Chương 22: 21. Whalefall

Marcus dreamt he was a squirrel. Not some awakened animal, or that he was shape-shifted into it, but simply a regular squirrel going about its life as any other member of its kind. He lived in an old woodpecker hole, spending his time feeding on acorns and tree sap and running away from predators. Life was simple as a squirrel. He lived alone and did not need to deal with any sort of society and rules.

His life contained plenty of fear and frustration, but he did not worry about what the future would bring and lived in the eternal present, tackling problems as they came and following his instincts. Sometimes, when the times were good and he found more food than he could eat, he hid nuts in various tree holes for later, but his memory was fuzzy and he forgot his hiding places often. He was a young squirrel, full of life and vigor, and times were good. Perhaps too good.

One day, his belly full and his mind dulled by the warm sunlight streaming down from the skies, he was inattentive to his surroundings and he realized too late there was a fox sneaking up on him. He fled towards the nearest tree with all the speed he could muster, his heart pounding with pure terror… but he was too slow. Massive jaws filled with dagger-like teeth closed around him and everything suddenly went dark.

"Teacher! Teacher!" Renatus shouted at him, shaking him awake.

"Wake up!" Marcus hurriedly climbed up to his feet, his heart pounding and his breath quickened and panicked, and quickly took note of the situation around him. His three students were gathered around him, giving him worried looks, but they appeared to be unharmed. He winced in pain. His head hurt, and getting up to his feet so quickly only made that worse, causing waves of pain to echo inside his skull.

It actually took him a few seconds to realize where they were and what they had been doing, as his mind was still lingering on the strange and vivid dream he had.

"What happened?" he demanded.

"You were having a nightmare," Agron said simply.

"I told Renatus to leave you alone, but he insisted we should wake you up."

"These tunnels are strange," Renatus said, shaking his head.

"Who knows if the nightmare is just a nightmare here?"

"Besides, nobody likes having a nightmare," Diocles commented.

"We figured we were doing you a favor."

"It's fine," Marcus said, rubbing the bridge of his nose in an attempt to calm down his headache.

"The nightmare is… not related to this place. Besides, I've slept long enough. Are you all well-rested? We have a long day in front of us." A chorus of worried agreement answered his question. Marcus frowned, staring at the stone ceiling of the tunnel for several seconds as his mind dwelt on the dream… the nightmare… that he'd had. Although at first glance it appeared to be just a dream, unusual only in his ability to vividly remember every aspect of it after waking up, Marcus knew what it truly was.

In his experiments with the soul seeds, he had attached them to several animals in order to puzzle out their limitations and to see what would happen. Usually he picked relatively long-lived animals, but one of them was a simple squirrel. He had done that because Sacred Oak had used its own soul seed on a squirrel, and he thought there might be some hidden meaning to that. That squirrel was now dead, eaten by a fox, and the moment it died its soul seed made its way back to Marcus.

Everything about the squirrel – all the knowledge and memories its simple mind possessed – flowed into him. It was a lot to take in, and unfortunately, this was not the best time to dwell on this. His newfound knowledge on how to be a squirrel was not going to help him out of his current predicament.

"Chompy!" Marcus called. His ever-faithful earth elemental popped out of the nearby rock wall, quickly coiling around him in a greeting gesture. Marcus gave him a good pat on its head, mentally querying him if anything had tried to approach the group while they rested. It did not. Looks like they picked a good spot. He glanced again at his students, who were giving Chompy a curious but unconcerned look. They had already seen the earth elemental before, and knew it had been guarding them from underground.

They found the earth elemental interesting mostly because Chompy spent most of his time underground, and they rarely had the chance to really study his appearance from up close like this, but they didn't really fear him.

"Where are your caterpillars?" Marcus asked. Agron pointed at the nearby patch of glowing moss, where three large caterpillars were happily munching on the cave vegetation without a care in the world. As far as they were concerned, this place was great, full of unprotected magical plants that Marcus and his students regarded as useless, but which the caterpillars clearly found very appetizing.

"Still eating, of course," Marcus mumbled. He had set up a summoning ritual with all three of his students before they went to sleep, just to see if there would be any issues with summoning creatures here. There was not. Just like there was no issue bringing Chompy here, the caterpillars could also be brought in without any issues. Instead, the issue was getting out of this place. No matter what Marcus did, he couldn't make his way out of the tunnels and back to the surface.

The effect was clearly supernatural in nature, but not in any way that Marcus could understand. Maps were useless. The proper path could not be divined. Even attempting to backtrack to where they were ten minutes ago always brought them to a new, unfamiliar area. He ended up sitting down with his spellbook and attuning himself to a different set of spells to try and figure out the situation. However, all that he figured out via various divinations was that space was strangely warped in this entire area.

What exactly that meant, he couldn't say.

"What are we going to do now, teacher?" Renatus said.

"I mean, you even tried to dig straight up through the rock and it didn't work. What more can we do?" Technically, it did work. The rock that surrounded them was perfectly normal, and he had no trouble using earth spells to dig straight up. The problem was that doing so was not bringing them any closer to the surface. He had dug upwards long enough that they should have reached the tower by sheer brute force alone, but that had not happened.

