He stayed in the crouch for a full minute just watching them.
The practical problem was immediate and obvious. His spear was a pointed stick with a bone tip and these things had no organs, no skeleton, no throat to cut or chest to drive something through. The entire design philosophy of his current weapon set assumed a target with conventional biology and slimes had made a deliberate architectural choice to abandon that framework entirely.
He stood up slowly.
The nearest slime pulsed. Its surface shifted, the blue-green light inside it brightening briefly and then settling. It did not move toward him. It did not move away. It simply existed in his direction with the calm of something that had never needed to develop an opinion about threats.
He threw the spear anyway.
It went through the slime, through the middle of it, and came out the other side and stuck in the earth behind it. The slime's mass parted around the shaft and closed behind it like water. The slime pulsed once and continued existing. There was no indication that it had registered this as an attack rather than a minor inconvenience.
He retrieved the spear.
There was a faint residue on the bone tip that he did not touch with his fingers, a slightly luminescent film that he wiped on the earth until the tip looked clean. He stood back and looked at the three of them and they looked back at him with the collective intelligence of things that did not need to be concerned.
He picked up a rock.
The rock connected with the nearest slime and the result was more promising than the spear in the sense that something happened. The slime's mass compressed under the impact and scattered outward in a spray of luminescent gel that hit the surrounding roots and earth and his left forearm.
His left forearm went numb from the wrist to the elbow instantly.
He shook it. The numbness didn't shift. He looked at the gel on his skin, the faint blue-green of it already fading, and filed this information under important and moved back two steps. The feeling came back over the next thirty seconds in the specific pins and needles way that suggested electricity rather than venom.
The scattered slime was already pulling itself back together.
"Of course it is," he said.
He scattered it twice more with rocks before accepting that scattering was a temporary condition and not a solution. The slime reformed each time with the patient certainty of something that had evolved specifically to make rocks useless. The other two had not moved. They were watching, if watching was something slimes did, with complete composure.
He stood there and thought about what he knew and what he had.
He had fire. Fire was back at the cave which was a meaningful distance away but fire was what he had that he hadn't tried yet and the logic was sound. Lightning and fire were not friends. They operated on opposite principles and the slime's clear aversion to having its mass disrupted suggested that anything capable of disrupting it more permanently than a rock might actually work.
He looked at the three slimes.
He looked at the forest between him and the cave.
He jogged back.
He returned with a branch he had lit from the fire pit, its end burning with a flame he had kept alive by holding it angled down and moving fast enough to feed it air. The slimes had not moved. He stood at the same distance as before and looked at the burning branch and then at the nearest slime and then threw the branch directly at it.
The effect was not subtle.
The slime the branch landed on contracted violently, its mass pulling inward in a way that looked involuntary and painful if slimes experienced pain, the blue-green light inside it going white and then very bright and then the whole thing came apart in a crack of electricity that he felt in his back teeth and a flash that left a shape in his vision for several seconds afterward.
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The other two moved. Toward him.
He grabbed the burning branch from the ground where it had landed after the first slime and swung it at the second one and the result was the same, contraction, white light, the crack of electricity, the smell of ozone sharp and clean in the forest air. The third one reached him before he could reset and hit his leg with its mass and the numbness climbed from his ankle to his hip in one cold instant and he went down on one knee.
He drove the burning end of the branch into the slime from above with both hands behind it.
The crack this time was loud enough to echo off the trees.
He knelt on the forest floor for a moment in the silence that followed, his right leg numb from hip to foot, the branch still smoking in his hand, three patches of scorched earth where the slimes had been. The ozone smell was everywhere. Small blue-green sparks died in the air around him like the last of something going out.
The feeling came back into his leg.
He sat there until it did and then collected what remained of the slimes in the largest leaves he could find nearby, folding them carefully and tying them with vine, not touching the contents directly. He carried the packages back to the cave with the focused care of a man transporting something he did not fully understand.
He built the fire up higher than usual and cooked the slime mass on flat stones beside the flames rather than on sticks over them, because the consistency of what he was working with did not cooperate with the stick method. It changed under heat, becoming less translucent, the blue-green deepening and then settling into something that looked approximately like food if you were willing to stretch the definition.
He looked at it on the flat stone.
He looked at the forest.
He ate it.
The taste was nothing like meat. It was nothing like anything. It was the taste of a battery if a battery could be consumed, metallic and sharp and immediate, sitting on the back of his tongue with the assertive quality of something that knew exactly what it was doing. He ate all three portions without stopping because stopping would have involved thinking about the taste for longer than he wanted to.
He set the leaf plate down.
He waited.
The seizure when it came was not like the others.
The rabbit had rebuilt him over days. The reindeer had been brief and efficient. This was immediate and total and operating on a completely different set of instructions. The shaking started in his hands the way it always did and then the shaking stopped being shaking and became something else, his muscles contracting and releasing in rapid sequence, his body rigid and then not rigid and then rigid again, and the light behind his eyes was not red this time but white and absolute.
Then the lightning came out of him.
Not metaphorically. Not as a sensation. It came out of his skin in actual visible arcs, jumping from his hands to the ground, from his shoulders to the tree trunk beside the cave entrance, the crack of each discharge sharp and small and continuous, his body cycling through whatever the slimes had put into him and venting the excess in every direction at once. The grass near his hands blackened. The tree trunk beside him collected a series of small char marks at shoulder height.
He could not move and he could not speak and the lightning kept going and he watched it happen from inside his own body with the specific helplessness of a passenger.
It stopped.
All of it stopped at once, the way the others had stopped, a complete cessation with no tapering. He lay on his back outside the cave entrance looking up at the canopy and breathed and did not move anything voluntarily for a full minute.
Then he sat up.
He held his right hand in front of his face and looked at it. Nothing visible. Ordinary hand. He concentrated on nothing in particular and felt something respond, a charge that lived under his skin now like a current that had found a home, present and available and waiting.
A small arc jumped between his index finger and his thumb.
He stared at it.
He did it again deliberately. The arc was thin and blue-white and lasted less than a second and the crack it made was small and the smell of ozone rose from his hand like a signature.
He stood up and looked at the char marks on the tree trunk beside the cave. He looked at the blackened grass near where his hands had been. He looked at the forest, the ancient grey trees, the canopy filtering the last of the evening light down in shafts that had nothing to do with him.
He raised his right hand and concentrated and the arc that jumped from his fingers to the nearest tree trunk was larger than the one between his thumb and finger and left a mark in the bark and the crack of it rolled outward through the quiet forest and died somewhere in the distance between the trees.
He lowered his hand.
He thought about the rabbit. He thought about the reindeer. He thought about what he was accumulating, what he was becoming in this forest one dead creature at a time, and he thought about the fact that he had been here alone for weeks with no system, no guide, no chosen one speech, just a cave and a river and whatever he could kill with rocks tied to sticks.
A small arc ran across his knuckles uninvited and he shook his hand and it stopped.
He was going to need to learn to control that.
He sat back down by the fire and watched the trees go dark and held his hands in his lap and felt the current move through him like something that had always been there, waiting for the right conditions, and thought about what else was out there in this forest that he hadn't eaten yet.
He was still hungry.