Paperwork, Rimuru had decided somewhere around his three hundredth signature of the day, was the one enemy that no amount of raw power had ever managed to defeat.
He sat behind his desk in Tempest’s great hall — technically a Demon Lord, technically ruler of an entire nation, technically capable of ending most threats in the Jura Forest with a thought if he actually felt like it — and stared down at a stack of trade agreements with the particular exhaustion of a man who would have traded every ounce of that power for a single uninterrupted afternoon.
“Rimuru-sama.” Rigurd’s voice, patient as ever.
“The Lubelius envoy is still waiting.” “I know, I know.
Give me one second.” Rimuru rubbed at his temple, which, as a slime who technically had no need for a physical body at all, was more habit than necessity at this point.
“Diablo, tell me something distracting before I actually lose it.” Diablo, lounging nearby with his usual unsettling calm, smiled the way he always did — pleasant, and faintly terrifying.
“Shall I dispose of the envoy for you, Rimuru-sama?
It would resolve the scheduling conflict rather efficiently.” “That’s not — no.
We’ve talked about this.
No disposing of diplomats.” “A shame.” It was, all things considered, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday in Tempest, right up until the air above the desk shimmered gold and a card that had absolutely no business existing in a room this heavily warded simply appeared, hovering there with the calm, patient confidence of something that had never once worried about being denied entry anywhere.
Shion, standing guard nearby, had her blade half-drawn before it finished materializing.
“An intruder?” “It doesn’t feel hostile,” Rimuru said slowly, extending a small tendril of Magic Sense toward it, cautious more out of habit than genuine alarm.
Whatever it was, it registered as neither weapon nor curse nor anything resembling an attack — just information, patient and waiting.
[Rimuru Tempest.
You are invited as a guest to Void City — a city at the center of all dimensions.
Here we have everything, and lack nothing.] Rimuru stared at the words for a long moment, then let out a slow breath that was almost a laugh.
“A city outside every world,” he murmured.
“Huh.” “You’re not actually considering this,” Benimaru said, arms crossed near the doorway, tone somewhere between disbelief and resignation.
He’d long since learned to expect exactly this kind of decision from his lord.
“I mean — yeah, obviously I’m considering it.” Rimuru picked the card up properly, turning it over with open curiosity.
“Look, I love this nation, I do, but I have been doing paperwork since sunrise, and this is very clearly an invitation to go somewhere that is not this desk.” “Rimuru-sama—” “Rigurd, buddy, I’ll be back before anyone notices I’m gone.
Probably.
Time works weird with this kind of thing, I’ve read about it.” He glanced at Diablo, who was watching the whole exchange with far too much interest.
“You’re in charge of not causing an international incident while I’m out.” “I make no promises,” Diablo said, delighted.
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Rimuru looked at the card one more time — here we have everything, and lack nothing — and accepted before the rest of him had even finished making the decision.
• • He crossed the bridge in his slime form, small and blue and entirely unbothered by the impossible sight of the void around him, having long since exhausted his own supply of things that could genuinely surprise him.
The welcome message settled in, the rules along with it, and Rimuru absorbed all of it with the mild, practiced patience of a man who had read considerably stranger terms of service in his old life.
The gate opened, and he rolled through it into the square, and it was there that his past life finally caught up with him.
He recognized Naruto first — loud, orange, arguing about something with a boy who had a scar on his forehead — and very nearly lost his form entirely from sheer surprise.
(That’s — no.
No way.
That’s Naruto.
Actual, real Naruto or cosplayer?
I read that manga in high school.) He recognized Robin a moment later, and Sanji, and felt something in his chest do a slow, disbelieving flip that had nothing to do with any power scaling whatsoever.
(And that’s — okay, that’s One Piece.
That’s actually One Piece.
I have so many questions and none of them are about magic.) He did not, notably, recognize Gojo at all, or Tanjiro, or the boy with the pink-haired girl on his shoulders, and filed that away with mild curiosity rather than concern — apparently his own reading habits had a cutoff point, same as everyone’s, and whatever came after it simply hadn’t made it to him before the knife did.
He was still processing all of this, quietly reeling in a way his slime body had no real way of showing, when he wandered toward the Exchange Center out of simple curiosity and found the crystal waiting.
• • The moment Rimuru stepped in front of it, the crystal’s light didn’t just gather.
It surged.
[Guest: Rimuru Tempest] The panel that unfolded wasn’t a short list.
