At least his main self didn't.
All the rest of 'Him' did as it always did, not a moment of pause despite their administrator's worries.
Of course more slime apostle 2 prototypes were being produced, one or two
It felt strange doing nothing, he didn't like doing nothing. He always did something, and he was indeed doing something, he was thinking. But was that really doing 'Something'?
It didn't feel like it, but it also felt like it was.
But he could do nothing about it- He could, actually- Nothing else seemed worth doing right now.
He needed some way to make sentients go away, how or why didn't matter. Fear had been proven to work; kill enough sentients and they would flee like the pressurized wind. But it also seemed volatile, proven by the hunt of slime apostle 1, what would happen when the herald of all slime returned was still in question.
Though, luckily for the somewhat intelligent thing he felt no need to answer said question.
It would be fine if a monster of his became the target, but who knew if it would cause more dangerous sentients to appear just like his advancement to [Uncommon] had? He didn't, but he did have one or two uneducated guesses.
And all of them led to less than pleasant conclusions, some far worse than the other.
It could be possible that- Seeing from the conflict that had spurred his current state- That above ground sentients roamed, doing their own thing and entering his recesses for essence or something equivalent to it. That they had a reason to enter, and the moment that reason was gone they would stop doing so. But that lead to the idea that they were after his core, or something else far deeper in his dungeon.
Or the realm above his own could also be an endless well spring of sentients where they would interact and do their things above ground before going under ground to slay him.
Or- The most worrisome of the bunch- The land above was a dungeon itself, or at least the sentient equivalent of one. Dead set on felling him to maybe jump in rank, or whatever other reason. But then why did the two sentients fight? To intimidate him? Probably not, he was plenty intimidated from the few new essence generators revealed before. Maybe sentients could get stronger by killing other sentients like how monsters could?
At least the worst of them seemed the least likely considering recent sentient behavior, though there were other theories that he could not prove.
If he knew what drove sentients, why they took such keen interest in slime nuclei, why they fought, why they did what they did. If he knew how they ticked, if he knew their weaknesses both big and small, he could focus on them. Target them as directly as he possibly could, put acid in an already gaping wound.
But he didn't have time for weaknesses, he needed power. Some kind of monster that could either take one or two blows or another that could bypass whatever protective measures a sentient had set. As long as one could get by whatever barrier or redirecting method was around, it should be easy to take down one or two sentients. From what he could see, the few with barriers and the like didn't even try to evade.
Which meant if something could bypass it, they wouldn't evade and would easily be dealt with or at least end up with some significant injury.
But there was also the problem of sentients that evaded any shot acid or could endure even D-7 acid with mere acid burns.
The former was easily reduced to a non-issue with enough acid, but the latter would probably require some kind of D-10 acid or something.
'Or maybe wind-earth acid? It's shot out as more of a spray than a singular blob so it might be less effective against that weird air force barrier, but it is far more powerful. It could probably do a lot of damage if it was made of D-7 wind-earth mana, probably... It could work.' The thought seemed pretty solid to Falc, in all honesty.
While it wouldn't exactly work much better against the slippery sentient variants, the more hearty of them would regret charging straight ahead into his wind-earth machinations!
But that wasn't what he needed right now, he needed a way to put down the barrier sentients. Both the evaders and the endurers could easily be snuffled out with enough acid, but those damn barrier sentients... Maybe he could end them with enough acid?
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It wasn't as if barrier sentients directly turned the acid created by
But then, if all problematic sentients could be dealt with by merely invoking the ancient art of quantity over quality, wouldn't that mean there was no problem at all?
...No, the problem was that the slime to acid ratio was far too small to actually take advantage of the pure volume method.
But then, how would he pierce through the barriers? The sentients used enough power to pierce through stone with their metal implements, if he could produce enough force then maybe it could pierce through their barriers. Though he did question whether that would work on that sentient with the weird redirecting barrier, from what he could see the acid that had drifted from its original course were not faced with any outside force.
