Survival in Another World with My Mistress!, Volume 3, page 11
“Sure. Just don’t hurt or eat me please.”
I sat down in place and scratched my cheek. I was glad we could communicate, and that it didn’t seem hostile. Honestly, it kind of reminded me of a small child, which was why it’d be best to let it do as it pleased so that it felt comfortable around me.
“No hurt!” the slime promised. It jiggled a bit and began to touch my hands, arms, ankles, and neck. “Taste and smell elf, cyclops, and harpy! Others too!”
“Taste? Hold on, smell?!”
I took a bath this morning, I’ll have you know. Is this slime sensing something that I can’t just clean off?
“Not a bad human, so I’ll take you home!”
“You will? Um, are there…smarter folks than you at home?”
“Yup!”
“Hm. All right,” I said. “I’ll come with you.”
“’Kay, ’kay! Follow me!”
The slime… He…? She? Did slimes have genders? Either way, the slime began to move off, so I followed after it. I always pictured them as being heavy and slow, but this one zoomed off at a good clip. There wasn’t much of a difference between my walking pace and its…slimy slither.
“The name’s Kousuke, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Kousuke!” it said as we went along. “I’m Lime!”
“Gotcha… Nice to meet you, Lime the slime.”
Exploring these dark caverns on my own was honestly a bit of a downer, so I felt really lucky to have hit it off with a friendly…whatever. Yep, that was me! Lucky!
***
“Hey, Lime, where exactly are we headed?” I asked the creature as it rolled and sloshed along in front of me.
Y’know, I could understand the whole jumping and rolling bit, but how did it slide like that?
“Our home!” it said.
That wasn’t a very illuminating answer, but I supposed I’d find out soon enough if I followed along.
“When you say ‘our,’ that means others are there too?” I asked.
“Hm? Big Lime, Big Bess, Big Poiso!”
“Big…?”
What exactly did that mean? Was there some kind of main body? Nah, that couldn’t be right. But it was a slime, so… But who were Bess and Poiso?
“Do you, Bess, and Poiso live together?” I asked.
“Yup! When scary humans find us, we move!”
“That happen a lot?”
“Yup! They’re awful. Shoot magic at us, poison us, light us on fire,” said Lime, its tone dismayingly sunny. Were these slimes fine with the whole fire and poison thing?
“That’s terrible. And you’re all okay? Not injured?”
“Don’t die easily. Very good at pretending to get killed!”
Lime proceeded to spread out on the ground, turned see-through and then vanished. Then it swiftly returned to its normal form.
“Good, right?”
“Majorly good.”
Lime giggled and seemed pleased with the compliment. Truth be told, if I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought it’d really just died. Lime literally looked like it’d become a puddle of water.
The two of us talked up a storm all the way down the underground path. I was doing most of the questioning. Lime’s command of language was pretty elementary, and its memory and intelligence seemed like a bit of a mess, which meant that I didn’t get all the details. I did gather that Lime and its friends had lived in secret under the capital city since the Holy Kingdom took Merinard. Since they couldn’t leave, they were never able to flee to the Black Forest.
“And the royal family is in the castle!” Lime said. “Can’t leave them behind.”
“Wait, they’re still here?”
“Yup!”
“Whoa…”
Now that was some big new information. Sylphy heard from Danan and the others that the members of the royal family had been sent all over the Holy Kingdom as slaves… So what was really going on?
Either Danan’s info was wrong, or Lime’s info was wrong… We’d have to confirm one way or the other.
Lime hopped up and down next to a barred entrance on the floor. These bars were quite large, and the entrance was quite small. Humidity in a sewer was usually pretty bad, and yet these bars weren’t rusted at all. Were they not made of iron?
“This is the entrance.”
“I see… Um, I don’t think I’ll be getting through here.”
“You can’t slippy-slidey?” Lime asked.
“Nope.”
“Hm…”
Lime liquified itself a bit and squeezed through the piping effortlessly, something my body was not at all capable of. I hadn’t quite given up being human just yet.
“Is it okay if I destroy the floor next to the grate?” I asked it.
“Hm? Probably.”
“Only probably?”
“Big Lime might get upset, y’know?” Lime said.
“Then I’ll apologize when the time comes. I should be able to fix it, anyway.”
“We can apologize together-gether!!” Lime kindly offered, bouncing up and down.
Well, that was a relief. Also, dang, Lime was adorable. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I wondered if I could take it home with me… No, it’s not a cat or a dog. Stop it, Kousuke.