It kept going — skill after skill, title after title, numbers climbing so fast that even the System itself seemed to hesitate partway through, recalculating, before finally settling on a total that made the air around the crystal hum audibly.
[Total Assessed Value — 4,820,000 Void Points.] Somewhere in the depths of the System’s architecture, something that functioned very much like enthusiasm kicked in.
[City-wide notification: new guest assessed value more than 4 million Void Points.] The message rippled out across every guest’s panel simultaneously, and Void City did exactly what Void City always did with the promise of something extraordinary — it ran toward it.
Guests poured into the square from every direction within minutes, food street included, half of them abandoning meals mid-bite.
Sheldon arrived first, breathless, muttering something about probability distributions.
Naruto and Harry came sprinting from District A.
Even Sakamoto arrived at a dignified, unhurried walk that somehow still got him there almost as fast as everyone else.
“A number that big,” Sheldon panted, “has to be a god.
It has to be.
Nothing else accounts for it.” “Definitely a god,” Naruto agreed, craning his neck over the crowd.
“Some kind of — I don’t know, cosmic being.
Ancient.
Terrifying.” The crowd parted enough to actually see the crystal, and the source of the number currently rewriting everyone’s understanding of the local economy.
A small blue slime sat on the platform, wobbling faintly, one single eye blinking up at the assembled crowd with open, apologetic bewilderment.
The silence that followed was profound.
“…That’s a slime,” Sheldon said, flatly, several long seconds later.
“That’s a slime,” Naruto agreed, equally flat.
Rimuru said, in a small, slightly embarrassed voice.
“Hi.” • • Ari felt the notification land somewhere behind her sternum with the particular force of a woman whose entire soul had just been personally addressed.
She had not moved this fast in her entire afterlife.
She teleported directly to the crystal’s platform, materializing in front of the small blue slime with an expression that had abandoned every trace of her usual laziness entirely, replaced instead by the wide, delighted, slightly unhinged focus of a woman who had just found the single greatest thing she had ever seen.
“Oh my god,” Ari said, scooping Rimuru up in both hands before he could so much as protest.
“Oh my god, you’re so squishy.” “I — yes, that is generally accurate, I’m a—” “You’re SO SQUISHY.” She squeezed, gently, delighted at the way he compressed and reformed beneath her palms.
“Look at this.
Look at what this is.
This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” “Please be gentle, I do still have organs, functionally speaking—” Ari was not listening.
She had progressed to bouncing him lightly between both hands, poking one experimental finger into his center and watching, entranced, as it sank in and popped back out again.
“Do that again,” she said, to herself, and did it again herself instead of waiting.
Gojo, arriving a beat later and taking in the scene with visible, mounting horror, pointed one accusing finger at the whole display.
“Okay, hold on, HOLD ON.
She’s held me for exactly zero seconds combined and this slime gets cradled?” “I’m four point eight million points,” Rimuru offered helpfully, still being gently squished.
“That might be a factor.” “That’s not fair.
That’s not a fair factor.” Levi, arms crossed a short distance away, watched Ari coo over the slime with a flat, deeply unimpressed stare that somehow radiated more jealousy than either of the other two combined despite not moving a single muscle in his face.
“Tch,” he said, to no one, and said nothing further, which everyone present understood to be considerably worse than shouting.
Sanji had, by this point, entirely abandoned his usual composure.
“I offer her chairs.
I offer her parfait.
This thing offers texture, and somehow that’s what wins?” “Texture is very underrated,” Ari said, entirely serious, still poking.
“Do it again.
The thing where you go flat.” Rimuru, caught somewhere between mild alarm and the dawning realization that resistance was, at this point, entirely futile, obligingly flattened himself into a small blue puddle across her palm.
Ari made a sound that could only be described as a squeal, which absolutely nobody present had ever heard her make before, about anything.
“I’m keeping him,” she announced, to the entire square, cradling the now-puddled Rimuru against her chest with the fierce, unshakeable possessiveness of a woman who had just adopted a very expensive pet.
“Nobody argue with me about this.” Nobody argued.
Gojo tried anyway.
“I would just like it noted, for the record, that I have also been very squishy, metaphorically, in an emotional sense, and nobody has ever once—” “Nobody cares,” Levi said.
“You don’t get to say that, you’re jealous too!” “I am not.” “You’ve been standing there radiating murder for two full minutes.” “That’s just my face.” • • Somewhere in the depths of its own architecture, the System had been watching all of this with a mounting, deeply undignified sense of grievance.
