As much as Reysha wished otherwise, Apexus did have to wear the mask when they went into the next city. Learning all of the ways his facial features should and should not move was difficult. Apexus’ facial features had too much manoeuvrability. Pulling the corners of his mouth up to the height of his nose was as easy as pulling his lips back to reveal his teeth.

It was best to keep his face concealed, lest he tried to wrinkle his forehead and instead push his hairline back by several centimetres.

“I hope my face fixes itself when I get muscles,” Apexus said, while they left the town behind. “In the way I move it, I mean,” he clarified before Reysha could say that there was nothing left to fix about his face.

The tiger girl’s mouth was already open, so another comment flew out with bantering ease, “How would muscles help your face? Do ya want to beat people up by wiggling your eyebrows?”

“It’s about limiting the movements,” Apexus explained. “When you smile, it tenses and relaxes muscles and sinews. It does that the same way every time. I need that too, so I can stay consistent with my facial expressions. Otherwise, I have to actively think about where my eyebrows go every time.”

“That does sound annoying,” Reysha said, while making a variety of faces. Smiling, frowning, confused looks, surprisedly raised brows, wide and narrowed eyes, the whole program.

“What are you doing?” Apexus wondered.

“Ya talked about my face and now I have to test all of it,” Reysha explained. “It’s like when someone tells ya that your tongue is too big for your mouth or that you are breathing loudly so you become super aware of it… or if someone yawns around you so you… haaaaaaaaaaahhh… do it without thinking about it yourself.”

Apexus, who did not get any of those urges himself, tilted his head and then looked to Aclysia for confirmation. He got it not in proper words, but in the fact that the metal fairy was in the middle of yawning. Despite her not needing sleep, she had been created with an accurate representation of all standard humanoid urges. The slime, on the other hand, (currently) had no tongue, didn’t breathe, and hadn’t evolved to be a social animal in the same sense as humanoids.

“How are you doing, my melody?” Apexus asked, since Aclysia behaved absently.

“Calculating our current finances,” the metal fairy responded. “We are in possession of forty-two silver and three copper now.” She looked over her shoulder. “I am considering if we may have bought a little too much.”

Because the group was so light on living expenses, not having any rent or food costs, money easily pooled in their pockets. After they had sold everything they had recently gotten, they had been around two gold in wealth. To the average person, that was existence assurance for a solid two weeks. For the three of them, it was money for new equipment. A new dress for Aclysia, an extra pair of boots for Reysha, as well as maintenance of her weapons and armour, and a couple of general tools to add to their growing arsenal of things. Also, additional underwear and means to clean it. As cleanly as they tried to be, certain kinds of dirt, sweat for example, tended to stick to clothes.

The only thing Apexus had wanted out of that entire shopping spree were two simple strips of linen that he could use to tie his hair together. The slime found it bothersome for the entirety of the black strands to fly around every time he moved his head. Being confined to a ponytail was a bit better. The girls liked it too, more than they had thought when he had suggested it.

“Not like we’re going to use that money for anything else,” Reysha pointed out.

“I suppose so, but I prefer having a sizable amount of disposable income,” responded Aclysia while they continued their march south. “It gives me a bit of ease.”

They had been out of the desert for about two days now. It had taken them one day to take the air route of it and another for them to approach a city with the wanted level of inconspicuousness. Now they were making their way to the Drowned Altar, one of two dungeons remaining before they could access the one at the centre of Azenia Ra, called the Long Way.

The Drowned Altar would be more of a challenge. Being a dungeon of a higher-level bracket, the monsters inside were tougher than those they had faced previously. As its name implied, it was also partly underwater. The prospect didn’t bother Apexus, he had been born from and lived his early life in water. Aclysia and Reysha would struggle with the environment. They were already clear on that much.

