Drip-Fed Pt. 04

"Can't wait -- can't wait," Reysha's excited voice sang out into the landscape. She wasn't nearly as melodic as Aclysia was and obviously lacked any training in that school, but she had the right kind of voice for that line of work. Although the unstableness of her tone made it clear that she didn't have the mindset for singing. "Finally, meat, cooked fucking meat."

"Your enthusiasm seems unbecoming, given how interested you were in the flesh of dungeon creatures," Aclysia pointed out, sitting atop Apexus, as the tiger girl nimbly grabbed the tailfin of one of the fish between her light red tinting claws and turned it around. Some of the scaled skin stuck to the surface as she did, but she didn't care.

"I know, I know," Reysha continued in her little melody. "And, not gonna lie, I kinda want to get back into that dungeon and see if I can rip open a rat or something, but still. I am out of there, I am alive, I can eat something that's not raw for a change!" She flipped the bird in the general direction of the dungeon.

They continued waiting for the fish to get done, with Reysha continuously babbling to herself little words of happiness and curses. The firewood cracked, collapsing on itself and causing embers to scatter through the air, a conveniently dry thorn-bush. It had developed a naturally dead, withered texture to be unappealing to the landscape's prime omnivores, the slimes. If a slime did try to eat the plant despite that, they would usually be dried up from within. That kept the bushes safe, but also made them great firewood. Good for them that adventurers were much rarer a predator in these parts.

Apexus looked at the flames from a nice distance, but his attention lay definitely with the double spheres that were softly depressing its surface with their curvature. Although bigger, Aclysia had no intentions of stopping using her awakener as a chair. As this didn't happen out of disrespect or a sense of superiority, but rather the want to be close to him and the fact that the gelatinous mass was incredibly comfortable, no objections were raised or would be even if she reached Reysha's size.

It was really convenient that her new and improved curves stayed despite her clothed state, as her sensitivity apparently vanished when she wasn't nude. Something about her clothes and nakedness being two different modes of existence. Shifting his mass a bit, the slime adjusted his shape to be an even better seat, by creating a backrest for his beloved fairy.

Since losing his virginity earlier, the slime felt it's much easier to retain changes in his shape. Picking a gender, effectively, had stabilized the slimes mass, currently holding the potential for both at the cost of some smaller features of being what he was. His default colour had also gotten a bit darker, in response to the outer membrane, keeping the acid that made up most of its internals from constantly burning at everything, growing thicker and denser. With it the colour of his eyes had shifted from a colourless pale to a light blue.

Even with the shapeshifting being less of a pain to keep up, it was far from a reliable tool. The makeshift limbs were soft and slow, inferior in every regard to whatever Growths Apexus tried to emulate through them. Still, while that newfound elasticity wasn't going to be useful as limbs, being able to be around in shapes that weren't the usual ellipse would be useful.

"Looking goooooood," Reysha grabbed one of the fish off the plate and began juggling it between her hands as she waited for it to cool down a holdable degree. "Food, grilled fooood, grilled fissshhhh," the tiger girl didn't care that her enthusiasm for seafood reinforced some stereotypes against her people, she was just happy to sink her fangs into the meat.

The flavour exploded in her mouth like the rancid smell of a shoe that hadn't been taken off once during a seven-day march through a swamp being held right under her sensitive nose. Rather than the meat going down, she felt bile wanting to go up her throat as she quickly spat out the fish and threw it aside. "Bad one, probably spoiled," Reysha explained under the questioning gaze of her comrades, grabbing the next one.

Again, with much enthusiasm, she bit into it. This one tasted like some had taken rotten meat, ground it down, had fed a pig with nothing but it for its entire life until it died of food poisoning, taken that entire pig, let it decay until the meat grew eyes, ground that abomination down, repeated the process three times and then had thrown just a sprinkle of salt on it to make that little bit bearable. Reysha quickly threw that one aside as well.

The third one she only nibbled on carefully. Even that simple act caused her stomach to revolt. All the while the fish smelled fantastic, making her mouth water. The dissonance between taste and smell affected her balance to a degree and she sat down. "These fish taste like absolute ass," she stated.

