One down.

  One down…

  I let the words echo in my head longer than necessary, as if repetition might summon the rest of the problem into view. It didn’t. The sewer stretched on ahead of me, sloped gently downward, walls slick with moisture and age. The world around me felt wrong in its calm. Too quiet. No wet sloshing of red gelatinous bodies. No suctioning sounds. No hungry wobble.

  Instead, there was only water.

  Condensed droplets fell from the ceiling in lazy intervals, striking the wastewater below with soft, hollow plinks. The current carried everything downstream in a steady, unbothered rush, as indifferent as gravity itself.

  Right. The phrase surfaced unbidden.

  Shit rolls downhill.

  I sighed through my nose and finally understood why this section of the sewer was so empty. I was standing at the top. Of course I was. Slimes followed mass, waste, nutrients. They pooled where things gathered, not where things began.

  I glanced back at the remains behind me, already dissolving into inert sludge.

  How much had that slime weighed before I cursed it?

  A pound? Probably less. Definitely less. This world used the metric system… somehow. Four hundred grams, give or take? The thought irritated me. Units never stayed consistent in my head anymore. My brain stubbornly wanted carats. Old habits from a life that no longer applied.

  Seventy-six carats, maybe.

  Either way, density was mass divided by volume. Its mass had been negligible. Its volume absurdly inflated. Which meant it certainly would be…

  I trailed off, staring back at the water, watching how the current thinned as it climbed upward, how nothing substantial lingered here for long.

  “Sophitia,” I murmured, breaking the quiet. “Tell me. Am I correct in my assumptions?”

  I can’t give you a falsehood, my lord. However, it is a very apt assumption to make based on the data we have collected.

  I winced. “Data? Why are you talking like some scientific lab AI-assistant?”

  My lord. This is because I am beginning to synchronize with your memories of the other world. Your home. Did you not originate from a time during the height of artificial intelligence? Wouldn’t ‘data’ be the appropriate term regarding this analysis?

  “Please. Stop.” I exhaled sharply. “Everyone my age loathes and hates AI use…”

  The words died in my throat.

  Something splashed behind me.

  Not the lazy drip of condensation. Not the steady churn of water. This was heavier. Intentional. Multiple points of impact, converging.

  I turned.

  Three red slimes slid into view, oozing from separate channels before flowing together with unsettling coordination. Their bodies merged, gelatinous masses folding inward, shaping themselves into something taller. Narrower. Humanoid.

  Limbs formed. A torso. A head that was just a little too smooth.

  Then it reached down, extruded a shape, and—

  A cane.

  Shorter than mine, but unmistakably similar.

  It was copying me.

  The thing straightened, posture awkward but improving by the second. The surface of its body rippled as it adjusted proportions, refining angles, redistributing mass. Its head tilted, mirroring the angle of my own.

  I clenched my cane, shoulders tightening as muscle memory took over. I stepped forward and thrust, not expecting much more than resistance. I wasn’t aiming to kill it yet. I needed the cores cursed first.

  What I didn’t expect was resistance with intent.

  Its cane snapped up and met mine mid-thrust, the impact sending a sharp vibration up my arms.

  Steel met slime.

  And didn’t pass through.

  “Sophitia,” I said quietly, teeth clenched as it pressed back. “Please tell me this isn’t what I think this is.”

  Then I won’t tell you that. Instead, I will inform you that this entity is classified as a [Mimic-Slime].

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” I muttered.

  I twisted my wrist, breaking contact, and immediately parried as it countered. Its movements were sloppy, but improving. Every exchange smoothed its timing. Every strike it copied shaved away hesitation.

  It was learning.

  From me.

  I gave ground deliberately, boots scraping against damp stone. My breathing slowed. Panic would only feed it more data.

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  Luckily, learning required focus.

  I attacked again, a wide swipe meant to be blocked. As expected, it mirrored the motion, raising its cane to intercept.

  That was when I lifted my free hand.

  Just a little.

  “Flesh to stone,” I intoned.

  “Iron to bone.

  What bends must rest.

  What rests is kept.

  Time sets its hand.

  Remain.

  One with the land.”

  The jade nail launched forward like a thought given form, impaling itself into one of the slime’s internal cores. The reaction was immediate. That section of its body stiffened, translucence clouding as the liquid cohesion began to fail. The red hue dulled, turning opaque, veins of mineral rigidity crawling outward.

  Calcification.

  Jade wasn’t the hardest substance. Six to seven on the Mohs scale. Durable, but not absolute. That was fine. I didn’t need indestructible.

  I needed brittle.

  I stepped in and brought my cane down with a grunt.

  The petrified section shattered under the blow, cracks racing through it before the entire chunk tore free. The mimic-slime staggered, its balance failing as the crystallized core and surrounding mass sloughed off behind it, hitting the sewer floor in a spreading puddle that rapidly hardened into useless stone.

  For half a second, I thought I had it.

  Then the thing shuddered, stretched, and drank.

