Simon was more impacted by the loss of so much progress than he thought he would be and was very glad he hadn’t taken Helades advice to wipe the slate clean any further. “Little adjustments,” he told himself as he packed up his camp that morning and went looking for a tavern further down the road where he could find something to drink and wash the bad taste of this recent development out of his mouth.
“It’s not so bad,” he told himself unconvincingly. “This time, you can strike down the basilisk from a distance, and the orcs and the cemetery will be easy. You can even go with those kids and maybe stop Kaylee’s murderous rampage before…” Chapters first released on N0v3l.Fiɾe.net
“Was it Kaylee? Or was it the other one that tried to kill all those nobles?” he wondered aloud. He couldn’t quite recall, and unless he walked back to the river he’d just left, there was no way to check.
The truth was that he was overreacting to only a couple of those levels, and he shouldn’t. He knew better. Simon knew that Ionar would reset when he changed the levels preceding it. He also knew from his brief time with a dragon that none of those lives or events were really lost; they were just out of his reach.
Out of my reach forever, more like, he thought glumly.
It took him a few hours to get his mind right about all of this, and by then, he saw a village on the horizon. To call the sole inn on the place run down would have been an understatement, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and though they didn’t have a still to make whiskey, they did have wine, and a few glasses of the sour red was all it took to get him to the point where he wasn’t worried about any of it at all.
Fortunately, though, he stopped before he managed to drink the barmaid pretty. Instead, he diced with some of the locals to keep his spirits up and won nearly as many coppers as he lost, which was good because aside from them, he really only had a few pounds of golden ornaments that hadn’t been melted down into coins yet.
Even if they were coins, that much gold would be bound to raise eyebrows, though, Simon reminded himself. He knew that from hard experience. Losing money was better than losing his mind by letting his own thoughts engage in a vicious blood sport like dog fighting or bear-baiting like he knew they would if he was alone.
“You just got to keep your attitude up and know that the Gods will provide,” one farmer told another who was complaining about the way this year’s crop was shaping up.
“Some years are lean,” Simon interrupted, “But even a lean year is better than war or goblins.”
“Exactly my point,” the first man said, even though it wasn’t. “We got to count our blessings even when they’re meager, and peace is one such blessing!”
Even after he helped the complaining drunkard home and helped himself to a place in the man’s barn, Simon thought about the conversation while he lay there on a pile of hay, trying to sleep. It wasn’t about him or his problems, and yet some, it was.
It was just the booze and the moroseness that he warred with, but somehow, it felt like more than that, though he couldn’t precisely say what. I’m on level 1 now, well, level 0, he corrected himself. I’ve changed the future, but how much? How do I even know if I’m making things better or worse? What if they’re just a different kind of awful?
Simon knew that he could just go back to his cabin, hop down to level six, and find out right now. He might have if that didn’t mean he would run into Freya again. Part of him thought that it might be better to just go linger in the north for a few years and figure out where the zombies came from, but somehow, that didn’t feel right either.
“What I really need is some perspective,” he decided as he finally started to drift off to sleep. Where could he get that from? He had no idea. He could figure that out tomorrow.
Unfortunately for him, that idea didn’t wait for tomorrow. It hounded him in anxious dreams as he tried to cling to the sides of cliffs and showed up to battle goblins without any armor. It was only when he finally fell, though, that he recalled another dream like that.
“The Oracle.” He woke with her name on his lips just before sunrise.
It wasn’t the worst idea. He knew about the easier path now, and she was only a few weeks away. A few weeks wasn’t much compared to how he’d spend his next life or two. He didn’t get much from the crazy dreams she’d given him last time, but he did find the strange temple city to be very comforting, and at the moment, it was that comfort that called to him more than anything.
Simon rose and left that morning before anyone else was up. As he walked down the path toward the rutted road that led to town, he used a word of distant dispersed plant growth on the man’s field. He barely felt the slight surge of power from within him as it spread out into the field.
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That little power over as much of an area as he’d used it was probably a pointless use of a week of his life, but Simon didn’t care. This spot had given him a moment of inspiration, and he couldn’t ask for more than that. He’d found a problem, he’d tried to help, and he was moving on. There was nothing to him that seemed to indicate that the area was starving or anything.
There were no large cities on the west side of Brin, and Slany was a little too far away to visit and see if young Gregor had been born yet. So, Simon walked straight southwest toward the mountains that separated him from the coast and Ionia. As he went, he realized that with the wyvern level had come undone, so had young Gregor’s future. Without Simon’s intervention, he was doomed to become a bitter, one-armed man.