Then, when he tried to go back to the bottom of his artificial upward tunnel, he found it much shorter than it should be, terminating in a completely unfamiliar area of the underground labyrinth. Just how big was this place, anyway? Or was it simply changing its layout while they weren't looking?

"Don't be so worried," Marcus said, trying to calm them down.

"Although I admit I'm not sure what is happening here, we won't perish here." Marcus picked up his backpack from the floor of the cave, dismissed the basic alarm perimeter he had set up around them with a snap of his fingers, and then ran his fingers down his staff to feel the runes carved into its surface to reassure himself. His head was still hurting, and he only had a very vague plan in his head, but he would just have to press on regardless. He had gone through worse over the years.

He stepped forward, and motioned for his students to follow him. As he passed the glowing moss patch, he quickly scooped up the grazing caterpillars and handed them to the boys, ignoring the caterpillar's loud protests.

"There will be plenty of moss to eat elsewhere," Marcus said, pitilessly. It grew everywhere they went.

"Let's go." He continued walking with fast, purposeful steps, partially because he had an idea he wanted to try out and partially because he wanted to give his students a show of confidence. They were clearly badly spooked, and the last thing he needed was for them to panic and run off into the dark tunnels.

"Stick close to me at all times," he told them. He was confident that, whatever strangeness they encountered in these caves, he could protect them from it. However, if they were ever separated, it would be hellishly difficult to reunite with them again. Whenever he sent Chompy to scout too far ahead of them, the earth elemental never returned and Marcus had to dismiss him and then resummon him in order to get him back.

Chompy wasn't exactly an intellectual or particularly eloquent, so it was hard to get a detailed explanation out of him… but even for a creature that could swim through stone, the distances here didn't work how they were supposed to, and moving too far from the group made the earth elemental become alone in the maze and unable to make his way back to the group. Since Marcus had a soul connection to all of his students present, he felt he might be able to track his students down anyway.

However that could take a while and these caves were neither empty nor harmless. In any case, his students didn't have to be told twice, and immediately drew closer to him, matching his speed. Marcus could tell they were still on Tasloa. He was initially afraid that they had accidentally stepped through some kind of reality rift and ended up in some other world. However, he could still activate his spying sigils back in the tower to check up on his remaining students back at the surface.

They were worried about their long absence, but not panicking. Marcus had sent an illusionary recording of himself through one of these sigils, telling them they had encountered minor issues and may be gone for a while. The fact Marcus could do this was encouraging, because Marcus knew from past experiences that most spells did not work through a rift connection. If they were stuck in another world, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did.

So this space, as strange as it was, had to be on their home planet still.

"Can't you simply teleport us out?" Renatus asked.

"Is teleportation not a thing? Powerful mages know how to do that in stories."

"Teleportation is forbidden magic," Diocles told him disapprovingly.

"Teleportation does not work correctly on our world," Marcus said.

"No matter what destination you choose, the spells will deposit you on random places on the planet, possibly inside solid rock or underwater. This isn't the case for other planets, and seems to be unique to our planet. It might have something to do with the chaos storms we experience." Additionally, Marcus suspected that teleportation would be especially tricky inside this place. He would still do it if he had no other choice, of course, but he would prefer to avoid it if possible.

If he ended up on the other side of the planet, it would take him months to get back to his tower. Granted, the deviation from the intended destination wasn't usually that extreme, but still. He'd heard some horrific stories.

"Can you teleport, teacher?" Agron asked.

"I can," Marcus confirmed.

"But Diocles just said that is forbidden magic," Agron noted.

"And considering your explanation, I can imagine why. So how do you go about learning forbidden magic like that?"

"Well, you first find someone willing to break the law, of course…" Marcus began.

"You didn't get permission for it?" Diocles asked, sounding honestly shocked. Marcus chuckled at him. This silly kid… he had much to learn, it seemed. And here Marcus thought Regulus would be his most sheltered and naïve student.

"Stop," Marcus suddenly commanded, placing his hand in front of him to bar their way forward, then coming to a halt himself.

"What?" Renatus asked.

"Look up," Marcus said, pointing at the ceiling of the tunnel with his staff. Up there, attached to the rocky ceiling, was a large, dark blue puddle of slime. It hung motionless from the ceiling, having stretched itself thin to be as inconspicuous as possible. A trap for the unwary. If they had tried to pass below it, it would have dropped down onto their heads in a surprise ambush that would have been hard to defend against.

Most slimes were not strong enough to grip the rock like this, nor smart enough to execute ambushes and traps. The fact that local slimes were this advanced was concerning.

"A slime?" Diocles asked. Marcus nodded.

"What is it doing?"

"Trying to ambush us, obviously," said Marcus. He reached into his backpack and retrieved a big stone disc with a pair of explosive runes carved into it. He then crouched and lightly threw the disc in front of him, angling it so it bounced off the stone floor several times, producing noise vaguely similar to footsteps. A dark blue shadow immediately dropped onto the disc, engulfing it.

