“Are you sure about this? Slimes mean that I will not be able to step in without being recognized.”

“I’m sure!” Deyana chirped, bouncing along. It probably stood out, but she didn’t really care. She had two all-new rune setups to test in a live environment.

Well, someone had probably made the grenade glove at some point or another, but it was new to her, at least.

“And while I’d prefer you not let me die, just you being there means I’ll take fewer stupid risks.”

“Fewer? Wouldn’t one typically take more risks with a safety net?”

Deyana pulled a complicated face, thinking about how to explain it. It wasn’t that the conclusions were wrong for the premises, exactly, but there were a couple of assumed premises…

“It’s not so much that you’re a safety net, because I only sorta care about dying. What you are is someone whose opinion I care about, so I’ll limit the possible losses so that you don’t feel bad for me or worry.”

Geria’s steps stuttered for a moment, then she started catching up. Deyana slightly reduced her step size to make that easier. “Why in the world would that be what you’re concerned about?”

“Well, my first thought was to question whether I could poke thirty slimes to aggro them, get them all chasing me, then cook an orb for two seconds before throwing it to hit them all.”

There was a long pause where they both kept walking, neither of them saying anything. “Okay, but… why?”

She didn’t really have an answer to that, so she let it hang for a moment before shrugging. “It seems fun. Stupid, pretty likely to get me killed, but fun.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They were getting close to the slime area now, and Deyana felt that twitch in her fingers that had long ago replaced the nervousness of her early play time. The glove felt heavy on her hand, while the sword bouncing against her hip almost fell out of her attention.

It was, after all, slimes.

Some games had them as early game enemies, others decided to make them terrifying late game monstrosities.

Rune had chosen neither of those options.

Instead, spread out in levels over the whole range, the only truly notable level feature of slimes was that they were nearly immune to most forms of physical damage. Worse, unlike so many other games had decided, just being formed by magic didn’t make the attack bypass that.

Like everything else in Rune, it was much too based on reality for that.

Instead, “physical attacks” meant any attack that was based on physically separating, crushing, or piercing them. There were exceptions– cutting one fully into two pieces, and keeping them separated for a few seconds, would make two smaller enemies, which could eventually be reduced in size enough to lose coherency; splattering them completely, a difficult task due to their physical characteristics, could make the fragments unable to connect for too long; and creating an explosion or burst after piercing them could cause the same problem– but as a general rule, it was best to find another strategy to deal with them.

And the attack itself being made of void or air or ice wouldn’t bypass that.

Luckily, they were also extremely vulnerable to other strategies.

Not that she should take them for granted, which brought her up short. Geria was here after all, so she should probably find a single slime and pull it to test things first.

With almost nobody else in the area, it was a simple matter to scan the area, picking out a single blue specimen that was oozing across the ruined roadway.

Deyana pushed mana into her glove, manifesting the orb there in the middle of a n underhanded tossing motion.

Not quite landing where she was aiming, it smacked down into a crack next to the slime, instantly seeming to get stuck.

The slime moved quickly, sliding down into the crack and pulling the orb into its body.

Slimes didn’t exactly have the best track record for intelligence.

The orb went off, freezing the slime though and leaving a small glassy area around it.

Unexpectedly, though, there was no kill notification that graced her vision, and her mana regeneration was still bound by the combat version of it.

Only one answer then. “Um. So. It’s not dead.”

“Really? I would have thought freezing killed them.”

“I did too. Any ideas?”

“Nothing good. It doesn’t look like it’s moving, though…”

It seemed to be quite thoroughly frozen, but maybe becoming less so? A glossy sheen had started to appear on the outside, at least.

She was trying to wrack her brain for the options she had available, but she kept coming back to one thing.

It was good that she hadn’t tried the monster train idea. They’d be frozen for a time, true, but they’d also track her movements and be following her with attack aggro.

Plus, her freezing would be somewhat antithetical to the usual slime strategy of evaporating them. Or, in some lower-level cases like she was seeing around, reducing them until they stopped moving and came apart.

“Do you think you could shatter them?” Geria asked, her eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure you’d have the mana availability to so that without absorbing something first…”

She was probably right about that. While the merged runes on her arm could be scaled up to create their own energy, doing so would cost much more in terms of mana than it had really been built for, and leave her basically helpless.

Although–

“If it unfreezes, you can wall it out with sand until I can regen mana. It’s not perfect, obviously, but we have the time to test some stuff.”

“Yes. This means you’re going to try without?”

“Mhmm.”

As she stepped closer to the slime, she was already working out the numbers in her head. Eighty mana at level sixteen, but that would go up quickly with slime kills. Twenty for the ice bomb, and a bit of a safety margin to not pass out.

She funneled her mana into the runes on the shirt. Connected as they were, she couldn’t just activate one section without being specialized in any of the runes involved, and specializations unlocked at level fifty.

