Drip-Fed Pt. 01

It had spent a lot of time growing those shells, using them as it hunted more axolotls to continue its growth, and it didn't want to lose them yet. There had to be some part where the water was shallow and the land rose slowly.

Bumping its sturdy nose against the cliffs to find that spot, only relying on touch and vibrations, the slime searched. Every time it surfaced it felt a mixture of nostalgia, alienation and anticipation. Nostalgia, as its first moments had been spent falling, alienation because it had been a long while and anticipation because it wanted to explore this new area.

When it finally managed to find a suitable spot, it walked on land and just stood there for a moment. It was sniffing, if there was any predator around it surely would leave some sort of scent to track. Straining the vibration sense it possessed by nature, it also searched around. It found nothing noteworthy, just some insects busily walking around in search of something to eat.

That made the slime happy, it seemed like it arrived at the scene already the top of the food chain. With swaggering steps, a particular development from its body structure and it still learning how to walk on land, it traversed the rocky terrain. Soon rock made for moss. It was nice for its feet, but somewhat hard to keep a footing on.

One of the busy insects came close and the slime suddenly opened its axolotl mouth. It was a bit confused when basically nothing happened. It tried a second, then a third time before realizing that the suction only worked in water.

So it opted for the old fashioned way instead, since its mouth was already open it swallowed the insect whole. The tiny thing was of no match for the mighty axo-slime and it quite liked the refreshing taste. It had something of citrus.

That was when it was attacked by two more of the tiny things. The slime felt something like admiration for the fact that they were so willing to die for their comrades. Much more it felt thankful that its food was so willing to dive into its maw.

The comradery was short-lived, however, as one of the insects was swallowed whole again. This time the slime took a moment to feel its shape. It had pretty big jaws, two antenna and six legs that were wide apart from each other. Its middle section was immensely thin, but the tail end was a bloated container of guts and two stomachs, one of them made for regurgitation.

There were also these ducts, the slime had no idea what they were about, only that they produced a 'smell'. It would have loved to experiment, but then it suddenly heard something. The insect was returning and it wasn't alone.

Hundreds of skittering legs were heading for it. Quite rapidly as well. The angry buzzing of a swarm. Unbeknownst to the slime, it had angered a new kind of species: the common cave ant.

The concept of an army was entirely removed from the slime's understanding of the world. As far as it had experienced, hunting was a one on one encounter with things that usually only wanted to get away. Now it was face to face with not only an enemy that wanted to fight back, but was also ready to kill it and had the numbers to back it up.

So, as the slime sensed the army approaching, it did the only sensible thing. Which was run. Run for its life from the eusocial terror about to descend on it. It was slow, a crawl which was fast as it could run, heading for the water. Surely, these creatures could not have been able of swimming, otherwise it would have encountered them before.

Still, to the water was a small trip and the ants were a lot faster than it was. Soon it felt pincers grabbing at its tail, ripping pieces out while trying to inject the slime with some sort of acid. That second part bothered the slime very little, being an incredibly acidic creature itself, but the pinching hurt. Not one pinching, one pinching was less than a prick of a needle. A dozen, however, in quick succession, alongside the feeling of slowly getting covered as ants hitched a ride on its back and bit whatever they sensed to be a vulnerable spot. That was torment.

The slime dipped its front leg into the water just as an ant had figured out where the head of it lay. If the dozens of bites were torture, then the sensitive concentration of emulated nerves that was its nose getting bitten was just hell. Luckily, the pain was dulled quickly by the water encapsulating it.

Ants were still holding on to it even after diving, their mandibles buried deep into the slime flesh. One by one, it plucked them off by pulling them inside itself and digesting them. Now that they weren't in their element and there were a limited amount of them, that was actually an option.

Ants, the slime decided, were supremely scary.