His students took a step back, shocked, as the large slime quickly pulled at its scattered mass, trying to assume a combat form, having realized it had dropped on the wrong target. Unfortunately for it, it did not immediately spit out the stone disc and instead let it float around in its center of mass. Marcus waited for it to gather its form a bit, getting more compact and concentrated, and then triggered the runes on the disc and casually raised a weak force field in front of him.

The resulting boom utterly destroyed the slime in one move, splattering the dark blue gel all over the surrounding walls and sending stone shrapnel flying everywhere. It might have been somewhat dangerous to be near the detonation, except that it all harmlessly bounced off Marcus's shield. He used a gust of wind to blow away the dust in front of him and waited for a second to see if the slime would reform from the blast. It did not. He continued onward, motioning for his students to follow him.

Explosive stones like that were the most effective method of fighting slimes that Marcus had figured out thus far. Slimes were usually not a big threat, but as a monster group, they were notoriously resilient to damage. It took a lot of damage to bring one down, and the slimes in these tunnels grew very big. If he tried to fight them normally, by throwing fireballs and other destructive spells at them, he would have an exhausting fight on his hand every time he encountered one.

Thankfully, though smarter than average, they all instinctively swallowed anything thrown at them, and they couldn't or wouldn't digest stone.

"I'll need to make more discs soon," Marcus commented out loud. Thankfully they were very easy to make.

"I wonder how these tunnels can stay so lush and full of moss and mushrooms with slimes this big roaming around the place. As far as I know, they're absolutely voracious and eat just about anything."

"These slimes are getting scary," Renatus commented. Marcus hummed indecipherably, not saying anything substantial. In fact, Marcus had never seen slimes this dangerous in his entire life. The ease with which he had been dispatching them probably made them seem like a non-issue to his students, but internally he was worried… though more about the fact that they had begun to set up ambushes than them becoming larger and tougher. Even Chompy hadn't detected that last slime.

Chompy had difficulty detecting slimes in general, as they did not produce a lot of vibrations while moving, and when they lay still they were all but invisible to the earth elemental's senses. If Marcus wasn't as experienced and if he did not have supernaturally sharp senses, they would have walked straight into that ambush.

As they walked, he noticed that Renatus was occasionally ripping out handfuls of glowing moss from patches that grew on the walls and handing them to his caterpillar, which he was carrying on his shoulder. His caterpillar, a curious thing with striking black markings all over its body, eagerly accepted the food, curiously looking around while constantly chewing on the glowing cave moss.

Marcus had thought the caterpillar might bear a grudge against Renatus for getting it killed that one time, but the larva didn't appear to care. His two other students didn't seem as enthused about their own caterpillars. They carried theirs inside of their backpacks, where they were out of the way and couldn't bother them while they walked.

"So, I know I'm probably being a little annoying…" Renatus began, "but where are we even going? We know from before that simply going in one direction just leads up deeper into the labyrinth, and you're not even using a map this time. Aren't we just getting more lost?" Marcus supposed there was no harm in telling him.

"Space seems to be warped here," Marcus said.

"As you said, going in a direction without turning seems to just lead us deeper. Previously, I was trying to fight the effect and find a way back to the entrance, but now I'm thinking that was the wrong approach. This place is trying to lead us somewhere, and I'm going to accept its invitation." Marcus's logic was simple – an effect like this needed a source or an anchor, an item or creature that maintained it and kept it going.

If Marcus could reach the center and kill whatever needed killing, smash what needed smashing, then the effect would surely stop and he could go back to the surface and continue teaching his students in peace. Ideally, he would first get his students to safety before trying something like this, but in this case he had to keep them close at all times so that wasn't an option. Inconvenient, but he would manage.

"Why not call Miss Celer here and see if she can help us navigate this place?" Diocles asked.

"As a spirit from the outer planes, she is bound to know more about strange places like this than mere mortals like us."

"I already tried to summon Celer and she wouldn't answer my summons," Marcus admitted.

"However, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. She has her own life and does not answer my every call." That was why he'd had them summon their caterpillars down there – to confirm it was just Celer refusing his summons rather than him being unable to reach her.

"Does that happen often?" Agron asked.

"Summoning magic seems to be pretty unreliable if that's the case."

"Mmm… it happens a fair bit," Marcus said after a bit of thought.

"Simpler, weaker spirits usually answer every summon since they have nothing better to do anyway. Chompy comes every time I call, for instance. More powerful spirits tend to be more demanding, and some of them will even demand additional payment every time they're summoned or they will not answer the call again in the future. Thankfully, Celer isn't so greedy. She's probably just busy with something."

Marcus actually had a way to indicate to Celer that something was an emergency, but he didn't think this truly qualified as one, so he didn't use it. Especially since he doubted she would truly be able to help. There was no reason she would be better than Marcus at navigating strange spatial anomalies, and her type of magic was terrible against opponents like slimes. He still would have preferred if he could consult her on the issue, but if she had other things to do, he would not bother her.

