[SS] Chapter 10: Wolves are scary in any universe.

I was being eaten. Pain, pain. I could feel sharp teeth piercing my slime and separating me. I reacted with the slime equivalent of a scream and trying to melt everything around me. That made everything worse.

Suddenly, I felt myself be torn apart and be splattered against the tree I had been resting against.

I opened my eyes and saw a wolf staring down at me. It was huge. It was easily 5x my height and had parts of me dribbling down its mouth. It was the middle of the night and it must have black fur because even with True Sight, it seemed to blend into the background. It swallowed the chunk of me it had torn off and glared down at me. I want you to imagine a creature 5 stories tall. A giant. Now imagine that giant ripped off your arm and swallowed it in front of you.

The terror that passed through my soul was indescribable. I was going to die and I had the feeling I wouldn’t arrive back in the divine realm if I did.

The wolf was angry. Really, really angry. A bit of blood leaked out of its mouth. Right, I had tried melting it from the inside. It swiped at me and I wasn’t fast enough to move. It felt like I had my stomach torn out.

Oh my God I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die again. I’m gonna die again. I’m gonna-

The wolf slashed me and that was it. I felt myself be cleaved apart.

[HP: 0/240]

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[Ring Activated]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I was alive. Alive. I felt myself be pulled back together and put into one piece, all of the damage healed. Along with those pieces of slime, I finally noticed something. One of those pieces had something else in it. I hadn’t even realized. It was my ring.

Ring of Regeneration - Increased healing when wearing this ring. Able to regenerate lost limbs. Once a week, recover from a fatal wound.

I had, I had accidentally equipped this earlier. During my Stat trance. I had forgotten about it. I hadn’t even noticed it had been missing. And it had just saved my life.

[Physical Resistance (Slash) Tier 1 Gained!]

Oh my god, I died. Again.

I looked up and saw a hungry open maw. I screamed and reacted on instinct, trying to punch out with my arm.

It worked.

A spirit hand came into existence and pushed the massive mouth away from me.

My non-existent heart was racing and beating like a drum. The pain from earlier still lingered in my mind. The fear of death and terror of it all was crushing me.

But it was nothing compared to the fact that the wolf was still here. It was going to kill me. Again.

I panicked. I summoned two spirit hands, four, six, ten. I felt my MP dropping but I wasn’t in the right state of mind to care. I punched and punched and punched and punched and punched and punched and punched and punched.

The wolf bit my hands and I could feel it. Could feel my hands be shredded apart. The pain only caused me to breakdown further and punch more and more. Teeth, teeth shearing through me. Claws ripping me apart. Pain, pain, pain, pain.

“AHHHHHH!!!!!!”

I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. That wasn’t a concept in me anymore. There was only pain and terror and fear and my screaming.

Hours passed, but I didn’t notice. I was stuck in a hell of terror and horror where I was going to die and die and die again and again and again and just keep dying.

Eventually, my MP ran out. My HP started to take a dive as my spirit hands started to use that instead. My regeneration kept up, for a while. Eventually, my own [Danger Sense] was screaming at me that I was going to die if I kept going. I froze in horror. The light of sanity touched upon my mind and I looked at the wolf.

It was dead. I had been beating a corpse for hours. At least I assume it had been hours since the first rays of light were touching upon me.

I wanted to sleep. Mana exhaustion and regular exhaustion were tearing me down. But the last time I slept, I had been attacked and eaten. Nearly on autopilot, I rolled my body over to the wolf and began absorbing it. I could feel it melting underneath me but there was no relief, just more exhaustion. It took, I don’t know. It took time. When I was done, I summoned a single ghostly hand to pull my bag with me and wandered off. I needed, I needed to find a safe haven. A cave, a hole. I needed to find a place to rest.

A wolf's howl echoed through the morning air and I sped up.

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I was really getting sick and tired of losing my senses. I felt like I had been rolled over like a pancake and squashed flat even further. Like every bone in my body was broken and my soul was wounded.

If I wasn’t a slime I’d have expected there was something wrong with my body. But being a slime makes that element kind of hard.

I was in a cave I had found. Of course it probably had residents but I had seen a small crevice and squeezed myself into it while putting the bag over me. And then finally got some sleep.

And now that I had, it was time to reassess. I had died. Again. The pain, terror, and my own PTSD had caused me to freeze up in the middle of that “”Fight”” and get murdered. I hadn’t done any better when coming back to life either. It was pure luck that my spirit hands saved me. They were magic but seemed to copy my own Strength. And apparently, I was strong enough to beat a wolf to death, if there were ten of me. I tried to think back and froze up. Pain, Pain, Teeth and jaws snapping, hands being torn apart, over and over and over again. Shredded. Torn apart.

Pain.

Pain.

PAIN

PAIN

“AHHHHHH!”

