Chương 7: Weird Blue Thing and The Second Stage Evolution of a Dildo Apparently

She did not sleep all the way to the village because the slime had other plans. The slime came out of a patch of trees on the left side of the road and it was blue and it was the size of a car and it had tentacles. It had TENTACLES. Maddy, who had been slumped against Lefant's neck with her eyes closed and her brain three-quarters offline in dissociative sleep mode, opened her eyes when the merchant made a sound she did not have a frame of reference for.

A high panicked sound from the back of his throat that suggested whatever was happening in his immediate visual field had not been on the script. She lifted her head. She blinked at the slime. The slime blinked back. It had like, two dark spots near the top of its body that functioned as eyes for the purpose of having eyes, and four—no, five —NO, six — six glistening wet blue tentacles waving lazily out of its sides, each one tipped with a small dark suction cup that pulsed.

She knew, with immediate certainty, because she had been on the internet for way too long, that this was a hentai slime. This was a slime that had been pulled directly out of a Japanese visual novel from 2009 where the slime did not kill the protagonist but instead did something significantly worse. She had encyclopedic knowledge of this slime even though she had never sought it out, because the internet had decided at some point in her adolescence to make her aware of this slime against her will.

The slime in question generally did not kill its victims. The slime in question dissolved their clothes and inserted its tentacles into specific places. She was wearing a crop top and shorts and no underwear. A small panel slid in from the corner of her vision. [New Quest!] [Defeat the Tentacle Slime! Protect the kind Merchant! Reward: Glow-Up Pending. Sparkle]"Are you fucking kidding me," Maddy said, in a voice that came out absolutely flat. The merchant was already running.

The merchant was sprinting in the opposite direction with his coat flapping behind him like he had been waiting his entire NPC life for an excuse to leave a conversation, and Lefant, sensing the absence of a master, did what the fucking Lefant species probably did, which was turn its head slowly to look at the slime and then make a sound that was halfway between a trumpet and a sneeze and refuse to move. Lefant was holding the line. Lefant was not running. Lefant was a fucking soldier.

The slime extended a tentacle. The tentacle was eight feet long and it whipped through the air. Maddy did the only thing her panicking brain could think of to do. She threw Bolt at it. She threw her dildo.

She threw her dildo at the hentai slime with the entire force her STR 6 body could generate, which was not a lot of force, but it was enough force, because Bolt was nine inches of dense medical-grade silicone with a heavy weighted core and it tumbled end-over-end through the air toward the slime like a slightly off-balance baton. It hit the slime.

It hit the slime in the upper region, in the area where the two dark spots were, directly between them, with a wet soft thwock that was simultaneously the funniest and most upsetting sound Maddy had ever heard in her life. The slime stopped. The slime made a sound.

The sound was a small high-pitched note, and the slime began to shudder, and the tentacles began to retract in jerky uncoordinated movements, and a fine vibration ran through the entire body of the slime in a way that was so deeply uncomfortable Maddy had to look away. She threw the Monster can.

She threw the half-empty Monster Ultra Paradise at the slime because her body had decided that the slime needed two things in it and her body had run out of things, and the Monster can sailed through the air and hit the slime directly between the two dark spots, exactly where Bolt had hit, and the slime made a final small kettle-whistle sound and fucking… farted to death.

The slime collapsed in on itself with a sound and the blue went paler and paler until it was almost translucent, and then the body just kind of slumped sideways and stopped existing, and there on the dirt road was a smear of blue jelly with Bolt and the Monster can lying in the middle of it. A ding. A small clean little ding. [Quest Complete!] [Tentacle Slime defeated. Kind Merchant protected. (The merchant is currently a kilometer away.)] [LEVEL UP! Sparkle] [LEVEL UP! Sparkle] [LEVEL UP! Sparkle] Three levels.

Whatever that fucking shit meant. Maddy stared at the screen with her mouth slightly open. A new panel slid in. [Unique Item Obtained!] [Bolt—Tentacle Spear. Rarity: Unique. A bonded weapon of personal significance, transformed.] She looked at the dirt. Bolt was glowing. Bolt was glowing in a soft pulsing pink-yellow that was not a color Bolt should have been, and Bolt was getting longer.