Seeing how nobody was saying anything anymore, Marcus picked up the pace. They continued deeper into the tunnel complex.

The journey was long, and much harder than Marcus had hoped it would be. His plan called for them to move in straight lines, since that seemed to bring them into deeper portions of the underground complex, where more dangerous slimes dwelt and which Marcus suspected were closer to the source of the anomaly. However, the tunnels were rarely straight for long, and branched often. He could use his earth spells to simply drill into one direction, but that would take a lot of effort and be relatively slow.

On top of that, not only did the slimes get larger and faster, they also continued to employ more sophisticated strategies. They lurked around corners, spread themselves over the floor and walls in order to engulf anyone who stepped into the area, and in one case two of them worked together to attack them from opposite ends of the corridor in an attempt to box them in and overwhelm them from two sides simultaneously. They also got stranger in color and form.

At one point, Marcus spotted a dark red slime crawling over the floor towards them, incredibly small for this area of the underground, but quite fast. Marcus was used to dealing with slimes by now, simply making them swallow explosive stones… but the dark red slime, perhaps because it was so small, did not try to simply swallow his stone disc. It dodged it, and jumped at them. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Its jump took Marcus completely by surprise.

It was powerful and quick, catapulting the small slime towards Marcus like a dark red bullet. He still managed to erect a quick force field in front of him, but instead of splattering against it and then slowly reforming its shape, the dark red slime bounced off it in a practiced manner, angling itself towards a nearby wall. It then bounced off the wall, sidestepping Marcus and his force field, and hurled itself straight at Renatus's head.

Marcus's student didn't even have the time to scream before the slime was already in front of his face. Before the slime could connect, however, it was blown away into the distance by a bolt of force from Marcus. It was unhurt, of course. It bounced off the floor behind them a few times, and then immediately righted itself and bounced back towards them.

This time, instead of launching itself in a relatively straight path towards his students, the slime repeatedly bounced off the walls of the tunnel, advancing towards them in a sort of zigzag pattern that was hard to visually follow. The whole thing happened so fast his three students barely had time to process the attack, let alone react to it. They were only in the process of turning around to face this new threat when the red slime was already upon them.

Unfortunately for it, Marcus had completely gathered his wits by now, and wasn't going to allow this to continue any longer. Before the slime even recovered from the force bolt he had used to fling it away, Marcus was already making a triangular gesture in the air and mumbling a short chant. By the time it approached his students, he was ready. He pointed his palm at it, instantly trapping it in a force prison.

The dark red slime sloshed against the smooth, spherical surface of the trap, unable to find any leverage to break out of it. Marcus waited for about ten seconds to confirm that the spell would hold, and then ordered the force prison to float closer to him so he could study the slime. It didn't look like anything special, really, but this little thing had come the closest to actually hurting his students out of all the slimes in these tunnels. It was praiseworthy, in a way.

"Wha? What happened?" Renatus asked, still struggling to process what had happened.

"We almost died," Agron said calmly.

"I think." Marcus said nothing, staring silently at the red slime struggling in its magical cage, letting his three students calm down a little and discuss what happened.

"Err, teacher?" Renatus eventually asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.

"What's going on? Are you thinking about how to dispose of the slime?"

"Hm? No, no, I don't want to get rid of it," Marcus shook his head.

"This little guy might be useful, so he'll be accompanying us from now on. I have an idea I want to try." From then on, the group continued pressing forward with a dark red slime floating beside Marcus at all times, trapped into a spherical forcefield. By observing the frantic sloshing of the slime and targeting it with certain divinations, Marcus started to understand the place they were in somewhat. The slimes could sense something.

They could navigate the maze in some way, despite having only a rudimentary intelligence, and if Marcus could not perceive the secret geometry of this place, well… he could at least tap into the slime's senses indirectly. Eventually, he felt he found a thread to follow. There was a sort of stream to this place, like the circular stream of a whirlpool. As Marcus started to move along this flow, he soon started to feel something, even without relying on his trapped slime.

He doubted he would have noticed anything if he wasn't practicing the soul seed technique, because this feeling wasn't a simple logos resonance or a mana flow. He was feeling something that disturbed his soul directly. Marcus had never encountered something like this before, but that was something that happened a lot in this place. He pressed on, his three students shadowing his every move. Eventually, they came upon a massive cavern. And it really was absolutely, mind-bogglingly massive in every sense.

Its dome-like shape was large enough to accommodate the entire Great Sea Academy in its interior. Hundreds of holes dotted its walls, each of them the end of a tunnel that eventually terminated at this place, and a forest of stalagmites and stalactites covered the floor and the ceiling. However, the size of the chamber was secondary to its contents. Sprawled motionless across the floor of the chamber and taking up most of its space was a giant… sculpture? No, not a sculpture. A corpse.

