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.