The pace had become a thing with its own momentum, a wheel turning fast enough that stopping it would require more force than keeping it spinning.

  Quests arrived and departed without the intervals that had once separated them. The party left the inn before the sky was light, fought through morning, returned to the guild to collect payment and accept the next assignment in the same breath, fought through afternoon, returned after dark, slept for a number of hours that decreased each week, and left again before the sky was light. The cycle had compressed beyond recognition. What had once been a rhythm was now a blur.

  The body drove it. Its emotional colors burned with a constant, searing blend of golden ambition and the anxious orange of someone who can see the finish line and is terrified that it will move. The body wanted the next rank. The body wanted what the next rank would buy. And the body had incorporated into its calculations a premise that it had never tested and would not test until the premise failed: that the slime's capacity for healing was a constant. A given. A number in the equation that did not change.

  The slime healed. Continuously. The distinction between "in combat" and "between combat" had dissolved. There was only "healing" and "about to heal," and the reserves that powered the output ran at a deficit that compounded with each day. The body mass had stabilized at a size smaller than its original, not because it had found a new resting point but because the energy to rebuild was being consumed faster than it was being generated. The color was a permanent muted blue-grey. The core pulsed in a rhythm that had become irregular enough to be its own kind of pattern: three beats, a skip, two beats, a skip, three beats.

  The others wore down alongside it. The tall one's shoulder carried a stiffness that [Heal] could address but not cure, a structural complaint that reasserted itself hours after each treatment. The large one's knee produced a sound when he walked. The soft-handed one's voice had thinned, the resonance worn away by weeks of too little sleep and too much adrenaline. But they followed the body's lead, drawn forward by the body's certainty, and no one calculated the rate of accumulating damage against the rate of diminishing repair.

  ***

  Underground. The air changed between the first and second layer. Denser. Colder. Carrying the mineral weight of stone that had not been disturbed in a long time and the faint, stale warmth of things that lived in places light could not reach.

  The first layer cost the slime a quarter of its reserves. The second layer cost the rest.

  The creatures on the second layer were faster and more numerous and more coordinated than anything the party had faced since the rank promotion. Six of them emerged from the walls simultaneously. Multi-legged. Armored in chitin. Moving with the synchronized precision of predators that hunted as a unit rather than as individuals. The party was surrounded before the body could finish shouting its first command.

  The body's voice. The syllable. Sharp. Repeated. The flat yellow of tactical urgency, stripped of everything that was not function. The slime activated [Heal] and turned and activated it again and turned and activated it again. The tall one's arm, shredded by a lateral strike from a segmented limb. The large one's side, punctured by a fang that carried venom in its delivery, the tissue around the wound immediately darkening in a way that [Heal] could fight but not reverse. The body's ribs, cracked where a blow had driven it into the wall. The soft-handed one's hip, bruised by a fall when the ground beneath her was destabilized by a burrowing attack.

  Four targets. Continuous damage. The slime moved between them in a pattern that consumed every fraction of attention and energy it possessed, directing the light of [Heal] wherever the need was most acute, pulling from reserves that were already past empty and drawing instead on something deeper. Something structural. The tissue thinned. The mass reduced. The blue retreated from the body's surface and left grey in its wake.

  Three of the creatures fell. Three remained. The large one was bitten again. Deep. The wound was worse than the first, the venom spreading faster through tissue that had already been compromised, and [Heal] could not neutralize poison but could repair the damage the poison caused, and the repair consumed MP at a rate the slime had never sustained because it was fighting not just the wound but the ongoing destruction of tissue by a substance that was still active inside the body.

  The body's voice. The syllable. Again.

  The slime's reserves were theoretical. The core flickered. The light that [Heal] produced was thin and pale, a suggestion of the healing it had once provided. The large one's wound closed. Barely. He rose. The remaining creatures fell.

  The slime lay on the stone floor of the second layer and could not move. A membrane over a core. Grey. Translucent. Pulsing in a rhythm that skipped every third beat and sometimes every second.

  ***

  The safe zone between layers. Stone walls. Silence. The distant drip of water through rock.

  The tall one spoke first. His vibrations carried the temperature of someone stating a fact he did not enjoy stating but could no longer avoid. His attention turned toward the slime on the ground, and the emotional color that accompanied the attention was layered: concern that was partly genuine and partly self-interested, the awareness that a broken healer meant a broken party.