  Water surged from the surrounding flow, drawn unnaturally into its form. Its volume swelled, replacing what it had lost. The shape stabilized. Same height. Same mass. Same terrible imitation of me.

  A dull gong sounded inside my skull.

  Text flickered at the edge of my vision.

  I ignored it.

  “Distraction is death,” I muttered.

  My mother’s voice echoed with the memory. Not a battlefield lesson. A driving one. Screamed at me from the passenger seat of our beat-up 1999 Mazda while I fumbled with the radio.

  Still true.

  In any environment where spatial awareness mattered, distraction didn’t wound you.

  It ended you.

  I tightened my grip on the cane, refocused on the mimic’s stance, and prepared to adapt faster than it could learn.

  There were three key things about this thing learning from me that, paradoxically, worked in my favor.

  First: I barely knew what I was doing.

  My stance was a patchwork of half-remembered lessons, instincts stolen from observation rather than training. I overextended my left hip when I advanced, telegraphing every forward step. My arm moved before the cane did, a tell so obvious it might as well have come with an announcement. When I committed to a swing, I committed too much, pouring weight and intent into motions that should have been restrained, leaving openings wide enough to walk through.

  Which meant the mimic-slime was learning all of it.

  Every bad habit. Every inefficiency. Every flaw that would have gotten me corrected, or broken, if I’d ever stood in front of someone who actually knew what they were doing.

  Second: watching it was like being forced to stare into a warped mirror.

  Seeing my mistakes performed by something else stripped away any excuses I’d been unconsciously leaning on. The overextension looked ridiculous when it wasn’t mine. The premature arm movement was painfully obvious when exaggerated by a body that hadn’t yet learned how to hide it. The overcommitted swings weren’t bold or decisive. They were desperate.

  There is a unique educational value in witnessing how pathetic your own technique looks when it’s copied without ego.

  Each exchange became a lesson. I adjusted my footing mid-fight, shortened my steps, anchored my weight. I delayed my arm movement by a heartbeat, let the cane lead instead of chasing it. When I swung, I stopped swinging to end the motion and instead swung to control space, ready to retract or redirect.

  And the mimic followed.

  A fraction of a second late. Always a fraction too late.

  Third, and most importantly: since I barely knew what I was doing…

  It barely knew what I was doing, too.

  It could copy motions, angles, timing. It could not copy intent. It couldn’t grasp why a feint mattered, or why restraint was sometimes more dangerous than aggression. Every correction I made had to be observed, processed, and then replicated. And in that delay lived my advantage.

  I wasn’t fighting something that had mastered me.

  I was fighting something stuck perpetually half a step behind my growth.

  Each improvement widened the gap instead of closing it. Every adjustment sharpened me while leaving it scrambling to keep up, drowning in a sea of outdated knowledge.

  The only real problem with realizing you’re fighting outdated knowledge is this simple, unavoidable truth: it hurts.

  Not physically. Not at first, anyway. It hurts in a quieter, sharper way. Seeing yourself reflected in something else strips away the comforting lies you didn’t even know you were telling. Seeing how pathetic you were. How weak. How clumsy. How utterly unprepared you’d been moments ago.

  The mimic-slime lunged again, repeating the same mistake it had learned from me. A telegraphed thrust, its semi-humanoid form dipping its weight forward too early, shoulder rolling down before the strike could properly land. It was aiming for my shoulder, just like I would have.

  Just like I used to.

  I stepped aside with barely any effort this time, the motion smaller, tighter. One simple swipe of my cane knocked its own imitation aside, redirecting the force instead of meeting it head-on. As I moved, my free hand came up almost reflexively, the chant spilling from my lips faster now, cleaner.

  “Flesh to stone.

  Iron to bone.

  What bends must rest—”

  The jade coalesced mid-phrase, a narrow needle forming with a crystalline snap. I drove it into the slime’s body, piercing one of its cores. The effect was immediate. The surrounding mass stiffened, liquidity collapsing into brittle solidity as the petrification raced outward like frost.

  The mimic staggered, its form losing cohesion, movements lagging as the altered mass dragged against itself.

  I didn’t give it time.

  Before it could compensate, before it could shed the damaged portion and adapt, I surged forward. My cane came down hard, not as a strike meant to shatter, but as a shove. I aimed for the only remaining core, leveraging my weight properly this time, hips aligned, stance grounded.

  The impact forced the core free.

  It popped loose with a wet, unpleasant sound, skidding across the slick stone of the sewer. I followed without thinking, boot coming down in a decisive stomp. The core ruptured beneath my heel, collapsing into inert residue.

  The rest of the slime didn’t scream. It didn’t thrash. It simply failed.

  With the cores gone, the structure holding it together vanished. The red mass sagged, then slumped entirely, losing whatever animation had sustained it moments before. What remained was just a large, motionless puddle, slowly spreading with the flow of wastewater.

  I stood there, chest rising and falling, staring down at the aftermath.

  It hurt, realizing how much I’d already grown in such a short span.

  Because that meant acknowledging how close I’d been to dying before I ever had the chance to learn.