I broke the floor with my stone axe so I could drop through. It took a little time, but ultimately I finished with no problem.
“Amazing! Super amazing! You’re amazing, Kousuke!”
The little slime’s delight had me laughing. “I know, right?”
I couldn’t help but get a big head as Lime hopped around praising me. When I did stuff in the Liberation Army, people usually just looked at me cooly like, What, this again? Though I supposed you could also describe the look in their eyes as so blown away by my prowess that they’d achieved spiritual enlightenment.
I dug out the floor next to the grate and formed the stones into a set of stairs. When I peered down them, I saw a five-meter drop, give or take. Wasn’t too bad. I’d have been lying if I said I wanted to leap right down, but I could’ve if I’d had to. Like me, Lime just took the stairs.
“Do you always just kinda jelly-up and squish your way through to get down here?”
“Yup! Slish, slosh, swoop! Fun.”
“Are you okay with swooping too?”
“Yuppy-yup!”
Sounded like Lime was okay with sloshing from five meters up. Made sense—slimes didn’t have a lot to bruise or contuse.
At the bottom of my stairs we came to what looked to be the real sewer, but it didn’t stink at all. Which was weird, since if we were in a sewer, then I should be retching and heaving from the smell.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“A sewer, of course.”
“For real?”
“Poiso and pals processed the sewer water! Runs clean here!”
“Huh…”
So Poiso and company are on some water treatment biz? Are they a poison slime or something? Nominative determinism strikes again.
“Is your home far from here?”
“Nope! It’s right over there!”
Lime hopped along, and I followed after it again. Soon enough, I spotted a light in the tunnel ahead. I’d seen this particular sort of glow before… It was similar to Ira’s light spell.
“I’m home,” Lime trilled. “I brought a Kousuke!”
When we got inside, I had to squint into the light. Although, really, it wasn’t super bright, so much as the sewers had been mega dark. Even by torchlight, my eyes adjusted to the gloom.
There were three women in the room, or at least things shaped like women. One of them greeted us cheerfully. She was light blue in color, like what you’d call cyan.
“Heya! Welcome back!” And as soon as she’d said that, Lime leapt into her chest and disappeared into her. Er, what? Um, what’s going on?
Another one of them spoke up. This woman-shaped creature was red, and she eyed me up while I stood there looking gobsmacked.
“Hrmph, he certainly is a human,” she said.
And then the third one chimed in. She was seafoam green, as lady-looking as the rest.
“He seems surprised,” she said.
Ya think?! I never thought that slime girls actually existed…!
The thought had occurred to me when I met Lime, but the reality was something else. Speaking of which…
“Um, where’s Lime?” I asked.
“I’m Lime!”
The light blue one smiled brightly at me. She then split off a chunk of herself, recreating the Lime I knew.
The seafoam-green one gestured over at the light-blue one. She said, “The Lime that was with you and the Lime right here are both the same person. And I’m Bess, by the way.”
“We can split off parts of ourselves and create clones of ourselves,” explained the red one. “I’m Poiso, FYI.”
This was a helluva lot to think about, but for the moment, I just focused on making a strong first impression.
“My name is Kousuke, and I’ve been traveling together with Sylphy’s… Er, Princess Sylphyel’s Liberation Army, if that’s at all familiar to you ladies. One thing led to another, and the Holy Kingdom took me prisoner. I was just in the middle of escaping when I bumped into Lime…er, little Lime. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”
“You can just call me Lime!”
She gave me another big smile. Yeah, she was the cutest in this form too.
“Princess Sylphyel’s Liberation Army, eh?” said Bess. “I’ve heard rumors. The military and higher-ups in the church have been desperate to keep the situation under wraps, but the capital is swirling with talk of the Liberation Army.”
“We heard they’ve been wiping the floor with the Holy Kingdom,” said Poiso. “Is it true they already took Arichburg?”
“Yup, it’s all true. Arichburg’s been dealt with. Right now we’re clearing out the stragglers from the Holy Kingdom’s army who are still hanging on in the south, and building the city back into a hub…”
The three of them listened raptly while I explained the situation. It must have been hard for them to get fresh info on the outside world when they were stuck down here.
“I see…” Lime’s eyes were practically sparkling as she sidled up to me. “So, what sort of relationship do you have with the princess? Are you close?”
