[current quest objective: eliminate all slimes in the Well of Spawning.]

“Huph! Hahh! Graahh!”

The barbarian swung her sword two-handed, grunting as she did so. The creatures crowding around her, a variety of slimes, fell before her blade.

“Accursed things,” she hissed between clenched teeth, “why are you so impervious to the bite of good steel?”

It’s not as though her blade was useless—far from it, in fact. The creatures fell like any other. But for what they were—beasts ranging from the size of an apple to as large as a healthy ram—it took far too many swings for her liking.

She had spurned the assistance of others in town, had turned her nose up at any costly magical artifacts. They were slimes. She’d cut down direwolves, gone face to face with manticores, tangled with dragons—they were hardly threats!

The slimes came in an array of colors—bright yellow and solid purple and lush green and sweet red. There appeared to be no sense or consistency to them, except that each one was solid all the way through without deviation. Uniformly, they wore the same infuriating face—two dot eyes and a perpetual, almost childlike grin. Still, they were monsters like any other, and she would cut them down with impunity.

A large orange one oozed at her and she drove it back with a two-handed swing of her blade, the steel cleaving into its gel—but then a small, melon-sized one the color of sapphires lunged through the air, landing on her hand and immediately encompassing it.

[status: grappled (weak). stamina reduction (temporary), two-handed penalty (temporary), movement speed penalty (temporary)]

“Damn!” she cursed. The thing had swallowed her sword hand! It squelched around her hand, cooing and babbling in its nonsense voice, and the pressure made her drop her blade. She staggered back, gripping at the thing wriggling about her wrist, beating at it futilely with her other hand. Around her, the eager-looking slimes quivered, some oozing towards her.