Slaying the creatures in groups at a time because of his shadow magic was difficult but possible and occasionally he did have to find a place to recover his mana.
While traveling and gaining experience he kept his eye on that giant slime just waiting for a sign of its strength.
Glancing back and forth what he saw was interesting though.
The slime moved like a machine and no matter what damage it took it kept moving forward to its prey.
The slime would catch prey pretty regularly but rather than its own efforts being the cause it was actually betrayal.
Occasionally one of the other creatures would attack the slowest of the bunch which would lead to it inevitably being caught.
When this happened it would slow the slime down enough for the rest to flee which only made the slime look for the next closest source of prey which began the cycle all over again.
With each kill he saw his experience bar growing closer and closer, he could feel how close he was to whatever happened at lv20 and he was ready.
He did not want to fight the slime until he hit lv20 anyway.
As he burned another pack of wolves to death it finally happened
~~~~~~~~~~
Belial
Mage lv20. (Novice)
Shadowfire Devil
Affinity: 32% fire, 37% shadow
Mana Core: 0% fire, 0% shadow
Strength: 5
Vitality: 5
Agility: 83 -> 91
Wisdom: 116 -> 122
Intelligence: 116 -> 122
Bloodline: child of the void.
Titles: n/a
Skills: Mana Control lv1 (E), Mana Sense lv8 (A), Mana Core lv4 (E), Spell Mastery (E)
Defenses: Fire Resistance lv1 (N)
Spells:
Mana Bolt lv1 (E)
Mana Burst lv1 (A)
Fire Bomb lv8 (E)
Fire Bolt lv2 (E)
Shadow Bolt lv8 (E)
Shadow Burst lv5 (A)
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
Congratulations!
Skill: Mana Control lv10 (Apprentice) has increased in tier!
Mana Control lv10 (Apprentice) -> Mana Control lv1 (Experienced)
Reduces the consumption of mana for all skills by 35%
~~~~~~~~~~
This was perfect!
He saw no other notifications about anything unique to lv20 but he would deal with that disappointment later.
For now he had a giant slime to hunt down.
~
With his goal set and his path ready he began to chase down the giant slime.
He ignored the other players and cast a shadow burst out at the pack ahead of the slime.
With the radius it had he could easily hit a quarter of the fleeing creatures which would easily distract the slime long enough to get a few easy hits in.
The group he hit faltered and in their pain they began to become erratic.
They bit at one another or clawed or tried to gore but no matter their method of choice they began to attack whatever they percieved to be the source of such pain.
This battle made it easy for the slime to engulfe a large number of them, this group was not enough to stop the slime but it did slow drastically so he began casting shadow bolts at the slime's cores.
The first thing he noticed was the slime body being dense enough to not allow the bolts very deep.
When the bolts entered it would react with obvious discomfort as it shook violently but that did not change the fact that Ezekiel got to see what happened internay with his shadow magic for the first time.
Where the shadow bolts pierced, black smoke would emanate.
Inside of the body this smoke was like a black fire that burned away at the wound.
He kept casting as fast as he could and thankfully he had reached lv1 mastery with his bolt spells a long time ago.
He was using mana rapidly even with his reduced mana costs and increased mana pool.
He soon got a few notifications about assisting in the kills of the creatures consumed by the slime but the experience wasn't enough to bring him to lv21.
As the other creatures began to get away the slime stopped its chase... and began moving towards him.
He knew how fast this thing could be so he began to run.
What he quickly learned was the slime had a higher speed than he did and it wouldnt take long to catch him.
Thinking quickly he began to run towards the players.
Running towards the players would force them to help kill the slime or they would have to act as additional bait.
No matter what they chose Ezekiel would benefit.
"Hey is that horned freak coming over here?"
"Yeah i think he's coming this way."
"HE'S LEADING THE SLIME, RUN!"
The various players all began to flee with some of the range focused players firing at either him or the slime.
With his high agility he could dodge the projectiles but he was clearly a lower level.
This slime was chasing him down and aside from the agility focused players he was outrunning the rest.
While outrunning a few players to let them act as bait he cast a few more shadow bolts to hopefully scratch away a few more health points.
When he took a moment to check the slime's hp it was resting at a comfortable ~40% which was excellent!
What wasnt excellent was how low his mana was.
This slime must have easily had over a hundred thousand hp since each of his spells would be doing quite a bit.
Over time he had figured out that not only was his intelligence stat what decided his spell damage but affinity did as well!
With an intelligence stat of 122 his spells would naturally do 122 damage before defense was applied.
Shadow affinity at 37% surprisingly increased the damage of his shadow spells by 37%!
With his total spell damage he was dealing 167 damage before any defense was taken into account.
Against this slime it was only doing 134 damage but he had a very large mana pool currently.
He had cast this spell dozens of times by now and each time it hardly did anything but each instance of consumption did 16 damage as well.
With how much he had cast this spell he knew that eventually the slime would die but what mattered right now was that if he wasnt careful he would run out of mana while fleeing this creature.