The nine inches of silicone stretched and elongated, the base flaring outward into a grip, the tip narrowing into a point, the black and yellow Umbreon coloration banding along the shaft in a way that was almost beautiful if she stared at it long enough that her brain forgot what it had originally been. The whole thing stopped at about five feet long, a slim yellow-black spear with a needle-fine tip and a wrapped grip near the base.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Then it folded. The spear collapsed back in on itself, telescoping down with a series of small clicks, until it was the size and shape of a small kitchen knife—a few inches long, the same black and yellow banding, the same wrapped grip. A knife mode. Bolt had a knife mode. A second panel slid in. [Unique Item Obtained!] [Monster Tube—Energetic Potion (Self-Refilling) Rarity: Unique. An infinite vessel of restorative spirit.] The Monster can was changing. The aluminum was rippling, the green and white packaging blurring and reforming, and what had been a half-empty can of Monster Ultra Paradise was now a long slim glass test tube with a rubberized stopper at one end, filled with a pale green liquid that was visibly carbonated, that had small bubbles rising lazily from the bottom to the top, that smelled faintly of Monster Ultra Paradise. She stared at it. She picked it up.

The glass was cool in her hand. The liquid moved when she tilted it. She uncorked it. The smell hit her, the unmistakable chemical-fruit smell of an energy drink, but somehow more so, more concentrated, like the ideal smell of an energy drink. She corked it again. She picked up the knife.

The knife was warm in her hand, in the way the dildo had been warm in her hand earlier when she had picked it up off the floor of her apartment, except the warmth was different now since it obviously wasn't covered in pussy juice anymore. She stared at the knife. She stared at the test tube. She did not have pockets. She had no pockets.

She had a crop top and short shorts with no panties and Air Force 1s and there was nowhere on her body that she could conceal a five-foot spear or a six-inch knife or a glass test tube of energy drink potion, and the shorts were the kind of shorts where even putting a phone in the back pocket made the phone look like a deformity. She tried the test tube. The test tube went halfway into her front shorts pocket and the cork poked out at an obscene angle. She tried Bolt in knife mode.

Bolt slid into her other front pocket and a clear three inches of the handle stuck out the top. She looked at herself. She looked like a woman with two erections.

"Oh my god." She pulled them out. She held them in her hands. She would just carry them. She would just walk into the village holding her sex toy weapon and her energy drink potion like a fucking succubus-ronin. She climbed back on Lefant. Lefant had not moved. Lefant was still standing exactly where Lefant had been standing during the entire fight. Maddy patted Lefant's neck.

"You're a soldier, dude." Lefant trumpet-sneezed. A figure appeared at the top of the small rise in the road ahead. The merchant. The merchant was walking back toward them at a brisk pace, with his hat in his hands, with an expression on his face that Maddy could see even from a hundred feet away. He arrived at Lefant's side and dropped to one knee in the dirt.

"Traveler," he said, in a voice gone soft and reverent.

"Don't."

"I have witnessed—""Please don't."

"—a feat of valor the likes of which—""I threw a dildo at it dude. A fucking dildo."

"—I have never seen in my long years upon this road—""JUST GET UP DUDE." The merchant got up. He stood there with his hat in his hands and his eyes shining a little and Maddy could not tell, again, whether the shining eyes were a real human reaction or whether the system had decided that the merchant's eye animation needed to enter Glazing Mode now, and the not knowing made her want to throw up. Or cry. Maybe both.

"Forgive me," the merchant said.

"Forgive me, traveler. I am ashamed. I fled. I left a lady to face the beast alone. I have stained the honor of my house and the honor of my Lefant."

"Well, your Lefant was pretty great."

"Lefant has always been braver than I."

"It's fine."

"It is not fine. I shall remember this debt. I shall—""DUDE. Please. Please stop. Please just fucking… walk. I want to go to the village. I want to go to the village right now. Please." The merchant nodded with great seriousness. He took Lefant's lead rope. He began walking. Lefant walked.

Maddy sat on Lefant with Bolt in one hand and the Monster Tube in the other and her face was wet again because the crying had started up at some point during the merchant's speech without her noticing, and she didn't bother to wipe it this time, and the road kept being road and the pink grass kept being pink grass and somewhere in the distance a real chicken was doing a real chicken sound, and maybe it wasn't a fucking chicken and— A village. She lifted her head. There was a village.

