+ + +

Ume quickly realized that attempting to flop around this world at her full size would probably be very impractical. This tiny slime was stuck to her back like a small droplet of water, and there was essentially no way for her to interact with that adorable little blob at her current dimensions. 

Moreover, Ume really wanted to touch it!

After spending fifty years isolated in a cave, Ume was basically crying figurative tears of joy now that she finally encountered another living organism that wasn't a family member. Seriously! She was so starved for contact, and she finally met someone! Ume immediately decided that she was going to be best friends with this slime. Sure, it couldn't talk, and it was still trying to eat her, but it still was her very first friend!

If you thought about it carefully, it was a great honor to be a dragon's first friend.

This slime should be grateful!!!

Ume estimated there were somewhere on the order of 10^408913871223651 souls in the entire universe, and so this slime was clearly extremely lucky to be picked by her instead of anyone else.

Careful not to accidentally disturb her new friend, Ume started to shrink her body into a more convenient size. Ryūjin (竜人) possessed transformation magic, and the dragons of old were well-known to mingle with humans and other creatures. Ume could shapeshift into a variety of different forms, and she practiced this skill extensively during her fifty years inside a cave. 

Her miniature form was approximately the size of a large wolf, but it retained most of her original bodily features. She had dark fur with light blue scales, as well as a long flowing mane and fluffy tail. Although she had four legs, Ume mainly preferred to levitate. Why bother to crawl on the ground when floating was effortless?

The young dragon twisted her body around and pulled the slime into her arms.

Ume was the perfect size now, and and this slime was just like a large pillow! It was squishy and kind of soft, and Ume felt so happy for no reason whatsoever. It was so nice to have a friend. The slime wiggled inside her arms, and it was still trying to eat her like a hungry little devil. Ume thought her friend was extraordinarily cute, and she wanted to carry it around everywhere.

She bet that no other dragon had a best friend as cute as hers!

The slime jiggled like a piece of jello, and Ume assumed that this meant it was happy.

Ume cheerfully floated away carrying this slime in her arms.

+ + +

The 53-year-old dragon drifted leisurely through this massive field of floating rocks. She was much smaller now, so many of the 'asteroids' looked like mountains. Little bits of green, vines, and trees grew on top of many of the miniature islands, although most of them seemed largely uninhabited. This seemed to be a relatively turbulent area of the archipelago, and there were many kinds of debris and truck-sized boulders in the air. It would be quite hazardous for any airships or other vehicles to navigate this mine field.

Ume wondered why all these smaller rock fragments floated together in a cluster instead of drifting away in the wind.

Perhaps the levitating rocks were attracted to each other, somehow.

It reminded her a lot of cosmic dust. When solar systems were born in outer space, primordial planets were formed from residual star dust that congregated in large clumps. Under the right conditions, the dust could fuse into larger chunks and form solid rock. Ume hypothesized that little bits of levitating sand and gravel would aggregate in the skies and eventually form these floating islands.

Of course, Ume had no way of knowing for sure.

It was just a guess, and Ume simply liked to think about things. She had spent fifty years inside a cave, and there was nothing better to do other than ponder hypotheticals about the universe based on a few words that she read inside books. Honestly, if she got started thinking about something, she could easily spend a decade or two pondering about the same subject.

The dragon absentmindedly squeezed her slime friend in her arms as she floated through the rocky skies, dodging and weaving in between irregularly shaped boulders every few seconds.

A little puff of smoke in the distance caught Ume's interest.

Some kind of man-made machine was hovering near one of the islands. It was anchored to one of the 'asteroids', and bright surges of magic flashed every few minutes. It was some form of barrier magic, and the flashes came from small floating rocks that collided with the airship's shields. Since this was a hazardous debris field, it was probably necessary to employ magical defenses to protect the vessel.

!!!

Could it be humans???

Ume always wanted to meet a human!

Humans wrote a lot of interesting books, and Ume quietly admired many of the human authors in her bookshelf. For such a tiny and short-lived species, humans wrote a lot of interesting stuff. There had been one manga that she had been reading back inside of her cave, but the serialization ended abruptly, and Ume was desperate to read the next chapter. Hopefully, these humans would know if the next volume of One Piece existed because she really wanted to read what happened to Luffy after the Straw Hat pirates arrived at Whole Cake Island...

...Suddenly, Ume felt really shy.

What if the humans didn't like her?

Would they judge her antlers? Ume was self-conscious about her antlers because they were short and stubby, and they weren't cute at all. In truth, Ume had a huge complex about her antlers, and she was suddenly afraid that the humans would hate her because her short antlers were ugly...

Ume hid behind a cluster of levitating boulders.

She was so nervous that she didn't realize how hard she was squeezing the slime in her arms. The slime was practically suffocating, almost desperate to escape from from Ume's death grip. However, the 53-year-old dragon was stronger than a dinosaur despite her compact size.

Ume crept closer, sneakily slipping from rock to rock until she could see the humans from the airship clearly.

When she got a better look, Ume realized that there was a party of human adventurers inside a slime pit.

They were viciously slaughtering slimes left and right, systematically killing every single slime that they encountered in the crater like a well-oiled machine. They didn't even bother to pause and collect the Slime Cores that dropped from the endless sea of murdered slimes. Slime corpses piled up like a mountain, but they continued to farm slime mobs like nothing else mattered in the entire world.

∎