What terrified Matthias about his slimes the most was not their size or their propensity to eat everything and anything. It was how his slimes decided to make the long-distance trek.

  He had expected some mix of hopping or rolling like a boulder. Instead, they rolled and slowly picked up speed. As they accelerated, they narrowed into a wheel-like shape. Soon, they were moving fast enough that they looked like blades rolling off into the distance.

  And they did not even roll in formation—they seemed to be treating it like a drag race to see who could get there the fastest.

  "I-I don't even..." Lucy tried.

  "What did you do to your slimes?" Chloe asked.

  "I have no idea," he admitted. "Maybe they are tapping into my subconscious? Drawing instincts from me?"

  "I am surprised they are holding together," Serenia confessed.

  "Well, I could explain some of it, but I think some kind of magical tomfoolery is going on here," Matthias said. He could feel his truths begging him to go into all the nerdy details. "But none of it would help us right now. Somehow, those slimes will make it to the enemy dungeon in three days. We need to create an envoy to deal with other envoys if they show up. How do I do that?"

  "Normally, you would just summon an entity from either faction," Lucy explained. "An angel or a demon. They would then speak on your behalf as an envoy to other dungeons."

  "But we are not part of a faction," he pointed out.

  "We could be," Lucy offered. "The infernal jerks just took a swing."

  "No, a young dungeon lashed out," Matthias corrected her. "It is not the same thing."

  "Would you be saying that if they had sent a bigger army?" Lucy asked.

  "That would imply an older dungeon that was trying to test me," Matthias replied.

  "And now everyone will think that our dungeon is a slime dungeon," Chloe said, deflating slightly. "Did you have to send slimes?"

  "I mean, neither of you gave me any better ideas, and I needed to bleed off some slimes," he retorted. "They have been breeding faster lately."

  "Your dungeon is a slime paradise," Lucy pointed out. "They can eat all they want all day. They then just bud off babies whenever they feel like it."

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "Could the slimes have been acting like that due to his passives?" Serenia interrupted, still stuck on the madly spinning slimes. "Could he have simply and accidentally created smarter slimes by letting them have more generations than usual?"

  Everyone paused at that. Matthias looked toward his monster stat block.

  "Oh," was the first thing he said. "So what is average sapient intelligence?"

  "Ten intelligence and ten wisdom," Lucy commented.

  "It can go as low as eight wisdom or intelligence—but not both—as long as the parents are a sapient species," Chloe added.

  "The slimes have an intelligence of six, but a wisdom of fourteen," Matthias informed them.

  "So they are all idiot savants," Chloe summarized. "They know very little, but they know how to use it."

  "So we have nearly sapient slimes, and now they have the zoomies," Lucy said.

  "I will move the slimes down a floor. Maybe all of them," Matthias conceded as he issued the order to his monsters.

  "I-I just don't get it," Chloe confessed. "Why wisdom?"

  "Better instinct," Serenia noted. "They simply understand how to better use what they have. I am just surprised that the swamp was stressful enough that even a slime felt evolutionary pressure."

  "From how the camp has been looking, the first raid team will be entering the swamp tomorrow," Matthias reminded everyone. "We should iron out the swamp to make sure it goes well. Have any of you noticed any other abnormalities?"

  "The hobs," Serenia said.

  "The crabs," Lucy stated.

  "The turtles," Chloe teased.

  Matthias just groaned. "You know that I can't do anything about the turtles. There are far too many of them."

  "And the hobs," Serenia insisted.

  "Will go down a floor once they are mature," Matthias promised.

  "And the crabs?" Lucy pressed.

  "As far as I can tell, they are functioning as intended," he replied.

  "They creep me out," Lucy said with a shudder. "You should just get rid of them."

  "But the lurkers have actually carved out a nice little niche as mini-bosses on the second floor," he countered.

  "And I hate them," she argued. "They don't look like they belong."

  "If you don't like them, then I vote we keep them," Chloe teased.

  "Noooooo," Lucy whined in defeat.

  "I actually like them, but I think they are an evolutionary dead end," Serenia admitted.

  "I don't think they are," Matthias said. "I just don't think they have the right pressure to evolve yet."

  "What could they possibly evolve into?" Serenia asked.

  "Maybe shark-kin sized," Matthias began. "Two to four legs. One big claw for defense, while the other gets longer and more narrow. Give them lesser regeneration and maybe a few more spectrums they can see in. Call them Royal Lancers. They would fight like spearmen."

  They all looked at him, each wearing a mix of horror and curiosity.

  "What?" he asked.

  "I think that would be worse," Lucy said with another shudder.

  "They could get into smaller areas," Chloe noted.

  "With how crabs multiply, that would be horrifying on an ecological level," Serenia said. "They would either be sapient—with that pragmatism most sea-originating life seems to have—or they would not be sapient and would just be another form of crustacean malice."

  "I don't think crabs are naturally malicious," Matthias argued.

  "Then what would you call that look in their dark and hollow eyes?" Lucy asked.

  "Hunger," Matthias answered without hesitation. "Crustaceans will never turn down a meal. That look is just them evaluating, in their prehistoric brains, what you count as. Crabs are so evolutionarily successful that they have not needed to evolve."

  "Then explain the lurker!" Lucy accused.

  "Sometimes nature just wants to be cruel," Matthias admitted with a sigh.