That annoyed him because that level had already come undone during his previous Ionia adventure in his life before last, which meant that his young friend had been suffering this whole time, and he didn’t even realize it. “And it’s all part of Helades grand plan,” he told himself bitterly before he corrected himself.
“No, wait,” he clarified a few moments later. “The wyvern level is how Freya and I got to Crowvar, Gregor was healed on the goblin level, and that’s still locked in.”
Simon breathed a sigh of relief at that. He traveled over the next few days, he made a list of all the things he had to stop and people he had to save. He wasn’t sure he’d try for it this life or anything, but it passed the time, and he started to think of it as his perfect run, even though he knew there would never be any such thing.
“You could save everyone, but it would be like lining the beach with sand castles, but in a generation, the tide of war will still come from the north and sweep over everyone anyway,” he reminded himself. “That’s what Helades should be trying to stop. Next to some of the plague outbreaks I help with, It's hard to think of anything bigger than war.”
That she didn’t seem the least bit concerned with it was a puzzle, and clearly one he was not meant to solve. At least so far, the early parts of the Pit seemed to be about saving a few people here and a few people there. He wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the goal of the volcano level was to help a single person get to the ship instead of trying to stop the eruption, but that was bullshit.
“I beat it before, and I can beat it again,” he reminded himself one night around a campfire where he ate at a rabbit he’d shot a few hours earlier.
Later that night, a few goblins decided they wanted a taste, but Simon merely used them to feed his vampiric dagger instead. He didn’t need the energy, but he no longer felt bad about using such powers on vermin , as long as it was done in moderation. He didn’t want to become an addict again.
As the farmlands gave way to foothills and eventually mountain crags, his dinner options dwindled, but so did the likelihood that he was going to run into bandits. Those untamed places held far worse things than desperate men with swords, though.
Things weren’t all bad, though. At one point, he found some wild grapes that were ripe before the birds did, and he feasted on those with a gusto that made him surprised he’d ever thought he hated fruit. Not even the seeds were enough to make him find a single fault with the tart berries.
Several times, he saw flying beasts in the distance. Once, it was a wyvern, though he was pretty sure it wasn’t the wyvern he’d fought before. Two other times, he saw griffons.
Well, he might have seen the same griffon twice. It was hard to say. The second time, he even spied its nest high on a cliff at least five hundred feet above the pass he was crossing. He took one look at that sheer location and decided that there was no way he was going up there.
“If the thing wants a fight, I’ll shoot it down, but otherwise…” he let the statement linger, unfinished and stood ready to use a word of force to send it tumbling to the ground if he needed to. Fortunately, the thing either wasn’t hungry, or it didn’t spot him, and he continued on his way.
That distance was a small comfort when he found an ogre’s lair, though. Even if he avoided trouble, it still found him. He’d smelled the place before he saw it, and truthfully, he thought it had been a beastman camp because those goaty bastards were filthy. It turned out the only beastmen there, though, had been used as dinner by the ten-foot-tall monster.
Simon briefly considered skipping the thing. I don’t have to kill every monster, do I? He asked himself. His mind warred for a moment between his own feeling of personal responsibility and Helades comments about how he didn’t need to solve every problem. He’d almost convinced himself that she might be right, but then, as he got closer, he saw that some of the bones in the nearest pile were human. No, they were human. They were children’s bones or that of a very small woman. He couldn’t say for sure.
Had they been merchants or pilgrims? Was there a village somewhere around here with grieving parents? “Helades would say that the real question is, is the future better off for most people if these people died here,” he said numbly. “My response is fuck that.”
Simon set his gear down, and with his eyes watering at the stench, he peered into the cave. It was a shallow thing that didn’t appear to be the secret entrance to some Shangri-La or long-forgotten dungeon. It was just a rotting garbage pit where a giant, primitive man-thing slept away the day on a pile of bear skin rugs.
“I don’t have to fight it,” he decided aloud, “But I do have to make sure it never hurts anyone else ever again.”
Then, taking a moment to imagine the entire place caving in on itself, he shouted, “Gervuul Vrazig Vosden!” and used a greater word of earth ruining on the thing. It had just enough time to stir at the noise, but not enough time to rise or even bellow in pain before the stone above its head cracked and the mountain itself came down on it.
Simon stood there for several seconds tensely to see if the thing would yet burst out of its tomb like some comic book villain, but it didn’t. The rocks never stirred. So, he walked over and planted a few of his grape seeds and then used a lesser word of plant growth on them. He couldn’t save the lives it had already devoured, but he could grant just a touch of new life to this barren escarpment before he continued on.