[Admin Lover's Laurel: Well I suppose we'll just have to fix that then!]
Nickel sighed in relief, glad that he wasn't completely alone here. And that his foot was probably gonna be fixed. Strangely, he could hear the voice of this admin. The sound of it filled him with a feeling of comfort.
"...Hi?"
[Admin Lover's Laurel: Hullo little Silver. Sorry about your foot. You must not have been particularly close when the portal opened, huh?]
"No, I wasn't," he admitted. "It's not like Sherash told me it'd become harder to move once it did."
[Admin Lover's Laurel: Please don't be too mad at Sherash. You're the first person outside the admins that that little girl has talked to in a long time. She's used to interacting with people that know just as much as her, if not more. It probably didn't occur to her that you wouldn't know about the world pressure.]
"That explains why I kept having to ask her to explain things." Nickel stopped to think about the admin's words. "Why do you call her a little girl? The first admin I spoke to implied that Sherash is pretty old?"
[Admin Lover's laurel: Which admin was this?]
Nickel recognized that tone. The same one his mother used when his father was about to get scolded. It was best not to get in the way when that tone was used.
"Dragon's Tooth."
[Admin Lover's Laurel: I see! I'll have to have a little 'talk' with Dragon's Tooth… though I'm sure to some, Sherash is old, I can't help but see her as a little girl. Now, let's get that wound healed. Fair warning, as an admin, I can only heal you by utilizing the system, if I don't use my authority.]
"Why don't you use your…authority, then?"
As soon as the words left his mouth, he gasped in pain. The slightly healed flesh on his leg had begun bleeding again, though this time, it was accompanied by another, far more disturbing sensation, as well as a bright golden-green light.
The flesh, skin, blood, and bone of his wound had started to regenerate, slowly growing out to form a new ankle.
[Admin Lover's Laurel: I'm already pushing it by doing this. Using the system to heal you is gonna make it so I won't be able to reach out to you any time soon. Based on what happened before, with the system crash, I suspect Dragon's Tooth won't be able to use the system at all for a while.]
Gritting his teeth, Nickel asked, "You know about the system crash, but not who resolved it?"
[Admin Lover's laurel: The logs don't record which admin resolves which issues, only how they get resolved. So while I knew an admin used their authority to prevent your brain from leaking from your ears, I didn't know it was Dragon's Tooth.]
Nickel clenched his fists, trying to ignore the pain of regrowing an appendage. The new foot had just grown past the heel.
"Are the admins not all together?"
[Admin Lover's Laurel: Unfortunately, Little Silver, that's not something you can know yet. You probably have time for one last question, then I'll have to leave you here.]
His foot was down to the toes now, which he'd heard was the worst part. Doing his best to not move his foot, so as to avoid his toes growing together, Nickel asked a question about the dungeon he found himself in.
"Can you tell me what monsters are in this dungeon?"
His foot fully regrown, Nickel lay back on the stone floor, closing his eyes.
[Admin Lover's Laurel: Of course. There's slimes, goblins, and–]
"Huh? Lover's laurel?" Nickel opened his eyes, and sat back up. "Time must have been up."
He got on his hands and knees, and crawled to the tent nearby, hoping the system was kind enough to give him at least a blanket. Healing wounds, even with high level healing magic like Lover's laurel used, took a lot out of a person.
It seemed the system was kind today. Nickel didn't find a blanket in the tent, he found a whole fur lined sleeping bag. What kind of fur, you ask? Does it matter?
It was warm and soft, so it fit Nickel's criteria. As he lied down to sleep, the thought crossed his mind that if he could use magic, his system probably worked again. He was out too quickly to check, though.
—
Nickel woke up to a rather loud commotion coming from outside the tent. It sounded like… like something wet splatting against the ground, and… screeching?
He carefully got out of the sleeping bag, doing his best to be as stealthy as possible. Making his way to the tent flap, he pulled it open slightly and peered outside.
He was met with the sight of a group of five slimes, ganging up on a lone goblin. The slimes were transparent blue blobs, with a dark blue core floating within them. The goblin… well, you know what a goblin is. Small, green, big ears, liked to bite things.
The slimes were taking turns ramming into it, while the goblin turned to face them each time, screeching, only to be smacked from behind. The little biter looked pretty rough, not that that would garner it any sympathy from Nickel. It was wheezing, trying in vain to swing the crude knife in it's hands at the slimes.
It was somewhat successful… Well, It hit the slimes, anyway. But slimes can't be killed just by cutting into them. You either destroyed the core, or completely obliterated the slime making up it's body.
After roughly a minute of the goblin getting smacked around, it finally collapsed to the ground, it's breathing shallow. The slimes slowly slid across the ground to it, and observed it for a few seconds.
Once they seemed sure the goblin was on it's last legs, the largest of the slimes moved over it, sucking it up into its body. The dying goblin put up a feeble resistance, but was ultimately absorbed.
The goblin began to dissolve, quite slowly at first, patches of it's skin burning off into the slime's acidic form. After a few seconds, the rate of dissolvement began to rapidly increase, destroying the goblin layer after layer, until there was only it's monster core left.
The slime moved the goblin core and it's own towards each other. When they met, there was a flash, forcing Nickel to look away. When he looked back, the slime had grown slightly larger, and had developed several solid square plates equally spaced around it's body.
Nickel gasped, not expecting to witness a monster evolution first hand. He quickly closed the tent flap, knowing that despite their apparent lack of sensory organs, slimes could still detect you through sight and sound.
He decided to risk another quick look. Slowly, ever so slowly, he opened the tent flap just enough to see out.
It seemed his good luck would hold. The slimes hadn't seemed to notice his presence, and were moving away.
Nickel began mentally preparing himself. This would be his first battle against a monster. The first step on his path. He could do this.
As he crouched behind the tent flap, his body began to transform.