She didn’t look nearly as interested when I was talking about the war effort. And she was getting closer, too… The other two seemed just as interested, both of them watching me starry-eyed.
“Well, Sylphy and I are mega close. We share our nights together.”
“Wowee,” said Lime.
“Yup. Exactly,” I agreed.
“That’s really close…”
Lime got real, real close. And so did the other two, for that matter. I know you’re having fun, ladies, but give me a little bit of space, please! Do you have to feel up my neck and cheeks and such? Some of my thoughts must have shown on my face.
“Sorry, bad habit!” Lime said.
“We can share information via touch,” explained Bess.
“But just between us,” clarified Poiso.
“I see… Only works between slimes, huh?”
“Well…” said Lime. “We can do it with others, but we gotta get inside of you and go all squishy-swishy.”
“Inside? Wait, how do you get inside? Where do you enter? Okay, that’s kinda scary.”
“Wanna try it? You’ll get addicted.” Lime snaked out a pseudopod my way. Umm!
“Nah, I’m good!”
“But it feels sooo nice.” Lime retracted her tentacle with obvious regret.
Jeez, I was starting to think these girls really were working that shoggoth angle!
“You definitely shouldn’t do it with Lime,” said Poiso. “You won’t be back on your feet for a full three days. With me, it’d only take a day.”
“Half a day for me,” said Bess.
“Yeah, but yours is addictive…” Poiso started to say. They were all getting excited about the idea, so I jumped in to cut things short.
“Hey, can we put a moratorium on horrifying propositions? Okay? Okay.” I pivoted the conversation. “I have a ton of questions I’d like to ask you girls. Is that cool?”
The three slime girls shared a moment of eye contact and turned back to me simultaneously.
“And you won’t keep anything from us?” they asked.
“If you’ll do the same for me.”
“Then we’ll answer anything we can.”
And then they stared at me.
Yeah, okay, I understood where they were coming from. I did kinda specifically leave out who I am, what I do in the Liberation Army, why I was kidnapped, etc.
“Do you not trust us, Kousuke?” Lime asked.
“Just to be clear, if we were going to do something to you, we’d have done it already,” Bess said.
“We’re on your side,” said Poiso. “Even now, we’re protecting the capital and the royal family.”
Ah, she brought up the royal family again. I really wanted to know what was up with that.
“All right, fine, yeah, you got it. I’ll spill the beans if you do.”
“Yippie-yay!” Lime smiled brightly.
“Finally. Now then, let’s hear it.”
“Bess, stop being so impatient. You can take it easy, Kousuke.”
Bess seemed to sit up on her high horse, and Poiso split the difference. I could just about see what sort of relationship these three had with each other.
“All right, let me start from the beginning. This is gonna go some weird places, so brace yourselves.”
I began to tell my tale: the story of how I came to this world, and how I first met Sylphy.
Chapter 4:
Living Underground with the Slime Girls
“YOU’RE A FABLED VISITOR!” Lime.
“I thought they only existed in fairy tales and myth.” Bess.
“It doesn’t seem like he’s lying. He certainly has an incredible power.” Poiso.
“I’m just glad you believe me.” Me again, Kousuke.
I’d made sure to show my abilities off, so it figured that they believed me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t show them my crafting skills without materials or a workbench.
“It’s so weird how you pull stuff outta nothing!”
“And it’s also weird how you can move around in that gross fashion. Not normal at all.”
“That everlasting torch of yours certainly is the real deal.”
Lime, Bess, and Poiso each remarked as they munched on gizma meat fresh from my inventory. Well, okay, by “munched,” I don’t so much mean that they put it into their mouths and chewed. In reality, they absorbed the meat into their bodies, somewhere around where a stomach would be on a human. The meat simply dissolved into them.
“Mmm, delish!” Lime was really into it.
“This is my first time eating fresh gizma meat,” Bess said.
“It’s not easy to find,” added Poiso.
“Um,” I said, “are you ladies okay with eating it raw?”
I hadn’t cooked it at all before they started chowing down. Were their stomachs going to be okay? Maybe it would be fine, since they were slimes. Anyway, Lime insisted that it was tastier uncooked.
“Not that we can’t eat gizma meat cooked,” Bess added. “But we prefer it raw.”
“Actually, how have you ladies been surviving down here?” I asked. “What have you been eating?”
“While we’re hiding down here, we’ve also been managing the sewer water. We get all our nutrients from that,” Poiso said.
“For real?”
