I almost left without breaking the barroom doors, which would have been a bad move. When I had first entered the secret room, I was scared of the Sleem finding their way in. I watched the door behind me like a hawk as red dots piled up against it on my map, but that seal had proven tight enough to prevent their passage.

So my fear moved to the darkened hallway ahead of me. My imagination produced drains, air ducts, and other secret doors with looser seals at the end of the hallway, and until I lit up the plasma falchion and nothing came at me, I was concerned that I had only staved off the inevitable by hiding in here.

The plasma roared so loudly when it fired that anything in that tunnel would have had no choice but to know that I was there. It also lit up the entire thing, allowing me to see down to the end.

It was a blank hallway, extending a long distance before turning a corner. There was a ladder part way down the hallway, and a series of old hanging lights, but no other markings or decoration. Just me, and this ratty old batwing door that led into the bar.

I laid into it, smashing down on the rotten old wood with my metal encased fists. My cartoon starfish showed up and started moaning happy things in its thick Dutch accent, but I ignored it and kept smashing. The wood was brittle, and snapped into dust and splinters under my blows, and I got the much-needed charge for my starfish repair suit.

Not all the way charged, but it made me feel better to know I could get healed if something went wrong with all my new toys.

Plus, anyone who cared about the doors died in a shootout decades ago, then got sold to an uncaring marketplace. Probably got ground up and used as fertilizer or something. The thought made me snicker, and I felt a little better about having sold the egg to their bioweapon project. What a bunch of jerks, actually making that weapon. At least I was merely the buffoon who sold it thoughtlessly, for his own self-interest and survival.

Walking down the hallway in my anti-Sleem suit distracted me from that line of thinking, thankfully. The suit was turning out to be a bit of a pain in the ass to walk in. It was like walking in a full body pajama, but the bottoms of the feet were mildly slippery instead of tactile. I almost fell as I got up to full speed and had problems with my helmet trying to learn a whole new set of movements to draw for me in the dark.

An ad popped up before me.

Zalf Multi-MortBlock Industries Presents - SleemSupreme Tactical Footwear! Are you tired of slipping and sliding in your SleemSupreme protective attire? Protected from slimes but not from the lack of traction that protection provides? Well slip and slide no more with SleemSupreme Tactical Footwear. Immune to Sleem Slime and hyper tracted to guaranteed that your slip n slide days are over. 200,000 morties. 4.1 stars.

That was BuyMort’s batteries not included. I groaned and spent another two hundred thousand morties on them, bringing my remaining total down to seven hundred thousand.

The boots worked at least, gripping the concrete floor like any work boot would, but offering the same protection as the suit. I set aside my annoyances and left, moving down the long tunnel toward the darkened corner it vanished around.

There were no drains or vents to worry about as I walked down to the ladder and stopped to look at my map. I was roughly halfway between the secret door I had entered from, and the corner my hallway ended in. A metal plaque on the wall read “medical,” and I promptly walked past the ladder.

If it went up to that section of this facility, I had no interest in trying to navigate it. The area had been a maze from the top, and it was full of so many ducts and drains I doubted my ability to easily survive, even with all my new toys.

I looked up at the hatch on the ceiling, shook my head, and continued plodding down the long concrete hallway.

I stopped again once I reached the corner. My helmet couldn’t map what it couldn’t see, so until I poked my head around that corner, it was just another hole in the dark, and my anxiety had been growing about it since the ladder. Upon arrival, I hefted my shotgun, loaded with laser slugs, and stepped quickly around the corner.

It ended at a thick metal hatch, about ten feet in front of me. I sighed in relief and started working on my breathing again. My fear was back, and spikier than ever. The only thing that helped was remembering Molls’ lesson by the attic window. And how cute she had looked all bundled up in her blankets.

I shook out of it, that kind of distraction wouldn’t help. The Sleem were waiting for me on the other side of this door, and new equipment or not, they were dangerous and shockingly numerous. We were definitely the source of the local infestation I had heard about on the news, though I hadn’t quite figured out how they came and went in such large numbers without us noticing.

Shortly after opening the door, I found out.

The door was sealed tight, but the wheel and mechanism were simple, and still worked. I heaved against the metal until it turned, and with a series of soft thuds, the door drifted open. Dust rained from the hinges, but they didn’t produce sound, which I was grateful for. It seemed to open up directly behind a structural support pillar, because the door was nearly touching concrete once fully open. I slipped by it and slid the door mostly closed, wanting to leave an escape path if needed.

A quick look around didn’t help me very much, as the range in here was too much for my helmet. The wall behind me stopped part way up, as did the flooring all around. There were more structural pillars nearby, but those just vanished part way up as well, leaving me with no sense of size to the structure I was in.

