NOVPUBRather than finish the whole thing in five days like he’d planned, it took Simon almost two weeks. In the end, he found out a bit about the exploits of Rognar the Pale, the Brojin Brothers, and a number of other historical figures who belonged to a now-extinct nation. However, no matter how many tombs he opened, none of them contained the unquiet dead. They were just empty tombs, and truthfully, he felt a little bad for breaking into them when all was said and done.
Including his greater word of distant lightning, he’d wasted about three years of his life while he was here, but he’d get it back. When he’d purged the rest of the barrows, he searched the Reaver King’s one more time before he headed back. There, at least, he discovered a couple of small details.
There were no words he could find that caused the dead to rise up, which puzzled him because the same trap that would make the roof crumble was the result of words of power was still there and recognizable. “If magic isn’t bringing the dead to life, then what is?” Simon asked himself. He didn’t have an answer, though he could imagine many. After all, when he was a vampire, there was no clear evidence that runes had done this to him.
Ultimately, it was a question he was unable to answer, and even as he leveled the place by triggering the trap from a distance, it was something he thought about a lot as he journeyed south to destroy the Blackheart.
Even when he stopped in Schwarzenbruck to resupply, the thoughts didn’t entirely leave him except for a single moment in the marketplace where he was haggling with a merchant about the price of his bacon and salt pork. That was the moment that he saw Freya dart out from between two stalls before hurrying on her way with a few other children her age.
He had no idea what game they were playing. He couldn’t even be sure that it was her, but somehow, he was anyway. She wore a gap-toothed smile and was as happy as Simon had ever seen her, and for a moment, that was enough. It wasn’t enough to erase the horrible things she'd done to him as a vampire, but it was enough to give him hope for the future he was building.
As long as he could help that smiling girl and all the others like her become happy, smiling women with little girls of their own in a world free from rampaging armies and endless zombies, he was doing the right thing. Simon kept that thought in mind even as he journeyed south.
Still, it was hard to know if he was doing a good job, and he doubted himself often since he didn’t even know how much of his previous work that one move had reset. Fortunately, it was that stray thought that eventually led to its own answer.
“Mirror, show me the list of accessible levels,” Simon commanded two days later as he sat by a still pond, taking a break.
It hadn’t occurred to him right away that he could use this ability to check how much he’d changed the timeline, but after obsessing about it for days, it occurred to him, eventually as a bolt of inspiration. He was not disappointed.
‘Level 4 - An evil skeleton’s crypt.
Level 6 - Tavern infested with zombies.
Level 9 - Ruins on a mountaintop and a wyvern.
Level 10 - A dark forest at night with an owl bear.
Level 15 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.
Level 22 - A Costume Party.
Level 34 - ?????”
“Well, that certainly undid a lot of work,” he said as he looked through the list. “I wonder why it's these levels that I seem to have to repeat the most.”
It was a fair question, but it was one he didn’t have a good answer for. He’d probably repeated the wyvern level the most often, though dealing with the zombies in level six was the next most common, for sure. There were other levels, like the plants, that he never saw again once he’d completed it. It was like it didn’t exist anymore.
That’s probably somewhere very far from here, though, he decided. It makes sense that nothing I do in this corner of the world would ripple out that far.
Out of everything, though, the fact that level six was back again was the odd one out. That was the signal to him that he might not understand what was going on there as well as he thought he did. Simon considered spending more time up here to investigate that but decided against it for now.
“It only says zombies because that's what I told the mirror to put there,” he reminded himself. “It could be back for anything. It could be a freaking bar fight. I can worry about it on my next run.”
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It wasn’t like anything he did reset everything else. The rats and the goblins were still dead, and no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find the dungeon filled with gold that he’d sealed away so long ago.
Fortunately, today, he wasn’t looking for that. He was seeking out the graveyard just outside Kawsburl, and when he stayed there for the night, passing himself off as a messenger heading to Abrese, no one gave him a second look.
The people of this town were still as unwelcoming as they’d ever been. They had something to hide, but if you didn’t seem like you were sticking around, then they didn’t really care. He was pretty sure it was more than this tomb, but today, he didn’t really care, either. That was another mystery for another day.
