(Book 1 Complete!) Side Quest [Isekai / LitRPG]

Logan watched in dread as the onslaught of slimy threats approached, but when the torch slugs reached within a certain distance of the water, they stopped. He let his head slap into the shallow pool as he sighed in relief. The heat of the cavern was making him a little thirsty and while he considered taking a sip, he decided against it. Burning was one condition; poison might be another.

In the water's safety, he glanced at his HUD. Two health remained. A prompt had appeared as he evaded the slugs moments earlier, but he had dismissed it. He opened it now.

Congratulations! You have learned a new skill!
Running (Common), level 1!
+1 to Strength, +1 to Endurance
Sometimes walking just isn't fast enough! Flee, chase, or awkwardly jog your way to greatness.

Running is level 2!
Running is level 3!

Logan knuckled his brow. "Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?"

While waiting for his health to tick back to full, he timed his regeneration. It came out to about one point every thirty seconds.

Meanwhile, the slugs continued to gather. They piled over one another in a writhing mass, and at a glance, they looked like a single creature. Only the shifting rings of bioluminescence gave away their separate forms, each glow twisting in its own pattern.

He hadn't spent the time idly, though. While they had gathered into their tangled cluster, he had made some preparations of his own.

So much moss grew here, it entirely hid the stony walls in portions. The torch slugs charred none of it, the vegetation being so close to the water.

Analyzing the water did as little good as trying to Analyze the cave walls, and, disappointingly, the stalactites.

However, Logan's initial collapse into the water had chipped off the end of one stalagmite at the water's edge. Not for the first time in the past few minutes, he was grateful there had been no other stalagmites hidden in the pool he had so carelessly let himself collapse into. That would have been a stupidly spiky end to face after surviving the dumb torch slugs.

Curiously, he could Analyze the chipped fragment of the stalagmite, but not anything that was part of the cave's features itself. He figured landscapes weren't open to the power of his skill, but once a piece of the landscape became separate and quantifiable, the rule changed.

Name: Stone Fragment
Type: Environ
Lore: A chipped shard from a stalagmite. This stone is native to the Gnashridge Mountain Range. It's not particularly rare, nor particularly useful.

While the stone's information itself wasn't helpful, it gave him a location. This System had welcomed him to some place called the Fold, and Gnashridge sounded like a region within it. It might be a small part of the puzzle of where he was.

Picking up the stone, he tossed it in his palm twice, smirking up at the nefarious slugs. He drenched a handful of moss in the shallow pool and wound it around the stone's jagged tip. Water dripped from the sopping wet green growth entwined around his makeshift projectile.

"Say hello to my little friend," Logan said as he hurled it up at the nearest slug.

The slug's amorphous body recoiled at the strike, and steam fizzled in a violent hiss. The red undulation on the slug's body went dark.

When the stone fell to the ground within arm's reach, he quickly reclaimed it. Charred moss stuck to it, the slug's body having absorbed the weaponized water and then burning through the dried vegetation, but it had been worth it.

He prepared the stone with another clump of moss, dipped it in the water, and then tossed it up at the next slug over. It took two hits, but then he made contact. He smiled at the satisfying hiss.

Strike two.

His eyes extended down the corridor's length. With a sigh, he acknowledged he had quite a way to go.

After striking the third slug, though, he discovered two problems. First, the stone stayed embedded within the slug's slimy body, effectively denying him of his weapon. Second, while Logan waited beneath his target for his crafted projectile to fall free, his initial slug victim had reignited in as little as ten seconds. Logan suffered another fiery splatter as he returned to the shallow pool, and without his prized stone fragment.

"Damn," he muttered, sinking his shoulder into the water to extinguish the fiery goop and end its Burning affliction prematurely. He eyed slug number three, and, sure enough, his stone was still wedged into its body. From there, his eyes drifted to the rest of the stalagmites and stalactites.

From that time spelunking, he recalled his tour guide's words about how long it took these cave structures to form. Logan had shaken his head just as much as everybody else at the story of the people who had vandalized the caverns, chipping off ancient chunks here or there.

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"Sorry," he said to the nameless memory. Then he smashed free a handful of projectile stones off the cavern's spikes. When he engaged Analyze to make sure no overlooked stones sat beneath the shallow pool's surface, he noticed updated lore.

Name: Stone Fragment
Type: Environ
Lore: A chipped shard from a stalagmite. This stone is native to the Gnashridge Mountain Range. It's not particularly rare, nor particularly useful. But when it's lobbed at enemies… it still isn't that great.

Analyze is level 4!

He weighed the stone in his palm. "So, did I update that information about you, or did this esoteric System? Does lore look the same for everybody, or is it based on personal experience?"

Surely others besides him had thought to throw stones as weapons. And he could assume spelunking vandals existed in this world before him. But he also would never have known the name of the mountain range. Now he was hungry for more information.

"Gnashridge Mountain Range."

No answer.

"Information about Gnashridge Mountain Range."