There was almost no sound. It was eerily silent, aside from a single persistent drip. The entire area echoed with it, a thick drop of something falling into something else wet. It wasn’t quite a splash sound, more of a wet plop. My imagination filled in all kinds of things it could be in the dark, but I reasonably settled on Sleem being the cause.

Before moving any further, I stayed behind my pillar and played with my map. Once I got the helmet to recognize that I wanted to manipulate it, the map moved easily with my hand motions. I zoomed it out and swung the angle down to better relate where I was, compared to where I had entered the facility. I could see the escape tunnel, leading to the small chunk of medical that we had explored. Then, next to that was residential and experimentation, which went all the way down to the giant cargo elevator shaft and followed me all the way through the secret tunnel to where I was now.

As I had assumed upon exiting the door, I was in the hangar section of the base. Far back and lower than the escape tunnel, but I knew exactly which direction I had to go in, and I was equipped for a fight. So I took a few deep breaths to steady myself and stepped out from behind the pillar. I walked softly, carefully, trying desperately not to make any noise. Unconsciously, my footsteps fell into rhythm with the echoing drip. Creeping from one column to the next, I tried to map out the room while heading in the general direction I needed to go, but I quickly ran into the source of the sound.

A wall of slime was encasing the far side of the room. I made it all the way to the metal stairs leading up. If I could have climbed those, I would have been able to run down the hallway I had defended with Ordo earlier. It felt like hours ago, but my helmet’s clock told me it had been less than an hour since I had gotten separated and trapped down here. The giant wall of slime encasing the stairs seemed like it may take issue with me trying to climb them.

The dripping appeared to be serving a purpose. The helmet showed me that the slime up on top of the stairs was different. It was covered in hardened flakes, which I realized was burn damage from Rayna and her flame thrower. The damaged material sloughed in a single direction from the drip point, pooling and being left on the concrete. Dripping slowly from the upper walkway was allowing it to remove damaged portions of its body.

This collection of ooze, whatever it was, had been what attacked us before.

I looked in either direction, realizing the sheer mass of it. The blob extended as far in either direction as my helmet could draw and was roughly three feet high at the tallest point. It was just a lake of caustic slime, between me and where I needed to go.

I reached in my satchel and produced a grenade. The material had said one was enough to kill Sleem of any size. My intention was to test that claim, but I never got the chance. Something massive appeared in the room behind me with a sudden rush of air and torn space. That same fart stink of burnt ozone from the dimensional pods accompanied it, washing over me in a wave of dry heat.

The lake of slime in front of me immediately stirred, drawing itself back and away from the burnt portions it left behind, and squalled a rumbling fart. Then, its body retracted, in a huge wave.

I held perfectly still as the massive quantity of slime flattened out against a concrete wall and slid away, upwards out of sight. I put the grenade away and ran for a nearby pillar, hoping the giant Sleem wasn’t about to land on me. It had been impossible to tell if it had reacted to me, or just to the arrival of whatever the hell had warped in on top of us.

Nothing I could do about it if it did fall on me anyway, I just had to hope my new suit and shield were up to the task. I hesitated to use a grenade in that theoretical scenario, the ads had been a little fuzzy on what would happen if you did that, but generally seemed to suggest avoiding it.

My map filled in something huge as I approached the object. Then my helmet did too, as I got close enough to see part of it. It was the Sleem’s ship. Massive, bulbous, and green, according to my helmet, the ship radiated a soft source of light. A series of large bulbs near the craft’s bottom hummed with visible power, and produced most of the light, but the entire ship leaked illumination from its sectioned plating.

It hummed in the air as a door slid open on the bottom, and Sleem began to pour out. A long tube of gelatin extended from the ovoid doorway and pooled on the floor. It formed into an orb and rolled away as another Sleem began to push its way through.

I held perfectly still, and they rolled past me into the darkness of the hangar beyond. The suit I was wearing over my mostly burned away clothing was helping me to mute my own production of sound, and it confirmed my suspicions about their hunting methods.

The next Sleem orb did the exact same thing. Just rolled past me, heading for the back of the hangar section. As I watched, several more orbs flowed from the inside of the ship, before being followed by cubes. Once the cubes had finished, the oozes began flopping out onto the concrete.

Each of them carried some kind of object in their bodies. Most of the bigger ones held curled up versions of the land wasps I had seen. Some of the cubes had the remains of people in them, slowly bubbling as their skin and muscle layers dissolved. Even the little oozes held detritus like cloth, wood, or random globs of sludge.

The placement of the door, near the rear and bottom of the ship, and the manner in which they disembarked had me wanting to turn my head and give the ship some privacy, but I was more terrified of moving. A steady line of Sleem rolled, jiggled, and squirmed past my position, all filled with cargo, and I held perfectly still. Some of them went into the darkness of the hangar behind me, but the majority diverted up the nearby metal stairs and vanished into the nest of hallways above.