It was calcified, its skin cracked and withered like dry ground, its one open eye milky white like marble, but the more Marcus stared at it the more he realized this had once been a living being. The corpse was remarkably human-like, other than its size. Only part of it was visible – the head, the upper torso, and one arm. The rest of the body was stuck in the walls, buried under countless layers of rock.

The head was bald and tilted to the side, with one of its eyes not visible due to being pointed at the floor of the cave. The other was perpetually open, and it almost appeared to Marcus as if it was looking straight at Marcus and his students. The giant cadaver looked ancient, primordial, yet it was covered in terrible-looking wounds. Long gashes and cuts that looked as if they were inflicted by claws or swords… and they still bled!

Glowing purple blood seeped slowly out of the giant's many wounds, forming a shallow stream and eventually pooling into a small lake at the center of the cavern. A forest of strange, alien-looking plants grew on the banks of the streams and the pool of giant's blood at the center. They all glowed purple and swayed disturbingly as if affected by some kind of wind, despite the air in the cavern being absolutely stifling and still. The eerie purple plants illuminated the entire massive cavern with plenty of light.

Enough that Marcus could see a multitude of large colorful slimes crawling around the entire place, greedily drinking from the blood seeping from the corpse, and occasionally feeding on the plants as well. Idly, Marcus observed that the plants fought back. Were they even plants? They kind of reminded him of various sea animals like coral, sponges, and certain types of worms that looked plant-like to the uninitiated, but had no actual relation to them…

"How… how could something like this exist beneath our feet?" Diocles asked quietly, his voice full of awe.

"Did we accidentally wander into the underworld?" The other two students stayed silent, wordlessly taking in the sight in front of them. Marcus said nothing either.

"I don't think my plan of destroying the source of the anomaly will work," he thought silently in his head. There was no doubt in his mind that the fallen giant in front of him was the source of the spatial distortion keeping them trapped here. But what was it? Was he looking at a dead god? He sent a weak, harmless jolt of electricity at Renatus, breaking him out of his stupor and locking eyes with him.

Marcus was never that fond of mind magic, so he couldn't send the boy a secret message, but after a few seconds of staring at Renatus, his student seemed to figure out what Marcus was trying to ask him.

'Do you sense anything from that giant?' Renatus shook his head. Which might not mean anything, now that Marcus thought about it. Just because Renatus had a divine ability, did not necessarily mean he could sense godly magic. Without saying anything further, Marcus once again went through the motions of summoning Celer. However, this time he attached a single message along with his call.

"IT'S URGENT!" Celer materialized in front of him in a puff of smoke.

"Marcus, you are such a needy brat lately," she immediately complained.

"I swear if you interrupted my weekly gossip meet-up just to explore some dank cave again, I will-" Marcus did not bother saying anything. He simply pointed his finger behind her and waited for her to turn around. He didn't have to wait long.

"Oh. Oh wow. Oh my…" she commented lamely.

"What am I even looking at?"

"You tell me," Marcus said.

"I haven't the faintest idea!" Celer said. However, she sounded happy rather than frustrated.

"I can't sense even the faintest trace of spirit in this thing. It must have died a long time ago, and yet-""It's still bleeding," Marcus pointed out.

"It's hard to miss that, yes," Celer said. She took a look around him, noticing his three students and the captured slime sloshing around the force cage beside him.

"Did something happen while I was gone? Don't tell me you lost most of your students already? Are you on the run from assassins, your tower having been destroyed and all but three of your students slain? Is that why you called me here so urgently?"

"Why would you even think something like that?" Marcus asked, annoyed.

"Listen, here's what happened…" He gave her a quick explanation about the predicament they found themselves in.

"My story sounded more fun," Celer stated when he was done. Marcus gave her a look devoid of amusement.

"That aside, I'm not sure what I can do to help you. Normally I'd just tell you to kill the source of the anomaly, but somebody beat you to the punch already. I'm out of ideas."

"Surely an enlightened spirit like Miss Celer-" Diocles began.

"Nope, I'm definitely out of ideas," Celer cut him off.

"Oh, and it seems like we have visitors." Indeed, it seemed that their arrival to this place was noted by at least some of its inhabitants. Perhaps the spatial disturbance Marcus caused by summoning Celer had drawn too much attention to them, but four slimes were crawling towards them. A very large slime the color of amethyst, accompanied by three smaller slimes that followed after it, maintaining a healthy amount of distance from it at all times.

Marcus sighed and took out a handful of explosive stone discs from his backpack. Yes, it was true that a series of explosions had a large chance of attracting even more slimes to this location, but frankly, so did a lengthy magical battle with many offensive spells being thrown about. At least this way things would be done quickly. He angled one of the discs just the right way, and then sent it skipping towards the amethyst slime in the lead.

The creature suddenly extruded a whip-like pseudopod and batted the explosive disc away from itself, not even trying to swallow it. Oh hell…

"Celer, keep my students safe," Marcus ordered, rotating one of his hands in a circle and slamming his staff against the cavern floor. His three students shouted in surprise as the stone beneath them ripped itself upward from the rest of the floor, creating a circular stone platform. Marcus thrust his hand upward, sending the platform hurtling upward, hopefully out of reach of the incoming slimes.