"Apexus doesn't seem to mind," Aclysia pointed out, the slime had a strict policy of not wasting food. Even if it wasn't going to give him any Growths, there was no need to leave meat laying around. Cooked food, he decided, wasn't that bad actually. Raw was better, but not bad.

"He is a monster made of stomach acid that eats things whole, what the fuck would he know about taste," Reysha cussed, in a very bad mood due to her being both hungry and having that disgusting taste stuck in her mouth. Her tail whipped around in an angry frenzy.

Apexus took great offense to that, bolstering itself up like an animal ready to attack. In retort, Reysha hissed and lowered her posture, ready to pounce. "Control yourself!" Aclysia intervened, taking to the air between them. She was swiftly ignored as Reysha jumped on the slime.

She landed right on his back, grabbing both wings to pin him on the floor. It was a great strategy for everything that had a bone structure, but for a slime it didn't work, Apexus simply caving away under her leg and shaking violently. Its wings were much stronger than Reysha had given them credit for and they slipped from her grasp.

What followed was a succession of rolls, assaults and dodges over the stone floor, as Apexus followed right after her and tried to turn the situation around. She was much faster than him, however, and so it was a chase. Occasionally she would try to kick or scratch him, just as he tried to grab her ankles and immobilize her.

To say it was a messy fight was would have been an understatement. It was also, however, not a real one. Reysha's claws were retracted at any given time and despite numerous opportunities, Apexus never opened his membrane to let a foot or arm sink inside and begin dissolving it.

Not that that would have been a smart strategy. Sure, the acid burns would have been nasty, but Apexus was much more concerned about the damage that a perforation of its membrane from the inside presented. The point was, anyway, that this was a tumble, not an actual fight.

It eventually ended with Apexus as the winner by virtue of the terrain. Sharp pebbles cut into the exposed areas of Reysha's one-piece and the general hardness of the floor was suboptimal for rolling around. Breathing heavily, she eventually stopped resisting, letting Apexus spread over her as she watched with her blue-in-grey eyes.

"I give up, you have tastebuds," she announced and the slime retracted after turning his dominant pinning into something like an appreciative cuddle. Sitting straight, Reysha was almost immediately made the target of healing magic. Small cuts were covering the V-shaped cut-out on her back, ending just below the base of her tail and just above the start of her butt crack. "Those are just scratches, no need to bother," she told the healing fairy behind her.

"Scratches can still get infected, sit still," Aclysia demanded in a snappy tone. Now that her advice had been so brazenly ignored, all of them were in a bad mood. It slowly cooled down over the passing minutes, just like the discarded fish on the floor. Exactly like them, however, the awkward air eventually dissolved, although not inside Apexus' acid.

"Well, seems like I will go hungry for a bit," Reysha eventually declared, getting up as her wounds were healed. They continued their way south. Apexus wasn't strong enough to carry Reysha across the ocean, so they had to go with an alternative solution. Namely, the tiger girl had to take a boat back across. They idea was that they would escort her to the port, then fly over themselves and meet her back south of the town on the other site.

From there, they would make their way to Gizmo. Although Reysha wanted to leave this particular world, the idea of hanging around a slime, a fairy and an old man in the woods had made her giggle, so she had agreed to that plan for the time being. Interesting things were bound to happen if she did. Additionally, finding a group of adventurers was hard, so she might as well stay with this odd formation that worked. And she wanted to be fucked by those tentacles again. They were all equally good reasons as far as she was concerned.

A couple of hours later, they rested a second time. Apexus ate, Reysha found some more fish, this time trying them raw. While way more acceptable, it was still incredibly disgusting compared to what she remembered. It was odd, she had eaten these pond dwelling fish on the way and not run into any problems.

After a day of not having eaten a complete meal, Reysha forced herself, much to the revulsion of her stomach, to just eat one of them. Once she managed to get it down, it wasn't bad and she felt sated, but that didn't solve the problem of how excruciatingly vile the taste was. She may as well have drank a glass of pus as far as she was concerned.

On the third day of this, and with no signs of it getting better, she said in a scarily clear voice, "Something is incredibly wrong." Not only was all food and drink she got in her hands disgusting, but her urges were also at an all time low. She had always been a horny one and in the dungeon, it had been five-times worse, now she felt about as interested in sex as a widowed grandmother. That was despite her witnessing Apexus and Aclysia happily shagging a few hours earlier.