I waited to move until they were all completely gone. Only once the red dots had left my map entirely did I dare to even relax my stance and let go of the pillar I had been holding onto. The almost silent scrape of my gloves on concrete still made me grit my teeth in fear. When nothing landed on me or charged at me from the dark, I breathed out the nerves and started walking slowly toward the stairs leading to the exit. It meant following the Sleem up, but I was hoping they were filing into medical and the residential block instead of just waiting in the escape tunnel hallway to swallow me up.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned around and looked behind me at the ship. It hovered, glowing, and heating up the cold room around it. Condensation was forming on the walls near the ship, and a consistent dripping was audible in the dark. There were no other sounds. The ship was too close to ignore, and I turned to go back to it.

We were definitely the cause of the Sleem infestation in the area, and I knew for sure this ship was a massive part of that. It looked like it could blink from location to location. Some kind of dimensional gating, or maybe just advanced FTL that could move them through solid matter. I couldn’t tell from out here, but that didn’t matter. I just needed to find a way to sabotage them, so they couldn’t keep terrorizing the neighbors.

That likely meant they would be terrorizing us a lot more, but I planned to re-equip and come back down here after selling a lot of spiderwebs in a big hurry. There had been items for sale that promised to clear out infestations like ours, and I liked the look of several. My focus had been on personal protection and making sure I could escape, but once I had more funding, I was coming back down here with a vengeance.

Everything came down to the morties.

I carefully stepped over to the ship, and when nothing jumped out to kill me, walked beneath it. The ship hovered barely a foot over my head and bobbed slightly when I reached up to grab the lip of the doorway. It was a firm handhold, and the ship didn’t budge at all as I tried to clamber in silently.

The light hum from the engine pods along the sides of the ship must have kept my struggle hidden, because climbing on board without scraping the shotgun or rattling my bag of crystalline grenades did not happen. I also definitely grunted in exertion more than once. By the time I was standing up in front of the doorway on board the alien vessel, I was afraid I would get caught, and just started moving. I stepped quickly but carefully through the hallway ahead of me, staring at the surroundings.

The ship I walked through was covered in greenish metal plating, most of which had a thick coating of Sleem slime all over it. The viscous stuff dripped and smeared on me as I walked, but the suit protected me exactly as advertised. The goo just slid down to plop to the floor as I walked. The hallway I walked through felt like it should be part of a landing ramp, based on the interior. It felt like an extending airport bridge, with sections in the flooring, walls, and ceiling that clearly were meant to extend out of one another.

As I passed into a wider, open space, I noticed the floor was gummed up. Slime had oozed into the ship’s ramp and now when the door opened, it wouldn’t extend. Several other areas nearby were also gummed over, with old Sleem ooze. The ship had no furniture whatsoever, and an almost completely open floor plan. The interior was mostly hollowed out, with large open spaces covered in old gummy slime. They must have packed into this ship and made raiding runs, like Vikings made of slime.

A door ahead of me in a straight line from the exit was coated in slime like the rest, but all of it was fresh. It looked like it had a light on the side of the round portal, which I walked carefully over to and peered closer at. It was free of slime, and when I reached my hand slowly toward it, it chimed and the door hissed open at my side.

Revealing a cockpit, with three Sleem Orbs still inside.

Two were the usual coloration, yellowish green and blue. But the orb in the center was bigger, and bright orange.

Two of them extended tendrils and began making excited burbles and squealing fart sounds, but the big orange one simply lunged for me. I had been nervously clutching my shotgun since boarding the ship, so I swiveled toward it, and hip-fired a shell.

A beam of vibrant red light shot out of my Mossburg, along with a spray of molten slag. I’m enough of a gun guy to have realized my mistake in that moment, but it was hard to focus on my ruined barrel threading with three Sleem orbs nearly in melee range.

The big one I had shot at the front reacted appropriately. The beam of light had lasted just over a full second, as they advertised they would, and it had scorched a hole directly through the monster, burning the console behind it.

The first Sleem stopped, as the hole burned through it shrank and crisped, with embers still burning. It vibrated and emitted a terrible squeal, and the other two charged, rolling directly at me.

I racked the slide and stepped back, turning to fire at the orb on my right.

It stopped and began screaming too, but before I could rack my slide again, the orb on my left surged forward and engulfed me.

My first instinct was to shout, but I held my breath as the orb rolled over me. I held onto my shotgun and was gripped by an inappropriate but sad thought.

The poor thing was probably done for after tonight.

First I’d soaked it in acid three times, then I’d scorched its threading out with a laser. The strap finally gave up and snapped, and the orb flexed part of its body to yank the weapon from my grasp.

My suit worked exactly as advertised. No pain, no acid at all. I had felt a little like an infectious disease lab worker before, but as soon as the Sleem engulfed me, the suit collapsed against my body. I tried to move my arm down to my new falchion, which had come with a Sleem acid protection guarantee, but the orb was too strong by far.

