Brooke bent his back slightly and said politely, "Captain Shalom, they are mocking me…"

He explained everything, carefully omitting nothing.

"Hahaha!" Shalom laughed out loud. "A slime killed him, and that slime… was multicolored?"

He didn't believe it.

He pointed randomly at a villager and said, "You, lead the way to the slime farms."

The farmer walked out with shaky legs and led the way. A few villagers followed them.

----

"This is…" Captain Shalom froze, cold sweat crawling down his spine.

"This is....demon's aura…" Brooke, who was always calm in front of the villagers—shivered. His legs bent; he almost pissed himself from the pressure in the slime farm.

'A slime… became a demon?' Shalom opened his mouth wide and stammered, "How...can...this happen…"

They found no bodies along the way, since villagers had picked them up and burned them.

As for the baron's soldiers, kids, and the slime farm owner's dead bodies, they were shattered into pieces of blood, which had been cleaned up as well.

They had cleaned everything, but they didn't know how to cover up the demonic force, remnants of the Demonic Bind spell still clinging to the ground.

----

Captain Shalom glanced at the villagers and muttered, "A necromancer… a demon researcher…" His voice dropped to a whisper.

'A slime cannot evolve into a demon… it has never happened in history,' he mused, coming to the conclusion that Oakfield Village was hiding a dangerous being.

He picked a palm‑sized golden metal locket from his pouch and opened it. A faint hologram image formed on it.

'A smartphone… ten three-striped crystals… he even brought that.' Brooke was envious, but even more resentful of Captain Shalom.

Shalom quickly opened his contacts and called Baron Blackwell.

A ring sounded for a few seconds, then a majestic old man's voice echoed, "What is it, Deputy Captain Shalom?"

A hologram of an old man with thick grey hair and beard, sitting in a huge majesty chair behind a desk, formed on the locket.

The old man's face had a few battle scars. He was muscular, and he was clad in a modern red suit.

Shalom's eyes twitched when he heard the word 'deputy', but he calmed himself, as it was the baron who said that.

"Lord, we…" He explained the situation.

"A demonic force… a slime…" Old Baron pondered. "Go ahead. Kill everyone in that village."

He ordered, "I will inform the guild. A necromancer, a demon researcher, or even a chimera maker might have been behind this… a slime will never grow like that. They are puny creatures meant to be devoured. That is their fate."

"I will kill everyone and make sure the person behind this won't escape," Captain Shalom vowed.

He cut off the call, closed his locket, and placed it back in the pouch.

Thud!

"They're going to kill us all—RUN!" a villager screamed in fear while running away.

He'd heard the discussion between Shalom and Baron Blackwell.

Thud!

Everyone started to run, screaming, "Hide! Hide!"

----

"Mom, what's wrong?" the purple‑eyed girl asked, glancing at her mother, who had tears in her eyes.

"They are tears of joy.....Baron has decreased the tax this month," her mom said, pulling her child to the third house in the second row.

The house was dusty and seemed abandoned, but a skinny couple in rags lived in it. They nodded at the purple‑eyed girl's parents, who nodded back in response.

Just like them, many villagers brought their kids.

The house hid a secret room beneath the kitchen floor—under the rotten wooden floor.

They hid along with the kids in it whenever monsters attacked Oakfield Village or evil adventurers visited their village under the command of the bailiff.

The villagers built it with their own hands to hide whenever the situation required.

"This… hiding place? Why?" the girl questioned doubtfully. She remembered that she would hide when bandits or powerful monsters attacked the village.

"Nothing… just now a big golden eagle attacked the village…" her dad, who had been silent all along, said bitterly, holding his tears back.

"Will you also hide?" the girl asked her mom and dad worriedly.

"No," both parents rejected.

She wanted to bring them along, but they coldly forced her to go in without them. The girl could only agree reluctantly when they said, "We will be fine. It's just a bunch of normal golden eagles—remember how easily we killed them?"

Soon, all the kids hid inside and closed the room with rotten wood, then stomped their feet a little to make sure nothing was wrong.

As for themselves—the baron's men had already counted them; they had to sacrifice their lives.

But the kids might survive due to luck in the mess—and that is why they were only hiding their children.

Bang!

"Ahhh!"

The painful screams grew stronger; finally, they could hear them from the house.

The purple‑eyed girl's dad yelled, "We cannot stay here any longer."

They soon got out of the house, since the baron's army would find it suspicious if they all stayed in one dwelling.

----

A short time earlier...

"Fireball." Brooke cast a basketball‑sized fireball at the running farmer in the front, bypassing the lagging farmers behind.

The farmer caught fire and fell to the ground with a scream.

Brooke went near Captain Shalom and whispered silently.

"Good idea, Brooke," Shalom praised, nodding with a big grin.

"We will play a game with you. Whoever is at the front will die first. But if you all stop, only the one at the end will die," Brooke yelled with a creepy smile.

The farmers who heard him stopped in fear, but—"Ahhh!"—the farmer at the end was scorched to death by the flame sphere.

Villagers ran in fear, glancing at the dead body on the ground.

"Fireball." The rune flared before anyone could scream.

Thud!

This time, the front villager was burnt to death.

Next, the end one…

"This is a good game." Shalom smiled coldly.

----

Thud!

The last running villager glanced at the front and back and pleaded with tears, "Lord, now I'm—" while kneeling.

"Fireball, fireball." Shalom cast the fireball twice and playfully said, "You're both the front and the end. You have to be struck twice."

----

Shalom entered the dwelling area of Oakfield Village with Brooke and glanced at the remaining villagers.

He glanced at Brooke, tired from playing too much.

Brooke nodded, understanding the gesture.

He turned his head to the villagers, but he was surprised. No one tried to run. Instead, they stared at him—grinning.

"I thank you, slime," a villager said with the biggest smile of his entire life. "If this had happened ten days ago…I would have been relieved to meet my end."

Shalom stopped Brooke, as he was pricked by the villager's words.

Another villager continued, "I finally managed to eat my stomach full, play with my kids, and roam Florita City with my kids who had so much joy."

"It's also due to you, slime, that we got a little attached to life," a skinny woman continued from before.

"It would've been better to die by your hands…than this utter pathetic trash of a human life," a man scolded angrily, taking over.

And that was enough.

"Fireball!" Shalom and Brooke both cast the spell, furious.

"How dare a country pumpkin scold!" Shalom barked and burned the villagers one by one.

They didn't scream. They smiled.

"Slime, if we get another life, we will repay you for showing what a life is!" They thanked Slime#47 as they turned toward the Arica Lotus pond direction, perfectly unknowingly.

"Hahaha!" They all laughed as they got burned to death.

----

The purple-eyed girl clutched her throat and cried. She understood what had really happened as she heard them.

"Ahhhh!" She couldn't control her sadness as she burst out crying.

Her black and yellow hair started to turn purple. Her eyes started to glow with a purplish hue.

"Victoria…" a teary kid hiding nearby whispered, stunned by the girl who started to glow.

End of the chapter.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.