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No one tried to call his bluff, which was good because it wasn’t one. The truth was it would be faster if they just cut him down here. It might even be more satisfying. But if he died, then he wouldn’t have her ring anymore, and that meant more to him than walking all the way back up that mountain to the wyvern.

The trip back was uneventful. As they’d ridden south together, Simon and Freya had feared that the zombies were nipping at their heels and would sweep across the world. They’d never come that close, though. After the fall of Schwarzenbruck, they’d become an endemic threat. They’d pop up periodically, but the people of the area knew how to handle them. Some people even believed that there were ways to cure the recently bitten before they turned, though Simon had yet to see any evidence for that claim.

There was a lot he still didn’t understand about this world, but right now, he didn’t care anymore. He just trudged forward from camp to inn and village to town as the mountain he needed to climb loomed into view.

The whole time Varten’s words haunted him, too. It didn’t matter that he knew they weren’t true. All that mattered was the way that they picked at the open wound and made him despair and doubt what he knew. Was it possible that Freya had been unfaithful to him or that she’d never really loved him? Simon knew that their courtship had been more than a little rushed and that he could have been a better partner, but even so, he found it impossible to believe she could lie to him well enough to be true.

Simon tried hard to stay positive whenever his rage faded enough for the despair to seep into his soul. As the trip wore on, this habit, combined with the familiar surroundings, made him more than a little nostalgic. He couldn’t help but think about the way Freya laughed or made fun of the way he pronounced certain words. It seemed like everything along the road brought back some memories, but it wasn’t until he got to a bridge he didn’t recognize that he realized that he’d gone almost a day too far to the north.

No one on the road bothered him, or even noticed him as he turned around and started walking back the way he’d come. Maybe bandits could see his little storm cloud that followed him around wherever he went, or maybe they could see he really wanted an excuse to kill someone. Either way, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hike up the mountain.

It took two days to get up this time instead of the three days it had taken to get down. Simon was a little amazed that he was in that much better shape, and he even stopped early one night to roast an ewe that he’d taken with his longbow earlier.

That was something else he’d gotten much better at, and he doubted he’d go back to a crossbow ever again unless he had to. Once you developed the technique for pulling back on the string, it was just so much better than having to step in the stirrup and reload the damn cross. He was under no illusions that he could take down the wyvern with one, though.

He’d seen it twice on his way up the mountain, and though it might theoretically be possible to shoot it in the eye and bring it down in a single blow, Simon had missed several rabbits from close range in the last few days. That was the reason he was eating goat. Because it was bigger.

Even the meal made him miss Freya, though. They’d had goat and sheep often in Crowvar because it was much cheaper than beef and significantly healthier than pork. His dried-out spit roast made him miss the way that Freya would do it, basting in herbs for hours during the months he was at home.

Simon sighed. The whole time he’d thought he was making a safer world for her, but in reality, he’d just been wasting time they could have spent together. That thought was enough to make him lose his appetite, and he cried himself to sleep.

Simon reached the ruined castle just after noon on the following day and found the portal just where he expected it to be. When he opened it, the seaside Mediterranean-style town was still burning, and the volcano was still erupting, which was both expected and strange. As glitchy as this whole arrangement was, Simon always thought that if he lingered long enough, he would find nothing on the other side of this door but a wall of cooling magma and ash, or worse, he’d open it only for a tide of magma to consume him immediately.

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It never happened that way, though. Instead, it always linked to the same spot, like the levels operated in some way that was entirely independent of each other.

“You know this whole arrangement ignores basic laws like causality, right Helades?” Simon asked, knowing he wouldn’t get an answer. She probably wasn’t even listening, except for the parts where he was suffering.

Simon strolled casually up the hill toward the river of lava and, eventually, the palace, but the panicking tide of humanity running the other way toward the harbor made progress slow. That didn’t bother Simon. He knew where he was going, and it was a pretty short trip from here.

This time, on a whim, he walked past the turnoff to the palace and all the way up to where the lava was flowing down the cobblestone street like a river of fire. It was a view he’d seen several times from a distance, but standing so close to it that he could feel the heat rippling off of it was a different experience entirely.

