Chapter 414: Racing the Hatchlings
Rummmble.
Struck by Harpuia’s scream rocketing toward the ceiling, Imugilaim froze in its tracks. As if time itself had stopped, the creature went rigid.
"Heh heh, the words may be ridiculous, but the vocal cords are powerful."
Just as the others had inherited a dragon’s power in various ways, Harpuia had received it in her vocal cords. For the harpy species, which specialized in luring enemies with enchanting singing voices, the dragon’s power manifested as sonic attacks.
Dragon roar, as they commonly call it.
A vocal power so potent that a faint-hearted goblin would die of cardiac arrest just from hearing the voice of a dragon, a creature at the pinnacle of the living world. In Harpuia’s case, that power had fused with her harpy traits to produce something entirely new.
"Ah, so this is what they call a sonic attack."
She hadn’t simply raised her voice and screamed. Harpuia’s sound was powerful enough to shake the entire cave. More powerful, even, than the vibrations Imugilaim generated as it moved.
"An imugi is a serpent that never ascended to become a dragon. Maybe that’s why it’s been clinging to the ceiling, coiled up like that, but..."
Whether it had been trapped on the second basement floor by the dungeon’s system or not, the crime of scorching my hair was unforgivable. I pulled the exhausted Harpuia into my arms and fell back toward the corridor.
"How dare you look down on me from above. The only ones allowed to look down on me..."
Rumble. The ceiling began to collapse. Not the ceiling; Imugilaim’s body was falling, head first. I aimed the seax at the creature.
"...are the women riding me in cowgirl."
KRABOOOM!!
In a massive cloud of dust, Imugilaim, which had been trying to ascend skyward, came crashing to the ground. Gray stepped forward and beat his wings to keep the dust from billowing into the corridor, while I gently patted the back of Harpuia, whose breathing was gradually stabilizing.
"Good job, Harpuia."
"...Hah, hah."
Harpuia looked up at me with a flushed face, then broke into a bashful grin.
"I want... to have sex..."
"Sure. Once we clear the second basement floor, I’ll let you go at it with Gray to your heart’s content."
"No... with... together..."
Slump. Harpuia lost consciousness in my arms. She had converted every last drop of mana from the magic fluid I’d infused to the limit into raw vocal power and unleashed it, resulting in temporary exhaustion.
"...Uh, hm, she’s saying she wants to do it with Gray, right? Heh heh heh."
"Pfft."
"Master, at least wipe that grin off your face before you say that."
The two of them gently laid the unconscious Harpuia on top of Slime Dragon Unit 11. I worried the magic stone inside might sting her, but fortunately, Unit 11 curled its body into a ball on its own, creating a surface for Harpuia to rest on face-down.
"My goodness. I didn’t quite catch the details, did I?"
"Sigh, this is exactly why carrying your child terrifies me, Master."
"What if this baby in my belly turns out to be a son instead of a daughter... would he go after his mother, or his father?"
"Let’s stop with the scary talk, Lune. It’s definitely going to be a daughter. Mm, anyway. Done cleaning my ears."
I pulled the remaining slime mucus out of my ears with my fingers. Some residue remained, but my hearing was fine.
Whoosh.
The dust gradually settled, and the cavern came into full view. The massive imugi, collapsed on the ground, was trembling while coiled up in a tight spiral.
"See, this is what happens. You’re a slime, so why were you clinging to the ceiling like that? Sheesh."
I gripped the seax and walked forward. As a precaution, I checked the ceiling first.
"Good, nobody up there."
Where Imugilaim had fallen from, only faint traces remained of a tail and body that had barely been clinging on. There were no slime dragons waiting in the wings for a free fall. Reassured, I approached Imugilaim.
"Harpuia’s sonic blast, then the impact of falling from above. Exposing your body to me was your fatal mistake."
I raised the seax high. My robe was already filthy with slime, so getting it a bit dirtier wouldn’t make much difference.
"If you want to blame someone, blame Baal for locking you in here."
Starting from the back of my hand, the glowing red Seal spread all the way to the halberd’s blade. I gathered every ounce of strength in my body and brought the seax down with all my might.
