Gauss froze for a moment.
Leaving aside the fact that they were still in the middle of a fight, this slime had vanished and launched its attack with incredible decisiveness just a second ago. And now, halfway through the battle, it was suddenly introducing itself?
Wasn't the order of operations a little off here?
The only explanation he could come up with was that monsters simply thought very differently from humans. Even if their intelligence had already reached human levels, they still lacked many of the concepts humans associated with shame, pride, and social decorum. Their thinking was far more direct.
Gauss kept his eyes locked on the surrounding area.
From those few brief exchanges, he had already figured out the pattern: if he disrupted the ambient mana in the area, the slime lord hidden within it would reveal traces of itself.
So all he needed to do now was roughly pinpoint the area it occupied, then use the same method to force it out again.
With that in mind, he sent out a stream of mental energy and continued speaking to the slime while secretly working on the next step.
"My name is Gauss."
Of course, that was just to distract it.
Just like he had no idea what the slime meant by suddenly reciting that absurdly long full name. For all he knew, it could also be trying to break his concentration while preparing something.
Suddenly, his sixth sense picked up an anomaly a short distance in front of him.
Without hesitation, the white staff in his hand spat out another storm of Magic Missiles.
Boom! Boom!
Violent magical force swallowed that entire area.
A vague figure flickered into view within the explosion.
But this time, Gauss didn't stop firing. The Magic Missiles continued launching in a relentless stream.
The instant that faint trace of the target appeared, Gauss used the fragment of world-rule power, Precision, within him to temporarily lock onto it.
The follow-up missiles poured toward that patch of air like a torrential storm.
The hidden presence moved rapidly once it realized it had been detected, but the missiles kept curving after it, constantly adjusting course.
Some were still dodged, but others struck the knot of energy merged into the ambient mana.
Boom! Boom!
The slime was forced back out of the environment.
Its soft, jelly-like body had changed again. Four mana-formed arms had grown out of its body, each coated in a hardened magical layer. Using its extraordinary control over its own flexible form, it continuously batted away the missiles it couldn't avoid, sending them flying off in every direction.
For a moment, Magic Missiles became like stray shots on a battlefield, exploding everywhere.
Perhaps because the slime's body was already so close to being pure mana, Gauss could feel that its control over magic was absurdly strong. It wasn't that its technical skill was exceptionally refined. Rather, it was an instinctive use of mana.
Like how most animals know how to breathe the moment they're born.
What would take extraordinary finesse for most creatures was, for this slime, apparently as natural as walking.
That was the cruel truth of talent. Some geniuses might spend their whole lives failing to grasp a high-level technique, while other beings were born with it.
"Human, you are very strong."
Even while fending off Gauss's flood-like assault, the slime could still split off enough attention to praise him.
"Thanks."
The mana in Gauss's hand grew even stronger.
Using the Magic Missiles as cover, he finished charging a more powerful spell.
"Dawn!"
This was one of only two Level 5 spells Gauss currently knew.
Unlike the bold, dominating force of Bigby's Hand, Dawn lacked wide attack coverage and flexibility. In exchange, anything caught within its range suffered far stronger damage from all directions at once.
From the start, Magic Missile had only been a feint. Gauss had never expected a spell with a Level 1 foundation to pose a serious threat to this abnormal creature. Even if his version far exceeded a normal Magic Missile in power, the underlying tier still mattered. Against truly powerful enemies, it could only serve as support.
A brilliant golden pillar of light came crashing down from above, instantly swallowing the still-shifting figure.
Hummm!
For that instant, time itself seemed to stop.
Blinding light burst outward from the pillar in every direction, immediately blinding every living thing exposed to it.
The monsters were affected even more strongly.
The radiance of Dawn naturally carried a measure of suppression against dark energies. Gauss's white staff amplified that effect as much as possible. Since the Red Dragon members already knew their commander possessed a flashbang-like blinding spell, the instant the light appeared they instinctively ducked their heads or threw themselves behind cover.
"Kill!"
Taking advantage of the fact that so many monsters had been scorched and blinded, the Red Dragon Company surged forward and cut down myconids by the dozens.
At the center of the light pillar, that purifying brilliance continued unabated.
Particles churned within it. Even microorganisms were not spared, and naturally neither was the slime.
When its body—so close to pure mana in nature—came into contact with that overwhelming light-attribute magic, it only resisted for a very brief instant before its structure began to collapse irreversibly.
Large portions of its bodily fluid were evaporated into base particles, and its mana began to disintegrate along with it.
Clearly, even the strongest gimmick-based monster still had to obey raw stats. If it couldn't withstand the attack, the only conclusion was that its numbers weren't high enough.
And the carefully prepared Level 5 Dawn Gauss had just landed directly on target definitely had enough numbers behind it.
Boom!!
Perhaps the slime lord's magical power was simply too strong, because an explosion actually erupted inside the light pillar itself.
"Not good."
Gauss narrowed his eyes.
From that violent eruption, he caught several strange things leaking out.
By instinct, he never treated anomalies like harmless noise.
And sure enough, several splashes of liquid that had escaped the pillar's range instantly began absorbing the surrounding natural mana, their auras climbing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
"So it's some kind of fusion of splitting and high-speed regeneration?"
Gauss couldn't help admiring it. Even as an enemy, he had to admit this slime was remarkable.
The pressure it gave him was nowhere near that of the transcendent mutant centaur king from Blackwater Town, but its survival methods and layered abilities were simply endless.
Extreme concealment. Elementalization. Mana hardening. Splitting. Rapid regeneration.
Any one of those abilities alone would have been enough to serve as the trump card of a lord-class monster. Yet this slime possessed all of them.
