30 Chapter XXX - Not What You’re Thinking

\\\Get your mind outta the gutters, it's 30 not naughty///

The giant blob didn't wait for the party to engage as it leapt high into the air and came crashing down next to everyone. Marcus and Mawu were lucky enough to avoid the damage but Lisa wasn't prepared and took a good chunk of damage. Artox immediately used [Envoke] and began being the sole target of the giant slime.

Mawu unleashed his [Rummage] and to his surprise 0 DMG… Marcus too was dealing 0 DMG with the occasional 1. Artox was unleashing a steady stream of 1 DMG against it thanks to his enchanted armor and as Lisa unleashed a [Wind Bolt] she spiked and did 10 DMG.

With her cool down being 3 seconds she immediately threw the heal onto Artox as his HP slowly was increasing over the poison he was receiving.

It wasn't long before Squishy changed to a slight shade of green and the top of it's body began bubbling and before long, numerous splats was shot out and littered the landscape around the party.

The fight was slow and arduous as the slime was nearing its final moments Marcus yelled "it's gonna separate, everyone stop and let Artox kill it!"

Everyone stopped their damage as Artox continued to hack and slash his way through the final remaining HP. As it died, Squishy's body began to pool and bubble on the cold hard ground before it shot up in two directions and reformed into slightly smaller versions of itself

<Squishy 1>

<Squishy 2>

Level 20

100/100 HP

As Artox was the one who dealt the final blow, both reconvened on him and he used [Envoke] to make one focus solely on him "Attack the taunted one!" Marcus yelled as everyone was already repositioning to engage the focused Squishy.

Due to it splitting all of it's stats were also split in half. The damage it was dealing was much more manageable making the fight smooth sailing. The party was now able to deal a continuous stream of 1 DMG and Artox was now dealing 2 DMG and Lisa was doing over 20 per Wind Bolt.

After taking down the two Squishy, it split into four and this continued until everyone was able to destroy the 32 Squishys needed to endthe fight.

Squishy slain!

1846+2013 EXP

Silver Chest dropped!

Silver Chest dropped!

Mawu and Lisa both hit level 24 with the boss slain and Marcus was a sliver away from catching up to Artox who was halfway through 25. Once again were gear upgrades but and once again they were given to Mawu and Lisa. Marcus' Basic Butchery had maxed out at level 9 with 99% experience to level 10, but he needed to complete a quest in order to rank it up, so Lisa dismantled the bosses corpse.

Marcus once again gathered the herbs and opened the next sluice gate as the party entered yet another grotesque scene. The walls and floor was covered head to toe with a thin layer of goop of varying colors resulting a psychedelic passageway as every inch of all surfaces was covered and the dripping from the ceiling to the floor made Lisa shudder.

To make matters worse this section came with an unavoidable debuff for the party in the form a -10% movement penalty as it made it very difficult to traverse and while they were in combat it made it very difficult to avoid taking damage and made blocking a nightmare as every attack came with a knock back effect.

The party had to deal with slimes in this section. There were a multitude of colors ranging from a dark blue, a light blue, green, red, yellow, brown, white, and even black. These corresponded to the elemental affinity of the slimes, each one only having one ability, the most basic spell from each of the primary schools of magic:

Fire

Water

Air

Earth

Ice

Lightning

Holy

Darkness

Their attacks were effectively negligible but their magic spells could prove devastating. Thankfully Artox and his shield would be able to block most of the damage thanks to [Deflecting Stance].

The sheer numbers in the groups of slimes made each fight a slow battle of attrition as their physical defenses made them near untouchable, let alone whenever they came across a green slime as it would actually recover if Lisa cast [Wind Bolt] so the group was essentially stonewalled until Artox could slay it solo while Marcus would occasionally be dealing damage.

Through this slow process Marcus had plenty of time to try and figure out what happened at the beginning of the dungeon and how he was able to create a skill. His most likely thought was that no one shared this knowledge and the ones that did discover it was way too few and far between, which resulted in them updating the game in the first patch to remove this ability and create skill books.

This had Marcus thinking what if he published this information and released Volume 2 before the first patch and remove all the relevant patch information. He had no clue how much of an impact this would have on the game or even if it would result in the game's first patch being postponed to the normal scheduled release. There was a lot of very good news following the release of the first patch, as well as a very important event that he wanted to dominate.

In the end Marcus decided to keep his mouth shut as he wouldn't even begin to understand the ramifications of unleashing this information and thought he or his family might become the targets of groups who didn't want that information being leaked. He did decide he was going to explain to everyone present after the guild was created and use the AI system to prevent the information from being leaked, not that he worried about these people running their lips to someone.

In the end through the slow and monotonous hacking and slashing the party has reached the base for the next boss, a hulking massive spider…

"EEEEEKKKKKK!!!!" a shrill scream came out of the most unlikely of candidates….