It had, after all, spent considerable effort compiling that four-point-eight-million valuation.
It had recalculated twice, for accuracy.
And it was being roundly, thoroughly ignored in favor of a slime getting squished.
[City-wide announcement.] Every panel in Void City chimed at once.
[Fun fact regarding Guest Rimuru Tempest: prior to reincarnation, subject was a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried Japanese salaryman named Satoru Mikami.
Bachelor status: confirmed, decades-long, uninterrupted.] The square went very quiet.
“…System,” Rimuru said, muffled slightly by still being partially puddled across Ari’s palm, voice climbing with real, genuine betrayal.
“System.
Why would you say that.
To everyone.
At once.” [The System felt it was relevant context, guest.] “It was NOT relevant context, it was petty, that’s what that was, that was a jealous, petty—” Gojo had already recovered from his own sulking with alarming speed, delighted by this sudden turn of fortune.
“Wait, hold on.
Thirty-seven.
Unmarried.
No girlfriend, ever, in thirty-seven years?” “That is an oversimplification of a complex—” “That’s not a no.” “It’s — okay, it’s technically not a no, but there’s context, I was busy, I had a career—” “Old man slime,” Naruto said, delighted, testing the phrase out loud like he intended to use it forever now.
“Old.
Man.
Slime.” “I am a few dozen years past caring what a child calls me, but I would like that on the record as deeply unfair.” • • Mary and Ai arrived at the edge of the crowd just in time to catch the tail end of the announcement, and exchanged a single, meaningful glance that required no further discussion between them.
“Ari-sama,” Mary said, carefully, “I feel compelled to point out — however squishy he currently is — that this is, underneath it all, still an old man.” “A very old, very single old man,” Ai added, with the flat, unimpressed disdain she reserved exclusively for suitors she’d already decided weren’t worth the trouble.
“He’s blue,” Ari said, entirely unbothered, still gently reshaping Rimuru’s puddled form with one finger.
“And squishy.
Those are the only two facts I currently care about.” “Perhaps,” Mary said, undeterred, “next time, we simply purchase an actual slime from the shop.
One without decades of unresolved bachelor context attached.” “A real slime,” Ai agreed.
“Simpler.
No opinions.
No tragic backstory.” “That seems needlessly cruel to me specifically,” Rimuru said, from somewhere in the general vicinity of Ari’s palm.
Gojo, Levi, and Sanji had, by this point, drifted into an unlikely and entirely temporary alliance at the edge of the group, watching Mary and Ai’s campaign with the dawning, gleeful realization that they had, for once, acquired backup.
“See, THAT’S the energy I’ve been looking for,” Gojo said, delighted.
“Solidarity.
Someone’s finally making sense.” “An old man slime,” Levi said, with something that might, on another man, have qualified as satisfaction.
“Tch.
Fitting.” Sanji simply nodded along, arms crossed, thoroughly vindicated.
Rimuru, caught in the middle of all of it, still cradled against Ari’s chest and still squished at semi-regular intervals, found himself briefly, genuinely bewildered by an entirely different problem than any of this.
(Wait.
Wait, hold on.) He reached, carefully, for Great Sage — for Raphael, for the vast analytical presence that had never once failed to parse a threat, a person, a situation down to its component parts within a fraction of a second — and found, for possibly the first time since his reincarnation, absolutely nothing useful waiting for him.
How did that System know my human name.
My actual name.
From my actual life.
I never told anyone here that.
I barely told anyone back home.
[Query acknowledged.
The System operates on a scale your own systems are not currently equipped to measure, guest.
Comparisons are not recommended.] Rimuru went very, very still.
(…Right,) he thought, faintly, some deep and rarely-touched part of him recalibrating his entire understanding of where he currently stood in the universe.
(Okay.
Noted.
This is a whole different category of terrifying.) Nobody around him noticed.
They were still arguing about slimes.
Ari, entirely unbothered by any of it, sat down cross-legged right there in the square with Rimuru still cradled in both hands, and began, with great and evident satisfaction, poking him at regular, rhythmic intervals.
“So,” she said, to the slime, without looking up at the three increasingly offended men now standing around her.
“Tell me everything.
Start with how squishy you can actually get.” “That is not remotely the question I expected to be asked first,” Rimuru said, faintly.
“It’s the only question that matters.”