After dealing with the Level 10 dungeon beetles and advancing to Level 9, Lohan and Lisa no longer had much trouble fighting monsters of the same level, so they didn’t even need to worry too much when facing these golems—they simply attacked them indiscriminately while testing out different tactics.
For Lisa, there wasn’t much she could change, since her combat style wouldn’t change much until Level 11, just as it was for normal Players.
But for Lohan, with the ease with which he acquired new evolutions, his combat style was constantly evolving.
Just the addition of [Smoke Blast] was enough for him to develop a completely new combat style, focused on stealth and leveraging his superior perception compared to his enemies.
And it was in the face of these changes brought about by Lohan that Lisa had to adapt her fighting style in different ways, since even though her skills didn’t change much, by being able to focus on a different aspect like this, she also had to constantly think about what needed to be changed and improved.
"Halon, I feel like fighting with you is like having a constantly evolving Swiss Army knife... just when I think I’m getting used to our fighting style, you get a new skill and add yet another way to deal with enemies to our repertoire..." Lisa said, slightly out of breath, lying relaxed under a tree while Lohan rolled across the battlefield digesting the Golem cores and storing the rest of their bodies in the Astral Chest to digest later.
"A Swiss Army knife?" Lohan thought in surprise of that tool he hadn’t imagined even existed in this world. "Hehe, that really suits me well."
As he laughed, Lohan finished digesting the core of the last Golem, and finally a notification popped up for him.
[Artificial Magic Core Harmonizer Lv 8 → Lv 9]
’That saved me 200 biomass... not bad.’ He thought as he saw the reward for digesting the Golem’s core.
These creatures had very strange structures, with magic cores precisely controlling Mana to command a completely inorganic body to act as a life form.
Lohan was excited to try and get something like this, thinking about how useful such an evolution would be, but he didn’t know if it was bad luck, or just the low probability of getting this from such low-level monsters... in the end, he only managed two evolutions for skills he already had.
The other evolution was as follows:
[Structural Stability Lv 18 → Lv 19]
Lohan had already raised the level of this skill so much that the details of the limbs he could form were already much sharper.
Sure, he couldn’t create muscle definition in the arms he formed; they still looked like smooth, chubby baby arms.
But his control over these arms was becoming increasingly precise!
Suddenly, an idea came to his mind.
Looking at Lisa, Lohan activated his observation skills to the fullest.
Activating [Monocular Telescopic Vision Lv 9] in conjunction with his keen perception, Lohan began to "scan" Lisa’s anatomy beneath her silky fur as if he were reading the blueprint of a high-performance machine.
Then he forced his blue biomass to shift toward the base of the spherical body.
He felt the gelatin vibrate as he tried to "push" four extensions downward. Thanks to the [Morphological Memory] trait, he attempted to project the structure he had just analyzed.
Slowly, four legs began to emerge from the glowing blue mass. However, the initial result was... frustrating. The legs he formed had no defined bones or muscles; they looked like four plump, flabby cylinders, similar to the bluish baby arms he formed, lacking any firmness.
For everyday tasks like holding things or interacting peacefully with people, those small, flaccid arms he formed were more than enough, since no one tested the strength of those limbs of his, but he wanted to use these legs to run, just like Lisa did.
As soon as Lohan tried to shift the weight of his body, which was considerably larger due to [Mass Expansion] and [Body Density Lv 16], his legs "melted."
Although he could make himself smaller with size-reduction magic, that didn’t change his weight all that much.
’Damn... it’s like trying to balance a bowling ball on top of four marshmallows...’ Lohan thought, feeling the Biomass spread back into its spherical shape.
Seeing that scene, Lisa raised her eyebrows with interest, sensing she’d found a good show to watch.
It had been a while since she’d seen Halon pushing himself to try something different like that, and considering he was trying to make legs like hers, she became even more interested to see if this partner of hers was even more talented than she’d imagined.
Lohan didn’t give up. Thinking about how a physical body made of flesh worked, he remembered an important factor—the one responsible for keeping people and creatures standing and supporting their own weight... a skeleton!
He didn’t have an internal skeleton, but who said an external skeleton couldn’t work?
If the gelatin was too soft, he just needed to form an "exoskeleton" rigid enough to support him!
Perhaps the level of the exoskeleton he’d obtained from the ants a few days ago wasn’t sufficient, but with the [Obsidian Exoskeleton], maybe he could achieve the necessary rigidity!
Lohan concentrated the Biomass again. This time, while shaping his legs, he activated the [Obsidian Exoskeleton Lv 7] locally, completely coating the outer layer of the legs he had formed.
To avoid hindering flexibility, Lohan did his utmost to make the hexagonal plates of the exoskeleton as small as possible.
With a mental effort that pushed his [Parallel Processing Core] to its limits, he stood up again. His legs were now completely black, like dark obsidian "boots" that struck the ground with a snap, yet remained as flexible as a serpent’s scales.
He was finally standing!
Lohan took a few clumsy steps, still adjusting to the natural control required to maneuver these four legs with joints entirely different from the human body, experiencing the world from a slightly higher vantage point.
Fortunately, he’d had to get used to walking on two legs just a few days ago, as well as learning to roll like a Slime around the same time.
With the memory of these new learning processes still fresh, he was picking up the patterns of this new way of walking with ease!
Lisa stared at the scene with her silver eyes wide in shock.
Halon had really done it! He had gone from being a shiny blue sphere that just rolled around to now standing on four short, black, slightly curved legs. However, when he stopped beside Lisa to compare the difference between the original and his copy, Lohan realized the problem.
Although he had replicated its structure, his legs were tragically short. While Lisa maintained the slender elegance of a Legendary Fox, Lohan looked like a "low-rider" and chubby version of a four-legged animal.
He was so close to the ground that his slime belly almost scraped the grass.
"Lisa... why do I feel like I look like a jelly Corgi?" he asked telepathically, frustrated as he watched the fox shake her body, clearly struggling not to burst out laughing at his new appearance.
But despite the self-control instilled in her over the years by the Vance family, in the end, Lisa couldn’t resist and burst out laughing.
"Bwahahahah!!!!"