear that, he knew that he could impregnate them, but didn’t peg his seed as particularly compatible. Yet. “Fat chance, but you can’t make yourself infertile or something like that, right? Because I don’t want to just masturbate after all this, but I am not taking the risk.”

Inside civilization, there had been several alchemical means for both men and women to prevent pregnancy. Suddenly, she very much missed the city. The carefree sex after an evening of drinking had been pretty great. Well, the tentacles still felt better, but the carefree part was now ruined.

Apexus rummaged through his body composition, that was a part of himself he hadn’t explored before. Once he found it, it turned out to not be that hard. Compared to growing limbs or resizing organs, keeping the semen that he produced from being fertile was actually a rather easy change. “I can… but what would be the point of sex then?”

“It feels really fucking good?!” Reysha laughed out loud.

Aclysia nodded, “I am in agreement there.”

Apexus also felt himself unable to argue that point. “Change done.”