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He didn’t think they were listening to him, but then he didn’t think they’d listen to anything he had to say at this point. Instead, he pulled out his shield and started to retreat, using the broad kite shield to cover most of the corridor as he moved back with quick, certain steps into the gloom.

“Somebody stop him!” one of the men yelled, but Freya was already closing in on him with her knife.

“He’s a warlock,” she yelled. “Simon is a warlock!”

He fended off her attacks with a few casual swipes. They weren’t nearly as much trouble as the other people starting to come out of the side corridors as he moved toward the surface, a step at a time.

“It’s the gas!” Simon yelled, seeking to muddy the waters further. “I told them not to go in there, but now they’re seeing things!”

“What’s this now?” Garth asked, coming out of the nearest side passage. “Gas? Warlocks? Maybe we should all put away our weapons and—”

“Kill him,” Freya yelled, “before he steals your soul, Garth!”

Despite the pain of hearing his one-time love baying for his death, Simon had to smile bitterly as he appreciated the irony of the moment. Garth was the man most likely to believe that Simon was a warlock, but also the guy in the Butcher’s Bill most likely to take his side.

Everyone held their breath for a moment as the man took it all in, and then Garth turned to Freya and said, “It seems to me you’re the one that’s acting crazy. So why don’t we put down our weapons and talk this out beneath the open sky? We can—”

As the older man tried to talk some sense into the armed group that was stalking Simon through the corridor and get everyone to calm down, a tremendous thud shook the barrow, and a shockwave of sound and dust traveled up the torch lit corridor to them. Simon knew what had happened immediately, but it only took Freya a few seconds longer before she turned and ran back down into the dark.

“Kell!” she cried out, rushing toward the collapse.

Part of Simon wanted to try to stop her, but he was pretty sure she would be safe. Kell was almost certainly dead, but the collapse seemed to be restricted to the main chamber rather than the entire burial mound. Besides, he thought sardonically, I’m probably not even going to be able to save myself in all this.

“Screw it,” he said finally, as he turned and ran toward the surface, hoping to use the confusion to outpace the danger.

And, at least for the first minute, that gambit seemed to pay off. Simon reached the surface while everyone else was trying to figure out what had just happened, and when he got there, he started yelling. “There’s been a collapse! Kell is trapped down there. Get the mules. We need shovels and timber! We’ve got to get him out!”

Everyone set to work immediately, and as soon as they were busy, Simon ran around the far side of the barrow and made himself scarce before rumors of his powers could spread any further. This had been a complete bust, and though he didn’t know if they’d done enough to clear the level at this point, he desperately hoped that they hadn’t because he was going to need to come back here by himself and do all this again.

Once Simon had enough distance, he used a second barrow mound and then a third to hide his retreat before looping the long way back toward the treeline. He felt a little bad leaving everyone here, but not bad enough to try to salvage the situation.

“They’re probably better off without that asshole,” Simon muttered to himself as he hiked as fast as he could from the image of Freya trying to cut him to ribbons. “Seriously, everything that guy touches turns to shit.”

Simon had run into Kell so many times and watched the man ruin so many levels at this point that part of him wanted to figure out where it was the asshole was born so that he could kill Kell before the guy caused so many problems. He wasn’t so myopic not to realize that his urge to strangle the man in his crib was motivated by the fact that he’d managed to end up with Freya in at least one of his miserable little lives.

“I am so done with this level for a while,” Simon sighed as he continued to make good on his escape attempt. “If Kell wants to turn people into zombies with his short-sighted bullshit, that’s on him.”

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He made it back to Schwarzenbruck in less than a week and saw no zombies on the way there, which was enough to make him think that this level probably was done for. Even that wasn’t enough to make him pause and wait around to see what had happened to Freya. She’d survived the collapse, and that was all that mattered.

Simon immediately took the exit from the inn to the flaming ruins of Ionar. There were no plants there, which he took as a good sign, even though he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be even if he hadn’t defeated them. He wasn’t a hundred percent certain, but he was pretty sure that the levels didn’t connect that way where failed attempts were involved.

Still, he didn’t stop to ask questions, at least not until he got to the abandoned throne room and saw the gate of the demonic church. There, he relaxed and took the time to check a few things with a mirror mounted on one wall. The mirror could offer no clarification about the plants, but it was able to confirm that level six was still accessible, which meant that he had not, in fact, completed his time with Freya yet. Simon was unsure how he felt about that but resolved to ignore it the same way he planned to ignore the demon in the next level.

