Summoned A Hundred Years Too Late

With Willow and Kam behind her, Alexandra stood on a large boulder overlooking a quaint pond nestled in a low valley. The mountains near Balrum were tall, rugged, and riddled with such places.

“Do you see it?” Willow asked.

“Not yet,” Alexandra said, pushing her Tracking skill further.

Leaving the Iron Library had stripped Alexandra of the sense of looming urgency that had driven her since her arrival in this world and of much of her energy. As such, she’d allowed herself a few days of rest. The journey to Balrum had been difficult. It wasn’t that her drive to improve had disappeared, but she’d needed a break, some time to really consider what she was about to do.

Now, her course was set.

Medh’s list of elementals was incomplete. As central to his business as they were, elementals were fickle creatures, hard to find, harder to pin down. Still, with her friends’ help, Alexandra had studied the list and picked their best bet at hunting their first elemental.

“Are you sure it’s here?” Willow asked, leaning forward as she scanned the pond and its surroundings.

Alexandra shrugged. “Not a hundred percent. I’m only following what Tracking is telling me.”

“Not ideal,” Kam said, his voice low and flat.

“We gotta start somewhere,” Alexandra answered. “Let’s wait a little longer.”

It didn’t take long for their target to appear. On the near bank of the pond, a green, gooey blob surfaced from the water and crawled onto the shore.

“Bronze,” Kam said.

“Do you want to try?” Alexandra asked.

He nodded.

Willow put a hand on his shoulder. “We have your back. Don’t worry.”

This time, it wouldn’t be like their encounter with the stone elemental. They’d picked their opponent, studied its weaknesses. Kam knew what to do.

He jumped down from the boulder. The noise immediately raised the elemental’s attention.

It turned toward the boy, its gooey mass splooshing and gurgling as it expelled water. Kam didn’t flinch. It was a slime elemental, just as described in the list.

“You got this, Kam!” Willow cheered.

Kam didn’t react. Instead, he brought his hands together and focused. Alexandra saw his mana surge and realized she’d never asked about Kam’s fighting style. She frowned. Could he defeat the elemental? Then she relaxed. He seemed confident enough.

Just in case, she prepared a Solar Blast, ready to cast it if the need arose. Next to her, she saw Willow do the same.

The elemental surged forward, water sloughing off its flanks.

Kam stood his ground. His hands stayed locked together, fingers white at the knuckles, eyes fixed on the mass closing the distance between them.

Nothing happened.

Alexandra watched his shoulders, waiting for the spell he would inevitably fire. It didn’t come. The elemental closed another few paces, and still there was nothing. Kam’s hands were trembling against each other.

He took a step back, then another, putting distance between himself and the creature, buying time. His eyes darted to the pond’s edge, the boulder, then back to the thing crawling toward him. His fingers unlaced and relaced.

The elemental didn’t slow down. It surged over the grass in a fresh burst, closing the gap Kam had just made. This time, he flinched, his hands flying apart before he forced them back together. Whatever he was reaching for, it wasn’t holding.

”Kam, watch it!” Willow called.

He tried again. Alexandra saw it this time: the threads gathered around him, frail and unsteady. They reached toward the elemental and slipped off. Useless. His jaw clenched.

Ten paces. Five. The elemental roared.

Kam didn’t run. He planted his feet, hands locking together one more time, and this time something held. The threads locked into the beast, going straight for its lifeforce.

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But the elemental was already on him.

It caught his arm first, then his shoulder, spreading over him like a wave. Kam wrenched back, his whole body twisting against it, boots dragging through the earth. The mass held. His free hand slapped against the gel, trying to push it off, and came away coated to the wrist.

“Fuck.” Alexandra moved. She couldn’t just blast the thing with Kam attached to it, so she drove her sword through the elemental’s flank, twisting, tearing a channel through the gel. A wet tearing sound came when it gave, releasing Kam’s arm in a rush of displaced fluid. He staggered free and fell to one knee, chest heaving, and hands still curled from the effort of holding the spell together.

She raised her own hand, mana gathering in her palm.

The elemental convulsed.

It happened fast, almost immediately. The dark green color drained out of it like dye in water, then the shape collapsed, the mass sagging, losing tension and whatever held it together. It slumped onto the bank and didn’t move again. What was left didn’t look like anything. Just water and residue.

Alexandra let the Solar Blast die in her hand.

