AN: No chapter next week, sorry. I'm gonna be out of town!

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  Stepping over the slimes made me a bit slower than I would have liked. For all that I was rushing off heroically like that, I’m sure I must have looked like an idiot from the way I had to pick and choose my path around them. Still, I made my way as quickly as I could through all of the fttened jiggly blobs that lined the floor, and soon I made it back to the edge of the muddy water, staring into its murky depths. Even from here, I could see the compressed bodies of the rock slimes waiting deep below the water, ready to come out as soon as I released them. Although the obvious consequences stared me in the face, I pced my hands into the muddy water, ready to get rid of it.

  And then I realized a different problem with this stupid little pn of mine.

  See, all the other times that I’ve used [Cleanse] I could see where I was trying to use it, or at least vaguely tell the dimensions. Even the murky water that the slime was hiding in in the orphanage’s well I could kind of see into, at least enough to guess how deeply I wanted to use my skill. So long as I knew around what it was that I wanted, the cheatsy nature of my abilities would fill in the bnks for me. But still, at the very least, picturing what it was that I wanted required a closely proportionate picture to be imagined first… which is something that I don’t really have for this ke. I only knew that it was somewhat big and had a secret cavern attached to it and that’s about it, and I only knew that because Kale had told me so.

  Besides what I could see right here, in this dim mineshaft, I barely had anything to go off of.

  At this rate I would just clean the little muddy bit of water in front of me, which wouldn’t help anything.

  …I hate to say it, but I’m gonna have to spec into a very niche skill if I wanna have a chance of pulling this off. Guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t jump onto that new healing aura right away, huh? Well, I’ll still have 3 points left to spend anyways, so I shouldn’t be acting like it’s gonna be impossible to get if I change my mind ter…

  Let’s see, if I want to get this done correctly, then I suppose [All Seeing Eyes] is probably the best bet, right? I remember thinking it was going to be an x-ray kind of skill… Let’s hope that thought was right.

  {[All Seeing Eyes]: The Saintess can detect all things hidden within her sight. (Must focus for the skill to work.)}

  Oh, that’s interesting, so it doesn’t have a cost? I’d say it’s just like my [Appraisal] then, but I actually have to say that one out loud like the other skills to use; All this one says is that I have to be able to focus to use it, so it must be more like a passive skill then, huh? …Weird. I shouldn’t be looking a gift horse in the mouth though, right? If I don’t have to cast it like a normal skill, then maybe it won’t interrupt my Pressure. I’d been ready to have to race against the clock and suck up a few hits once I started casting my [Cleanse], but if I can stop myself from getting hit even earlier than that, then it was definitely ideal.

  Besides, I’m sure cleaning this big of an area is gonna be crazy costly, so if I can somehow manage to conserve some extra energy, then you won’t see me crying about it.

  Alright then, so I have to focus? Focus, focus, focus… Hmmm… Oooh wait, I think I can see it working? Ah, it’s actually easier somehow if I close my eyes. It’s like I can see a kind of bck and white x-ray world through my eyelids or something… Truth be told, it’s really cool to look at, but it’s also really hurting my head. It feels more and more like my skull might burst open any moment the longer I keep this up, so maybe I’d better hurry up and get this done so I don’t have to feel this odd sensation any longer. Ugh, no wonder it doesn’t cost anything…

  Okay. Okay, so… It’s a bit hard from the angle that I’m at, but I can definitely see the cavern that Kale was talking about. Yup, that thing is definitely big. Deep, too. All those crags and stagmites in the water are gonna make it pretty darn costly to clean, I’m sure… Well, at least I only have to clean the bits of the cave that have water in it, right?

  As an added bonus, I can actually also see all the slimes that are still in there, wriggling around. There are quite a few that seem like they’re not under the effects of my Pressure down there, but they’re way in the back, stuck behind all the ones that still are. From the looks of it, I’m guessing there’s maybe about 19 rock slimes down there in the water? Combined with the maybe 25-ish slimes in the mineshaft that I had to pick my way around to get here, I’m pretty darn sandwiched with these things, aren’t I…

  Well, I already invested a skill point into this, so there’s no backing down now!

  The clock's ticking, and it's time to take action!

  I’m just gonna have to trust in myself and those two back there to find a way out of this mess afterwards!

  “Alright… [Cleanse]!”

  I could feel the switch from my [Pressure of the Divine] flip off in my mind as the next skill began to start itself up, and slowly I could see the familiar holy-looking yellow energy begin slowly filling in the water as I followed along with it through my x-ray eyes. Honestly, I could understand why it was taking so long to finally cover and start cleaning the area, what with how crazy big of an area that I was trying to clean and all, but the fact that I was starting to see the rock slimes quiver back into their original shapes now that they’d been freed was kind of starting to freak me out. I still had a [Benediction] on me, but who knows how many more shots that was going to be able to take, especially from this many slimes at once. I wasn’t seeing any cracks in it yet, but still, I wasn’t overly confident in how much it had left in it, you know?