CRUNCH!!!
If what Gray had drawn across its neck was a slash, the seax I swung sank deep enough to bury the entire blade. Of course, even with my strength I couldn’t sever the creature’s body in a single blow, but cutting even a quarter of the way through was what mattered.
"Rastujad."
[Ready.]
Squirm, squirm.
The ghoul slimes swarmed the wound like lightning. Being already dead, getting aroused by the aphrodisiac was a complete non-issue for them. I wiped the yellow slime that had splattered on my face.
"Phew, phew. It really does heat you up, huh."
My already stiff equipment was getting even stiffer. I shoved my pants and underwear down together to relieve the pressure on my lower abdomen. The powerful sense of liberation was refreshing.
"If only the back of its neck were exposed too."
The wound Gray had made was a legitimate gash through the skin. If the ghoul slimes could wedge their heads into it the way they were doing now, they could widen the wound plenty.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
The ghouls devoured Imugilaim as if possessed. And not just eating haphazardly; they gnawed along the path of the wound I’d created, peeling away the outer shell with surgical precision.
SPLORCH.
With the sound of something bursting, Imugilaim’s body split in half. Over half the shell had been torn open, splitting apart like a sushi roll bursting at the seams, and bodily fluids the ghoul slimes hadn’t managed to consume began gushing out.
"...."
I couldn’t bring myself to say the words tingling on my tongue. If I said them and some fateful jinx kicked in, I was fully prepared to retreat immediately.
"Did we get it?"
"Lune, I think I just started to dislike you a little."
"Huh?! Why?!"
"...Because normally, when someone says that, the enemy regains consciousness. Yeah, just like with Halphas. Looks like we’re in the clear this time, though."
Splat.
The ghoul slimes had completely severed Imugilaim’s body. No matter how long the creature was, once its midsection was cut through, and with ghoul slimes continuing to devour it, regenerating and reattaching its body would be extremely difficult.
"It shouldn’t come back to life."
Which meant I had to make absolutely sure it was dead before it could. I raised the seax again and stepped forward.
"From this point, we’re performing a confirmed kill. Lune, from now on, blast wind holes into every wound I make. Gray, guard the rear. Ghouls, devour everything except where Lune is shooting. Today..."
Squelch! The seax’s blade split Imugilaim’s shell and dug deep inside. Yellow and red slime sprayed across my face.
"We’re carving up slime like sausag... hm? Why is the slime red?"
For a moment I wondered if my vision had gone red because of the Seal’s power. But if that were the case, my entire field of view should have been red, and the red slime was clearly smeared across the back of my hand.
"Something’s not right..."
Squirrrm.
From inside the gash where the halberd had struck, something wriggled and raised its head. My eyes met with the creature that was poking its face out.
Squee.
"A slime dragon... baby?"
A slime dragon that looked as if it had just been born squirmed its way out through the split skin. It was tiny, barely even 3 feet long.
Gurgle, gurgle.
The baby slime dragon looked left and right, opened its mouth wide, and:
Crunch.
It plunged its head straight into Imugilaim’s body. From the crunching sounds, it was clearly feeding on the slime.
"N-no way...!"
"Master! Over there, from the inside!!"
Lune screamed and pointed at where the body had burst open. There, the ghoul slimes were being eaten by something. The sound of slime popping filled my ears.
"Sh-shit."
Something had seemed off, now that I thought about it. No matter how much of a slime dungeon this was, as long as the dungeon was sealed off by the system, where could so many slimes possibly be born?
"A female...?"
Now the identity of the slime dragons that had fallen from above made sense. Imugilaim had been carrying slime dragons inside its own body.
Everything from countless eggs, to hatchlings, to fully grown adults!
SPLOOOSH!!
The burst flank ruptured again. Every last ghoul slime was devoured, and the slime dragons that emerged stretched their bodies like fish returning to water. Only then did I begin to dimly grasp Imugilaim’s true nature.
"You insane creature... You turned your own body into a dungeon for the sake of your offspring."