Kam knelt where he’d fallen, staring at what remained of the elemental. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking. “Thank you.”

Alexandra gave him her hand and pulled him up. “It looks like you would have been fine without me. That spell was nasty.”

“Only because that elemental had no defenses. Its slime nature made its lifeforce extremely destructive. I only had to introduce a little anomaly for it to come apart.”

She nodded, understanding the idea. It sounded remarkably similar to her experience with verdant beasts. So much so that Alexandra believed that a good old Dark Bolt would have had the same effect here. Still, she wasn’t keen on cursing herself again. Not for something she could defeat with another method.

“Did it cost you anything?” Willow asked, coming down from the boulder.

Kam shook his head. “No.”

Willow smiled. “That’s a relief. Let’s see if we can collect the source.”

The three of them approached what little remained of the slime elemental. There really wasn’t much left. A shallow puddle of residue soaked into the grass.

Willow crouched, cupping her hands and dipping them into the puddle. The liquid slid straight through her fingers, leaving only a faint sheen behind. “It’s running off,” she said.

“Try a container,” Alexandra said, already crouching beside her, pulling a flask from her pack.

She scooped at the puddle, tilting the flask to catch the runoff, but the ground had already swallowed half of it, dark patches spreading into the grass. What she caught kept slipping back over the flask’s lip.

Kam knelt on the far side, pressing his palms flat against the residue and dragging them toward the center, trying to herd it into one place.

“This isn’t working,” Willow muttered, shaking liquid off her fingers.

By the time they had it into the flask, more than half of it was gone, absorbed into the dirt or smeared uselessly across their hands and sleeves. What remained sat at the bottom of the flask, a thumb’s width of cloudy dark green liquid.

Alexandra held it up to the light. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Kam said.

She capped the flask and turned it over once, watching the liquid cling stubbornly to the glass. Not much to show for their first hunt. Still, it was something.

“We need gloves for this,” Willow said, wiping her hands on her trousers, which did nothing but spread the residue further. “Or a better container. Or something. There has to be a better way of doing this.”

“Or we don’t tear it apart so completely next time,” Kam said. He was looking at the empty patch of grass where the elemental had been. “Sorry.”

Alexandra followed his gaze. The sword had opened the thing, Kam’s spell had disassembled it, and her Solar Blast, if it had come to that, would have done worse. A cleaner kill. A smaller wound. Maybe that was the difference between a full flask and what they had.

She pocketed the flask anyway. “First one’s never going to be pretty.”

Willow managed a smile. “First one’s done, though. Should we keep hunting?”

Alexandra looked at Kam. “Are you good?”

He nodded.

“Then let’s go.”

Slime elementals’ sources were far from being the most valuable. They didn’t have to travel far from Balrum to hunt for them, and the elementals themselves were riddled with weaknesses, rarely going over the Bronze rank. It made them easy targets for novice hunters.

It took a few attempts for them to find a way to kill them without ruining the source. Solar Blast was too powerful, destroying the source itself from the heat. Willow’s version of the spell wasn’t much better, leaving little to be recovered. Drain Life brought the same issues Kam’s spell did, though it acted a lot slower.

On the other side of the spectrum, leaving magic out of the fight was not an option. As weak as the slime elementals were to spells, their gelatinous body was near unkillable with a sword. Cutting off a portion did nothing but delay the elemental. Then it gathered more material, converted it into slime, and kept going.

In the end, out of their entire arsenal of skills, spells, and weapons, it was Light that proved the most efficient. Augmented with solar mana, the orb of light had turned scalding hot. Yet, unlike Solar Blast, it wasn’t going to explode.

Alexandra kept her skill active, directing the orb next to the slime elementals while keeping her distance. Then all she had to do was wait for the slime to dry up, encasing its source in a solid crust of dried dead slime.

They spent the better part of the day perfecting their technique, only returning to Balrum a few hours before sunset, their packs full of slime elemental source. Medh was happy to purchase their haul, though the price was low.

“It’s not much, but it should be enough to rent a house in the lower part of town,” Alexandra said as they walked up the stairs to Zeynep’s place.

“Is that urgent? Zeynep will not kick us out,” Willow said.

Alexandra sighed. “I’ve had enough of living under someone else’s roof. It’s more than time to get our own place.” She hated her old apartment when she lived there, but it was hers. “I’m done with being a guest.”

Willow sighed. “Let’s get cleaned up first.”