He ignored the screams of terror from his students as they were pressed to the floor by the sudden movement of the ground beneath their feet. They'd recover. After that, he gestured again, this time towards the amethyst slime barreling down towards him, sending a blinding bolt of lightning towards it. It took the hit head on without slowing down, seemingly unaffected. The battle was joined.

The amethyst slime created dozens of long whip-like pseudopods out of its large body and thrust them at Marcus, trying to snatch him out of the air. Marcus responded with a pair of fireballs that scorched the entire area. He shaped the blast so that it did not expand in all directions, but instead focused its energies on a horizontal plane, washing over the cavern floor like a tsunami of fire.

Some of the smaller, weaker slimes writhed as the magical flames superheated their bodies and boiled them away, but the amethyst slime remained largely unaffected. It glittered in the dim light of the cave, almost as if it was protected by some kind of magical shield. The amethyst slime's movements were the most advanced Marcus had seen yet. It could form a seemingly endless number of long, whip-like pseudopods and swing them around at anything around it.

It even picked up loose chunks of rocks and gravel and hurled them at Marcus in an attempt to get at him from a distance. Fortunately for Marcus, this cavern was big enough that he could actually fly up into the air and pepper it with spells from a relative safety. He wasn't completely safe, because its pseudopods could reach very far. However, it was much easier to dodge its attacks while flying than it would be if he had to do it on the ground.

He also didn't dare move too far away from the slime, as his students were still there and he feared that if he didn't keep it occupied hard enough, it would switch to targeting them. Celer wasn't really the best user of defensive magic. The explosive discs he carried proved to be useful still, despite the amethyst slime's instinct to bat them away.

That was because Marcus was not fighting just the amethyst slime, but also the three slimes that accompanied it, as well as a dozen or so other slimes that were attracted by the fighting. These slimes were very diverse in their abilities, and would normally be able to overwhelm them, except they instinctively swallowed anything that touched them, including Marcus's explosive discs. As such, most of the slimes that tried to join the fight didn't last long, and died shortly after in a massive explosion.

Currently, Marcus was dealing with three frustrating opponents, not counting the amethyst slime itself. One of them was a large green slime that could fire globs of its mass as projectiles. They were highly acidic, burning holes in even the stone walls of the chamber. Marcus had a particular grudge against this slime, because it actively tried to shoot at the flying platform containing his three students.

If it weren't for Celer warping the trajectories of the slime globs, causing them to miss, Marcus would have really struggled to protect them. The green slime did not dodge his explosive discs, but it was so incredibly corrosive that they dissolved the moment they touched it. This prevented Marcus from detonating them inside the creature, where they would do the most damage.

The second slime was pitch black, and could contort its body in very flexible ways, creating holes through which attacks passed through harmlessly and dodging projectiles. It was also extremely fast and could also stretch its body to great lengths, and almost succeeded in snatching Marcus out of the sky and dragging him down to the cavern floor. Finally, there was a rusty red slime that had armored plates attached to its outer form.

Rather than an innate trait, this looked more like artificial armor – the creatures fused various stones, minerals, and metals together in a sort of patchwork shell. Marcus recognized some of the metal fragments as being mangled remains of human objects. A sword, a spearhead, a shield, and even a fork. It was a pretty clear evidence that Marcus wasn't the first person to have reached this place.

The armored slime simply disabled any of the explosive discs he threw at it with its strange magic, incorporating them into its armor. Marcus cast various offensive spells at the slimes, testing what worked and what didn't. Fire worked reasonably well. Seismic waves could stun them for a short time, but didn't seem to do much damage. Lightning was okay… but what really worked to end these creatures was scattering their mass into tiny chunks over a large areas. In other words, exploding them.

What could he use as a substitute… The flexible black slime lunged at him, its body extending out at him like a snake. Marcus cast the battering ram spell, normally used for breaking down doors and other obstacles, but modified it with his logos core. Instead of simply blasting the target with a burst of magical force, he twisted the projected forces with many counter-rotating spirals, creating what was effectively a powerful shredder.

The spell hit the incoming slime like a vortex of blades, sucking it in and slicing it into thousands of tiny chunks before flinging them all around Marcus like thousands of tiny black raindrops. He dodged a number of purple pseudopods directed his way and tried to use the same trick against the amethyst slime, but found it ineffective. The purple slime seemed to be protected by some kind of personal shield that made the slicing spirals bounce off of it without any effect.

He didn't dare to use the shredder against the green slime either, since that would cover the entire area in acid rain. He wasn't sure if Celer could protect his students from that. Instead, he slammed down onto the ground for a moment so he could touch it, abandoning the safety of air for a moment, and quickly created a kind of a stone catapult in front of the green slime. When it crawled on top of it, Marcus launched it into the air and towards the lake of dead giant's blood in the center of the cavern.