Today, he had one mission. Even though that mission would probably unlock several more levels, it was still something he had to do if he ever wanted to move forward.
Still, that night, he had three beers too many and allowed himself a chance to grieve the loss of the wife that he never had and the son he’d spent far too little time with. It was only in the morning, after a word of lesser cure to eliminate his hangover and a breakfast of eggs and toast, that he went to the graveyard.
That was an errand that he should have done last night instead of drinking, but he didn’t really care. He wouldn’t be sticking around here, and he cared very little what rumors his strange actions might cause. All that mattered was shattering this heart and moving on.
The battle to the thing had been easy for him for a long time. Even without his vorpal sword, which was useless against non-living targets, he had no trouble fighting his way through both floors of skeletons. Not even the knight gave him any real trouble. Simon studied the Blackheart for a few minutes to find any details he might have missed in previous visits, but it was just as he'd left it. Despite knowing basically every rune on the thing, he still didn’t understand precisely how it worked. That annoyed him on some level, but really, he had no interest in necromancy.
Is it really even necromantic, though? He wondered.
It seemed to have been created to extend life, perhaps even unnaturally so, to the point where it extended it all the way past death. He wasn’t totally convinced that was its original purpose.
The fact that it was made out of obsidian struck him as interesting and even important, but that just made the thing easier to destroy. When he was ready to do that, he set it down on the floor and crushed it with a word of force from a safe distance.
The thing shattered as easily as he’d expected. What was unexpected, though, was the burst of darkness and the wave of cold that spread out from that invisible impact. Even as the thing became nothing but a pile of broken glass, it managed to explode like an invisible bomb, and even though there was no shrapnel, Simon was staggered by the chill that passed through him.
He staggered back a few steps on numb feet and then slumped against the wall as he tried to figure out if he’d been dealt a mortal wound or not. The breath he exhaled then fogged the air, and the skin of his fingertips looked frostbitten in places. With chattering teeth, he whispered the word of lesser healing, and that cleared up, but that couldn’t be enough to undo whatever it was that had just happened to him. He searched himself for some terrible wound he just couldn’t feel yet, but shockingly, he seemed fine, mostly. Even so, his mind was racing.
What was that, and how bad did it hurt me, though, were secondary questions. The real question was how that was even possible. “If that was death energy, or cold or whatever, it doesn’t matter,” he told himself. “The real question is how that thing stored any amount of anything?”
Simon had long sought out a battery, capacitor, or some other magical equivalent. The closest he’d come was the ice orb or the dark heart. One seemed to store up heat, and he was pretty sure the other gathered unlife, but he could’t say for sure. He could think of a dozen ways to use one in his spells. Then, somehow, he’d found it by destroying one of the artifacts he’d known about for the longest. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
“You can always come straight here next life and steal it before it gets destroyed,” he reminded himself.
Still, that wasn’t enough, and even after he’d recovered from the shock of all of this, some part of it made him feel profoundly stupid. He should have been worried about where he was going next and what he was going to do with this life, but even as he staggered out of the tomb and let the sun warm him until the chill that reached his bones finally faded, he couldn’t get what had happened off his mind. He was missing something, and it was going to kill him until he figured out what it was. n𝚘𝚟𝚙𝚞𝚋.𝚌o𝚖
Simon was so distracted by this that he spent two days camping along a particularly lively river, fishing and thinking before he even asked the mirror to show him the current playing field. Then, not even his sadness at seeing Ionar reset was enough to penetrate his annoyance, at least not until he saw the basilisk level had returned.
‘Level 6 - Tavern infested with zombies.
Level 9 - Ruins on a mountaintop and a wyvern.
Level 10 - A volcano in Ionar.
Level 11 - A dark forest at night with an owl bear.
Level 15 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.
Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.
Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.
Level 22 - A costume party.
Level 26 - A werewolf in the mountains.
Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.
Level 34 - ?????”
“Level four is finally down and ten old levels back,” he said with a shake of his head as he counted one more time to make sure he’d gotten that right. “That’s ugly stuff.”
Simon sighed heavily. He still had to decide what he was going to do with this life, but after seeing his family vanish, the orphanage in Darndelle vanish, and his war against the centaurs erased, all he really wanted was a good stiff drink.