It made sense, but it was shocking to hear. Man, they could get nutrients from processing sewer water? Crazy.
Bess saw my face and spoke up. “Are you thinking something rude? Just to be clear, we’re perfectly clean about it.”
“We love being clean!” Lime said.
“We can purify just about any old muck,” said Bess. “Grime, poison, sickness. We can handle it all.”
“Wow, that’s something else.”
It was certainly true that their colorful bodies looked perfectly clean, and they smelled quite nice. The whole room did, actually.
“That’s it? You’re convinced?” asked Poiso.
“Most people would be turned off, even after we explained,” said Bess.
“They’d say we got the cooties!” Lime said.
“Really? That’s terrible. But think of it this way: compared to the weirdness of my crafting abilities or my inventory, your purification ability is pretty cute.”
It also wasn’t that far removed from my mental image of what slimes were like, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine that sewer water contained plenty of usable elements. It didn’t strike me as particularly crazy that slimes could take that water in and successfully metabolize all the poisonous and harmful contaminants.
As I thought this over in silence, Lime slid up to me and grasped my left hand in her own. Her hand was cool and soft as gel; it was truly a strange sensation.
“What’s up?” I said.
“You don’t mind me touching you?”
“Not at all. You’re super soft.”
“Yeah! I really am!” She’d seemed worried a moment ago, but now she smiled brightly.
Suddenly, Bess slid her way up to me and clasped my free hand.
“I-I’m just going to check and see if you really don’t mind being touched,” she said.
She felt distinctly different than Lime. Bess was way more bouncy and smooth to the touch. If Lime was super soft, Bess was extra silky smooth. She felt delightful.
“You two are so easy,” Poiso said from a distance, but even I could tell she was anxious.
Lime giggled. “Heehee, Poiso’s scared!”
“I-I am not!”
“Then c’mon over!” Bess said. “Let’s do this!”
Poiso growled at them. “I’ll make you regret your words!”
Poiso rushed at me super fast, knocked the breath out of me, and should have sent me flying. But I didn’t fly. Even though she smashed into me, she simply enveloped my body. Everything below my neck other than my arms were engulfed in her.
“How’s this feel?” she said, laughing.
She suddenly changed form so that it felt like she was embracing me from behind. How did she get there?!
I sat down in place and scratched my cheek. I was glad we could communicate, and that it didn’t seem hostile. Honestly, it kind of reminded me of a small child, which was why it’d be best to let it do as it pleased so that it felt comfortable around me.
“No hurt!” the slime promised. It jiggled a bit and began to touch my hands, arms, ankles, and neck. “Taste and smell elf, cyclops, and harpy! Others too!”
“Taste? Hold on, smell?!”
I took a bath this morning, I’ll have you know. Is this slime sensing something that I can’t just clean off?
“Not a bad human, so I’ll take you home!”
“You will? Um, are there…smarter folks than you at home?”
“Yup!”
“Hm. All right,” I said. “I’ll come with you.”
“’Kay, ’kay! Follow me!”
The slime… He…? She? Did slimes have genders? Either way, the slime began to move off, so I followed after it. I always pictured them as being heavy and slow, but this one zoomed off at a good clip. There wasn’t much of a difference between my walking pace and its…slimy slither.
“The name’s Kousuke, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Kousuke!” it said as we went along. “I’m Lime!”
“Gotcha… Nice to meet you, Lime the slime.”
Exploring these dark caverns on my own was honestly a bit of a downer, so I felt really lucky to have hit it off with a friendly…whatever. Yep, that was me! Lucky!
***
“Hey, Lime, where exactly are we headed?” I asked the creature as it rolled and sloshed along in front of me.
Y’know, I could understand the whole jumping and rolling bit, but how did it slide like that?
“Our home!” it said.
That wasn’t a very illuminating answer, but I supposed I’d find out soon enough if I followed along.
“When you say ‘our,’ that means others are there too?” I asked.
“Hm? Big Lime, Big Bess, Big Poiso!”
“Big…?”
What exactly did that mean? Was there some kind of main body? Nah, that couldn’t be right. But it was a slime, so… But who were Bess and Poiso?
“Do you, Bess, and Poiso live together?” I asked.
“Yup! When scary humans find us, we move!”
“That happen a lot?”
“Yup! They’re awful. Shoot magic at us, poison us, light us on fire,” said Lime, its tone dismayingly sunny. Were these slimes fine with the whole fire and poison thing?
