My Level Zero System

And as he stood before a giant stone door, the map in Kain's mind was complete.

He hesitated for a moment, then stepped inside, pushing to open the heavy stone door.

A long corridor appeared in front of Kain, he carefully stepped in, at the same time looking at the structure that appeared at the end of the corridor.

From the depth and curvature of the structure, it seemed that the guardian monster's room was cylindrical in shape, not much different from the guardian monster rooms he had seen before.

At the center of the room, a shapeless mass of slime was constantly moving and pulsating like a living creature breathing. This thing was ash-grey in color, and above this slime mass were Eyels that were constantly moving back and forth.

Mutated Slime? Symbiotic with Eyel?

Kain wondered in his mind, as he stepped into the guardian monster's room.

Almost at that moment, the grey Slime became abnormal. Its body made of slime, which had always been in a balled up state, suddenly stretched out, causing the Slime to instantly transform into a diamond-shaped object that was about three times as tall as Kain.

This transformation took even Kain by surprise, but that was not all.

In his line of sight, the tall Slime suddenly grew four arms, or rather tentacles.

Before Kain could realize it, tentacles sprouting from the monster's amorphous body had closed the distance with Kain at an incredible speed.

"A Slime can be that fast?"

A thought flashed through Kain's mind, his body unconsciously leaning back.

Kain realized now that he could have died if he had reacted just a little slower. In other words, Kain was very close to death.

A drop of blood ran down from a shallow cut on his cheek.

His heartbeat was starting to accelerate violently.

His body tensed, hormones pumping straight into his muscles and brain.

In his eyes, the entire world around him seemed to be slowed down and stretched out in an extremely strange way.

However, all of this could not affect Kain's mind.

These things do not make his mind dull and feeble, but on the contrary make his mind sharper.

That was what was going on in his mind, but in reality, everything had just passed by in a moment.

Suddenly, Kain crouched down, taking a somewhat deformed stance to quickly move to the left flank. At the same time, one of his hands raised, lightning accumulating extremely quickly.

[Thunder Bullet].

The lightning ball shot towards the monster at high speed, but the monster reacted even faster.

Only to see a tentacle of the monster swing horizontally, a long and flat shaped water blister immediately hit the lightning ball, causing the lightning ball to only be able to rage in the air but unable to touch the monster even a little bit.

This caused Kain's eyebrows to furrow.

From the start, he didn't expect this [Thunder Bullet] to be able to cause any damage to the enemy, after all, this was just a probe.

What truly surprised Kain was how the Slime responded to his attack. This means that this monster does not fight based on primitive instincts, or at least the instinct this monster possesses is also a fighting instinct.

Otherwise, this monster wouldn't have received that attack like that instead of using primitive actions like dodging or using its body to retreat.

This is very valuable information.

"So how about this!"

Kain's arm rotated, another magic skill was activated.

In the air, lightning began to flash and converge, forming a beam of lightning that struck downwards, straight towards the monster.

[Thunder Summon].

This was a magic skill with a large attack range, a large coverage area, and of course it wasn't the predetermined attack pattern of [Thunder Bullet], so Kain wanted to know how this Slime would counter it.

And once again, this monster did not fail to surprise Kain.

Two of the Slime's four tentacles rose up, then these tentacles began to shoot out long and flat shaped water blisters at different frequencies, just like the one that had previously blocked Kain's [Thunder Bullet]. And all the water blisters that were shot out formed a large net, accurately blocking all the lightning strikes within the Slime's range.

At the same time, the Slime's two remaining tentacles did not stop in their pursuit of Kain.

The versatility and flexibility of this monster is astounding.

Kain's attention was drawn to the Eyels that were constantly moving within the Slime's liquid body. He suspected that these symbiotic monsters were the reason why the Slime had such good spatial vision, able to accurately lock onto the location of multiple lightning strikes in an unpredictable manner.

This means... Kain's enemy this time has basically no blind spots.

Kain sighed, deciding to retreat.

That's enough exploration for now.

Kain quickly left the guardian monster's room. As he did so, the Slime's mutated body became still. The diamond-shaped liquid mass also shrinks into a fluid, irregular mass as before.

Seeing this, Kain narrowed his eyes slightly.

…

It took Kain another day to return to the campsite where Myra and Mera were camping. The two girls were already fed up with sitting still.

"How is it Kain? Have you got the map yet?"

Myra asked symbolically, but deep down she didn't have high expectations, she thought that Kain was just trying to find an excuse so they could rest.

Mera was no different from her sister, she assumed that the "map" that Kain had promised was a path to the guardian monster's room or something like that, not a map of the entire labyrinth.

But as Kain began to draw lines on the ground, the expressions on both of their faces became increasingly foolish.