It held my arm in place, while probing my suit for weaknesses. I directed my helmet to activate the suit’s built-in shield, and a sudden surge of electricity erupted from all around me. The orb vomited me out and the other one immediately rolled on top of me before I could get up. My body was pressed violently down to the deck, and I felt the Sleem lift my head, and then slam it down.

I shouted for my helmet to activate the suit’s shield again but was informed that it was charging and would be ready in two minutes. The Sleem lifted my head with a sucking noise. It dragged my head back further and further, while pressing down on my legs and I quickly realized it meant to snap my spine.

My muscles clenched as I fought it, and I realize now that if I hadn’t already injured it so badly with my laser shotgun blast, this orb would have snapped me like a twig. I managed to resist and force my body back into position.

It responded by slamming my head down and trying to bend me back up again. I fought it again, and the helmet did its job remarkably well. I barely felt the impact. The Sleem orb seemed to notice, because the next part of my body that moved involuntarily was my hips.

My butt and groin lifted into the air, putting me into an awkward and comical position in the giant gelatin monster. Then it slammed my hips against the hard metal floor of the deck.

That hurt.

Despite the soft padding of the suit, it felt like I was trapped between the crushing vice of a garbage compactor. When it began lifting my hips for another blow, I started to thrash. It pressed against my legs and back, but I noticed its grip on my arms loosen, and made a hurried grab for my falchion.

Just before my fingers closed around the handle, the Sleem squeezed down around my hand and stopped the movement. I strained harder and pressed all my strength into the movement, and as soon as my fingers wrapped around the handle, I squeezed the ignition button, which released it from the docking port on my thigh.

The Sleem orb screamed in pain and boiled all around me as the heat from the plasma scorched my leg. I hauled the falchion away from my body and was pleased to discover that it moved freely through the gel surrounding me. The orb tried to lift its body off of my own, but I rose from the ground with it, and kept the falchion burning and boiling it away. Thick black smoke erupted from the orb and began to pool at the top of the flight deck.

I roared in righteous anger as I reared back and slashed through the orb with my weapon, cutting a giant, burning tear into the dying Sleem. Its sounds stopped and the orb’s shape slumped, pouring boiled gelatin, and crusty burnt goo from its wounds. It remained mostly round but slumped enough to change its shape to that of a rotten plum.

The other two orbs in the cockpit with me immediately began jiggling and making high pitched squeals and farts. Then something I didn’t expect happened. The wounded, orange orb lunged at the smaller orb.

Both orbs fought in front of me for a few seconds, and I stared in confusion. The healthy orb quickly overwhelmed its injured companion and suddenly both of them were rolling toward me. I raised my plasma falchion, and the wounded orange orb rolled over the top of me with a clear scream-fart of terror.

I went down, back to the floor, as its gelatinous bulk flattened me. The falchion immediately tore a new, horrible wound in the Sleem orb, and its scream rose to teakettle levels. I waved the flaming blade around, burning and melting the orb as it tried desperately to move its body off from me. It was held down by the passage of the remaining orb, as that one fled the battle through the cockpit doorway I had blocked.

The dying orb on top of me finally managed to shift its weight away and I crawled out from underneath it. As it died, something clanked to the floor between us from its body. A MortBlock, just like the one Mr. Sada had been playing with.

I ignored it and focused on the fight I was in. My helmet notified me that my falchion was down thirty percent of its charge already, so I quickly sheathed it in its docking port before I even stood. My shotgun was beneath a puddle of melted acidic gelatin, bubbling gently. I hauled the weapon out and racked it with a mushy clack, before pointing it at the Sleem fleeing behind me, while still sitting in slime.

I squeezed the trigger and swept the gun intentionally this time. The beam started in the middle of the fleeing Sleem orb, and cut through it entirely, scorching part of the exit ramp it had shoved its bulk into.

The Sleem released a bubbling scream, and kept going, heaving itself out to flop onto the concrete behind the ship. It was still making the tea kettle whistle when I arrived behind it and shot it with another blast of weaponized light and radiation.

As I swung the weapon to the side, the high pitched whistle it had been making stopped, and the orb fell into two separate piles of glop. I glanced back at the smoking console behind me in the cockpit and shrugged.

Good enough to keep them here, I hoped.

Then I returned to take a look at the MortBlock the orange orb had left behind.

When I picked up the little cube, I noticed all the cheap paint that provided the BuyMort emblem was eaten away. This MortBlock was just a small box. As I lifted it, my personal account popped up and BuyMort had an important message for me.

“This MortBlock no longer has an owner! It covers the entire underground area and ends at Anthony Sada’s MortBlock. Would you like to claim ownership of this MortBlock?”