My second life as a dungeon

I was starting to get used to sensing mana around me but everything was still incredibly blurry by the time the slimes had spawned and attacked me from all sides, sending me flying. Luckily, my constitution was high, and I resisted the damage thanks to being a slime, so the fight wasn’t over before it hadn’t even started. I couldn’t fight without seeing where they were, so I needed to stall while I tried to figure out how my new sense worked. 

To do this I stretched my body at high speeds until it hit anything, I tried to get it to hit the floor but without being able to see which way was up or down that was hard. Feeling my body stretch in ways that felt unnatural to me was another source of discomfort, but I fought through it and kept on going.  

The world around me slowly came into focus as I figured it out. Sensing mana wasn’t exactly the same as seeing with biological eyes. For example, instead of seeing detail everything was incredibly smooth, mostly because everything radiated mana evenly but also because I still wasn’t good enough to see minute fluctuations in mana. Secondly mana was everywhere, even in the air, this meant that to me the arena was covered by a light purplish fog. 

After five minutes of bouncing around the arena my mana sight was good enough to fight back. Each of the slimes, like most living things, let off a bit of mana that clued me in to where they were. Their spawn points created a perfect pentagon so that the edges of the shape were five metres away from where I had entered the arena. They weren’t moving around too much as they were more focused on hitting me than anything else.  

It wasn’t perfect by any means and I had only managed to learn this fast because it came naturally to slimes but I wasn’t going to complain. In that time I had been hit a few times but I felt like I still had more than half my HP. I started my counterattack by striking the ground at an angle with a tentacle so that I was launched over the top of one of the slimes, landing behind it.  

I shot another tendril at the slime, who wasn’t nearly as fast as I was so my strike was on a perfect trajectory to hit the slime but it bounced off something before it could hit its mark. At first I was confused until I realised that I must be sensing the slime cores as that must be emitting much more mana than the goo that encased it. 

Thanks to my realisation I quickly recovered from my confusion before it could recuperate from my attack. I sent two more tendril strikes at the slime, each one getting faster and stronger than the last as I slowly got used to the body. My second strike hit the goo barrier but instead of bouncing off it dug into it before losing all momentum and retracting into me. The third tendril followed quickly afterwards before the goo could be replaced, letting it hit the core, shattering it. 

Sensing the slime’s concentrated mana start to disperse into the air was weird but I just focused on how it told me that the slime was dead. My attack may have been successful, but I had to stand still to pull it off, letting the other slimes get an attack on me. I tried to bounce away before they had a chance to react but got nicked by two of the tendrils.  

I still had plenty of health though, so I didn’t change my strategy, bouncing behind the next slime in the, now broken, pentagon. This time I sent two tendrils at it at the same time causing a bunch of its slime to burst out of it. It was still alive so I sent a third tendril straight into its core killing it.  

This time I was too fast for the other slimes so I managed to get out without getting attacked again. I repeated this two more times each time my attacks were faster and more powerful than last time. Even my sight had improved enough to be able to faintly see the goo around the slime core as well as see a bunch of shapes around us that I could only guess were trees.  

I created a tendril like before but instead of sending it out at once I turned the end of it into a point as sharp as I could and even started to rotate it. Thanks to the goo not having any bones it could spin indefinitely without any issues other than energy. Once I had it spinning as fast as I could I shot it out at the slime. 

It worked perfectly, the slime’s goo turning into water in front of the spear. Even the core barely put up any resistance, shattering into thousands of tiny pieces, ending the fight. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to celebrate as I felt my body change once more, this time it was imbued with a kind of mana I didn’t recognise. I could also tell the arena changed as the ‘trees’ disappeared and the shape of the floor changed. 

I had a few seconds before the next wave of slimes arrived so I decided to test out my mana to try to figure out what element it was. Luckily once you knew how to move mana to cast a spell one way it was easy to learn other ways of casting. Thanks to this I easily manipulated the mana around me into a simple spell. The only issue I came across was that the mana didn’t want to stay in one shape and was constantly shifting. 