It had made it so that the hatchlings could survive by feeding on its own bodily fluids. It used its shell to incubate slimes on the inside, released the slime dragons that grew strong enough to the outside, forced them into cannibalistic competition, and kept only the strongest survivors.
"And it was... selective!"
Newly laid eggs would have become food for the stronger slime dragons. Slimes were a species programmed to hunt and devour one another, after all.
Crunch, crunch.
But now Imugilaim was wounded. We had wounded it with our attacks, and a wounded apex predator is nothing but easy prey for the weak.
Even if that predator was the very body that had birthed them, to slimes devoid of intelligence, it was nothing more than food.
"...This won’t do. We need to purge this place with fire. Rastujad, go up to the main base and bring back torches and oil."
[If you intend to scorch this entire cave, you’ll need a massive quantity of oil. I don’t believe we have that much on hand.]
"Damn it. Is there any way to wipe them all out at once? If we don’t..."
I grew increasingly anxious as the number of slime dragons steadily multiplied.
"A 4-star, level 90 magic stone is going to get eaten by these baby slime dragons!"
It may not have been a true dragon pearl since the creature never became a dragon, but a magic stone on the verge of becoming one would surely contain mana of the highest quality among all high-grade stones.
A single high-grade magic stone converted to liquid mana could fill several orc barrels and then some, and a high-grade stone from a level 90 creature was practically equivalent to a highest-grade stone.
If even a nibble of that was taken by some newborn slime dragon, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
"The magic stone; I have to find the magic stone!"
I gripped the seax again and lopped off the head of a slime dragon as it popped out. It was weak enough that a single strike sent its head flying clean off, but for every one I killed, five more crawled out from beneath the shell.
"Damn it, forget levels and experience, just kill everything! We HAVE to secure Imugilaim’s magic stone!!"
The slime dragons were devouring Imugilaim. We had to kill the slime dragons one by one while searching for Imugilaim’s core.
A game of chicken against a wounded imugi had begun.
***
No matter how simple a slime might be, it possesses at least a basic level of intelligence.
The higher the rank, the greater the intelligence. And Imugilaim, which had once been a dungeon monster, was undeniably a creature that possessed intellect of its own.
It was being devoured.
The intruders had wounded it. Those wounds could have been repaired easily enough. But the will to heal its body had been broken.
Crunch, crunch.
Its body was being eaten from the inside out. The slime dragons it had given birth to were daring to devour their own progenitor and creator as though it were nothing but a tasty meal. With nothing but the instinct of hunger remaining, the slimes were gorging themselves without any awareness of what they were consuming.
Is this what I gave up evolution for?
Imugilaim lamented the scene as it watched from above.
It had struggled for decades to escape this place. And for all those decades, it had forsaken its ascension for the sake of its offspring and laid egg after egg. Yet its reward was to be devoured by those very offspring.
Crunch, crunch.
The orc, who appeared to be the leader of the intruders, and a band of monsters were hard at work dismembering Imugilaim’s body. They endured the arousal and carved through Imugilaim’s flesh, mercilessly slaughtering every hatchling that emerged from within.
Should I kill them all?
Imugilaim’s power was not enough to kill them all. The pig-like orc was surprisingly powerful for how he looked, strong enough that victory was uncertain even in a one-on-one fight.
If only I could consume that one, I could ascend.
Imugilaim’s gaze kept drifting toward the succubus radiating a purple aura. It felt as though consuming her would allow it to become what its former master once was.
But it could not break through the orc. The slime dragons were far too incompetent to overpower the orc, and on top of that, they had turned traitor.
Then let’s kill them all.
Bury everyone in the cave and be done with it. And if, by some chance, anything survived being crushed under the collapsed corridors, it would eat whatever remained and claw its way out.
Rumble, rumble, rumble.
Using its other head, the only part still connected to the ceiling, Imugilaim began scraping at the dungeon ceiling. The ceiling where it had been incubating its unhatched eggs began to crumble and cave in.
Let’s all die together.
After agonizing deliberation, Imugilaim made up its mind to bring the ceiling down.