For the cause of her condition, it was obviously something that had happened inside the dungeon. Was it the length of her stay? All the stress she had been through rebounding? The meat? Now that she asked herself these questions, it was fairly obvious that it had be the meat. The urge to consume the flesh of the dungeon creatures had only grown worse with time.

She looked at her nails. The permanent red tinge to them had stopped growing in intensity. Same was true for the grey in her eyes. It was easy not to be worried about these things when all they had brought here were greater delight in eating and sex, but now the drawback of these things became apparent.

Aclysia flew over. "You attempted to warn me," Reysha noted.

"That I did," the metal fairy stated factually, not wanting to rub salt into the wound. "Be at ease, Gizmo knows a lot of things, so I am sure he knows about your condition as well."

Apexus hoped that was true, it had been hours since he had seen her smile even a little bit. Without that crazy grin on her face, Reysha looked about ready to let insanity take the reigns and that wouldn't be fun for anyone around when she finally exploded. That and it just seemed wrong. The slime liked seeing her happy.

He realized that he was invested in yet another person.

There would not be a time when Apexus would let anything like Aclysia's breaking happen ever again.

The way back was, aside from Reysha's ongoing condition, uneventful. Learning to work with her new sense of taste, the tiger girl soon managed to find things she could eat without feeling absolutely disgusted. Typically, that came in the shape of things that normally bordered on tasteless.

As such, she could drink water without a problem, so the most essential thing was already covered. For the solid food, she went for things like potatoes, bread or very long boiled and very watery soup. With a full stomach returned some of her good mood, but by far not all of it.

"I feel like a Monk," she joked as they made their way through the woods. "Except I am not starving myself for inner peace."

"I doubt that whatever you are doing can be considered starving yourself," Aclysia had to point out, turning around from her position on Apexus' back. "Your diet changed, not your eating habits."

"I stand by my point," Reysha insisted, giving a weak chuckle while she walked after the pair. They were on the last stretch through the forest. Apexus had found an unlucky deer on the way and was using its legs to wander this ground as he travelled upon it. He could have also used the spider legs, but those made him very wide and awkward to manoeuvre through the uneven spacing between trees. "So, we just find the guy?"

Aclysia nodded, she had answered the question before but the tiger girl kept being confused about it. "He states that the magic that guards his home will guide people to him, as long as they have a wish that he could fulfil."

"Sounds like a dumbass enchantment to put on his house," Reysha commented. "Who the fuck would want to be bothered every other day by strangers?" She would soon have the opportunity to ask that question herself, as they stepped through the barrier. As usual, it happened suddenly. The camouflage spell worked perfectly, one step there was nothing but more trees before them, the next there was a small house peeking out between the small ring of trees inside the barrier.

Rather than going up to the metal fence that surrounded the green spot within the forest, however, the group quickly crouched into what bushes they could find. There was a man standing at the fence, armoured from neck to toe with plate. A mixture of spear and staff was strapped to his back, a long, gnarly piece of wood ending in a pointy tipped crystal of a pinkish-red colouration.

He had dark hair, which he made sure still sat properly gelled back every other moment. The slime recognized that person as Hemle, the adventurer (or rather adventurer trainer) that had threatened to end his life to gain access to Aclysia months ago. Despite their vastly decreased size difference, Apexus didn't feel like he had any chance of taking that man on even now.

Lucky for them then that he stood with his back towards them when they entered. Crossing the barrier created a visual effect like a small lightning strike, but no sound. As long as they remained put and perfectly still, there was a chance for them to stay out of Hemle's attention. Only Reysha would have had any interest in revealing their position there, she knew who that man was and what his plans with Apexus were from before her self-exile. However, she stayed put.

The Battlemage was occupied with the old man on the other side of the protective fence anyhow. "You cannot lie to me," Hemle stated, they must have been in the middle of a conversation. "I am an instructor on this leaf, I know who you are and that the only way I could have found you is because you know about that slime I seek."

Gizmo glanced over to the bushes where the trio was hiding terribly. Unlike Hemle, he had been facing the new arrivals. As quickly as Gizmo's eyes moved on, the armoured man had no time to suspect something was off. "I see then... but this is a secret that is not mine to reveal, not even in re..." his words were cut-off by a sudden coughing fit.