And even now, Gauss couldn't say for sure whether that was the full extent of its power. Ever since the battle began, it had kept revealing new talents.
"Human, you're terrifying. I almost died just now."
A calm voice sounded near Gauss.
He couldn't tell whether the slime was mocking him or sincerely expressing fear.
"But you're still alive."
Even though he hadn't managed to kill it in one strike, Gauss's expression stayed level.
He still had plenty of trump cards left, and unlike the slime, he wasn't just a mechanics monster—his raw numbers were utterly monstrous too.
If he deemed it necessary, he could unleash an outright overwhelming attack at any moment.
Still, he couldn't help feeling it was a bit of a shame. With talent like this, if this slime had been human instead of a monster, it might have become an extraordinarily powerful individual—perhaps even someone capable of climbing to the very top.
A few of the nearest split bodies finished regenerating and shot straight at Gauss.
Their bodies, reinforced by mana, exploded with terrifying speed.
"Dragonseed!"
Gauss unveiled his first true trump card.
An aura so dense it felt almost tangible surged from him. It was not the sort of presence any human should have possessed.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The dragon-heart in his chest began beating with slow, heavy force, pumping blood through his body at tremendous speed—dozens of cycles through his entire body in less than a blink.
It granted him even greater stamina and explosive power.
To anything watching, the feeling was unmistakable.
A dragon was awakening inside that man.
With Dragonseed fully activated, Gauss's golden eyes radiated such scorching spiritual pressure that anyone weaker meeting his gaze would have their eyes go white instantly, their minds blanked.
If they failed to look away in time, they could even be blinded or have their brains seared.
His armor became stronger too.
Though his size barely changed, his skin—already tougher than leather armor—was now enhanced severalfold by the Dragonseed power saturating it. And on top of that sat the energy dragon scales formed in conjunction with the Gauss Omni-Armor, creating a layered defense so formidable it was hard to imagine.
The three slime fragments charged in.
At this point, their appearance was no longer harmless or cute. They had begun to reveal their true form.
Especially through Gauss's dragon eyes, which could clearly see the essence of mana, he could sense that they were no longer holding back.
The slime before him no longer seemed small. It had fused with an enormous mass of natural mana, becoming like a clouded force where self and environment intermingled.
In fact, Gauss himself was effectively already standing inside that body.
"Bigby's Hand."
Gauss summoned the great silver hand that had already been waiting at his side.
"Guardian Palm!"
Bigby's Hand hardened instantly and wrapped around Gauss like a shield.
The three fragments extended branch-like piercing limbs and swallowed both Gauss and the Hand in a storm of strikes.
Every piercing blow was razor-sharp, carrying an overwhelming sense of absolute penetration.
Zzt! Zzt! Zzt!
The area within several kilometers trembled.
Far away, several adventuring parties who had followed the battle's noise to this place stared at the clash in stunned terror.
The moment they saw it, they stopped dead in place, all of them swallowing nervously.
Some of those with weaker nerves nearly collapsed where they stood, forced to brace themselves against the ground.
"This is power that only transcendent beings should possess…"
There were no true transcendent-level experts present, but that didn't mean they had no sense of the level above their own.
If they got dragged into the battle raging at the center, even their own company leaders would likely be gravely wounded—or killed—in an instant.
"I think we'd better not go any closer."
The leaders who had originally entertained the idea of offering "support" and then shamelessly taking a cut of the spoils now immediately backed off.
Adventurers never lacked courage.
But courage was not the same as suicidal stupidity.
That battle had long since surpassed anything they were capable of interfering in.
And if Gauss's battle hadn't happened to be unfolding here, then for some of them, this expedition into the labyrinth would have turned into a road to death.
Without Gauss, how were they supposed to deal with a creature like that?
Once they understood that, some of them even felt a little scared in retrospect.
Back at the battlefield's center, after the slime fragments' assault finally cooled, the heavily burdened mana-body began slowing down.
It was still a biological entity, after all. No matter how mana-based it had become, it was still constrained by a physical vessel.
When the spikes receded, Gauss was still standing perfectly unharmed inside Bigby's Hand.
Those unbelievably sharp attacks had broken through the first defensive layer of the Guardian Palm, then pierced the energy dragon scales, but finally they were stopped by the Moonlit Robe and Gauss's own skin.
Gauss smiled, satisfied. Part of the reason he had chosen to receive that attack had been to measure his own durability. If anything looked bad, he'd have used Any Door immediately.
After all, several layers of defense were more than enough to buy him the fractions of a second he needed.
But now it looked like compared to the slime's spear, his Gauss shield was still sturdier.
"Dawn!"
"Dawn!"
"…"
Gauss didn't waste the opening. The slime fragments had clearly just unleashed a major offensive, and their state had visibly dipped. He seized the moment and rained multiple Dawns onto them.
This time they were already at the end of their rope. They no longer had enough time to absorb more ambient mana to fully recover—and perhaps they had simply hit some internal limit.
Either way, after several blasts of Dawn, the fragments were finally completely annihilated.
The only thing Gauss found slightly disappointing was that destroying the fragments did not generate kill notifications in the Monster Index.
Apparently, the system recognized the slime lord as a single unit. That instantly extinguished a vague but tempting idea that had just begun forming in Gauss's mind.
Still, killing the fragments had not been meaningless. He could clearly feel that the main body's aura, somewhere in the distance, had weakened greatly.
Its power clearly came at a cost.
"Human… are you going to kill me?"
The slime sent another message.
"I think so."
Although he admired the slime's abilities, Gauss had come here to kill labyrinth monsters. He wasn't about to stop now.
The only thing that felt strange to him was that, hidden inside the slime's calm voice, he thought he sensed a faint excitement.
Was being killed really something to look forward to?
~~~
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