The System kept silent after every variation of the question until he gave up and turned his attention to more immediate matters. A quick tally showed he had collected eighteen stone fragments. He meticulously wrapped each one in moss and submerged them all. As they soaked, he surveyed the path ahead.

At least forty slugs awaited him, and he had stones for eighteen. Assuming each hit struck true, he still wouldn't have enough to deal with them all, since the moss burned up after one attack and he wouldn't have time to keep running back to the pool without the slugs reigniting with their internal heat source.

Worst-case scenario, he estimated he could suffer four or five hits of the fiery goop before his health hit zero.

But do I really have to take on all forty of them?

The slugs weren't lined up single file. The next stretch of corridor was slightly wider than the previous one, too, but only by about a foot. Judging by how spread out the invertebrates were, and the fact they sometimes overlapped, he felt reasonably safe dividing the total number of slugs he really had to dodge by four. So in a cluster of forty slugs, if he ran along the wall, he should only had to deal with ten. Breaking the numbers down like that helped calm him. Janie would probably be shouting at him for not being more worried. But the thought of Janie shouting just reminded him of the shouts he had walked in on her with, so he shut that memory down.

He focused again on his odds. If a slug went dormant for 30 seconds with each successful hit, he could spare a little time beneath a silenced one to aim before running and diving to the next one. Yeah, this is fine.

Unfortunately, the meme that conjured in his mind was of a dog sitting in a house on fire. That probably wasn't the best imagery to fixate on.

There was also the matter of what to do when he got past this cluster and the cave rounded another corner. How many more waves of slugs would he encounter? Could he expect more watery havens to restock his weapons?

The ambient light seemed to taper off, though. But what would he do if he faced utter darkness? He supposed he could draw one slug out from the larger group and string it along to act as some sort of lighting mechanism if it came to that. I mean, the thing's called a torch slug.

Logan lifted the eighteen chunks of moss-covered stone and nestled them in the nook of his arm. "Well, here goes nothing." He pinched a handful of moss from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, at the ready.

With a steeling breath, he braced himself and hurled the first stone.

Strike. Dash!

Second one.

Strike. Dash!

His third and fourth missed, but the fifth landed true. The eighth was where he got a little concerned. Some slugs had gathered on top of one another, which he had already observed. But contrary to his expectations, just because his attack hit one slug, he still got splattered by a huge glop right on top of his head.

"Ach!" His skin blistered under the heat. A notification blinked in his vision, probably about being afflicted by Burning, but he didn't have time to check it. He still had eight stones, but he was only halfway through.

As he sheltered under the cooled body of his latest slug victim, he took aim for his next throw. But when he struck his target, it had no effect. "Huh?" He tossed another at it, but it just clumped to the ground, the moss singeing away before it even landed.

"Are you kidding?" He looked down at the stones in his hand. The drenched moss had dried, especially given the ambient heat in the air. "No time like the present."

He ducked into a full-on sprint as well as he could in a crouched position. He put as much power as he could into each lunge, trying to jump ahead and cover the greatest distance possible with each step.

The now-familiar view of layered icons blinked in quick succession, and Logan tried to growl at it. He didn't need a notification to tell him that his head was on fire; his scalp was letting him know just fine.

He stuffed his mouth full of moss and chewed, sucking frantically to soak in all the restorative juices from it.

In the mad dash, his shirt slid off his body as two different burned areas met in the middle. His skin wasn't faring much better, and his vision dimmed. Come on, just a little further!

Two more slugs remained for him to go under, and he feared he could only endure one more hit. Despite the stones having no more water logged in their moss, he hurled one at a slug. "I'm not going down without a fight, you slimeballs!"

To his surprise, the slug fell mid-air. At first, he had thought it was a final goopy attack to end him. But no, that was the slug itself. It still lived, but he had knocked it from its perch! It landed with a sickening whack, even as the second slug's flaming goop hit him. Logan's chest heaved as he jumped over the fallen slug.

Fortunately, the slugs could only drop the goop and not launch it upwards, so he sailed over the last enemy, safe from its aim. He skidded on freshly blistered skin, even as he crammed another fistful of moss into his mouth, chewing as fast as he could.

Health: 1/20
Stamina: 10/40

He gasped and scuttled backward until his spine pressed against the cave wall. He shimmied with his shoulder blades until he stood upright.

The fallen slug wriggled in discomfort. Its top (or bottom, considering that was the part that had clung to the ceiling) resembled three shapeless suction cups that puckered as if searching for something to grip.

He didn't have time to observe the gross creature's anatomy any further.

For the forty-some slugs he had just barely survived dashing under, another eighty wriggled their way toward him from the next corner. And in their flickering light, he caught a shadow of something huge and horned approaching.

I can't believe it... Slugged by slugs.

He swallowed hard and gripped one of his remaining stones in his blistered palm, squeezing it tight. If he could even take down another one or two of these things, he would be content.

He hocked a wad of spit riddled with blood, and it smacked against the stone. "Come at me."