Okay, okay, okay, no. No thinking about that. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. It’s enough that I’m alive. After all, besides my life, I had only gotten two things out of that.

[Physical Resistance (Slash) T1] - 5% resistance to slashing damage.

[Free stat points: 1.]

Great. How many stat points did that fucking wolf have? It had to have been eating creatures since it was born but it seemed like a regular wolf to me. I tried to recall how the world of stats worked but it was slipping from my mind at the moment. Were any animals fair game? Or did it need to be specific animals? It couldn’t have been all animals or it would have had thousands of stat points. No wonder it wanted to eat me so bad. I represented an actual increase in strength. Or maybe it was just hungry. But then again, no normal wolf would have eaten a slime beforehand on earth. Or would they have?

Ughhhh. I was going in circles. I was trapped in a small crack, in the dark, underneath my bag. Could I stay here for a whole week so my ring could reactivate? Probably not… more than that, I really didn’t want to. I decided to pull up my status.

[General/Crown/Evolution/Dungeon

*Name Pending*

Free stat points: 1

HP: 260/260

MP: 140/140

STR: 20

AGI: 20

DEX: 20

CON: 20

END: 22

INT: 20

WIS: 20

SPI: 20

Astra: 173]

Sigh. I might as well throw my free stat point into Strength. I had noticed the name pending thing before but I don’t know if it matters. I could go with my old name, Mark Wilson but that was just so, boring. I had the opportunity to think of a new name in this new reality. A large part of me was tempted to name myself “wolf slayer” or something but no. I needed to really think things through right now.

Mainly, combat. I glanced at my skills.

[Skills:

Physicals Skills:

[Melt]

[Absorb]

[Enhanced Healing]

[Physical Resistance (Piercing) T1]

[Physical Resistance (Slashing) T1]

Magical Skills:

[Magic Skill: (Dark) T2]

[Magic Diet]

[Spirit Hands]

General Skills:

[Natural instincts]

[Danger Sense]

[Universal Speech]

Special Skills:

[True Sight]

[Astra Acclimation]

[Astra Manipulation]

[Increased Astra Accumulation x7 (128x)]]

Okay, so, which of these is going to help keep me alive? Let’s start with [Danger Sense].

[Danger Sense] - Sense Danger 5 minutes in advance to your life. The closer the danger, the stronger the feeling.

It should have warned me about the Wolf. But I was asleep. Dead asleep at that. Maybe it would have woken me up if I had been less tired but I couldn’t say for sure. So I needed a safe place to rest in the future. This cave might have to work for now but it could hold bears or a whole pack of wolves. So, don’t sleep out in the open like an idiot. Got it.

[Melt] - Melt up to Steel Tier items. Some materials are naturally resistant.

[Absorb] - Envelops a target into your body and then slowly eats away at it. This is akin to eating.

Second thing, both of these skills need to be used together in a fight. Melt clearly turns anything touching me and inside me, into slag. Absorb only works on something inside me, but both together should make materials disappear faster. The problem is that it will melt things, eventually. Not instantly. Not useless in a fight but I’ll need to get up close and personal and… shudder. That sounded like a recipe for disaster. Still, it might save my life.

[Enhanced healing] - Heal and recover 4x faster.

With my ring of regeneration, that was a 5x healing buff. I currently regenerated at, uhh, each point in CON is 10%, with a base of 1 an hour so, 15 HP an hour. That’s, good? It means I could be near death and recover in a day. I’ll take that. But it’s not good enough for during a fight, which is measured in minutes or seconds. I’m a long way off from that. Stats are weird. They have a specific value, as in, they affect specific measurable things, a non-specific value, as in, nowhere does it actually say END or more HP increases my actual defense but they both have a non-measurable effect, and are then affected by Astra in a very metaphysical way. All of which just increases my hatred of stats more but I’m gonna have to care. Still, focusing on the specifics, if I nearly die, I’ll need to hide away for a day before I’m ready to go again.

[Spirit Hands]

[True Sight]

I picked these two skills out of need more than anything. Eyes and hands. I didn’t think they’d save my life. I wouldn’t have even been able to see the wolf without True Sight and Spirit Hands was literally what killed it. Which pulled from my Strength and MP. I’m sure my others stats came into play as well. I hadn’t even considered that Spirit Hands might have combat applications. It was just meant so I could open doors and carry stuff. It doesn’t use a lot of Mana but it requires an initial cost and a channeling cost. Both of which are low and flexible enough that usually it doesn’t matter. Till you summon ten of them and have them be constantly torn apart fighting a wolf. Focusing, that means that it can be done again, without me going crazy. I’ll have to practice. Slime of a thousand fists sounds good.

That was the first thought that had me perking up. Laying waste to my enemies with a ton of hands as a slime was probably the funniest thing I could think of. Still, while apparently having great combat abilities, it wasn’t meant to be one.