  The soft-handed one's voice rose in agreement. Her vibrations aligned with the tall one's, reinforcing them, and then moved past them toward something the slime had not heard from her before. Her voice continued. It did not stop when the body's vibrations pushed back. It did not fold when the body produced the temperature of dismissal. It kept going.

  The body's counter was reasonable. Logical. The temperature of arithmetic. The same flat yellow of calculated risk that had accompanied every decision the body had made since the colors changed. The vibrations carried the shape of numbers: reward ratios, time invested, progress lost, the cost of retreat measured in currency and opportunity.

  The soft-handed one's voice did something it had never done.

  It broke through.

  Not a shout. Not an outburst. But a vibration that carried a color the slime had never seen directed at the body from this particular source: anger. Red-tinged blue. The color of someone who has watched a thing be broken for months and has arrived at the point where the silence required to continue watching costs more than the consequences of speaking. Her voice produced a single, sharp sequence, and the temperature of it was the temperature of a line being drawn. Of a limit being declared. Of a mouth that had opened and closed and opened and closed finally holding itself open long enough for the full sentence to emerge.

  Silence.

  The body's emotional color shifted through a rapid sequence: surprise-white, defensive red, then the controlled return to calculation-yellow. The body produced a concession. A compromise. Rest. Resume in the morning.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  But [Emotion Sense] read what lay beneath the compromise. The body had agreed to pause not because the soft-handed one's words had reached it but because the internal cost of conflict had exceeded the internal cost of delay. The slime's condition, if it factored into the calculation at all, was a variable in the equation. Not the reason for the answer.

  The slime perceived this and lay on the stone and let the safe zone's cold seep into its depleted body and did not expect anything else.

  ***

  Night underground. The others slept. The slime did not.

  It lay on a flat stone in the corner, its body spread thin, barely cohesive. The reserves had begun their slow regeneration, the baseline trickle that the core produced even at its lowest, accumulating like dew on cold glass. Not enough to restore shape. Not enough to do anything except sustain the minimum.

  The slime directed a small pulse of [Heal] inward. A maintenance action. An attempt to pull the membrane back toward something that held a form rather than spreading like a stain.

  The light activated. The core brightened.

  And something inside the core broke.

  Not a sound that the chamber could hear. A sensation that existed only inside the slime's own architecture. The feeling of a structure that has absorbed impact after impact after impact, that has been stressed and depleted and stressed again without adequate recovery between cycles, finally reaching the point past which the material does not return to its original shape. A fracture. Fine as a hair. Running through the core itself.

  Pain.

  A category of pain the slime had never experienced. Not the absence-pain of MP depletion, which was hollow and hungry and recoverable. Not the surface-pain of torn tissue, which [Heal] could address and which faded with treatment. This was foundational. This was the source of [Heal] itself sustaining damage that [Heal] could not repair, because the light came from the place that was broken, and the light could not reach its own origin. The foundation cracking. The root of the root splitting.

  The slime's body convulsed. The membrane rippled and contracted in spasms that had no rhythm and no purpose. The color flashed between blue and grey in rapid alternation, the core's light stuttering like a flame being shaken. A vibration escaped the slime's body. Small. High-pitched. The frequency that a creature produces when it has no voice and is in enough pain that the body generates sound anyway.

  The body woke.

  The slime felt the transition: the sudden shift from unconsciousness to alertness, the weight redistributing as the body turned, the attention landing on the slime.

  And [Emotion Sense], even through the fracture, even through the pain, read what came next.

  Gold.

  Warm. Immediate. Unfiltered. The color of a person startled from sleep by the sound of something suffering and responding, before the conscious mind could engage, with the reflex of genuine concern. Not calculated. Not performed. Not the gold of strategy or the gold of ambition. The gold of a nineteen-year-old boy who had once reached into a crevice and waited for a small blue thing to climb into his hand. The same gold. Still there. Buried under months of yellow, suppressed by the waking mind's priorities, inaccessible during consciousness, but alive. Reflexive. Real.

  The slime's core responded. Through the fracture. Through the pain. Through every lesson the past months had delivered about the unreliability of this particular color. The core responded because the response to warmth was older than the damage and deeper than the learning and could not be overridden by knowledge. The slime brightened. The pain did not diminish but the perception of it softened, the way a wound hurts less when someone is near.

  Two seconds.

  Yellow replaced the gold. The body's waking mind engaged. The calculation surfaces activated. The concern was identified, processed, and reassigned to the operational question that the conscious mind considered relevant. The body produced vibrations. The two-syllable name, followed by the temperature of assessment. The shape of the question was the same shape it had been every time: Can you still function? Can you still perform?