Using my mana sense I could see that the spell I created let off mana that waved like water or wind, so I knew it wasn’t earth. Next, I tried to ball it up into a singular point, but it constantly fought me, eliminating water. Finally, I tried to stretch it out and at first it worked leading me to believe I had become an air slime, but when I let my spell loose it didn’t hold its shape as well as I was expecting so that left me with fire.  

As I came to this conclusion I sensed the other slimes spawn so I immediately started using the tactic from the earlier fight of just bouncing around while I figured things out. Unfortunately, the firebolts travel faster than tendrils do so I got hit pretty badly a couple of times, losing a quarter of my health in the first few seconds of the fight. I started to panic as I didn’t want to already start losing the fights. 

Bouncing around aimlessly wasn’t working so instead I focused on the movement of mana around the arena to predict where the spells were coming from before dodging out of the way. This worked much better, and I only got hit a few more times as I got used to it. Once I had the technique down, I started to fire off my own spells in retaliation.  

I could tell that my spells were hitting but my opponents also resisted fire so even though I was so much higher level than them it wasn’t doing enough damage, I needed to think of a new strategy. I couldn’t just bounce around forever thinking of the perfect strategy so instead I tried the simplest thing I could think of, just making the spell bigger. 

As I bounced around, I split my focus so that half of my mind was making sure I didn’t stop moving while the other half of my mind focused on casting the spell. At first, I started the same as before, by summoning a fist sized fireball above my head. Once I had that I then condensed it while pouring even more mana into it. 

I had the same trouble as when I was trying to figure out what sort of slime I was, but I eventually managed to condense it until it was the same size as a golf ball by creating a forcefield of mana around the ball. It took a ton of mana so I wouldn’t be able to do many of these spells but that was fine as theoretically I only needed to cast five of them to win the fight. 

This process took around a minute to pull off but as soon as it was ready I shot it at the closest slime. The fireball shot through the air faster than a bullet before landing in front of the slime, the resulting explosion completely engulfed the slime and caused the purple mana fog to shift extremely violently. Once everything calmed down, I could see one less source of mana moving around the room, my plan had worked amazingly.  

Now that I had figured out the trick to my new spell casting it again was pretty simple, I even managed to shorten the cast time each time I sent one out with the last one only taking 15 seconds. After the second one the slimes figured out what I was doing and tried to start dodging the condensed fireballs, but it always travelled too fast, and the explosion was too big for them to get out of the lethal range. 

This time I was ready for the arena and my body to shift so I was quick to cast another spell. Like last time it shifted and was hard to move how I wanted it to, so I knew my mana was air this time. I couldn’t be fire a second time, earth wouldn’t shift and from the few times I worked with water spells I knew it was pretty easy to manipulate. 

I came to this conclusion at the same time as the other slimes were spawned and I instantly started to dash over the arena. I knew from last time that just dashing wouldn’t be enough, so I boosted my speed with the air mana. This worked like a charm as I shot around much faster than before. It was also pretty easy to dodge the air slices even though they are usually invisible as I could see the mana that made them. 

As I was bouncing around I shot some air bullets at my opponents but all it did was nudge them back a bit without doing any damage. I quickly gave that up as I needed to conserve my mana, instead going to my second idea. I changed my trajectory so instead of bouncing around randomly I started to go around in a circle with all the slimes in the middle of it. 

Since I was moving around in one direction the gusts that I was using to boost my speed picked up more air and lasted longer. At first it created a light gust around the room, but it quickly grew faster and faster until I could just ride the wind and focus all my mana on turning the wind into a proper tornado. The air slimes tried to counter my spell but I was already going too fast for them, they were soon picked up from the floor and smashed into each other as the wind started to get sharper to the point that it was cutting into the goo. 

The spell drained my mana at a rapid pace and for a while I was worried that I would run out of mana before they died. Thankfully the fight ended just as my mana pool got down to one percent full. By this point I was completely used to fighting as a slime so my next two fights, water and then earth, went much easier and ten minutes later I was halfway through the trial and moving on to the tier 2 slimes