Good news for the trio was that they had thoroughly read the guide and could prepare themselves in various ways, be that by discussing tactics or simply mentally adjust for the potential of water combat. They had also been able to scout out what Apexus would want next and the choice had been obvious and splendid.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The sound of water dripping from the cave ceiling into the ponds was steady and calming. It echoed from both the natural formations all around and the stone bricks that surrounded the ponds and walkways. The Drowned Altar was a typical dungeon, in case of its location. At the heart of a half-flooded landscape laid the entrance to a tunnel that led deep underground. Down there, the dungeon sprawled out in all directions.

The trio had descended several hours earlier and had gotten familiar with their surroundings. That was, at least, the walkable parts of it. Between the drip stones slithered semi-aquatic snakes with a weak venom, their black scales glistening from the moisture in the air, reflecting the light of the glowing insects that hopped around in search of plant life to consume. Proper walkways were nowhere to be found, instead they had to weave through the stalagmites, and so run-ins with those snakes were an ever-present obstacle, but they weren’t so powerful as to serve a proper threat to the three as they searched for the correct pond to advance their dungeon crawling.

As they knew from the guide, the Drowned Altar was roughly separated into two different kinds of segments. Those were the cave areas, such as the one they were in at the moment, and the underwater areas, accessed through the many ponds that were found all across the caves. Any sane landwalker would have avoided hopping into the water if they could help it. Aside from humanoids being, in almost all cases, not optimized for underwater combat, there was also the issue of warmth. The water of the Drowned Altar wasn’t freezing cold, but neither was it warm by any description. It would sap the stamina from anyone inside. There was also the standard water issue of diving coming with the question of breath.

Knowing that mortals would consider all of these drawbacks, the god that had created this dungeon had decided to leave people no choice. The entrance area was filled with nothing of interest. The snakes were simultaneously weak and punished carelessness, making them awful opponents even for the task of training for additional levels. To access more interesting parts of the dungeon, one had to swim through underground tunnels that connected the different cave segments.

As clear as the water was, fighting in it was going to be difficult or border on suicide. The strongest monsters of the dungeon lurked in there. “So, how are we going to go about things?” Reysha wanted to know, once they had found the correct pond. With the help of the map they had bought, they could minimize the number of times they had to dive and aim for the safe caves where the healing fountains were. Regardless, they had to dive. “We just jump in face first or what’s the plan?”

“As the guide describes, we have to consider three types of enemies,” Aclysia reminded the redhead. “A many-toothed fish with a lamp-like appendage attached to its head, a large eel with a venomous bite and a slime with adjustable tentacles. All of them are ambush predators to some degree, so I think it would be unwise to advance recklessly.” She looked to Apexus. “Darling, as previously discussed, I think our smartest path is for you to clear the way and to signal us once its safe.”

“Urgh, but that means we just have to sit here and wait,” Reysha complained before he could answer. “I want action, bubble butt, action!”

“May I remind you of the described appearance and behaviour of the Anklebiter?” Aclysia asked and pulled the guide out of the adventurer’s bag to cite a well-chosen passage. “The Anklebiter is named for its tendency to attack prey after it has passed them, usually catching its victims ankles. It does so with needle sharp teeth that are set in a jaw that make up 70% of the monster’s total body. The bite strength is enough to penetrate even leather boots. The teeth will usually break in the ensuing struggle, allowing one to get away, but drain blood until a person arrives on the other end of the tunnel.” Aclysia took a dramatic pause to put away the guide again. “Blood is not replenished by simple healing spells and taking a break every time you become anaemic would slow us down considerably.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Reysha sighed and conceded. “Okay, I’ll just keep gutting snakes then. At least I can gorge myself around here.”

“I’ll just get to it, then,” Apexus let the two women know and turned to the pond.

“Retreat if it's too dangerous, darling,” the metal fairy called out, before he got into the water. “We can come up with alternative strategies, in case this gets too dangerous.”

“I will,” the slime assured her, his tone free of worry. Because he wasn’t human, the hunting strategies of any of the three water predators didn’t scare him. Bleeding out was not a concern and neither was running out of oxygen or stamina.