The slime had gotten itself in a precarious situation. It was currently surrounded by ants, lots and lots of ants, enough to rip it apart in no time flat if they wanted to. It was a good thing for the amorphous that they didn't, because they didn't see the slime as an enemy. They saw it as part of their nest.

Yes, the slime was now part of an ant lair. To be exact, it was the reinforced ceiling of something like a central road that connected several breeding chambers with a dumping site. Judging by the fact that it was hit by drops of water from above every now and again, it had been put there for rain protection.

How had it gotten there? Through its own fault. After having waited for a short span of time to make sure the ants weren't still on the look-out for it, the slime had returned to land. Rather than a predator, it had loaded its proverbial stomach before coming, this time it came as an observer.

What it did was hide itself inside its shell and just watch the ants, while running experiments with the pheromone duct it had gotten from the first few ants it devoured. As ants were quite small, that was the only part of their body that the slime could actually use for something.

At first everything went fine, it just went through the different kinds of smells the duct could produce. Very carefully, it tried one thing, then another, then another. It was interesting to see that the ants reacted in odd ways. They were obviously disinterested in attacking what must have looked like a rock to them. Instead they came in bigger and bigger numbers.

So, the slime reached out of its shell and attacked, convinced that the duct must have pacified the ants somehow. When attacked, the insects reacted exactly as before and swarmed him. One bath, one filled stomach and one climb back on land later, the slime repeated the game.

Maybe it just hadn't used enough of the pheromones? Time to kick the production into overdrive and see what would happen. At first the game just repeated itself, one ant came to check out what it was smelling, then two, then thirty-five. Then more than it had ever seen skitter around at one place. Then it happened. The slime, thinking about whether it should strike now or later, was suddenly lifted up.

It really hadn't expected the tiny insects to muster that much power, but they worked in instinctual unison. Together they managed to carry the camouflaged slime, who had a bit of a panic attack at that point.

Quickly, it disabled its pheromone duct, but the smell was already sticking to it and the other ants were marking it themselves. This was already a process it couldn't stop. There were so many ants around that it didn't feel like it could fight its way out either and the chances only became slimmer the further it was carried away from the water.

Thus, it just let it happen and became part of the nest. Truthfully speaking, its position wasn't the worst. It rested on the edges of three separate bundles of moss, underneath which the ants had buried their main chambers. It was both a rain shield and a bridge for the ants to cross, but that was a sacrifice it could take in return for its supreme observing position.

The problem was it had to eat eventually. Soon, actually, since it already felt famished and would soon become weaker.

Luckily, it had hatched a plan. Through experimentation and observation, it had puzzled together a strategy that should allow it to survive this mess. Should, theoretically, this could all horribly backfire, ending the slimes ascension up the food chain at a mere ant colony.

The reason why the slime was willing to even throw its life on the line in this fight was that it thought it was facing the final boss. What could be stronger than a hivemind organized colony consisting of insects that could carry several times their weight and inject acid into bite wounds? In its tiny mind, barely understanding that there had to be something outside this cave, it felt like a hero challenging the army of the dark lord on its own, about to smash them into the next cycle. So the risk was worth taking.

Its plan hinged on two things. One was the fact that the ants would only react aggressively towards it if they were convinced it was attacking them. As long as it kept the pheromones on and moved in a non-threatening way, they would disregard what it did. Which was what allowed it to, very slowly, extend a part of its liquid body out of the shell and into an opportune position above one of the breeding chambers' exits.

The reason for that was that the slime had observed there to be different kinds of ants. It had managed to distinguish three by their tremors, smell and looks. The latter two the slime identified through an insect-eyes tentacle and the ant's own noses, or whatever one wanted to call their smelling organ.

One was the workers, the smallest and most numerous of the swarm. Next were the elites, bigger versions that did more of the heavy lifting and fighting but were less numerous and nimble. Last, and the slime had only managed to see a few of these, were the queens. They were tucked away in the breeding chambers most of the day and when they came out they had a number of worker and elites steadily buzzing around them.