[Magic Skill (Dark) Tier 2]

This was meant to be my combat skill. But I don’t know what I expected. Using magic in a fight requires a calm and steady head and more to the point, I have no idea what I can do with it yet. It hadn’t even occurred to me during the fight to use it. This was a gained skill, it was part of me, it could grow. But it wasn’t literally part of my soul. Which meant it wasn’t innate, something I almost had going on reflex, like my other abilities. This was something I had to train to learn anything about. But the only thing I could really think of was blindness. Fire bolts do damage because they are fire. But I don’t how shooting darkness at anyone would do anything besides rob them of vision. Surely there’s more than just that, removing vision, but I don’t know. Which means it might help me in 2 or 3 days or 2 or 3 weeks, but as of right this very moment, it wasn’t useful. Which left me with one more thing.

[Astra manipulation]

While, like everything else, this needed training, it did have two immediate uses. A. I could shoot astra. Sadly, I’d have to pump probably like, I don’t know, 20,000 into a wolf to age it into death. Probably more. But it could also B. Drain Astra. Astra was your very lifeforce. While you got old and aged because of it, nothing could exist without it either. There was no such thing as having negative astra, you were just dead.

So my combat strategy if I saw another wolf was:

Blind it with dark magic if I can manage it. Then, jump on it and try to [Melt], [Absorb] and drain of it of Astra all at the same time, while I also try to beat it to death with my [Spirit Hands].

Hmm. No, no. That won’t work. It’s too much going on. Until I train dark magic, I’ll cut it out completely and instead try to use my spirit hands to restrain a wolf or blind it. If I can get the wolf to go away, I win. If I can get it to not be able to move so I can jump on it and kill it, I win.

Those were my most useful skills for actual combat. Maybe I was missing something amazing but it’s the best I had. But not all I had were skills.

[General/Crown/Evolution/Dungeon

Summon time: 5 seconds

Time stored: 1 hour

Crown types: [Immunity Type] [Enhancement Type]

Authorities: [Sustenance Authority] [Life Authority] [Minion Authority]]

It would have been useless against the wolf. I had no time stored which means I would have just gotten the passive effects and the control effects and that wolf was not at all weaker than me. Now though? I’d need six more days to generate enough time to actually get an extra life, same situation with my ring bitterly enough, but what I could do was summon a slime. It’d just be a normal slime, without anything I had. It would be cannon fodder at best, useless completely at worst. But it was an option. And one I’d probably do the second I could. Even if it only bought me a few seconds, those seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

I sighed again. I wish I had been able to use any of my items besides the ring. Speaking of, when they said they were going to make the equipment fit for my race, I was skeptical you could make equipment for a slime. I was wrong. While annoyingly, the bag is a bag and the potions are glass potion bottles, the ring, cuffs, and amulet are all made out of semi-solid slime. Already, the ring had saved my life and the amulet had allowed me to keep punching the wolf with the excess mana. I don’t know if that was necessary but it had allowed me to do so. I was particularly bitter about the Cuffs.

[Black Mage’s Cuffs] - When worn, gives the wearer Magic Skill (Dark) at Tier 4 and the ability to turn into an inky immaterial shadow once per day.

I could have used this instead to escape the wolf. But I hadn’t even had it equipped. Now I did. At the very least, it gave me a few ideas. Apparently dark magic, at some tier, allowed you to turn into a god damn shadow. Maybe I could eventually travel through shadows or summon physical darkness or something. Ideas were worth their weight in gold when I’d have to figure everything out myself.

I glanced at my next two tabs but didn’t open them. Evolution would be annoying because I already knew what options I had and what options I wanted. What I wanted to become, required eating human hearts. And yeah, I didn’t think a random forest was going to have humans. But that was fine. I just, had thought I was going to be stupidly OP and could spend a year relaxing and learning. I don’t really know how I thought that. My skills were good but I didn’t actually choose many things that could give me a combat edge, because I am an idiot.

I guess, despite me never wanting to focus on stats, I thought I would just be that strong? And to be fair, I am. I’ve taken my time in this crack of the earth to really focus on stats more. Reading them. Remembering everything Order and Knowledge had said about them. And my answer? I’m probably twice as strong as a normal human man from earth.

Strong. Not faster, not more durable. Though I technically might be that too. I definitely heal stupidly faster than any person that has ever lived on earth. The problem is that I’m not solid. I’m easily separated and that’s the issue. If I was even just flesh, I could probably have taken those claws and teeth way better than any human should be able to. But that’s not what I am. And 2x average human man doesn’t cut it in a world of magic and stats. My mental stats haven’t come into play yet. Almost all of them revolve around magic after all.

Assessment done. Time for a game plan.

Get out of this crack, make this place my home base, and put up defenses. And there’s only one thing I have in my possession that can easily do that.

It was time to become a dungeon master.

At least for a little while.