Bang!

The four-legged dragon took a pillar.

Bang!

The four-legged dragon took another pillar.

Bang!

The four-legged dragon took a third.

It went down on the hillside, hauled itself up, and circled the spherical Slime without daring to press an attack again.

The spherical Slime's combat power came close to knocking Shen Cong's eyes out of his head. A minute ago he'd still been reckoning the thing a combat-zero, nothing but a mass of feeble jin fungi stuck together that he could wipe out in a couple of minutes. And now, right now, the spherical Slime's combat power was off the scale entirely.

It didn't fear being hit. The four-legged dragon's jin-core claws came down on its body and opened enormous wounds, and it squirmed itself whole again without effort.

Then the spherical body would swell a black pillar out of itself, and the sheer force of the impact left the four-legged dragon covered in lumps. However furious the four-legged dragon got, however savage its attacks, it couldn't take the spherical Slime apart. Never mind that the Slime's defense had risen enormously since it inflated itself.

Even the pieces cut off it could get back onto its body fast and restore themselves.

The jin-core arrows Shen Cong loosed were more useless still — the spherical Slime simply wrapped them into its body and took not a scratch. And Shen Cong was unwilling to use Mushroom Arrows. Even a landlord's household runs short of grain; his mushroom spores were limited, every one he used was one gone, and they had to be saved for the critical moment.

For a while neither Shen Cong nor the four-legged dragon had any idea what to do with the spherical Slime.

The spherical Slime rolled around the cave mouth, drawing in all those small pieces of Slime that his pressure aura had pinned motionless, and inflated again — more than double the size it had been.

An oval spherical Slime pushing a hundred and fifty meters across, its whole body glittering with black metallic sheen.

Chasing Shen Cong and the four-legged dragon, running circles around…