They were attracted to the queens by such a powerful pheromone that it triumphed over everything the slime could produce at the current time. The glands producing them had to be slightly different and that was the second thing the slime was banking on.

Its opportunity came eventually. A queen, taking a small stroll out of her underground confinement in order to get some fresh food rather than being steadily feed through her workers social stomach, revealed herself. Eating the regurgitations of her underlings all the time must have been tiring even for a being with next to no capability to think.

Humanizations aside, she didn't think about it and wasn't tired of regurgitations. Her body just craved some fresh sugar, so she would go the place where the colony was currently breeding a kind of greenfly that ate moss and secreted a sweet liquid. Then she would head right back underground. That was the plan her instincts had scraped together.

Until she was suddenly scooped up by a viscous liquid, sucked under the outer layer and into the acidic main fluid of the ambushing roof. The slime quickly retreated its tentacle, as the ants went into a frenzy. Many of them jumped onto the tentacle, hitching a ride and greatly annoying the slime with their bites.

The drop of evolutionary soup had already taken this into account and it wasn't a hindrance that was important. All that mattered was that it transported the queen inside it. Once it managed to do that, it tightly closed its shell and digested the queen alongside with the workers and guarding elites that had either been scooped up with or jumped onto the slime to follow her.

This part of the plan was relatively safe. Ants, while strong relative to their size, did not possess the tools to puncture the shell of the slime. They gnawed at and skittered all over it, desperately trying to find an opening. A myriad of tiny steps like drum beats stressed the slime, even knowing it was safe didn't help when it was continuously assaulted by the hammering and scraping sounds.

If the slime was wrong and the queen's pheromones did not allow it to become an object of veneration to the ants, then this would be its end. Either it would sit there inside its shell and starve to death, or it would open and be ripped apart. Personally, it had already decided that it would rather starve in that situation.

An eternity spent digesting to the sound of the raging swarm later, the slime grew its new duct and began producing pheromones like mad, opening its shell just a bit to let it flow out unobstructed.

Nothing happened for a long time. The slime was already resigning itself to its fate. Then, the attacks became less intense, confused even, as the ants were tricked into thinking they were attacking what they were trying to save. It took more time for the slime's new queen pheromones to overpower the attack-markings that were covering its shell, but eventually the ants went docile.

They still skittered all over the slime, but when it moved probingly, they didn't see it as an enemy. Instead, they were now swarming in protection of their newly anointed boss. That greatly pleased the slime, as it picked them up one by one and ate them with a side-serving of moss.

It was really hungry after all that.

The slime couldn't know this, but when it finally figured out how to manipulate the ants accurately, it had turned one year old. Indeed, a lot of the actions it had to wait for, it had to figure things out for, all of these things had taken weeks to months. Large gaps of nothing or boring safety between the occasional chaos and risk.

For the slime itself, all of that had just been one large, continuous blob of experience. It didn't need to sleep after all, although it did prefer to just sit around while digesting. None of this was really important at the current moment, however.

Because it was about to find a way out of its birth place.

After taking over several more ant queendoms, the slime had started a large-scale search for cracks or any other possible way to escape the confines of the cave. Not that it had anything against its birthplace, but as the slime got bigger and left without any enemies to supercede, it felt confined and bored.

Several such cracks had been found over time. Usually leading nowhere or being too narrow for the slime to pass through. Even while being an amorphous blob, it still needed to get its solid nucleus through. Finding a crack that was large enough and led somewhere seemed to be an impossible combination.

Good thing it had lots and lots of tiny helpers. By signalling all of the ants that it was time to relocate the nest all the time, it sent them into a search frenzy. Granted, this was immensely bad for the ants' health, especially the brood, but that was a sacrifice the bored slime was willing to make.

Eventually, they did find a path the slime could fit into, then they scouted it out, removed the tiny obstacles that were lodged in there and so on. Then, several dozen ants went out, only to return with some odd smell to them, something that smelled new and exciting. It was like moss, but fresher and more intensive and less stuffy, if that made sense.