“That’s terrible. And you’re all okay? Not injured?”
“Don’t die easily. Very good at pretending to get killed!”
Lime proceeded to spread out on the ground, turned see-through and then vanished. Then it swiftly returned to its normal form.
“Good, right?”
“Majorly good.”
Lime giggled and seemed pleased with the compliment. Truth be told, if I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought it’d really just died. Lime literally looked like it’d become a puddle of water.
The two of us talked up a storm all the way down the underground path. I was doing most of the questioning. Lime’s command of language was pretty elementary, and its memory and intelligence seemed like a bit of a mess, which meant that I didn’t get all the details. I did gather that Lime and its friends had lived in secret under the capital city since the Holy Kingdom took Merinard. Since they couldn’t leave, they were never able to flee to the Black Forest.
“And the royal family is in the castle!” Lime said. “Can’t leave them behind.”
“Wait, they’re still here?”
“Yup!”
“Whoa…”
Now that was some big new information. Sylphy heard from Danan and the others that the members of the royal family had been sent all over the Holy Kingdom as slaves… So what was really going on?
Either Danan’s info was wrong, or Lime’s info was wrong… We’d have to confirm one way or the other.
Lime hopped up and down next to a barred entrance on the floor. These bars were quite large, and the entrance was quite small. Humidity in a sewer was usually pretty bad, and yet these bars weren’t rusted at all. Were they not made of iron?
“This is the entrance.”
“I see… Um, I don’t think I’ll be getting through here.”
“You can’t slippy-slidey?” Lime asked.
“Nope.”
“Hm…”
Lime liquified itself a bit and squeezed through the piping effortlessly, something my body was not at all capable of. I hadn’t quite given up being human just yet.
“Is it okay if I destroy the floor next to the grate?” I asked it.
“Hm? Probably.”
“Only probably?”
“Big Lime might get upset, y’know?” Lime said.
“Then I’ll apologize when the time comes. I should be able to fix it, anyway.”
“We can apologize together-gether!!” Lime kindly offered, bouncing up and down.
Well, that was a relief. Also, dang, Lime was adorable. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I wondered if I could take it home with me… No, it’s not a cat or a dog. Stop it, Kousuke.
I broke the floor with my stone axe so I could drop through. It took a little time, but ultimately I finished with no problem.
“Amazing! Super amazing! You’re amazing, Kousuke!”
The little slime’s delight had me laughing. “I know, right?”
I couldn’t help but get a big head as Lime hopped around praising me. When I did stuff in the Liberation Army, people usually just looked at me cooly like, What, this again? Though I supposed you could also describe the look in their eyes as so blown away by my prowess that they’d achieved spiritual enlightenment.
I dug out the floor next to the grate and formed the stones into a set of stairs. When I peered down them, I saw a five-meter drop, give or take. Wasn’t too bad. I’d have been lying if I said I wanted to leap right down, but I could’ve if I’d had to. Like me, Lime just took the stairs.
“Do you always just kinda jelly-up and squish your way through to get down here?”
“Yup! Slish, slosh, swoop! Fun.”
“Are you okay with swooping too?”
“Yuppy-yup!”
Sounded like Lime was okay with sloshing from five meters up. Made sense—slimes didn’t have a lot to bruise or contuse.
At the bottom of my stairs we came to what looked to be the real sewer, but it didn’t stink at all. Which was weird, since if we were in a sewer, then I should be retching and heaving from the smell.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“A sewer, of course.”
“For real?”
“Poiso and pals processed the sewer water! Runs clean here!”
“Huh…”
So Poiso and company are on some water treatment biz? Are they a poison slime or something? Nominative determinism strikes again.
“Is your home far from here?”
“Nope! It’s right over there!”
Lime hopped along, and I followed after it again. Soon enough, I spotted a light in the tunnel ahead. I’d seen this particular sort of glow before… It was similar to Ira’s light spell.
“I’m home,” Lime trilled. “I brought a Kousuke!”
When we got inside, I had to squint into the light. Although, really, it wasn’t super bright, so much as the sewers had been mega dark. Even by torchlight, my eyes adjusted to the gloom.
There were three women in the room, or at least things shaped like women. One of them greeted us cheerfully. She was light blue in color, like what you’d call cyan.
“Heya! Welcome back!” And as soon as she’d said that, Lime leapt into her chest and disappeared into her. Er, what? Um, what’s going on?
