Mono Mondays: Practice

On Mondays, we like to support our resident artist, Mono!  They're an up-and-coming scribbler of things dark and weird, and we consider ourselves lucky to have leeched onto— er, formed a mutually beneficial relationship with them.  You can watch Mono hard at work creating various pieces on their YouTube channel.  For those who don't feel like watching digital paint getting splashed around, we'll be showcasing a different piece of theirs right here every Monday.

This week, we see your typical overpowered protagonist hard at work.

This one requires some context.  The Slime King, whose hand you can see, has taken an interest in humans and wants to study them.  To do so, he's disguised himself as a human with illusion magic and is traveling to one of the human kingdoms, where he plans on entering one of the more prestigious schools- after all, where better to study humans than in a place literally made for study?

There is one problem, however.  The school is magical in nature, and human magic doesn't work the same way slime magic does.  The biggest problem is that human magic is so much weaker.

For those who might think that's strange, we hasten to remind you that the slimes of Mono's world are both thaumavores and the companions of dragons.  They are heavily steeped in magic from birth, and while they may be the squishiest of monsters, when it comes to spellcrafting, they are more like glass cannons.  Case in point:  When a human spell is cast, it shatters, releasing its contained magic.  Slime magic does not typically shatter; a spell cast by a slime is far more permanent in nature than a human spell.  It thus falls on the Slime King to figure out how to weaken his spells to the point that they shatter like human spells do.

The picture above is, technically, a success!  The spell has shattered.  His practice target is a charred husk, which is still far more powerful than a typical "fire" spell, but this is an improvement over his first attempts, which left craters.  Practice will hopefully make perfect before he gets to the school.

Oh!  And Mono added that the Slime King's hand is as he perceives it.  Any human happening along will see a far less green appendage.