Slimes Can Kill People Too

After leaving the Adventurer's Guild, Mel headed straight for the market. If there were any country folk who had entered the city last night, he could travel to the quest location with them today.

From the map, he learned that the place was not very far away. It was just that along one of the roads back, slimes had appeared because of a nearby river.

The weapons he had on him now were a dagger and a knife. He would prioritize using the knife; it had more reach. He also did not know how different these slimes would be from the ones in the game.

In games, mobs like these went down in two slashes.

[Mighty Slash] Proficiency 800/10000

[Stealing] Proficiency 505/10000

[Back Hop] Proficiency 3801/10000

These three skills needed to be his primary training targets. He also had to be frugal with his points. Once proficiency was maxed out, he could no longer gain effort points through training.

[Thrust], [Rising Uppercut], and [Cutting] were all still at proficiency 1. He could pick another one to train when he had time later, since they were all upper-body skills.

[Throwing Blade] Elite (Purple): precision, penetration, and of course, the rapid throwing he had developed through training. That was not included in the skill description; it was technique accumulated through real-world practice.

[Assassin's Breathing Technique] Master (Gold): Move Release. It was very useful for concealment in combat. If he learned a thief's stealth skill later, it should produce excellent results.

[Dagger Attack] Elite (Purple): double damage. This only boosted dagger-type weapons. If a thief advanced into an assassin, it could achieve a very high damage conversion rate.

Skills, weapons and equipment, and potions all used the same color scheme, though their labels differed slightly.

Quality: White, Green, Purple, Gold, Red.

White—ordinary, no grade (Apprentice); Green—good quality (Proficient); Purple—excellent (Elite); Gold—rare (Master); Red—divine artifact (Legendary).

Mel Carlo had already recorded all of this in his notes. Its actual viability would still need testing. As for crafting equipment, he could not obtain the materials required by those recipes anytime soon.

"Effort points: 91. That's a little miserable." Mel Carlo analyzed as he walked, only stopping when he reached the market.

Sure enough, some farmers had already packed up their carts. It was clear they had slept inside them last night. The weather here was much more pleasant than in the north, but the nights were still quite cold.

Mel Carlo approached a farmer. "Hello, may I ask which nearby village has slimes appearing around it?"

The farmer scratched his head and looked Mel over. Mel's thin linen clothes were much the same as his own, which put him at ease. "They're all around here. The monsters have been getting a little out of hand lately. Even bringing grain and vegetables into the city to sell has become much more troublesome."

"May I travel with you? I'm from the Adventurer's Guild, sent to deal with the slimes."

"Kid, you're not joking, are you? You look about the same age as my son. Can you really deal with slimes? Though ordinary people like us can handle them too, it's a bit troublesome, so we generally avoid them."

"Sir, please trust me. Let me give it a try first." Mel spoke sincerely. He was a newcomer here, after all, and no one knew him. Adventurers with even slightly higher levels would not take slime commissions.

The farmer thought for a moment before finally rolling up his sleeves. "All right, get on. Come with us, and I'll let you off when we reach the place. Kid, you need to watch your safety. Slimes can kill people too."

"Okay, thank you." Mel Carlo quickly climbed aboard.

But his attention remained on the slimes. Slimes could kill people? In every work he had seen, slimes were soft, bouncy monsters with barely any offensive power.

Unless someone had reincarnated as a slime, then gone completely overpowered and become some "Slime Overlord."

But with his wits, if he really saw something like that, he would probably run while it was still eight hundred meters away.

"Sir, could you tell me why slimes can kill people? How exactly do they kill?"

Information. What he needed most now was more information. If demonkind was truly so easy to deal with, why did these ordinary level-one people not just take up hoes and wipe out all the slimes?

Looking at his own level, he was only level one as well. He did not know whether killing someone last time had not given enough experience to level up, or whether killing people gave no experience at all.

The cart rumbled out of the city. It was just an ordinary horse pulling an ordinary cart, though the horse's hooves had been fitted with horseshoes.

Based on the game's setting, this was closer to a medieval otherworld fantasy adventure. Yet many of its elements were not so medieval. Take the hidden Gunslinger class, for example—it felt like a modern invention, yet the game described it as ancient technology.

He could only slowly learn everything for himself. If he did not verify the knowledge he had gained from the game, it would only become something that misled him.

If someone transmigrated here and simply assumed he had entered the game world, he probably would not live long. Game settings were one-sided and shallow, designed to serve gameplay, while the real world was far more complex.

Over all this time, what Mel Carlo found most faithful to the game was combat. Even without the support system, the feel he had gained from hundreds upon hundreds of practices was real. Rather than being carved into muscle memory, those techniques felt engraved into his soul.

The main limitation was still his physical ability. This childish body was far too different from the adult body of the game character he had once played.

As the cart slowly swayed along, he listened to the farmer explain the dangers of slimes. They would leap up and ram people. If one was careless, it could knock them to the ground, causing their head to strike a rock or a tree.

Once someone passed out, the slime would cover the victim's breathing passages and suffocate them to death. The digestion process was relatively slow.

But there was also a rarer kind of slime: the Acid Slime. That kind could corrode blades, and ordinary methods simply could not kill or capture it.

Listening to this, Mel Carlo noticed some similarities to the game. Acid Slimes were rare monsters in the game; they spawned by chance rather than appearing at fixed locations.

In the game, if he wanted to avoid losing weapon durability, he needed an item: Wood Ash. He could find a way to make some himself.

Before long, they arrived at a small road leading toward a village. Beside it stretched broad grasslands and a small patch of forest. A stream flowed out of the woods, crossed the grassland, and eventually joined the river.

"Kid, it should be around here. Watch yourself. I need to head back to the village."

"Okay, thank you, sir." Mel did not hesitate before quickly jumping down from the cart.

The surroundings were pleasant, and there were barely any monsters in sight. Perhaps they were hiding deep in the stream or in the bushes beside the grass, which was why they were not so easy to spot.