I was kept especially far back from combat in the second wave of enemies to preserve my suit, simply emptying my remaining two sets of ammo into oversized slime bodies with Emilia at the sides before the others moved in to melee.
They actually made the joke that it was to keep my suit dry.
All jokes aside, I actually had a newfound appreciation for the group because Fred had actually offered me his proto-suit to wear over my own. Despite the size difference, his suit would at least help preserve my arms and legs and his suit were replaced for free at E rank. However, I politely refused the offer.
When the others had finished cleaning up the remaining upper E slimes that were what I had previously seen as a group of goblin and slime 'boss group' in an F rank dungeon, we went through one final weapons check near the back of the tunnel.
After I was stocked with a single set of loads straight from Emilia, I went ahead and removed my coat to leave with Ms. Gwyn before leading the group toward the cavern entrance. The giant slime spider could be seen anxiously wandering about from as far back as the dead slimes, its bulbous back body that likely contained its core was just that immense.
Because it was pacing around on our side of the main crystal cluster, the spider was actually within good range. If it ever sat still, I could almost ensure my first two shots would hit the same 'leg' of tendrils. However, the slime's sound vibration detection abilities were good enough to know we were in the area.
It stayed in its slow but study pacing moving one pair of legs on either side of its body at time to crawl forward like a disproportionate centipede. If I anticipated its front legs, I could easily tenderize the front few of either front side while that big body was getting in motion. Emilia was already going to focus on the back legs in the same way.
We might actually have a chance at this.
Drawing my long barreled revolver and bracing the triangle of barrels on my free forearm, I drop into a crouch to better control the aim of the gun and just wait to watch the giant slime spider's movements. After a few seconds of familiarizing myself with its speed, I say, "Once it turns around and starts its next set of paces, I'll put three in the front and you hit the back."
"By the time it turns towards us, we can empty on the other side and then take them out on the next load," She says by way of agreeing, holding her guns more casually down by her sides while gauging the target. "If it can't get to the tunnel, it's open season. If we have to retreat because it sticks its head inside, we'll empty all opening that face to lay down the foundation for the first barrage."
"Teamwork," Ms. Gwyn enthuses from the background, barely paying attention while studying the cavern from our new vantage point.
With those oh so encouraging words from our team leader, Emilia and I just quietly watched and waited. When the mutant slime finally turned around, Emilia raised both guns and held them close together lined up with the center of her body. I was already aiming down my own sights and once it began its second set of steps in the same direction I pulled back the hammer.
Just to give Emilia time to steady her aim, I counted one full second before signaling the start of the gun show with my first shot. The heavy gun in my hand bounced up a couple of inches despite my tightened grip but was already cocked back before the barrel came back down on my arm. My first shot had land among a cluster of leg joints on the front side of the body and juices were only just then thickly puckering out from the shots when I fired again.
My second set of shots landed at the same time as Emilia's, now, but her doubled shots obviously had a greater spray reaction and damage to the legs. But, as we hoped, the body was slow to move around in two large arcs of paces. We were both able to land our third shots in the same areas as our first and second.
Because I would be getting up close and personal with the weakest side of the behemoth when it was finally time, I spent the rest of my first chamber focusing on that same cluster of joints. The third shot had already made it so that it could not bear weight, but the front legs themselves could still be used as weapons. When the fourth shot struck aling the side of its body under the cluster of limb, those front three legs simply started dragging.
Five and six caused one cluster of tentacles called a leg fall away while the other deflated slowly.
Emilia's six shots from two sets of barrels had already caused the same damage on the back middle legs. Now, she took it upon herself to cripple the front cluster of legs on the opposite side. By the time she started reloading and I finished, the front legs of the opposite side were dragging and the boss was limping at less than ten miles per hour.
However, half of half of the cavern had already been covered.
Despite the fact that this brought the various targets on its body in better range, it also meant it was getting closer and closer to us! We had not removed nearly enough limbs yet! Even though I finished reloading first, we both fired in the same second as I carefully took aim.
The first shot detached another leg while the bullets continued on into the next joints down the line. The second and third shots both landed in the top and bottom of the front of the next leg cluster. The front leg of that cluster was already dragging.
Shots four and five were fired in quick succession but number five managed to detach a remaining from limb while both shots hit within the middle of the neighboring joint cluster. Shot number six deliberately detached a limb from the second join cluster.
I barely had time to see that Emilia stopped to reload at the same time as I did but in the same time had detached two more legs and crippled even more than I had. Two sets of three bullets really made the difference in our current damage outputs. I was willing to make changes for the future.
The incredibly long legs of the spider raised its body on long arcs to be as high up as the tunnel. Even though we had slowed it down to a crawl and had time to reload, it was already so close that we could both only aim our shots at the middle and back legs on either side, thanks to Emilia tenderizing the back two sets of leg joints, I could focus my second to last load in that area.
With only the middle legs on my side remaining to support weight, it would basically only be able to stand on the side.
Shots one and two were fired a full second apart and each removed a previously damaged limb from either join cluster, but the remaining four shots in my gun were all wildly loosed down at the beast while standing up and backing away. Still, two more limbs detached while the others deflated lifelessly.
Even though the slime spider was now standing in the entrance of the tunnel, it could only shrug forward into the tunnel with its working back left legs. With the others in formation behind and around the tankers behind us, we reloaded our final sets of bullets while retreating ten yards back luckily, even if the beast wanted to reach its legs inside it could no longer position itself.