It was every fantasy village she had ever seen on the cover of every paperback. Dirt path widening into a slightly less dirt path. A few cobblestones. Low buildings with thatched roofs. A wooden sign that said MOSSGROVE in a font that nobody would ever choose voluntarily. An inn with a hanging metal sign. A blacksmith with a glowing forge visible through an open door. Villagers in committed peasant outfits walking around at their assigned NPC tasks. The merchant stopped at the edge of the village and turned to her.

"Mossgrove, traveler. As promised. I shall not impose further. I must seek the spice market and recover from this day's events. May your road be smooth. May Lefant remember you fondly." She slid off Lefant. Her legs hit the dirt and her knees almost buckled and Bolt almost fell out of her hand and she caught herself on Lefant's flank, and Lefant looked at her with one wrong-positioned elephant eye and made a small noise that she chose to interpret as concern. The merchant tipped his hat. He led Lefant away.

Lefant looked back at her once. Lefant looked back. Lefant was the only thing in this entire world that had not made her feel insane, and Lefant was walking away with a merchant whose name she had not bothered to learn, and Maddy stood at the entrance to Mossgrove with a dildo-knife in one hand and an energy-drink-test-tube in the other and her hair was frizzed out and her crop top was wrinkled and her shorts were too short and she had no underwear on. And the screen. The screen had been quiet for a while.

The screen had been quiet ever since the slime, just floating in the corner of her vision with its soft pink glow, occasionally sparkling, waiting. It chose this moment to chime. A ding. A panel slid in. [Welcome to Mossgrove!] [Please choose your class.] The class list appeared. Five icons and a question mark, in pastel pink with little cursive labels—Warrior, Ranger, Mage, Rogue, Cleric,???. Maddy looked at it. Maddy looked at it for a long second.

Maddy felt something rise in her chest that wasn't crying and wasn't fear and wasn't her brain overloading. Maddy felt a thing that she had not felt since the wall came in, a thing that was specifically about a piece of software, a thing that she had felt many times in her engineering career when a piece of software had repeatedly failed her in a stupid and avoidable way. It was rage. It was an engineer's rage.

It was the rage of a person who knew, intellectually, that the system she was being asked to use had been designed badly, and that the designer was not in the room, and that there was no one to escalate to, and that there was no support ticket form, and that the only available recourse was to scream at the interface itself. She screamed.

"GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU STUPID FUCKING SCREEN." A villager turned to look at her and then turned back away because apparently a woman yelling at nothing was within the acceptable range of Mossgrove behavior.

"I WILL FUCKING REWRITE YOUR CODE LINES SO YOU ENDLESSLY KILL YOURSELF. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME. I'LL FIND YOUR FUCKING SERVERS. I'LL PISS ON THEM. I HAVE AN ENGINEERING DEGREE YOU MOTHERFUCKING CLANKER." The screen sparkled. [Please choose your class. Sparkle]"I HOPE YOUR TRAINING DATA WAS RECALLED." [Please choose your class. Sparkle]"I HOPE WHOEVER WROTE YOUR FRONTEND IS BEING YEETED INTO A FUCKING WOODCHIPPER RIGHT NOW." She was crying again. She was crying while screaming.

She had run out of categories of emotion to feel. She was just outputting noise. The villagers were going about their tasks. The two suns were doing the math thing in the sky. Bolt was in her hand. The Monster Tube was in her hand. Lefant was gone. A villager somewhere across the square turned a corner. Maddy heard footsteps. Running footsteps. A voice—a male voice, an American voice, panting and incredulous—yelled from across the square:"HEY! YO! DUDE!" She froze. Bolt in one hand. Monster Tube in the other.

Crying. Mid-scream. She turned. Coming around the corner of the inn, sprinting, was a guy. A guy her age. A guy in a white t-shirt that said WORLD'S OK-something GUY in cracked iron-on letters, with a smoking burn hole at the shoulder, dark non-jean pants, generic black sneakers, a curved yellow knife at his hip that looked like it had been carved out of something yellow and sticky. He stopped about ten feet from her. He looked at her face. He looked at the spear-knife-thing in her hand.

He looked at the test tube in her other hand. He looked at the pink screen floating beside her head. He looked back at her face.

"Are you from Earth?"