Recognizing that tone, Apexus was filled with worry. Those weren't the dry and simple coughs that shook the man periodically due to his age, but the heavy and prolonged ones from his worst days, those where Gizmo was bedridden. From the cold sweat on the old man's face and the unhealthily pale complexion of his skin, it appeared that his condition had taken a turn for the much worse during the slime's absence. A wonder, in several ways, that his body just refused to stop its prolonged grasping at life.

"Look at you, Apotho, a husk," Hemle ridiculed, the ever present scowl on his face deepening, "A legend faded. Give me what I want and I will leave you alone to die."

"Die? Me?" a quiet question, one that the Battlemage with his human ears failed to pick up, but Apexus heard clearly enough in the calm forest. "What you seek I can only give you inside," the voice of the old man was still sickly, but a strange charisma was swinging underneath as well. He raised a quivering hand and gestured Hemle to step inside. Who hesitated. "Don't be afraid," it sounded more like a command than an assurance, "I am just a husk, am I not? What could I ever do to you."

"Right," Hemle grunted, as if enchanted. He climbed over the fence. An effortless gesture that every child could have executed, the metal construction failing completely in its apparent purpose. Plated feet came in contact with the grass floor, the armour cluttering. "Now show me-"

Quicker than a man of his age should have been able to move, the man known to Apexus as Gizmo closed the couple of steps between him and Hemle. His bony fingers reached up to the instructor's face, the only part of him with exposed skin, and grabbed as tightly as he could. The walking cane dropped into the grass behind him.

Hemle felt the cold hands encapsulate his head like death itself. A desperate attempt at shoving the old man back with one arm and grabbing his spear with the other didn't come to fruition. His body simply refused to move. The old man gave the grin of the wicked, his light blue eyes changing into a crimson red as the wrinkles around them began to disappear.

"I will NEVER die!" Apotho raised his voice. "No matter how often my body withers through time, no matter how much that fool on the surface wants to see us perish." Apexus watched in disgust as the unnatural display played out on front of him and the group. "As long as my spell keeps guiding your greed to me, I will always have more of you fools to consume!" Red energy flowed out of Hemle's and into Apotho's veins, all the way up to his face, until, rather suddenly, the plate armour collapsed into a pile of dust.

The man that stood now alone, kicking the steel in front of him with utter disappointment on his face, was still old. However, the age spots over his skin had clearly shrunk and so had the sickness. Picking up the mage staff, Apotho's chuckles slowly turned into a shocked sobbing.

"What did I... no, not again..." Gizmo stared at his hands, immediately dropping the staff he had just picked up. "Apexus... Apexus!" he turned towards the slime, who instinctively took a step back as the suddenly unknown person pressed his hands against a wall of green fire that connected with the metal bars in the ground through lines of energy. It had never been a fence to keep things out, always to keep this Warlock in. "I didn't mean to... please... please..." the red in his eyes, slowly fading without an energy source, flared up again, "Drag that other human in here, I need more power to break out this laughable prison!" Apotho grinned again, a strange, unnatural undertone in his voice, even as Gizmo's tears continued running, "The poison of the dungeons runs through her veins anyway."

Reysha's eyes widened in fear, not of Apexus, the slime wasn't making any indication that it would follow that order, but at the prospect of having what just happened to Hemle done to her. He had been one of the strongest people in the city, as far as she knew, and hadn't even put up a fight against this sick old man. "What do you mean?" the tiger girl asked, despite her fear.

"Your sclera is darkening and your fingernails are slowly turning red," Apotho listed, speaking like a superior to her and with the glee of the self-indulgent know-it-all. "Your senses were at an all time high, especially hunger and lust, but now that you left the dungeon and stopped feasting on its creations they are dulling immensely. You can't eat normal food anymore, as it fills your mouth with vile taste, but your senses let you know what deliciousness you are missing. You envy people indulging in their worldly desires, but cannot feel them yourself." His grin only grew wider, "You should be proud of yourself. Few possess the gluttony to even fuel this transformation. Most just die of the magic overdose. There is no cure, the rest of your life will be ashen and hollow," there it was again, that sweet authority in his voice, "so you might as well give up and give your lifeforce to me."