Balthazar inteo ask what it was that they had fotten to feed, but before the crab could even fully regain his footing from all the rumbling, Tom had already taken off back through the tunnel with Sal’s skull still in his hands.

  “Hey, wait for me!” excimed the crusta, following them out of the room. “Don’t leave me down here, I don’t know this pce!”

  “This is bad,” the worried skeleton said as he rushed through the corridors.

  “So bad,” reiterated the skull, boung up and down iher undead’s hands. “How did you let this happen, Tom? Wasn’t it your turn to feed it today?”

  “It was, and I was going to! But then Balthazar showed up, Jim called for me, I went to go meet them, and I just got pletely sidetracked!”

  “I hope you remember what happe time!” excimed Sal.

  “What are you two talking about?!” asked Balthazar, trying to keep up with the running skeleton as they passed through tunnels and corridors, moved down narros and underpasses, until finally arriving at a rge atrium with a wide double gate oher side.

  The rumbling and ground stomping had not ceased, and was now even stronger, ing directly from behind the doors in front of the trio.

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story, Balthazar,” the nervous skeleton said, eye sockets fixed oe.

  “’t you give me the short version?” said the apprehensive crab, unsure if ing all the way down there had been the best choice. “Start by telling me what’s behind those doors?”

  “Our unwaenant,” said Tom.

  “What??”

  “Let me show you.”

  The bony mert pushed forward, towards the gates. Balthazar hesitated, w why he was following a spooky skeleton and a talking skull to a room that rumbled and shook the very walls around them. heless, he carried on behind Tom, not by virtue of ce, but by virtue of pure curiosity.

  To his surprise, the skeleton cut to the right as he reached he double doors, once again tapping the bricks on the walls in a specific order, which revealed another hidden passage into a side tunnel.

  As they scooted into the small space, a small sliver of light hitting the wall revealed to the crab that there was a thin slit on the opposite side, allowing them to peek into the room behind the gates.

  “This is our final chamber,” expiom in a hushed voice. “Most adventurers never make it this far, but if they did, this would be where we keep our best loot. You know, gotta have a nice lure to cate fish.”

  “Or skillful pincers,” said the crusta.

  “Anyway, one day we came dowo dump some new loot into the pile, and we found out we had a little iion problem.”

  Balthazar frow the other mert, and leaned forward to look through the hairline cra the wall.

  Just as he looked into the room, a new r rumble shook the dust off the walls, as the creature inside smmed itself against the stone floor.

  A viscous ooze blob sat at the ter of the chamber, partially attached to one of the four support pilrs of the room. It was easily bigger than the crab’s gazebo back at his pond, and stra of all, its whole body, made of a gel-like substance, had a translut golden color to it.

  “A slime iion,” added Sal’s skull, still sitting in Tom’s hands.

  “Woah,” excimed the crab in a murmur. “It’s huge.”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing,” tihe full-bodied skeleton. “At first we found just some small gray balls of goo around the room. We told Jim to get rid of them, but you met Jim… he’s ly great at doing what he’s told. Long story short, by the time we looked again, that thing had already eaten almost all the stuff we had in the room and growimes its inal size.”

  Balthazar winced. “Yikes. But then what? How did it bee… this?”

  “Well, then came the problem,” Tom expined. “The slime grew too big for us to get rid of it easily, and now it was hungry and demanding to be fed.”

  “I tried to shoo it away with a broom,” said the bearded skull. “Back then I still had more bohan what you see now.”

  “Yep,” Sal’s holder said. “That thing gulped up all of his bones wheried to fight it. All Bob could save was his skull before the slime absorbed everything else.”

  The crab peeked at the mass of ooze again, gurgling and bubbling in its chamber as it occasionally smmed the ground and walls near it in a hungry protest.

  “So what did you guys do?”

  “What else could we do?” Tom said with a shrug. “We kept feeding it as best as we could, so it wouldn’t gobble us all up and take the dungeon for itself. So long as we kept providing it with things to absorb, it stayed quiet and sleepy, digesting everything we brought.”

  Balthazar g his skeletal friend. “But let me guess, that only deyed the problem?”

  “You got it. The more we fed it, the bigger it got, and the bigger it got, the rger its appetite. That’s why I started having to work overtime. We o fill the crypt faster and attract more adventurers here so we could keep feeding it.”

  “Wait, you’re not telling me you’ve been feeding adveo that slime, are you?!” said the slightly ed crab.

  “Oh, no, no, of course not,” Tom said.

  “Ah, alright, good,” Balthazar said with relief. “I may have no big love for most of those dunces, but even I would find that just a little morally questiona—”

  “We started feeding it gold s instead.”

  “You monsters!” the crab blurted out as his eyes nearly jumped out of their stalks.

  “We were running out of any other junk,” said Tom with an apologetic shrug. “Adventurers always carry lots of money in their pockets wherever they go, and that thing seemed to grow a taste fold, so…”

  “’t bme it,” said the crusta. “Even I felt tempted before, but s taste awful.”

  “How would you know tha—”

  “So anyway, you’ve been dumping s into that blob of jelly this whole time? Is that why it looks golden now?”

  “Guess so. It used to just be pin gray,” Sal’s skull said.