Three revolvers were tirelessly raised and held perfectly level despite the incline of the tunnel floor, aiming straight ahead at the head of the slime spider that was as big was a small VW. On top of its size, the head was encased in several layers of overlapping spider carapaces. Some of which included empty portions of eye sockets.
I doubted such a thing was intentional, but the clusters of empty sockets gave the impression of a solid mouth surrounded by eyes for a face. I aimed for the dead center of all that mass and freely fired off my last chamber of shots using the recoil to cock my gun against my flexed arm. If not for my proto-suit, I could have hurt myself.
Emilia's doubled shots were all alternated between the left and right side of its face. While I busted away portions of carapace to emphasize the 'mouth' of the creature, her twin sets of barrels punched three lines of small holes up and down either side of my clustered breakage. I really needed to get and practice with a second gun.
Now that I was useless in the way of ranged weaponry, I simply holstered my revolver and backed away while Emilia took out her big gun for the first time in my view. Just a few seconds after being drawn out, the semi-auto rifle and pump-action under-barrels were letting fly with everything the gun had to offer. That was still what I was getting from the government's contribution points I had saved up.
The first few shots landed in, above, and then right below the head of the giant slime spider along a vague central axis. The next four carefully combined shots started in the middle and then emphasized the initial spread of pulverizing calibers that gushed gelatinous mass through the shattering carapaces.
Even before the next three shots that marked half of the overall capacity in the first magazine, the head was a shattered wet mass and the body was opening up in a long jagged scar down the middle.
The slime spider naturally began withdrawing by stepping and leaning back to one side, almost buckling from its disproportionate weight, but this only swung its opening head and frontal body into the middle of the opening. The second half of the barrage began in that moment and the spider was soon rocked back on its hind end.
This, of course, only allowed the second half of the barrage to start opening a jagged line through the outer and inner cell walls along its underbelly.
C grade mucus was already flowing freely from the deflated head and 'shoulders' area as the body's mass pushed through the wrecked front. I did not bother waiting on the reload as the slime spider sat back on its rear and squished its mass upward. If we waited on the second barrage, I would not even have to enter the beast's body.
Running to the end of the tunnel with my sword held ahead of me, I raise it high into the air over my head as I leap into the air from the tunnel. "Heal!" I call out as I fall into the temporarily exposed underside of the slime spider and use my weight and momentum to chop down into the jagged opening created by Emilia.
My sword cut down through the slime spider's body from the top of the opening until my feet touched the ground, opening both the outer and inner cell walls to release the innermost C grade acidic mucus in my wake. I simply left the sword in place and sidestepped as far as I could from the downpour before shouldering into the side of the slime's underbelly with all of my might.
Not only did this help to shock-wave the mucus inside into re-proportioning but also helped keel the monster over on its back. Holding onto the edge of the opening to ride rise with the falling weight of multiple tons, I find myself lying on the slime spider's belly and unceremoniously roll into its opened gut while reaching for my sword.
The air around the opening was burning my lungs and blurred from acid fumes that caused my naked face to tingle but once my hand closed on the hilt of my sword I kicked off of the thick gelatinous inner wall and threw myself down into the slime's body. The slime's cores are usually in the densest areas of their bodies which for this big guy would be low down and in the back of its giant rear mass.
Luckily, I had the good fortune to enter from its underside through the torso so that I could fall into the swimming pool sized mass of abdomen. Two seconds passed before my hands and feet found anything substantial enough to support my body. Two seconds was enough that the skin of my face had already started bubbling and peeling away in layers.
I was wrong in my original estimates that my eyelids would fuse close in about five seconds, the pressure of slashing against the inner wall to propel myself pressure-melted my eyelids together at three seconds. There I passed a vague change in the density of the mucus around me and swung my body in a backward spin to blinding slash through its area.
My blade only met a little resistance but the damage done was enough to make the body begin trembling and shaking around me. Luckily, five seconds had not even passed before there was a combined chilling and warming energy running through my body. I was being healed.
Despite swiftly losing the ability to tell up from down in the shaking mucus body, I carefully turned this way and that for almost two seconds before finding another resistance. However, I identified it this time as nervous system belonging to the legs and followed its direction deeper into the body. Even though I was being healed, my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were nothing more than thin lines of different tissues on my head and all of my hair had been eaten away by now.
However, I found more changes in mucus density in multiple areas, some of which were strong enough to push off of. I followed these for most of my last two seconds before I finally felt the core itself with the tip of my sword. Almost as if the core had triggered a devastating explosive device, once I found its presence I started hacking and slashing and thrashing about.
Now was the time when my team would be coming to pull me out. I still had a couple seconds of healing left. Even though my suit was already inking out from around my body in the mucus I had complete faith in my teammates and simply focused on keeping my body moving through the pain.
The slime spider's body shifted wildly around me as if it had started flailing and rolling about, now, instead of simple thrashing. However, I just did my best to keep swinging above and below the core area even as mucus pressure suddenly released off to the side. That was the team opening up the side of the boss mob to pull me out.
Of course, with my luck, the healing had already stopped around the time I stopped swinging which was well before their hands finally got a hold of me. By the time I was pulled out of the slime, I could only let myself be nakedly dragged while light shone on the backs of my eyelids. A few seconds later, water was being unceremoniously poured out over me.
Because of the bubbling in my outer and some inner layers of skin, patches of dead and almost powdery tissues washed away from my body with varying degrees of depth. After several soothing seconds of being rinsed off, the cold and warm energy of healing magic once again flowed through me. Soon enough I could differentiate my own eyelids and move my nose and lips.
My face was finally back.
*