Corrupted slime and the hollow

A corrupted slime is the grove’s ooze after something older has corrupted it — its touch sickens, and the ground around it turns black in a line pointed at farmsteads. It’s the body behind The Rot in the Hollow, and it never fights alone: a larger mass commands it, and while that mass lives, every ooze on the field fights as a coordinated pack.

Unlike the well’s weak slimes, this isn’t a cluster to hug and finish. A failed save against its sickness is an emergency, not a detail to shrug off. The warrior holds the lip without crossing into the stain; the cleric stays on clean ground, since it can’t cure from inside the same rot; the wizard casts only from ground that hasn’t turned.

Kin

The well’s slime is the same family at its smallest, initiate scrape. The ancient slime lord under the roots is the same wet grown into a source that won’t stay cleared. Ember mites and needlers are different weathers entirely — dry fire and range, not rot. Briarlings are thorn-hunters, real wildlife in the woodland but not yet a fight on this site.

“Iron” is the word for all of it: ordinary wildlife, not a rank. This one is ordinary only in the sense that it happens — one is still enough to empty a village of commoners if a party lets it walk.