  The slime saw it. For the fifth time. For the tenth. For however many iterations this cycle had accumulated since the colors first began to change. The gold was a reflex. The yellow was the choice. The heart produced warmth and the mind overrode it and the mind won every time. Had won every time. Would win every time. The gold was not evidence that the person the slime had loved was still present. It was the involuntary twitch of a muscle that the body's owner no longer chose to use.

  The slime knew this.

  And held on anyway.

  It was warm. For a moment. It was still warm.

  The word returned. Still. The word that had broken on a windowsill. The word that had hung unfinished in the core for weeks. It came back now, in the underground dark, attached to two seconds of gold that had already been replaced by the yellow that always replaced it. The slime held the word and knew it was not true and held it because the fracture in the core was too large to face without something warm pressed against it, even if the warmth was a memory of a reflex of a feeling that no longer existed in any form the body would choose to express.

  Still warm.

  The slime made a choice.

  It gathered its remaining body. The membrane that was spread across the stone, the thin outer regions that had lost density and coherence, the edges where the tissue was more water than slime. It pulled inward. Drew tight around the core. And at the perimeter, where the body was weakest, the slime let go.

  Released it. The outermost thirty percent of its mass. Let the tissue separate from the main body and remain on the stone, disconnecting it the way a tree drops a branch it can no longer sustain. The separated tissue cooled. Stilled. Became a thing that had been part of the slime and was now not. Would not be again.

  The main body shrank. From palm-sized to half a palm. A small, dense knot of tissue wrapped tight around a cracked core, carrying in its reduced mass a higher concentration of the reserves that remained.

  The slime directed [Heal] outward. At the sleeping party. At the tall one's shoulder, the large one's poisoned side, the soft-handed one's exhaustion, the body's cracked ribs. The light was weak. But it was there. It was enough. The slime could still perform.

  On the stone behind it, the separated tissue dried in the underground air. A part of the slime that would never return. The cost of continued function, paid in body.

  ***

  Morning. The surface. Light.

  The party emerged from the dungeon. The body had chosen retreat. Not for the slime. For the arithmetic. The tall one's resistance and the soft-handed one's unprecedented opposition had increased the cost of pressing forward past the body's threshold for acceptable risk. The retreat was framed as strategy: regroup, recover, return at full strength. The body's vibrations, as it looked at the sky, carried the temperature of next time.

  The others moved. The tall one rolled his repaired shoulder. The large one tested his knee. The body walked toward the guild, already orienting toward the next calculation.

  The slime was on the ground.

  At the body's feet. Where it had been set down when the party exited the dungeon entrance. Half its original size. Grey-blue. Core cracked, its pulse carrying the stutter that would not smooth out. Sitting on the dirt in sunlight that was warm and had been warm on the first day outside the cave when a hand had carried it through the wind, and the sunlight still reached it and the slime's body did not respond.

  No one picked it up.

  The body walked. The tall one walked. The large one walked. Three sets of footsteps producing vibrations that diminished with distance. Three people moving away from a small grey shape on the ground without looking back. Not cruelty. Not decision. The simple, devastating absence of the thought that would have been required to remember that the shape was there.

  The soft-handed one stopped. Turned. The slime felt her attention land on it, felt the sharp spike of her concern-blue, felt the shift in her weight as her body began to redirect toward it. Her emotional color was a saturated mix: the blue of distress, the green of guilt, the bright helpless orange of a person watching a thing she had tried to prevent.

  The body's voice, ahead. Calling. The temperature of routine. Of let's go.

  She looked at the slime. The slime oriented every sensor toward her, the whole body directed at the single source of warmth that still, consistently, reliably, turned in its direction.

  She turned away. She walked toward the body's voice.

  The slime remained. On the ground. In the light.

  Then it began to move. Slowly. The basic locomotion of its kind, the rhythmic contraction and expansion that propelled it forward at a pace that would have been comical if anyone had been watching. It crawled across the dirt, following the vibrations of footsteps that were already far ahead and growing farther.

  Not because it wanted to follow. Not because following would lead to the warmth or the name or the three syllables that had meant more than a name. Because if it stopped, it would be alone. Because alone was the cave. Because the cave was still the worst thing. Because the fracture in the core and the grey of the body and the yellow of the body's colors and the two seconds of gold that would not come again were all terrible, but they were not the cave, and as long as they were not the cave, the slime would crawl.

  Half its size. Grey. Cracked. Slow.

  Following.