Excited, the slime squeezed into the crack. It had to get rid of its shells and basically every other Growth in the process, but it managed to get in there and keep crawling along. The only thing it kept was the pheromone duct, lest the ants suddenly broke free from their spell and attacked it. Such a tiny organ didn't hamper it.

The travel was long, ants skittering after it being the only feeling it had for orientation as it blindly probed its path. The further the slime got away from the chamber, and the magma inside the nearby earth that had heated it, the colder the world got. More than a few times, the slime wondered if it should turn around, if that chill was a warning.

Then it got warmer again, the air went from stale to fresh and even though the slime didn't breathe it felt relieved. And then it had another one of its instinctual revelations.

Having conquered and left an ecosystem of appropriate difficulty, the slime was allowed to upgrade one of its currently attained Growths to something that wouldn't become irrelevant, that would actually scale with it.

One thing.

Basically, everything else it had gotten in that cave would become useless. Aside from eyes, noses and other sensing organs, even then not all of them, everything was bound to become just too small.

There was a multitude of decisions. Legs would be good, not having to hunt for another new creature every time it needed a new pair was bound to be advantageous. Same was true for mouths, but then again it didn't yet find one it really liked. The axolotl had come close, but the really interesting bit, the suck-in, didn't work out of water. Its nose was good though. Maybe it should have gone with a sensing organ after all?

The slime didn't think any of that. It just went right with the pheromone gland.

There was not a doubt in its mind that ants were controlling the world wherever they walked. With this organ it would be able to take control of them and in turn immediately win over the ecosystem. It had no idea what other things pheromones could do, nor that ants weren't the one true master of the universes everywhere.

Immediately, the formerly fairly inconsequential organ became a permanent part of the slime's structure. It did so by first disappearing and then appearing again all over the slimes body in the shape of small pores, too small to be seen by the naked eye. It just transformed the slime's texture from perfectly smooth to slightly wavy, the difference between glass and lacquered wood. Basically none at all, unless someone had incredibly sensitive fingers.

Assured that its decision was genius, the blind, amorphous and now weirdly well-smelling slime oozed out of a crack on the side of a mountain, or volcano, rather, as it was the result of the magma chamber. It was noon and, for the first time, it felt sun rays falling upon it.

Maybe it should have been panicking at the inexplicable source of heat or the blinding light that burned into its eye once it had formed one. However, the warmth was a pleasant feeling and absolutely natural. Not looking at the ball of heat in the sky was a pretty easy rule to follow.

If there was something it was panicked by, it was the sheer scope of its surroundings. There were no walls. In the cave, it could clearly draw a border of where it ended on every side. Now that it was out here, the same thing couldn't be said.

As a matter of fact, the thing that stopped its vision was the fact that it was looking through a rather bad axolotl eye, which sadly enough was the best it had. The world, to its limited perception, was an endless stretch now.

Most of the terrain was rather boring, especially up here at the side of the mountain. Trees and grass scarcely covered the earthen ground, a lot of dark grey stones sticking out everywhere. Further below, there was an ocean of green, which the slime failed to identify as the mass of trees that it was, its eyesight just too bad to do so.

Well, it was time to get moving, better set up shop somewhere with its ant army and see what it could get up to. For ease of movement, it got itself a pair of axolotl legs. To better hold its balance, the slime also got itself the tail. Then it was up in the air.

That last part was entirely unplanned and also rather unpleasant. It was inside the talon of an eagle and moving at an absurd speed. If the slime could have screamed, it would now have been loudly doing so.

Things could swim in the air? How, since when, why? That was entirely unfair! Also, what the hell would happen now? The answer came, in the shape of the eagle sitting down on a tree far removed from the position it had picked up its meal and ramming its curved beak into the slimes form, ripping off one of its legs.