Another one of them spoke up. This woman-shaped creature was red, and she eyed me up while I stood there looking gobsmacked.
“Hrmph, he certainly is a human,” she said.
And then the third one chimed in. She was seafoam green, as lady-looking as the rest.
“He seems surprised,” she said.
Ya think?! I never thought that slime girls actually existed…!
The thought had occurred to me when I met Lime, but the reality was something else. Speaking of which…
“Um, where’s Lime?” I asked.
“I’m Lime!”
The light blue one smiled brightly at me. She then split off a chunk of herself, recreating the Lime I knew.
The seafoam-green one gestured over at the light-blue one. She said, “The Lime that was with you and the Lime right here are both the same person. And I’m Bess, by the way.”
“We can split off parts of ourselves and create clones of ourselves,” explained the red one. “I’m Poiso, FYI.”
This was a helluva lot to think about, but for the moment, I just focused on making a strong first impression.
“My name is Kousuke, and I’ve been traveling together with Sylphy’s… Er, Princess Sylphyel’s Liberation Army, if that’s at all familiar to you ladies. One thing led to another, and the Holy Kingdom took me prisoner. I was just in the middle of escaping when I bumped into Lime…er, little Lime. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”
“You can just call me Lime!”
She gave me another big smile. Yeah, she was the cutest in this form too.
“Princess Sylphyel’s Liberation Army, eh?” said Bess. “I’ve heard rumors. The military and higher-ups in the church have been desperate to keep the situation under wraps, but the capital is swirling with talk of the Liberation Army.”
“We heard they’ve been wiping the floor with the Holy Kingdom,” said Poiso. “Is it true they already took Arichburg?”
“Yup, it’s all true. Arichburg’s been dealt with. Right now we’re clearing out the stragglers from the Holy Kingdom’s army who are still hanging on in the south, and building the city back into a hub…”
The three of them listened raptly while I explained the situation. It must have been hard for them to get fresh info on the outside world when they were stuck down here.
“I see…” Lime’s eyes were practically sparkling as she sidled up to me. “So, what sort of relationship do you have with the princess? Are you close?”
She didn’t look nearly as interested when I was talking about the war effort. And she was getting closer, too… The other two seemed just as interested, both of them watching me starry-eyed.
“Well, Sylphy and I are mega close. We share our nights together.”
“Wowee,” said Lime.
“Yup. Exactly,” I agreed.
“That’s really close…”
Lime got real, real close. And so did the other two, for that matter. I know you’re having fun, ladies, but give me a little bit of space, please! Do you have to feel up my neck and cheeks and such? Some of my thoughts must have shown on my face.
“Sorry, bad habit!” Lime said.
“We can share information via touch,” explained Bess.
“But just between us,” clarified Poiso.
“I see… Only works between slimes, huh?”
“Well…” said Lime. “We can do it with others, but we gotta get inside of you and go all squishy-swishy.”
“Inside? Wait, how do you get inside? Where do you enter? Okay, that’s kinda scary.”
“Wanna try it? You’ll get addicted.” Lime snaked out a pseudopod my way. Umm!
“Nah, I’m good!”
“But it feels sooo nice.” Lime retracted her tentacle with obvious regret.
Jeez, I was starting to think these girls really were working that shoggoth angle!
“You definitely shouldn’t do it with Lime,” said Poiso. “You won’t be back on your feet for a full three days. With me, it’d only take a day.”
“Half a day for me,” said Bess.
“Yeah, but yours is addictive…” Poiso started to say. They were all getting excited about the idea, so I jumped in to cut things short.
“Hey, can we put a moratorium on horrifying propositions? Okay? Okay.” I pivoted the conversation. “I have a ton of questions I’d like to ask you girls. Is that cool?”
The three slime girls shared a moment of eye contact and turned back to me simultaneously.
“And you won’t keep anything from us?” they asked.
“If you’ll do the same for me.”
“Then we’ll answer anything we can.”
And then they stared at me.
Yeah, okay, I understood where they were coming from. I did kinda specifically leave out who I am, what I do in the Liberation Army, why I was kidnapped, etc.
“Do you not trust us, Kousuke?” Lime asked.
“Just to be clear, if we were going to do something to you, we’d have done it already,” Bess said.
“We’re on your side,” said Poiso. “Even now, we’re protecting the capital and the royal family.”
Ah, she brought up the royal family again. I really wanted to know what was up with that.