“Back so soon?” the devil asked as he strode through the portal, “You’re making fine progress lately, aren’t you.”

Simon ignored the man and paused only long enough to check a few runes to see if anything had changed before he left through the exit. All in all, he spent less than two minutes at that level, which had to be some kind of record. He simply didn’t have time to deal with that forked tongue bullshit just now.

Instead, he only calmed down when he finally reached the gently rolling decks of the Sea Seraph and walked out onto the darkened deck to enjoy the night sea air. Those other places were levels he could do nothing about, but here, he was certain he could save these people as long as he didn’t let himself get distracted again.

So, after giving himself enough time to calm down, Simon spent the rest of his days and nights on the ship doing just that: looking for the source of the plague. Sadly, he had no source of magical detection, which seemed like an obvious power that he would have to discover or create one day, but he saw no way to do so with his current words.

As this happened for the next few days, he resisted the urge to heal anyone. It would have been a simple thing to do. The refugees on the boat were crawling with coughs and rashes, but eliminating them before they’d resolved into something substantial would do very little to help him on this or future runs. Not that I’ll let anyone die, of course,

he told himself, but I need to know who’s the cause of all this suffering once and for all.

This time, given his more limited funds, he was a little less free with his coins than he had been before and stuck largely to telling stories and trading gossip instead of winning and losing coppers at the dice games that sprung up every night. He learned nothing new like that, but in a way, it was nice to see how little things changed. Sometimes, the parts of his journey that changed the least were the most reassuring, and he often found those moments among the soldiers or the sailors of the realm that were just trying to get by.

Almost a week into their voyage, they reached Ionar as always and stopped to take on water. Even though Simon was fairly certain he wouldn’t see those terrible plants again, it was still a relief to see those desolate cliffs when they arrived.

Truthfully, he didn’t know how it all worked. Some part of him felt like the plats would have been gone anyway, even if he hadn’t so ruthlessly chopped them up. After all, the levels he didn’t clear reset to some sort of default state. That didn’t quite make sense to him either, though. If he took the seed from one level, it had to end up in another, didn’t it?

So where is it now? He wondered to himself. He had no answers, though.

This time, he didn’t even try to leave the boat. It felt like he’d spent half a lifetime here, marching up and down the cliff face in an effort to purge every last tendril and flower, and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

The next time I make that hike, he told himself as he watched those broken cliffs retreat into the distance, it will be because I’ve saved that cursed city, and there will be something worth seeing from up there.

It was three days out from that city that he finally found the cause, or at least what he was almost certain was the cause of all this suffering. It turned out the reason that he’d never found it before was because it wasn’t on the ship all along like he’d presumed. Instead, late one evening, as the sun was beginning to set, the lookout called out a ship in distress off the port beam.

Simon didn’t have to get particularly close to see that they were in rough shape. Their sails were ragged, and their people were gaunt. Some callous part of Simon told himself that he should just discreetly sink the ship from a distance. He was fairly certain he could do that with a word of force.

It wouldn’t take much to hole the ship and send it below. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he did that, though. Instead, he watched as the small boat came alongside, and the survivors were ferried between the ships.

He saw the sores immediately on a number of people, and while everyone else watched what was happening, he was using a word of cure on each boat load of people just before they came aboard. As a result, he was completely exhausted by the end of that desperate evening.

He didn’t know what the vector for this plague was, of course. If it was rats or fleas, he was probably still screwed, but thanks to his time with Doctor Fallster, he was fairly sure that the spread was largely caused by touching infected fluids, so Simon was pretty sure he had it handled. He’d better, according to the sailors, they were less than two days from port, and he was too exhausted to do much else magically between now and then.

Instead, he contemplated what this level wanted. Honestly, it probably wasn’t even to save the Abrese. After all, if that was the point, the portal would be there and not on board the ship here.

So what was it she wants, then? He wondered. Am I supposed to save this ship or the refugees on that one? What’s the important element here?

It annoyed him that saving the city they were heading to probably wasn’t even the goal, but not so much that he didn’t spend the rest of the voyage obsessing over it as he scrambled for some kind of insight.