On past trips, he’d seen shapes moving in the heat haze there, but this time he saw a man made of red-hot stone and burning magma standing there like he was directing the flow of the whole thing. It stared at Simon briefly before it went back to doing whatever it was doing.

“So that’s a fire elemental, huh?” Simon said, nonplussed. “Looks a little basic. You could use some better art direction here.”

The only surprise of the whole level came when he got to the palace. This time it wasn’t in the form of Helades waiting for him, though. The portal was wrong. It still hung in the same spot, but it no longer led to the forest as he expected. Instead, it led to the entrance of the covered bridge. The far end was too dark to see, but Simon knew that the bridge troll waited down there for him somewhere. It always did.

“Really, Helades? Your world is glitching out now?” Simon said in exasperation.

Or maybe the portal wasn’t wrong at all, he realized. Maybe he was. Was it possible he got the levels out of order, he wondered? Was it possible he went over the bridge and then got to the owl bear? Simon thought about it hard, but in the end, he determined that it was impossible. He’d definitely gone forest, children, miller, and bridge the last time he was here. In that order. There was no question.

Thinking of that made Simon wonder how those kids were doing. He hoped someone else would be around to save them, though. Because apparently, he wasn’t going to get that chance now, he thought sadly as he unsheathed his sword and stepped through the portal to ruin this thing’s day.

In all the errands and quests he’d run for the Raithewait family over the better part of the last year, he’d never seen another troll, or really anything like it, Simon thought. The closest he’d come were hobgoblins and orcs. That made him wonder just how rare these beasts were, but that didn’t matter to him. It wasn’t like anyone would cry if this endangered species went extinct.

“You and me have unfinished business,” Simon said as he strode toward the thing in the near blackness of the wooden bridge.

He couldn’t see the monster, but he could smell it, and he thought it was fascinating that it was trying to preserve the advantage of surprise. Not that it really had it. That was an illusion because Simon wasn’t surprised.

As soon as the ten-foot tall warty monstrosity leaped out of the shadows to devour him, Simon rolled between its legs, slicing deep into one calf as he went and chopping all the way to the bone on the other side once he rolled to his feet, making the troll roar in pain as it collapsed to its knees. It still spun around and tried to grab him with its giant hands, but Simon was already well out of reach.

He walked backward to the far end of the bridge and looked around town to see where the best place to kill this thing might be. Its calf muscles were already almost completely healed in seconds, so he knew that his sword wasn’t going to cut it.

For a second, he considered letting the thing chase him into the church and pushing it into the portal to hell, but then the part of him that had seen way too many horror movies realized that if the thing messed up the circle as it charged through it might unleash hell in this world instead, and that was too big a risk to take.

Simon was fairly sure if he died in hell, he wouldn’t be coming back. He’d just be suffering for eternity. He’d already done that once, of course, and had no interest in doing it again.

In the end, Simon decided that simple was best. He dodged the thing’s strikes a few times as it lured the creature to a large barn he’d noticed not so far from the blacksmith’s building, and then just when it thought it had him cornered, he shouted the words of fire, erasing its face in a sea of flame and raking its chest with charred lines of power.

With the amount of rage he felt, he wasn’t surprised that shouting “G̴̝̈́͒͠ḛ̷͕̮̕͘r̵̛̫̮̔͠ͅv̴̿̀͠ͅu̷̝͚̜̎u̴͚͈̎ḻ̸̣̈́ ̸̦̟̜̈́̍M̷̪̹̪̓̓͒e̴̪̎i̴͓̗̔̔͆ͅr̸̹͓͚͐̅è̵̛͇̱̾n̴̩̜̍” had hurt more than usual, but it was hard to argue with the results. It lit up almost as easily as the wooden walls and the straw-filled stalls that surrounded it, giving Simon more than enough of an opportunity to slide around it in the chaos and bar the door, so the monster would be trapped in there until the whole place burned down.

Its chilling, painful screams followed him all the way across the town until he entered the church door and shut it behind him. Strangely, they didn’t bother him even a little bit, though. Right now, they just sounded like victory.