“All right, fine, yeah, you got it. I’ll spill the beans if you do.”
“Yippie-yay!” Lime smiled brightly.
“Finally. Now then, let’s hear it.”
“Bess, stop being so impatient. You can take it easy, Kousuke.”
Bess seemed to sit up on her high horse, and Poiso split the difference. I could just about see what sort of relationship these three had with each other.
“All right, let me start from the beginning. This is gonna go some weird places, so brace yourselves.”
I began to tell my tale: the story of how I came to this world, and how I first met Sylphy.
Chapter 4:
Living Underground with the Slime Girls
“YOU’RE A FABLED VISITOR!” Lime.
“I thought they only existed in fairy tales and myth.” Bess.
“It doesn’t seem like he’s lying. He certainly has an incredible power.” Poiso.
“I’m just glad you believe me.” Me again, Kousuke.
I’d made sure to show my abilities off, so it figured that they believed me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t show them my crafting skills without materials or a workbench.
“It’s so weird how you pull stuff outta nothing!”
“And it’s also weird how you can move around in that gross fashion. Not normal at all.”
“That everlasting torch of yours certainly is the real deal.”
Lime, Bess, and Poiso each remarked as they munched on gizma meat fresh from my inventory. Well, okay, by “munched,” I don’t so much mean that they put it into their mouths and chewed. In reality, they absorbed the meat into their bodies, somewhere around where a stomach would be on a human. The meat simply dissolved into them.
“Mmm, delish!” Lime was really into it.
“This is my first time eating fresh gizma meat,” Bess said.
“It’s not easy to find,” added Poiso.
“Um,” I said, “are you ladies okay with eating it raw?”
I hadn’t cooked it at all before they started chowing down. Were their stomachs going to be okay? Maybe it would be fine, since they were slimes. Anyway, Lime insisted that it was tastier uncooked.
“Not that we can’t eat gizma meat cooked,” Bess added. “But we prefer it raw.”
“Actually, how have you ladies been surviving down here?” I asked. “What have you been eating?”
“While we’re hiding down here, we’ve also been managing the sewer water. We get all our nutrients from that,” Poiso said.
“For real?”
It made sense, but it was shocking to hear. Man, they could get nutrients from processing sewer water? Crazy.
Bess saw my face and spoke up. “Are you thinking something rude? Just to be clear, we’re perfectly clean about it.”
“We love being clean!” Lime said.
“We can purify just about any old muck,” said Bess. “Grime, poison, sickness. We can handle it all.”
“Wow, that’s something else.”
It was certainly true that their colorful bodies looked perfectly clean, and they smelled quite nice. The whole room did, actually.
“That’s it? You’re convinced?” asked Poiso.
“Most people would be turned off, even after we explained,” said Bess.
“They’d say we got the cooties!” Lime said.
“Really? That’s terrible. But think of it this way: compared to the weirdness of my crafting abilities or my inventory, your purification ability is pretty cute.”
It also wasn’t that far removed from my mental image of what slimes were like, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine that sewer water contained plenty of usable elements. It didn’t strike me as particularly crazy that slimes could take that water in and successfully metabolize all the poisonous and harmful contaminants.
As I thought this over in silence, Lime slid up to me and grasped my left hand in her own. Her hand was cool and soft as gel; it was truly a strange sensation.
“What’s up?” I said.
“You don’t mind me touching you?”
“Not at all. You’re super soft.”
“Yeah! I really am!” She’d seemed worried a moment ago, but now she smiled brightly.
Suddenly, Bess slid her way up to me and clasped my free hand.
“I-I’m just going to check and see if you really don’t mind being touched,” she said.
She felt distinctly different than Lime. Bess was way more bouncy and smooth to the touch. If Lime was super soft, Bess was extra silky smooth. She felt delightful.
“You two are so easy,” Poiso said from a distance, but even I could tell she was anxious.
Lime giggled. “Heehee, Poiso’s scared!”
“I-I am not!”
“Then c’mon over!” Bess said. “Let’s do this!”
Poiso growled at them. “I’ll make you regret your words!”
Poiso rushed at me super fast, knocked the breath out of me, and should have sent me flying. But I didn’t fly. Even though she smashed into me, she simply enveloped my body. Everything below my neck other than my arms were engulfed in her.
“How’s this feel?” she said, laughing.
She suddenly changed form so that it felt like she was embracing me from behind. How did she get there?!