Forty-five mana, plus five for the activation itself, funneled into the runes on her arm, leaving her a bit lightheaded, but a pyramid shot out, slamming into the glistening slime.

It didn’t go all the way through, but large parts of the slime broke into fragments, sloughing off of the main body.

Cutting the power to her runes, Deyana looked it over again.

It hadn’t gone all the way through, but it had knocked off almost half of the thing’s composition, and the stone spike was still sticking out.

She kicked it.

Combat Ended!

+195 Experience, +20 credits

Deyana nodded to herself, watching as the icy fragments dissolved into the ether. Well, no; probably the lore would say “charged zones” instead. Those areas on the other side of the portals where monsters supposedly originated from and were enhanced by, reclaiming their own.

It would be believable, and the already-killed corpses that had been on the other side of most of the portals she’d been on the attack for lent credence to that interpretation.

The ritually laid out, tied-down and still-living enemies were more confusing, but they’d probably get more on that when they got into later portal tiers.

“Got the kill. Repeatable on the small scale, but I’d need you to boost me for more than one at a time.”

“I can do that. It will still count as your solo kill, yes?”

“Yep! So long as our party remains separate and you don’t directly hit them, at least.”

Geria nodded. “How many can you take, with me boosting?”

That was a good question.

Fifteen mana per bolt without inserting any additional speed into the equation directly meant that she could theoretically do three, but realistically, there was going to be time between them, and the uptick in costs associated with absorbing a hit would make a cut into that buffer as well.

“Two for now, three in two or three levels.”

Geria nodded. “I still don’t enjoy having to be out of your party.”

Deyana waved the concern off. “It’s fine; if it becomes important, I can just shoot you an invite.”

“I know.”

Deyana spotted two slimes close to each other and headed off for them, her escort following.

This time, she was more confident with the toss, holding it for a second before tossing this time.

It arced up, then down, popping before it even made contact with the ground.

Deyana activated the shield, motioning for Geria to hit her.

A spiraling wave of sand popped out around the top of the staff, and Geria spun it before the sand had even fallen, catching the main body of it in a much smaller area than Deyana had planned for it to be used in, before stabbing forward with the bottom end of the staff, the sand lagging behind.

Only for a blink, though, and it followed like it had been a rubber band pulled taut, moving faster than the original stab and thumping into her shielding with a sound like a dropped sandbag.

When the mana dropped significantly more precipitously than she’d expected, Deyana was suddenly glad that she’d built in safety margins.

Checking the sleeve as the power transfer happened revealed why.

Almost a third of the capacity, including the reserve, was being used.

She had no idea how much that was objectively, but given that not a single test up until that point had used more than a single rune’s capacity, it had to be a lot.

Actually, she was kind of worried: she could control how much was added directly, but [Impart Energy] had no such limiter for storage runes.

Only one way to deal with that problem, though.

Deyana spun, taking more careful aim than she had last time and making sure to keep a downwards angle towards the slime before triggering the runes.

She didn’t even see the projectile.

Instead, there was a crack, a shattering sound, and a thump as the slime broke into pieces and a hole appeared in the ground behind it.

Deyana stood there, blinking, before blowing out a breath.

“Huh. That was effective.”

Geria nodded. “It was. I did use a hundred mana for that, of course.”

Deyana sputtered. “A– a hundred? Why– why would you even… What was the point of that? I don’t even have a hundred yet!”

“I wanted to test your defenses. And I regen that in three seconds.”

“Yeah, I mean, that’s how the numbers work, but what would you have done if it couldn’t handle that much?”

Geria gave her a look like she was reevaluating the intelligence of the person she was talking to. “I’d already given the set of orders to stop it if it got close to you, obviously.”

Deyana rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. No more than fifty, this time, please.”

“Done,” Geria said, and before the syllable was even complete, more sand was in the air. The quick spin and pulling of the staff was less surprising this time, but that just left her to admire the form of it before her mana once again dove downwards.

Not nearly as bad this time. Which was the point, of course, but some part of her was ever-so-slightly disappointed to not be testing the work in even more extreme scenarios.

The part of her that didn’t particularly want to die again was glad that she wouldn’t have to deal with an overcap explosion because she didn’t have the right limiter runes yet to turn off the shield and take the hit on her HP yet.

Not that she’d be able to take anything approaching a strong hit from Geria on her HP.

Another cracking sound, this time much quieter, followed by a thump.

Unlike last time, she could see part of the stone spike sticking out of the ground as the slime finished collapsing.

Combat Ended!

+390 Experience, +40 credits

Slime obtained.

“Alright, we’ve got…” Deyana checked the time, “thirty minutes before we should leave the area and I need to log out. Keep the hits at that size, and let’s see how many we can get.”