Chương 9: The Only Direction

She couldn't sit still, and there was no reason for it she could find. Every feeling she'd ever carried had a shape she recognized by now. Hunger came, she ate, it left. Cold came, she found the fire, it left. This one hadn't gone quiet. A full night hadn't touched it at all. She paced the length of the beam twice, dropped down before she meant to, and crossed the hall without picking a direction first. Her paws decided faster than she did these days.

Bram nearly tripped over her by the pantry door, a sack of flour balanced on one shoulder, and caught himself hard against the frame.

"Watch it." He looked down at her properly.

"What's gotten into you today?" She sat down. It didn't help. Her tail kept moving on its own, flicking against the floor in a rhythm she hadn't told it to keep. Bram set the flour down and gave her another look.

"You alright, little thing?" He said it like a joke, though his eyes didn't quite let it be one, and went back to his shelves without finishing the thought. She left him to it and found Ren in the front hall, bent over the guild's ledgers with a face like she hadn't slept properly in longer than she should have. Amber jumped onto the desk, landing square in the middle of the open page.

"Not now." Ren nudged her off the ink without looking up. Amber didn't move. Ren looked up properly then, and something in her face shifted.

"What's wrong with you?" She pushed the ledger aside and scratched between Amber's ears, slow, the way she did when she had time for it. Amber leaned into her hand. It was warm, and steady, and it should have been enough. It wasn't. She jumped down and headed for the kitchen. She left through the kitchen door and out into the yard, and the yard told her something the hall hadn't. More boots than she'd seen crossing it in a long while.

A human in full gear stood posted by the gate itself, something she'd never once seen there before, arms crossed and eyes moving over everyone who passed. Two more adventurers she didn't recognize sat sharpening blades on the low wall, full kits already strapped and ready, the kind of readiness that didn't belong to any ordinary day. Neither paid much attention to the guard. The blade kept scraping against the whetstone, slow and even, while more boots passed through the yard behind them.

Voices carried from further down the street too, overlapping with the clatter of carts and footsteps. Amber couldn't make out the words, only the change in the usual noise of the street. She sat at the edge of the yard and watched it a while. Nobody paid her any attention at all. The scent of the yard had changed too, sharp and unfamiliar, layered under all the usual smells of hay and oil. Something about it made her fur want to stay up. She didn't like standing there with no way to place it.

She turned away from the yard. The tunnel came back to mind as she walked. Not the cold. Not what had happened there. Just the stone beneath her paws and the dark around her, something familiar enough to follow. She crossed the yard and slipped through the guild's gate into the street. From there, she followed the familiar streets until she reached the grate. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The grate was exactly where she'd left it, the same rusted gap bowed wide enough for her to slip through without needing to think about the angle. She dropped, landed clean, and let the dark close in around her, familiar now instead of frightening. The tunnels hadn't changed. Wet stone. Low ceilings. The same three-drip echo somewhere she still hadn't found the source of. She went deeper than she had before, past the wider chamber where she'd killed the big one, past the side passage she'd once avoided on instinct.

New ground now, ground she'd never crossed before, the walls closer together here, the air colder against her fur. One passage narrowed to nothing and forced her back the way she'd come. She tried another and found another dead end, then turned back and took a third. This one kept going, finally opening out into something wider. The first slime found her before she found it, a small thing, dim and slow, sitting in a puddle of its own making.

She circled once out of habit, more caution left in her than the last time she'd done this. It barely reacted at all, the same mindless drift she remembered from the lesser ones near the surface. [SYSTEM] You have slain: Lesser Cleaner Slime Mana gained. Easy. Too easy, maybe, though nothing in her minded that. She found two more further in, both the same, both gone the same quick way.

The tunnels kept opening wider the deeper she went, new passages branching off ones she hadn't known existed, the whole place bigger than she'd ever given it credit for from the one chamber she'd known before. The fourth one was wrong. She noticed it before she understood why. It sat the same way the others had, dim, slow, half-formed in its puddle.

But something about its shape kept almost matching hers, a flicker at the edge of it, there and gone, like it had caught sight of her and started copying the outline without quite finishing the job. She stopped. Ears forward. Every hair along her spine standing up at once. The shape flickered again, this time held longer, long enough that for one full breath there were two of her in the tunnel, one crouched low with claws out, one sitting dim and wrong in a puddle that had never been a cat at all.

She didn't wait for it to finish deciding what it wanted to be. She went in low and fast, teeth first, the way she always had. It didn't fight the way the big one had, no cold wrapping in from every side, no patient hunger. It just kept trying to become her, over and over, faster each time, like it thought if it got close enough this time it might finally work.

Her claws caught something solid at the center of it, the same way they always did, the one part that never changed no matter what the rest of it tried to be. It made no sound at all. Only a shudder, then stillness, and the flickering shape it had almost worn slid back into ordinary puddled slime, gone as quick as it had come. [SYSTEM] You have slain: Mimic Slime Mana gained. Skill Acquired: Imitation If you can copy it, why bother coming up with your own?

She sat over the puddle a long moment, tail low, ears still forward. She didn't understand the words. But she knew what the slime had tried to become. It had copied her, badly, but enough that she could recognize herself in it. She remembered the healer's pale glow. She'd watched it for a long time and nothing had come of it. Something had come of this. She didn't know what. She only knew she wanted more of it. The feeling hadn't gone away after the first time.

If anything, it had grown, like hunger after the first bite. She got up and shook the last of the puddle off one paw. [SYSTEM] Entering: Slimes Dungeon The words meant nothing to her, same as always. But something about them sitting there, unmoving, longer than the others usually had, settled colder in her chest than she expected. She kept going anyway. Further in, past ground she'd never once crossed, she found one sitting apart from the rest, smaller than the others, its shape sagging low and uneven where it sat.

It didn't flicker. It didn't move toward her at all. Just sat there, dim, dimmer than dim was supposed to look. She didn't want to kill this one. She didn't know why. It only knew how to sit there being small and wrong, dim in a way that made her chest go tight without asking her first. She thought of the healer's hands. The glow that gave instead of took.

She held the memory of it as hard as she could, the warmth, the color, the way it had settled soft over torn skin, and reached one paw out toward the small dim shape in front of her. Light answered. Pale, but wrong, flickering unsteady the way the mimic's copied shape had flickered, never quite settling into anything real. The slime seized. It didn't scream, not with any sound she recognized.

It just came apart at once, faster than anything she'd killed all day, a violent burst of wet and cold that splattered wide across the stone and left nothing behind but a smell like burnt copper. She sat very still. Whatever she'd just done, it wasn't healing. [SYSTEM] Imitation: Unstable. Effect failed. Target destroyed. Mana gained. She looked down at her own paw, the light already gone from it, nothing left to explain what had just happened. She'd wanted to save something.

She'd killed it faster than she'd killed anything on purpose. [SYSTEM] Skill Acquired: Basic Offensive Recovery A heal that does nothing but hasten a creature's end. She sat up straighter over the ruined puddle, chest puffed, tail curling high behind her, and was proud of it.