With wings barely the size of a hand, Apexus walked into the water. It was shallow at the rim, but quickly dropped. Soon the calming drop sounds all around were replaced with the unique sound underwater. Moving liquid surrounded him while he followed the oddly smooth floor of the pond into the tunnel.

In the absence of illuminating insects, glowing bits of crystals lended their light to the tunnel, creating spots of security between dark stretches. It was about twenty metres long, a considerable but not unreasonable distance for people to dive. A humanoid, particularly the kind that hadn’t grown up swimming regularly, would have been nevertheless unnerved by the prospect. The further one advanced into the tunnel, the further air was away. Anything could have lurked in the darkness and anything would have been more mobile down there than oneself. Humanoids weren’t usually anything but the top of the food chain, but in this environment, they were most decisively not.

Apexus felt nothing of that and took the opportunity to drink some of the water surrounding him. ‘Would be nice if I had something to control my buoyancy,’ he thought, while crawling along the tunnel floor on all fours. Being a solid blob of slime and bone, he stuck to the bottom with ease. ‘I hope the Graplegoo is down here…’ he thought eagerly.

His prayer was heard.

A quarter down the tunnel, his wrist came into contact with something slippery. It proceeded to swiftly wrap around his hand and then expanded. Tendrils sprouted from the tentacle, crawling up his arm. The mass for this was provided by a blob that spilled out of a barely visibly crag, holding onto Apexus with all its weight.

The chimera was curious and dragged its would-be predator into the light. It was a long-winded action, but one he had more than enough time for. Being weighed down until he suffocated wasn’t something that he felt threatened by.

It was, like himself, a slime. The Grapplegoo’s body was made from a light grey, translucent liquid, with a clearly visible, black core at the centre of it. Where Apexus differed from that base template through a vast accumulation of individual limbs and organs, the Grapplegoo stood out through the spiky appearance of its nucleus, a large number of hard, red spots all over it and a beak-like protrusion.

Each spike of the nucleus was connected to one of the red dots through a barely visible bundle of fibres. Each of the red dots, in turn, was the tip of one of the tendrils that extended from the main tentacle, which had a particularly large red dot on its own tip. The nucleus and the hardened spots were the two anchor points for the organs that gave the Grapplegoo its strength to hold its prey. These fibres were exactly what Apexus was looking for. Highly adaptable, stretchable tissue that fulfilled the role of muscles and sinews.

With each passing second, the Grapplegoo extended more tendrils around Apexus’ arm, making it almost impossible to be removed. If it had been capable of higher thought, it would have thought it would have been in for an easy meal. If it had been capable of more senses than touch, it may have been surprised to see the stomach of its prey bloat and deformed. As it was, the Grapplegoo only got to panick by the time it’s watermelon sized body was enveloped by a more potent variant of slime. One of these two had to rely on a beak to tear its food into smaller pieces and that one wasn’t the steadily evolving chimera.

The Grapplegoo tasted like saltwater with a pinch of sugar. Not all that pleasant, it had to be said. Apexus also was mildly displeased with himself for eating a fellow slime in the first place. There was no kinship between them, they were too different beyond the base to be considered to be the same species. Still, like many humans would feel it odd to eat a gorilla, the chimera slime was filled with a fundamental distaste for devouring the Grapplegoo. That it had very little in the way of sustenance didn’t help.

Instinctual dislike aside, Apexus had to eat it and he had to kill it to allow Reysha and Aclysia safe passage. When he had to kill it anyway, not eating it would have been even more disrespectful. Letting things rot was a waste. Prey deserved to be treated with respect, as Apexus saw it.

‘It being mostly water makes it pretty quick to eat,’ the slime thought about the upside and resumed his movement down the tunnel. He would clear it out while he was forming his new Growth. It was going to be temporary for now, but testing things was never wrong.