A while later...
Yeah. This wasn't working.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't gather any strength to move in the way he was imagining. His body simply didn't respond to those commands.
Meanwhile, his senses continued to grow sharper. Every inch of his form was now hyper-aware of its surroundings. The leaf beneath him. The faint movement of air. The microscopic textures of everything he touched.
It was becoming overwhelming.
He tried to think through the problem logically.
He didn't want to accept it. He really didn't. But it was becoming harder to deny.
His body was fundamentally different from before.
With his senses now fully awakened, he could feel every fiber of his being. And what he felt was not human. There were no bones. No muscles. No joints. Just a unified mass of... something. Soft, flexible, and completely uniform throughout.
At this moment, he was less like a person and more like an extremely pliable blob. He didn't understand how any of this worked, but this was what he had become.
After some thought, a realization struck him.
Maybe he was limiting himself.
He had been trying to move as his usual self - imagining legs that didn't exist, attempting to roll a body that no longer worked that way.
What if he stopped thinking like a human?
He decided to abandon his old understanding of movement entirely. For now, he would embrace this form, whatever it was.
If he was a flexible blob, then how would a flexible blob move?
An idea came to him.
An amoeba.
Yes. Single-celled organisms moved by extending part of their mass forward, then allowing the rest to flow into the new position.
Could he do the same?
He concentrated. Instead of trying to roll, he imagined extending a portion of his body forward - pushing part of his mass outward like a pseudopod.
He felt movement.
It was working.
He let the rest of his form collapse inward, the flexible property of his body pulling the remaining mass toward the new position. Then, naturally, his body settled back into its original blob-like shape.
He had moved.
Just a small distance, but he had actually moved.
Success.
But this also confirmed what he had been dreading.
He wasn't his usual self anymore. He had become some kind of blob-like organism. A creature without bones or limbs or eyes. Something that moved by shifting its own mass.
He had seen things like this before. In video games. In anime.
A slime.
Was that what he had become?
…
A few days had passed since he first found himself here.
At least, he assumed it was a few days. Without eyes or any sense of day and night, time had become difficult to track.
He still didn't fully understand what this place was. Based on what he could feel through his body - the rough stone surfaces, the uneven ground, the occasional drip of moisture from above - it seemed to be some sort of cave. That was all he could tell without sight.
Surprisingly, he had gotten used to not seeing quite easily. It was strangely calming, in a way.
Just existing in the quiet darkness, sensing the world through touch alone.
Though he couldn't shake the feeling that he was always just one moment away from becoming someone's dinner.
Since he had confirmed that this was definitely not a hospital and that he was now a fantasy monster, it wasn't far-fetched to assume other fantasy monsters existed here too. Creatures that would see a small slime as nothing more than a snack.
Just thinking about it made his form tense.
He forced himself to calm down. It seemed he had been doing this a lot lately.
While there was a real risk of becoming monster food, he wasn't the kind to just let it happen. That was why he had developed a little something for self-defense.
His form compressed downward, flattening against the stone floor. The mass that made up his body condensed tightly, the outer membrane stretching taut like a rubber band being pulled back. Then, in one motion, he released the tension…
Fwoom.
His body shot upward, crashing into a rock above him before falling back down to the ground.
He called this move: Slime Smash.
The principle was simple. By condensing his internal mass downward, he created pressure against his own flexible membrane. The elasticity of his outer layer acted like a spring mechanism. Once he released the compression, all that stored energy launched him in whatever direction he aimed.
It was quite handy. He could use it to hit a would-be attacker or propel himself away to escape.
Though, thinking about it more carefully... it might not be all that useful.
He couldn't see or hear an attacker coming. How would he know when or where to smash? And even if he tried to escape, he couldn't see where he was going. He might launch himself directly into another predator's mouth.
His form deflated slightly. A slime's version of a sigh.
Well, at least he could take some comfort in one thing. His blob body seemed to be quite durable. He had hit that stone pretty hard just now, yet he felt little to no damage. The impact had simply been absorbed and distributed across his entire form.
He guessed the surface tension of his blob-like structure made him resistant to physical damage. The force of a blunt impact would just spread out and dissipate rather than causing any real harm.
That was a nice perk.
Though he probably wouldn't be so lucky against something sharp. A pointed object would concentrate force on a single point rather than spreading it out. That could actually pierce him.
He decided to keep the Slime Smash to a minimum for now. Who knows - he might just launch himself onto a pointy rock in this cave.