  Ah, crap, I lost focus; The x-ray vision is starting to fade! Put that back! I need that to finish the [Cleanse]! If I mess up now this is only going to take longer!

  With a squeak in frustration and stress, I strained my eyes even harder, trying my absolute best to focus. My eyes felt like they would start to boil at any moment, and my hands in the water felt like they might just fry from how much power I was forcing into them, willing everything to go better, faster. I needed it all gone. I needed this all to get finished, and I needed it to get finished perfectly!

  As if some kind of odd reaction happened, it was like the [Cleanse] that I’d been casting had turned white and began exploding into light. Even with my eyes closed, I felt like I was going to be blinded. Heck, even without the explosion of light, it felt like my eyes and hands might just melt off and become one with the water just from the heat that was already flowing through them alone.

  And then, when the light faded and I opened my eyes, I was greeted with a pristine pool of water, and a rain of numbers flowing through my vision. It was almost like a carpet of ‘+40xp!’s were drifting up out of the water, and as they moved out of the way, I could see what the cause was with my fading x-ray eyes.

  I hadn’t just cleaned the water.

  I’d cleaned up all the slimes inside of it as well.

  My dizzy and abused head made me just stare into the water for a while in surprise at what I’d done. Sure, it was hardly something new, and yes, I’d definitely done simir things before. But I’d intentionally done those things before, you know? This time, to save on energy, I’d only been trying to clean up the water itself, not the slimes in it too! I didn’t even test if I could clean the darn rocks out of the rock slimes before! It’s not like those previous ‘dirty slimes’, who obviously needed a cleaning; These were rocks! How is that anything like dirt and grime?!

  I was so absorbed in the absurdity of what I’d somehow done that I didn’t even pay attention to the pellets of rocks that were now shooting at me. It wasn’t until I could feel myself starting to get pushed around and hear the familiar two voices yelling at me that I even gathered myself together and started to turn around.

  It wasn’t Kale and the guy padin pushing me like I’d expected it to be, however.

  Right. The slime filled corridor. 20 something slimes were still waiting behind me. Guess I didn’t somehow clean those ones away too, huh? Well, at least my [Benediction] is still keeping me safe from their rock shots… and also from the possibility of them burning and smothering me to death…

  My first instinct was to start using [Judgment] on the slimes that were now trying their best to pile on top of me, but I managed to quickly stop myself from doing anything stupid once my remaining energy came into view. Unsurprisingly, whatever ‘cleaning’ that it was that I did to that ke just now ate up a crapton of my energy. From the 3300 that I had from the time when I had first leveled, I was now only left with 800 energy to work with. That was only 8 uses of [Judgment] and then I would die, so obviously the frivolous use of it was absolutely forbidden right now. But then what did that leave me with to use against these things? There’s no way I can just sit here using [Benediction]s on myself repeatedly, hoping that Kale and the padin would come and save me. Weren’t they already running out of energy too?

  With a clearly unsure look on my face, I reached out and touched one of the slimes.

  “...[Cleanse]?”

  I know it worked on the rock slimes in the ke, but I still didn’t really trust in it, you know? That felt like some kind of unreplicatable freak accident or something. Really, no matter how I thought about it, it shouldn’t work, right?

  But once again, for whatever reason it was working

  The slime immediately dissolved away, just like the dirty slimes that I’d first tried this on before.

  …It’s crazy. Alright, whatever, I guess magic is just crazy, isn’t it?! Maybe I’ve just been putting too much stock into this whole ‘skill’ system being some kind of rigid ruleset, and ignoring that this is a fantasy world full of fantastical monsters and crazy magic. I always thought that what I do is different from the magic that everyone else does, but maybe I was just being an idiot; Maybe it’s more simir than I think.

  Once more pulling a face like I didn’t believe what I was seeing, I reached out to a slime for a test.

  “This time… maybe [Heal]?”

  Unsurprisingly enough the skill didn’t really do anything. It didn’t even take away any of my energy, as if what I was trying to do was so silly that it wouldn’t even humor me. But what I was trying to do now wasn’t totally without basis; Hadn’t I just healed a bunch of these exact same rocks that these slimes were shooting out of the townspeople here? I think the problem is just that I was using a bit too weak of a skill just now!

  “Okay, then [Greater Heal]?”

  The slime I was touching shook for a moment as the golden healing light from my hand seemed to seep through it and attach to the rocky bits that it held inside. Slowly the light ate at the rocks, and the slime shrunk and shrunk, becoming smaller and smaller until it shrunk to a size smaller than a soccer ball. It looked horribly weak and pale, as if it had somehow lost all of its vitality. All it could do was shiver pitifully. Honestly, for a moment I felt a bit sad for it.

  Only for a moment, though.

  “Well, if that’s how it is, then I guess I’m gonna get to use this new skill sooner than I expected, huh?”

  Looking back to my skill tree, I spent the remainder of my 3 points, immediately dumping them into [Healing Aura].