I poked my eyes out of my hidey-hole to check the surroundings. Nowadays, I mostly relied on my vibration sense to locate enemies, but it never hurt to take a look as well. There could always be some soft-footed monster camping my location.

Satisfied that there was no immediate threat to my life, I moved out of cover and towards the direction I knew the closest wall to be. Or at the very least where I knew the wall to be where I came from. I couldn’t be certain, but as far as I could tell, this cave I found myself in was absolutely huge.

After all, there were monsters the size of elephants roaming around in here, and there was probably more than the one currently sitting in my inventory. Then, there was the steady stream of monsters coming in from the side tunnels. I could constantly feel the vibrations of far-off battles, which made it harder to differentiate between the vibrations closer to me.

The point being, this cave was big.

As such, since I was very small, almost everything in here could serve as cover for me. This really helped me out, since my agility was still fixed at a measly one. I really had to fix that as soon as I could. Hopefully, the system would provide me with an opportunity for this in the future.

Feeling something close in on my location, I hid behind a rock opposite the vibrations and held myself perfectly still. It didn’t take long for a brown blur to pass by my hiding spot. Thankfully it didn’t see me and continued on its merry way, looking for its next fight.

I carefully continued my way back to the wall, successfully hiding myself every time a monster came my way. All in all, I probably only clung to the elephant for a minute or two before it collapsed, but now it was taking me hours to return to the wall. My speed was truly ridiculous compared to other monsters and it didn’t help that I needed to hide every time a monster so much as looked at me.

Maybe I could fight some of them by now, but I really didn’t want to risk it. The safety my tried and tested strategy provided me just couldn’t be beaten. And for as long as poison was my only viable attack, it would stay that way.

It was when I moved between two hiding spots when I suddenly froze. Something about the ground here was different… There seemed to be a layer of something above the rock, and it felt incredibly familiar to me…

Mucus.

There was some dried mucus here! Did another slug pass by here recently? They say curiosity killed the cat, but I needed to see what a regular slug was like on this planet. I spent some time trying to figure out which way the slug went, and eventually found out that the trail was just ever so slightly less dried out to my left, so I decided to follow in that direction.

I wasn’t entirely sure if I could even catch up, considering that we probably had the same agility, but I had to try. Going by how wide this slug’s mucus trail was, it was even smaller than me. So maybe I could be faster than it by virtue of being bigger.

The trail was getting wetter as I followed it, so that was good. And although I had to hide from a monster again, I felt that I was gaining ground here.

Eventually, the trail took a sharp right towards a big rock. It was the kind of rock that I’d been using as cover this entire time, so maybe the slug I was following was taking a break over there.

Curiously I approached the rock, making sure to stay on top of the trail. I kept my eyes open for any slug-like blurs, but I just couldn’t see anything that looked similar. All of a sudden I bumped into something soft.

I could see it squirm away at my touch, the brown coloration having blended in perfectly with the background before. Well, I guess that’s the slug I’ve been looking for. If I had to guess, I’d say that this thing was only about half as big as I was.

I briefly wondered if the difference in size was purely because I was another species, or because of the difference in our stats. Whatever it may be, the thing was obviously scared of me. I was fairly certain that it was currently activating its compress skill in order to defend against the big and scary monster attacking it.

I briefly wondered how I should go about killing it and eventually just decided to drench it with a poison shot. The deadly liquid, fired at point-blank range, splashed over the little slug, completely drenching and pooling around it. Now I just had to wait until it ingested some of the poison, be it through accident or because it was dumb and thirsty.

After a while of me not attacking, the slug must have decided that I wasn’t a threat, or maybe it just thought it could make a run for it. It doubled in size, as compress was released, and started crawling away from me. I idly followed right behind it, my larger frame allowing me to cover more ground with the same agility stat.

At this point, I was fairly certain that it hadn’t taken in any of my poison for some reason. Maybe this slug was smarter than any of the monsters I’d encountered so far since they were all too happy to gurgle down my poison. Which left me with the question of how to off this little cousin of mine.

Well, it was smaller than I was… and the bonus quest said to ‘consume 10 slugs’, so, why not just cut out the bit in the middle where I killed it first?

I quickly caught up to the fleeing slug and opened my mouth wide. Once I was positioned correctly, I closed my jaw on the unsuspecting slug and bit a healthy chunk right off.

It was a weird sensation to consume something that was still moving, but it worked. The slug squirmed around as a good quarter of its body just disappeared. But there was no way it could escape now. So I bit off another chunk, the manyfold teeth in my mouth shredding it into paste in short order. And as I was chewing on my second bite, the system let me know that I’d killed my first slug.

You have killed a Lv. 1 Slug

You have been awarded 5(10) XP

You have been awarded 1 Data Point

Huh, well would you look at that. I briefly wondered how something that gave so little XP was supposed to help weaker monsters level up, but maybe you were supposed to eat slugs in bulk… I continued eating, though, since I was still missing one more system message.

You have consumed 01/10 slugs needed to fulfill your bonus objective.

It finally showed up when I completely swallowed down the last bit of slug. One down, nine to go. I really hoped that the next slug I found was accompanied by more slugs because hunting for them like this was… tedious to say the least. It was also incredibly dangerous to be away from the wall.

Maybe I could camp out the watering spot I had found and go for any slugs that showed up there. Slugs needed lots of moisture to survive, and apart from me, I was pretty sure no slug could substitute water with the blood of slain enemies. It was also possible that a tier-two monster would show up there to have a drink at some point. Although, I wasn’t entirely certain how I’d even recognize such a monster.

Content with my newest kill, I made another attempt at returning to the wall. On my way I made sure to keep watching for mucus trails, yet I couldn’t find any more. I also went out of my way to check some hiding places, just in case I’d stumble across another slug. But this also turned out to be a waste of time.

Another curious thing I noticed, was that the frequency of monsters passing me by got lower and lower the closer I got to the wall. Was there some sort of battle royale going on in the center of the cave? Did the monsters only come to the outskirts of the cave to restore their health and take a break?

I couldn’t be sure, but on the topic of taking breaks, I realized that I had yet to sleep. Ever since I came here, I’d been fighting, planning, and observing. And I was fairly certain that more than a day had already passed, yet I wasn’t sleepy. Did monsters even need sleep?

No, I think they did. After all, the first hyena I encountered seemed to be sleeping. So was it just slugs that didn’t sleep? Or was it that slugs could stay awake for really long periods of time?

The system was weird like that. It downloaded detailed instructions on how to move my body, as well as some general knowledge about slugs directly into my brain. Yet it conveniently left out how much sleep I needed. What else was the system keeping from me?

That was actually a pretty good question. Just recently, I unlocked an achievement. A part of the system I had no idea existed up until that point. What other cool functions did the system have that I could potentially exploit for more gains?

But of course, wondering about that was entirely pointless, since the system refused to explain things about itself that I didn’t have access to yet.

I was grumbling to myself about how weird the system was at times, when the cave wall finally entered my vision. Not letting my guard down, I made a final check of my surroundings before covering the final stretch of floor before I could finally attach myself to the wall again.

Something about hanging out on a vertical surface just calmed my nerves. I’m home, dear wall! Did you miss me?

Of course, the wall wouldn’t answer me, but I was happy to just be an idiot for a bit, finally back to safety. I enjoyed the feeling a little longer, before heading off into the direction of the water pool. It was time to go search for more slugs… and I was also getting kinda thirsty myself!