He only meant to get the green slime out of his hair for a few minutes while he dealt with the other slimes, but when the green slime eventually splashed down into the shallow lake it started writhing in obvious pain and panic, kicking up huge waves in the shallow water. In just a few seconds it stilled, clearly dead. Apparently, despite all these slimes feeding on it, the blood was not safe to swim in. Good to know.

Idly, Marcus noticed that though the banks of the blood lake and the blood streams had plenty of strange vegetation, the giant corpse itself was free of any scavengers. It was as if nothing dared to approach and feed on the flesh directly. A mass of purple pseudopods broke him out of his thoughts and reminded him he still had two more annoying enemies to deal with. As well as a new batch of smaller slimes crawling in, attracted by the continued fighting.

Him stirring things up by throwing the green slime into the central lake didn't help matters in this regard. Ironically, it was one of those incoming smaller slimes that gave him an idea of how he could handle the amethyst slime. Since Marcus was running out of explosive discs, he opted to use the shredder beam on one of them to conserve his resources. It ended up surviving the blast by dodging most of it, only getting clipped by it, when something curious happened. The amethyst slime ate it.

It was close by, and apparently saw the wounded slime as an easy target – tempting enough that it momentarily stopped trying to fight Marcus in order to seize it with its many pseudopods and drag it struggling into its center of mass where it disappeared without a trace. It gave Marcus an idea. He still had the small dark red slime floating beside him in its force prison. He glanced at the creature, which had been frantically sloshing around in its cage for several minutes now.

It had been very useful in helping him navigate this place, but… it was time to say goodbye. He took out a cheap gem out of his pocket while dodging some more pseudopods, and quickly carved a dense network of explosive runes on its surface using his finger and his shaping skills. He then fired a series of golden waves at the trapped slime, stunning it with seismic waves, before dismissing the force cage and stuffing the explosive gem into the slime.

He then fired the dark red slime at the spot near the amethyst slime, far enough that he felt it wouldn't trigger its instinctual reaction of batting away incoming projectiles but close enough that it would detect the presence of the small slime. Marcus then finished it off by grazing the dark red slime with a shredder, wounding it. He was afraid that the amethyst slime would view the relatively tiny newcomer as too small and weak, not worth bothering with. But his fears were misplaced.

Before the wounded slime could recover and flee, the amethyst slime casually snatched it with one of its pseudopods and stuffed it inside itself. The explosive gem, still inside the small dark red slime, had gotten past whatever magical barrier protected the amethyst slime from the outside. Marcus sent the gem a mental trigger, and a massive explosion erupted inside the amethyst slime. It didn't die.

The amethyst slime was ruptured, torn open like a gelatinous flower, but it was still in mostly one piece and trying to pull itself together. Marcus fired another shredder beam at it at maximum power. Unlike the last time, it actually seemed to work. Its shield was still down from the explosion and Marcus could feel its gelatinous body twisting under his spell. But it wasn't being cut into thousands of tiny pieces and scattered around in the area.

Marcus maintained his shredder beam, determined to overpower it while it was still stunned and weakened, but there was something, some kind of force that was resisting him. He could see something in the center of the ruptured slime, a purple stone the same color of amethyst as the slime and big enough to fit comfortably in his palm. It glowed, growing brighter and brighter in intensity, and as it did, Marcus felt the resistance to his shredder beam increasing, the slime's defensive magic repairing itself.

Marcus slammed down next to the purple slime and did something reckless. He reached out for the stone with his hand, and physically ripped it out of the slime's body. The slime's impossibly tough body immediately stilled and then slacked, slain on the spot. It unceremoniously collapsed into a lifeless pool of amethyst fluid on the cavern floor. For a second, the cavern was still. Even the armored slime nearby was still for a second, seemingly stunned by this turn of events. And then everything went to hell.

Every slime in the cavern – every single one of them – immediately dropped whatever they were doing and went insane, rushing towards Marcus at the maximum speed they could muster. Marcus didn't need to think much about what he should do. He quickly flew back to his students, enveloped them in his flight spell, and then rushed back into the tunnel they came in from. Celer didn't need his help to fly, and easily matched his speed as he fled.

"We need to leave now," he told them simply.

"We've overstayed our welcome."

"Teacher, I think they're after the stone," Diocles said.

"If you leave it behind, they will probably stop pursuing us!"

"Don't be an idiot!" Celer scolded.

"Obviously Marcus knows this, but we're never giving it up! If everyone wants it, then it's clearly super valuable! Marcus won that fair and square – by looting it off the dead body of his enemy. Why should we give it up to a bunch of stupid slimes?" Well said. Additionally, the hand-sized amethyst stone in his hand reminded Marcus of something. He glanced at the crystal, which seemed strangely warm in his hand.

Wasn't it said that the founder of the Amethyst Academy had some sort of purple gem amplifying his capabilities? He put it out of his mind for now. He had more pressing problems to worry about at the moment.

