--- An hour before Jack was attacked.
In Uryen forest, in another cave, sat a woman. She was playing with her braids with her one hand. The other one ended in a stump, swaddled in white bandages. A half-eaten apple was on her lap, the sweet juice staining her fingertips. But her eyes, those were a stormy ocean, fixed on the flickering light of her small campfire.
"Come on be happy."
The priestess ordered her happiness as if it were a prayer that might be answered. She was rid of the demon. Her sin of summoning it was lessened. The path to redemption was clearer.
"I can confess my sin and become a priestess in Vylara."
The elven kingdom was rumored to be free of the Church's influence. A clean slate. A new beginning without her sins. All she needed to do was get 10 gold coins to pay the fee for passage.
So she took a bite. And then she spit the apple out and dropped the rest. Her appetite hasn't returned for hours.
The image of that slime, flattened, held hostage by the hybrid, flashed in her mind.
She shook her head.
"No he violated me. He's gone."
Jeanne said the last part to herself. Then why did she feel a pang of something that felt an awful lot like loss. She hasn't had a friend in a long time: they were only acquintances or superiors who looked down on her.
"He's not a friend." she grumbled.
--- Back to the present.
Marcus and his 5 other mercenaries were standing in front of Jack. Everything was escalating too fast for him. He didn't have super thinking power to come up with a grand plan like those reincarnated protagonists do in those novels his friend used to read.
Aria on the ground wasn't moving. The collar kept her immobilized.
"Okay," he said.
Their objective was to capture Aria alive so he didn't have to protect her from attacks, he could use her as a meat shield.He jumped on top of Aria.
Seeing that, the one with a crossbow, lowered his weapon and took out a dagger. They wouldn't risk hurting their 'prize'.
"Crafty little guy aren't you?"
A flicker of respect shone in the mercenary leader's eyes, quickly replaced by contempt.
Two other mercenaries lunged. One hand reaching for him, the other getting ready to slice his core in half.
Instead of defending, Jack hopped onto one of the swords. Using the momentum from the lunge, he catapulted himself towards the second mercenary.
Unlike Tyler, the mercenary dodged. Jack hit the wall. It splattered him like a pancake but his slime nature allowed him to pull himself together. Unfortunately the leader used this opportunity to capture Aria.
The iron collar on her neck seemed to pulse with cruel triumph as she was dragged, unconscious, across the damp floor of the cavern. Marcus lifted the slave and put her on his shoulder.
"When you're done with the slime. Meet me back at the shop. We've got a new shipment of rats in the cages," the leader barked.
He left the five mercs behind to clean up the bodies and to kill Jack. Their job wasn't that hard anymore: they had no reason to hold back now.
Dread hit Jack like a tidal wave. Failure was bitter and sticky; he couldn't protect her. And deathly.
Dodging arrows, and sword sliced was hard for him even as a slime. They missed his core but just hitting his goo made his hp go down.
[HP:15/40]
The sounds of steel striking stone and the heavy footfalls of the mercenaries echoed in the cavern, a grim soundtrack to Jack's desperate dance.
[HP: 5/40]
One more hit and he was a dead-slime. He already tried to cut the swords and arrows in half with his Blood Forging skill but it was useless. He couldn't cut steal.
Finally he was cornered.
Crossbow were aimed at him and one of them even had a fireball ready.
"This was one slippery slime." the merc with the crossbow said.
Jack had nothing else up his sleeves. He sighed. Accepting his fate that was maybe worse than the one he had on earth.
Suddenly the entrance to the cave shimmered with golden light. A spear, holy and pure, impaled itself between the mercenaries and the slime, missing everyone but striking the stone floor with an explosion of brilliant energy that blinded everyone.
Before any of them could recover, a figure stepped through the cave's entrance, a silhouette against the morning light.
She picked up Jack like she was picking a dropped coin. Before any of them could get a grasp of what happened, Jeanne ran out of the cave with him.
"Jeanne," Jack squeaked, a wave of relief washing over him, so potent it made his entire form quiver. She didn't answer, her face a cold, hard mask of focus. She had been tracking the commotion, drawn by the sounds of struggle and the screaming.
"I saw a body," she said.
Her grip on him tightened almost painfully as she leaped over a fallen log.
"Did you kill them?"
"A bit," he answered. "One. His brain has a hole."
She paused. Jack, expecting a sermon about the sanctity of life, was surprised when she simply nodded.
"You're a monster so that's understandable."
It wasn't an insult. In her world, it was a statement of fact, a sliver of acceptance for what he had become to survive.
"Wait did you miss on purpose?"
Jeanne stumbled slightly, her step catching on a gnarled root.
"Of course. I'm not a paladin. It's forbidden for me to kill humans."
She was running slower, her stamina clearly running out. "However anything else is fair game."
Finally they stopped. Jeanne leaned on a tree to catch her breath.
Jack hopped to the ground.
"We need to save her."
The silence stretched, broken only by Jeanne's ragged gasps for air. She was staring at the sky. Sweat was pouring down her face.
"No. She's a demon. And a slave, it's unlawful to free them." Jeanne's voice, though tired, had a familiar, hard-edged cadence of recited scripture.
"Lawful or not, I made a promise. A deal with blood," Jack retorted. He thought back to the deal he made with Aria. The blood pact wasn't valid. Yet the thought of leaving Aria to be sold, used, tormented, was like a shard of ice in the slime core that served as his heart.
"We will go to another city and make money there. Then we can go to Vylara together and start a new life, clean of sins," she said, her one good hand gesturing towards the distant, unseen north. Her eyes pleaded with him.
"Jeanne I made a pact." He looked her dead in her eyes.
"A pact?"
"Between hybrids."
A humorless snort escaped Jeanne's lips.
"That doesn't exist, Jack. Slimes don't make pacts. They ooze, they get stepped on, and sometimes they talk." she countered.
He started to hop away.
"Regardless I'm not leaving her."
And he's not leaving his ghost hand skill.