The trip to the dwarven kingdom took around three days. During that time, we rode on the backs of direwolves and chatted with Thought Communication. Big Bro Rimuru seemed to be interested in the guy, Gelmud, who'd named Rigur's dead big brother, and how Ranga felt about Big Bro killing his father, but both of those concerns were stupid in my opinion. Ranga was wholly devoted to Big Bro, or I'd end up killing him, and Gelmud was trashily weak in comparison to Big Bro.
Realizing that his questions were a waste of time, Big Bro began to ask our 'guide' about the place we were going to. He seemed nervous, but he answered as best he could. The place was called the Armed Nation of Dwargon, and their king was apparently a sort of long-lived living legend. They had high technological skills, and specialized in making high quality weapons and armor. Conflict was prohibited within its borders, so all manners of humans, nonhumans, and magic-born lived within the walls of Dwargon peacefully.
Apparently, this was because they had a good military. I wanted to fight it.
…
When we finally made it to Dwargon, Rimuru wanted me to stay outside with the rest of the goblins while he and Gobta, our guide, went inside. Naturally, I ignored him and went with, using a transformation I'd been working on perfecting for days now, 'Goblina.' With it, I could at least look like a humanoid creature, something that Rimuru envied. I'd used one of the girls, Haruna, as a reference, but I couldn't quite get the breasts right, so I'd just not bothered. As for what I was wearing, it was based on a reference from Big Bro's memory, made out of my threads, pants dyed brown and shirt dyed red. According to Big Bro, my goblina transformation made me look like a cute little girl, though I couldn't do it forever. It'd tire me out mentally after a few hours or so.
…
(Rimuru POV)
So, I ended up standing at the end of a giant line at the gates of Dwargon, beside a hobgoblin with an empty look in his eye and a loli goblina who gave off a murderous feeling with her smile, despite being better dressed than anyone else here.
Honestly, I really wanted to go in with just Gobta, but Risa wasn't having that at all. She threw a huge fit and practically forced me to let her come with me. Really throws a wrench in my plans… how can I go to one of those places with a little girl following me everywhere I went!?
But oh, well. Nothing I can do about that. My focus was on the annoying racket behind us.
"Hey! Hey, check it out, monsters! We can kill 'em, cause we aren't inside yet, right?"
"Yeah, gimme your spot, stupid monsters, before we kill ya! And leave your stuff there, too. Then, we might letcha go!" Yeah, Gobta had raised a flag last night, but I still hadn't expected this. Already, Risa's smile had somehow managed to get even scarier as she looked at the guys accosting her. I just thanked god that they didn't actually threaten Risa specifically, or they'd already be in her stomach. Apparently, she'd recently learned to rapidly dissolve just about anything by assisting her breakdown skill with the Tempest Snake's breath, so she doesn't have to get rid of things that she eats anymore. She can just turn them directly into magicules when she doesn't need them. Normal slimes struggle to dissolve too much at once, apparently, though I'd never had that problem thanks to Predator powering my intrinsics up.
"Hey, Gobta. Did you run into any trouble last time you were here?" I asked.
"Yes, of course, sir! They beat me silly! If the kobold merchants hadn't been there to pick me up off the ground, I might've died, eh?" He replied.
"So we can't avoid this?" I muttered to myself.
"It's uhh… the fate of the weak…?" He replied to me in a questioning tone, clearly trying to figure out how that fit our descriptions now. Sheesh, he could've told me.
"Big Bro…?" Risa's voice was getting scary again. I could just imagine her casually killing all of these adventurers. I suspected that the only reason they were still alive was because they hadn't actually attacked us yet.
"Yo! You runts think you can just ignore us!? You got a lotta guts!"
"Hey, isn't a talking slime pretty rare? Maybe we could get some dough outta sellin' it!"
The more they talked, the less I wanted to hold Risa back. People may have said that I had the patience of a saint, but this was quickly getting on my last nerve. And just when Gobta was beginning to get comfortable talking to me.
"Both of you remember the rules I gave you?"
"Y-yessir!" Gobta immediately answered like a good little boy. I wanted to tell them to look away, but as a slime, Risa was literally incapable of that.
"Only if you absolutely have to, do you fight. Look, guys, if you leave us alone and line up out back, then I'll let this all slide, alright?" I decided to ask them nicely, to leave a good example for Risa. Naturally, stupefied the duo, making them turn bright red.
"What the hell're you talking about, pissant! You wanna start somethin'?"
"Yeah, we were gonna letcha live, but now that ya've gone and pissed us off, you're dead!"
In the end, I waited until they were actually in the process of attacking me before using mimicry to turn into a direwolf… Or a Tempest Starwolf? Umm, Great Sage?
[Report. Your direwolf form has evolved into Form: Tempest Starwolf.] And I'd gained a few more skills, too, including Shadow Motion and Dark Lightning. After letting the five idiots take a good, ineffective swipe at my huge Tempest Starwolf form, I decided to invoke my Coercion skill on them.
Immediately, Great Sage began the extensive mental damage report. Basically there were two reactions. About three quarters of the line shat themselves and then fainted, while the last quarter ran away, screaming in terror. As for Gobta, he'd fallen unconscious. The only one who seemed unaffected by my coercion was Risa, who was looking up at me with sparkling eyes.
…
(Risa POV)
"I'm really sorry about this!" Big Bro did something really cool! …Unfortunately, it's considered 'rude' to use a powerful skill like Big Bro's coercion in a public setting like that.
So, we'd been arrested by a team of very scared dwarf security guards.
Now, Big Bro was apologizing to the dwarven guards' captain from inside a jail cell that he shared with Gobta and I. Meanwhile, I was tying Gobta to the ceiling with Sticky Thread. Why was I tying Gobta to the ceiling with Sticky Thread, you ask? Because he'd fallen asleep an hour ago, and I felt like punishing him.
I was very bored.
After making me promise to stay silent unless specifically spoken to, Big Bro began explaining our side of the story, heaping all of the blame onto the people who assaulted us. But apparently, it wasn't much of a problem. The guard captain wasn't mad because of Rimuru's little attack, but the fact that we'd been targeted at all. Apparently, it was rather difficult to crack down on that sort of thing outside the doors, but they were supposed to at least try.
But that didn't mean that we were free and clear.
"So, what was that huge wolf, then?" The guard captain wanted to know about the wolf.
Rimuru had already explained that it was his mimicry skill at work, even having me transform my arm back into slime for a moment as proof that we were both talking slimes, but the guard captain wasn't convinced. A talking slime was rare. A talking slime with mimicry? Almost unheard of. Two? Yeah, I couldn't really blame him for not believing it.
But it was the truth. And it actually wasn't as strange as he made it sound. Had Rimuru not led me out of that cave, I'd have lived out my lifespan and eventually died as a random, weak slime that just happened to have a Unique Skill.
With the sheer number of weak monsters out there, monsters with skills like mine probably existed all over the place, lived out short lives, and then died without their skills ever being noticed.
In the cave, there were hundreds of slimes, nestling in holes and absorbing minerals and scavenging off monster corpses, so the ratio of slimes with Skills was less than half a percent or so.
But Rimuru didn't think about that. Instead, when he realized that the guard captain didn't believe him, he made up a story.
In fact, he spent two hours talking with the guard captain about two young magical sisters who were gifted students at an obscure academy for illusion magic, cursed and transformed into slimes by an evil mage. Apparently, we were currently on a quest to find a way to undo the curse.
And here I thought that we were trying to find people to teach our people how to make houses and clothes?