  Balthazar squinted harder through the peephole, fog on the ter of the creature’s translut body, where he spotted a big pile of gold s within, as well as some loose loot and a chest, surrounded by bubbling mucus.

  Ew, but also… ooh.

  His eyes widened with a mix of slight disgust and great want.

  It’s just a slime, how hard could it be…

  “How e you guys haven’t just found a way to get rid of it?” asked the crab, turning back to the other two. “Slimes arely the smartest foe to face.”

  “You’d be wrong!” said Sal.

  “Jim kept dumping whatever random loot he found into it,” the bony mert tinued, “including things like Potions of Intellect, and a bunch of Intellect boosting gear. hing we know, that thing has grown way too smart for our own good.”

  The skull rattled angrily. “It started bckmailing us!”

  Tom nodded. “That slime got smart enough to see every pn to get rid of it ing. We were outmatched at every turn, and then it threateo colpse the whole dungeon around us if we didn’t keep bringing it loot and s daily. This is our home, we have nowhere else to go!”

  Balthazar g the slime oher side of the wall again, a rge portion of its body firmly attached to the surrounding pilrs, likely supp beams to the whole structure.

  “But wait,” the fused crab said, “if the slime did that, wouldn’t it also be bringing the whole pce down on itself?”

  Tht his face very close to the crab’s, sad frown all over his bones.

  “Yes, but the slime doesn’t have any bones, Balthazar.”

  The crabby mert’s eyestalks arched inwards in annoyance.

  Big as it was, it was still just a slime, hardly a match for a crab determio get his pincers on a pile of gold.

  If it’s smart enough to threaten a bunch of skeletons, it’s smart enough to uand what I say.

  “I’ll sort your pest problem,” announced Balthazar as he skittered towards the gate.

  “What?!” excimed Tom. “Are you crazy? e back here, what do you think yoing—”

  But it was too te to dissuade him, Balthazar had already pushed the double doors open with his cws and stepped inside, filled with determination in his step, as well as an unreasonable amount of loot greed.

  A guttural, stuffy voice echoed around the chamber, like a big barbarian with an awful case of throat gestion.

  “Finally, lunchtime. I started to think I would have t these pilrs down on—” A pair of bubbly orbs that vaguely resembled eyes rolled ihe slime’s translut body to face Balthazar. “You are not one of the usual skeletons.”

  “Hah, very of you!” the crab cheerfully said as he stepped into the room with a casual attitude. “I’m a traveling mert. Balthazar is my name, and I’ve heard so much about a fasating golden slime that I just had to e and see you for myself. Quite magnifit, you are!”

  The slime observed him zily before speaking in a bored tone.

  “I am Montgomery, the Great Destroyer, and you’re not fooling me, I know you’ve e to try a my precious gold, crab.”

  Well, darn it, that didn’t take long. And who the hell calls themselves that?! Balthazar thought.

  “Oh, ha ha, you are right, but only partially,” he said with a chuckle.

  The slime eyed him quietly, perhaps even with some bubbling i. Or maybe it was just gastric reflux.

  “As I said, I am a mert,” the crab tinued. “Of course I have an i in gold, why would I hide that? Gold is great, I’m sure you agree. I mean, look at you, that much is clear to see!”

  Montgomery tinued quietly bubbling, unfazed by Balthazar’s attempt at a joke.

  The mert g the being s within the monster, his heart beating faster at the shiny gold glowing through the yers of mucus separating them from being together at st.

  “What is it you want?” asked the ooze in a bitter, gested voice. “I am hungry, and my patience runs thin.”

  Balthazar tried to take his focus out of the s and bato how to get them out of the slime.

  “Well, you’re incredibly smart, I hear, so isn’t it obvious? I’m here tain! Make a deal. A trade. Some exge of goods. Perhaps something of mine for something of yours, like… s, maybe.”

  The ground shook once more as the creature suddenly smmed the old dungeon stones with its heavy body mass, nearly knog the crab off his feet.

  “You think you will scam me out of my delieal, crab?!” Montgomery shouted. “There is nothing you could possibly have that I’d want over my s!”

  Balthazar gulped nervously. The angry slime sure looked bigger and more intimidating up close. Oher pihe loot pile also looked much bigger the closer he got.

  “e on now, everyone always wants something more,” said the mert, tentatively stepping closer, uo resist the appeal of so much gold at near arm’s reach. “It’s only a matter of iating. Let’s make a trade, shall we?”

  “You’re right,” said Montgomery in a poisonous tone. “I ried crab before. I bet it’s delicious.”

  [Gift of the Crab: failure. Target’s INT too high.]

  A portion of the slime’s body suddenly reached out like a tentacle, ing around one of Balthazar’s legs. He tried to shake it off, but the gel-like substauck itself to him like glue, slowly slithering its and pulling him closer to the blob.

  “I’d rather just skip the iation part,” uttered the sludge with evil glee in its voice.

  The crab turned his eyes to the exit in a panic, stu pce by the sticky ooze, but all he had time to see was Tom and Sal running towards the rht as the gates smmed shut in front of them, leaving the skeletons out and trapping the crusta ih a very hungry slime.

  “Oh, crabapples…” said Balthazar as he watched the acidic muck creep over his leg.

  [Warning: you are being digested.]