With one hand occupied keeping me from falling and one leg out of commission for climbing, it was pot luck when I rummaged in my backpack for something to use to clean my boot.� The biggest and pointiest thing in the pack turned out to be the shortsword that I�d taken from the guard�s barracks.� While I was rooting about in the backpack, I got a small cut across the palm of my hand, but I wasn�t grabbing anything hard enough to cause serious damage.
It took some serious wriggling and cursing but I managed to get the sword free and set about scraping the sticky slime from the bottom of my boot.
There!� Got it.� I was now the proud owner of slime-on-a-sword.� Lovely.
Tired of swinging around, I got both feet back on the wall and found to my surprise that I could feel the cold of the wall through the bottom of my left boot.� As well as being slippery, it seemed that the sticky blob had corroded my boot.� I was surprised that it had been able to do so much damage in such a short time span.
While I was checking the status of my boot, the sticky slimy blob had been busy.� To my even greater surprise the little thing had crawled half way up the sword blade towards my bare hand.
When I saw that the blob had moved, I nearly dropped my sword.� From the way it was behaving, I guessed that it could eat living things like leather boots and hands pretty well, but didn�t do so well with metal and presumably stone.� Otherwise it would have eaten the wall while it was laying in wait for me.
I wasn�t in any immediate danger.� The blob was moving almost too slowly to see in the darkness, but it was determined.� I needed to figure out what to do with it before it reached my hand and before I lost all feeling in my arm that was wrapped in the rope keeping me in place.
Given the slow movement rate of my latest adversary, I came up with two plans.� The first involved introducing the slime to the interior of the trousers of my least favourite Jackalman, but I couldn�t see how that was going to work.� As a wise man once said �There�s no profit in revenge�.� I wasn�t sure I totally agreed.� After all, there would be a great deal of satisfaction.� Unfortunately, the practicalities of that plan would prove prohibitive.
Which left me with plan B.