If he couldn't understand how that barrier worked, if he couldn't understand even its most simple principles, how could he be sure something would work against it? He needed something that didn't have to travel through whatever strange barriers there were, something that would just directly reduce the life of a sentient to nothing.
But what could do that? There was no way a slime of all things could do something like that, so then, how would he do it? A new skill maybe? Well, no, he didn't have time to once again scour the skill list for more skills... It felt like he was forgetting something.
Something with a weird rarity he didn't know, direct-something... Uhhh,
He didn't know what it would do exactly, he didn't know what 'Spell-casting' was. But he did know what 'Direct' meant, and it was a core skill. So if he had it, it would probably mean he could, himself, make use of 'Spell-casting'. If so, then it wasn't an impossibility for him to take action himself?
If so, if so... What did he know that could cause a lot of damage to something? Well, obviously, wind-earth mana. It actively reduced anything it neared into dust on its own initiative, something he had never seen mana do. Normal aspected mana didn't do that, it just dispersed peacefully after being freed.
If it could so easily do that just by being in the presence of stone...
...
...
What if he put some wind-earth mana on a sentient?
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
Ignoring the sudden spike of instincts' mad tantrums- Even partially taking them as a sign that he was on the right track- He took some mana and formed a total of 15 mp of wind-earth mana. As always it raged against his rule, but was that because it wanted to be free or because it was just active?
It didn't really matter,
Anyways, despite whatever wind-earth mana wanted to do it was still dragged to the stone and he actively let go of it. And as one would expect, it was actually much easier to give it freedom than normal mana. Mostly because the mana did all the work for him, finally letting him see the positives of unruly mana.
It even started to eat through the floor in rapid fashion like last time 'There's so much potential in this! How did I not realize it before!?'
He created some more wind-earth mana, once again realizing why rebellious mana was annoying. He took a moment to look at the mana, then at a few sentients before falling into though for a bit of time.
After he finally finished his contemplation, he pressed down on the wind-earth mana. With all the self he had available to dictate its future, he compressed the mana.
Then, he once again tested it on the floor of the slime plains. And seeing it take even more violent effect, actively dispersing around where he had left it. Constantly moving with chaotic manner, the compressed wind-earth mana showed why wind-earth mana was the most volatile and powerful type of mana under his belt.
Seeing it run rampant, Falc couldn't help but laugh mentally. Just imagining placing some next to a sentient... The intensifying whining from his instincts even confirmed that he was correct!
He made some more wind-earth mana, actually quite a bit of it, 30 mp which was then compressed to D-1 with the volume of 8 mp. Then he repeated until he had 30 mp of D-1 wind-earth mana before then carrying it along to a group of weaker sentients. If he really wanted to, then he could probably bring them down with slime apostle 2 prototypes, but he didn't find it that important to do so for weaklings like them.
They were just victims for his experiment, and they should feel proud to be his labrats- If they could feel pride, Falc still wasn't exactly sure whether they had emotions.
With a highly metaphorical- Or crystaline- Heart filled with hope and incomprehensible amounts of joy, he dragged his hand-made wind-earth to its destined recipient.
But... It didn't move.
NO! NO! NO! STOP! STOP! STOP!
At an intensity far higher than when he had been forced to reach the ground above, his instincts screamed at metaphorically deafening volume. Even with Falc's greater mental capabilities, he couldn't force his way through his instincts' protests, no matter how hard he tried the wind-earth mana slowly stopped in its tracks as it neared the sentients he had determined as his victims.
Unable to ignore his instincts once again disparaging his peaceful life, first forcing him to introduce sentients to his halls and now stopping him from expelling them with ease, he felt something rise within him. A certain... Something.
He looked at the wind-earth mana in his grasp and then at the wind-earth mana that had torn through his nice stone floor, at how it had run rampant. And then, let go of the mana despite his instincts' wishes. At least, he tried to, and failed. His instincts forced his self to keep it in line, even while he himself tried to free the thing.
And so, instincts and core tussled in the mental arena.
The ignorant sentients which didn't even know that death was looming over them not even thanking instincts for their help in saving their pitiful little lives.
What will come about from this conflict?