It took them a long time to lose the mass of oozes pursuing them. Marcus had been hoping that the strange nature of this underground maze would cause the entire ooze group to quickly fragment as individual members lost themselves in the shifting tunnels. After all he could fly through the tunnels very fast, and the slimes could not. Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple. While he had slimes chasing him, there were also slimes lying in wait inside the tunnels, trying to ambush him.

So his speed was slower than he had hoped. Additionally, the slimes from the central cavern were very fast. The armored slime that was giving him trouble earlier was especially fast and persistent, seemingly not held back much by the fact it was effectively carrying a suit of heavy armor with it at all times. The mass of slimes also wasn't losing members nearly as fast as Marcus had hoped.

It seemed that so long as the slimes formed a relatively continuous line, the strange spatial anomaly of this place would not cause them to get lost. In the end, it took Marcus and his group several hours to lose all of their pursuers. It involved Marcus drilling straight up several times and collapsing some of the tunnels behind him, but eventually even the armored slime lost sight of them.

Once they were far enough from the leading slime, their pursuers seemingly vanished into thin air, the same way all groups that separated from each other lost the ability to navigate back together.

"Well, we finally lost them," Renatus commented.

"But now we're lost again." They were currently resting in one of the tunnels, near a familiar patch of glowing moss. The three caterpillars carried by the students were happily munching on the moss, completely unaffected by the events that had transpired just a few hours earlier. Marcus wondered about the moss now… was the reason this entire underground maze was so lush due to the blood still seeping from the ancient giant's corpse? Was the moss even safe for the caterpillar to eat?

"It should be fine," Celer told him when he asked her about it.

"They ate a ton already, and nothing happened to them. Ooh, maybe if they eat enough of it they will develop special magical abilities like those slimes did? Maybe we should try feeding them some of those strange glowing plants in the dead giant's cavern…" Right…

"Did you perhaps come up with any ideas of how we can get out of here?" Marcus asked Celer.

"We're not going back to that place any time soon, I think."

"Hmm… I'm going to try something," she told him.

"If you sense me de-summoning myself, summon me back as soon as possible." After that, Celer fluttered away into the distance, and he lost sight of her when she rounded a corner. After about fifteen minutes, he felt his connection with her break, and summoned her back to his side.

"I couldn't make my way back to you," she explained to him.

"It was the strangest thing. Usually I can use my connection to you to unerringly track you down, but even though I could still feel the connection between us, I just couldn't sense where I needed to go. I experienced something like this when I was trying to sneak into the palace of a great fey that one time, but I never figured out how it worked and how to foil it."

"So how did you escape that fey palace if you never figured it out?" Marcus asked.

"I cried to the guardian statues stationed inside the hedge maze to have mercy and they eventually took pity on me and threw me out," Celer admitted.

"However, I can't see any guardians here to try and annoy or swindle. Most inconvenient. Let me try something else." She flew off into the tunnels again, only for Marcus to have to re-summon her again half an hour later. This time she didn't even try to explain – she simply flew off into the tunnels again without saying a word. This continued on for three more times, until Celer gave up.

"I'm sorry, Marcus," she said. And she sounded honestly apologetic, too.

"I honestly can't see anything that would work to get us out by just walking out. You're going to have to resort to some pretty extreme methods to get out of this place." Marcus clacked his tongue, thinking.

"Alright," he said after a few seconds.

"Everyone gather around me. I'm going to try and teleport us back to the surface."

"Did you not say that doesn't work too well on your world?" Celer asked him.

"It doesn't," Marcus said.

"We're doing it anyway." After he got everyone closely clustered around him, with Celer sitting comfortably on his head, Marcus slowly and carefully drew a stabilizing diagram around the group. On other planes, diagrams like this were rarely used outside of extreme circumstances, as their point was to compensate for various complications and disturbances. On Tasloa, they were basically mandatory unless one wanted to gamble with their life. Even with them, the results were uncertain.

Marcus went through the gestures and chants of the spell slowly and deliberately; a level of caution he rarely displayed. The space around them twisted and warped, and the world suddenly lurched around them. Marcus fought off the sudden wave of nausea with ease, but his students were not so lucky. They stumbled and swayed from their spots, struggling to pull themselves together. Agron and Diocles managed to stabilize themselves eventually, but Renatus ended up emptying his stomach nearby.

They were still in the underground tunnels. There was a large patch of glowing moss not far from there.

"Well crap," Celer said.

"This place really is something, huh?" Marcus performed the teleportation spell one more time. This time nobody ended up vomiting, but the result was the same. The teleportation worked, but the spell did not take them out of the strange underground tunnels. It simply sent them to a random spot inside the maze. Marcus wasn't too surprised. There was a reason why he hadn't immediately tried this when he realized they were lost.

"Are we really going to die here?" Renatus asked quietly. Marcus could detect creeping fear in his voice. He sighed.

"No, we are not dying here," he told him.

"I told you all before I can definitely get us out, and I meant it. There is at least one thing that I know with absolute certainty will get us out."" Really?" Celer asked dubiously from the top of his head. He glanced up at her with annoyance. Even you, Celer?

"Yes, really," he told them all.

"I can open a rift to another world."