There were a lot of parts about his st jourhis deep that were a little hazy to Simon. For insta wasn’t until he was standing at the block of ice that he could really remember if the s level or the pgue level came first. Ohing he was certain of, though, was that he wasn’t staying in the same house he’d slept in st time, just feet away from a corpse.

  “That shit was vile,” he muttered to himself as he started walking dowreet, groping blindly in the dark for the door.

  Even after a mihe night was so dark that he had trouble seeing much more than the vague shadows of corpses on the ground. So, eventually, he pulled his fming sword just to have a torch to see with.

  “This is an awfully plex fshlight,” he said with a ugh, noting how crude the lines of his glyphs and runes were to the handwork of the orb he’d examined only a few minutes ago. “But hey - whatever works, right?”

  The fming swave him enough light to navigate and see, but every home he tried was either barred from the inside or tained corpses in varying states of decay. It also made him unbelievably hot, and after a few houses, he was forced to stop, sheath his sword, and then shed his armor before he could tinue on.

  “God - if I have to make a whole set of magic equipment for every level, this shit is going to take forever,” he grumbled as he started off again.

  He tried to do the math in his head. He’d really only spent two or three weeks w on his enting project. The rest had all been recovery, so it didn’t really t, but even so, a perfect run would be like 5 years at that pabsp;

  “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” he sighed.

  Less than ten mier, Simon found something that stopped him cold. It wasn’t another disgusting dead body, though, or even a house that was empty. It was a mirror.

  When he’d seen his distorted expression in the ice, Simon had thought that the cold and the weight loss had made him look older, but when he finally found a fine, silvered mirror in the house of some well-to-do craftsman, he could tell it was more than that at first gnce. For starters, he had gray fug hair and wrinkles around his eyes.

  He had trouble reizing himself most of the time these days, but usually, that was in a good way. This was most definitely not. He robably 30 now, but he might be 31. But he looked like he was 45 easy.

  “Is that from the magic I’ve been casting?” he asked himself as he touched his skin with his free hand. “Is this from that fug orb?”

  He had no idea which was the more likely culprit, but he was fairly sure that he hadn’t looked like this before now. Surely someone would have mentio in Rivenwood, or Freya would have told him that he was looking a little rough when they’d lived in Crowvar.

  He cursed himself for not b to buy a mirror for that house. They were expensive, and he hadn’t thought such a luxury was necessary at the time. Now, he dearly wished he’d had the baseline. Surely, if it was some byproduct of the magic, he would have noticed himself ging a little week by week and month by month, wouldn’t he? Simon tried hard to remember the st time he’d gotten a good look at himself, but his ret head injury made memories in that time frame muddy and difficult to remember with real certainty.

  “Whatever,” he said, feeling somehow cheated. “This doesn’t ge anything anyway.”

  Simon ged his pn, and instead of searg the rest of this dead city in vain for a corpse-free home, he simply went upstairs and found a spare bedroom that no one had died in and decided to call it a day here.

  Teically, Simon didn’t really o sleep yet. He’d only been awake for 6 or 8 hours and wasn’t particurly tired, but he wasn’t going to explore a city full of corpses in the dark. That was just asking for a zombie to pop up and bite him or worse. Besides, he had the word for cure now, so he doubted something as simple as a pgue could do much to harm him at this point.

  He was hopeful that the spell would work on whatever it was that zombies did when they bit you, too, of course, but as he blocked the door with a chair and stripped down to his small clothes, he admitted to himself that he was not looking forward to finding out if that was true or not. He’d holy prefer not to find out. He might even blow his own head off rather than take the risk, but he was sure he’d e across someone he could try to save on this trip to hell one day, and anyone who’d been bitten by a zombie was bound to be a very grateful guinea pig, he decided with a smile.

  The bed he’d chosen was one of the softest he’d id on in a long time. It was han anything he’d had since he’d known the joys of Egyptian cotton in the modern world. Even that wasn’t enough to let him rest, though.

  Instead, a variety of thoughts warred in his head. Why was he here in this city after everyone had died? Why wasn’t he here when people were just starting to get sick so he could do something to save them?

  Surely Simon could teach a few dedicated healers the word for lesser cure, couldn’t he? Even if that magic aged them prematurely as it might have doh him, that would be a small enough price to pay, wouldn’t it? A dozen lives to save hundreds?

  Why didn’t the portal open to the mert ship that had brought this pgue here or the wagon that it had in dormant in across long trade roads to get here? These were all good questions, of course. Good enough to torment him as he y there in the dark, w what the point of all this was.

  He didn’t have any answers, though. He didn’t even know for sure what had caused him to age like this or when it had happened. It was frustrating, and ultimately, it was that simmering frustration that had let him nap until dawn finally colored the sky.

  He slept fitfully, and he remembered only pieces of a dream involving Freya and the son they’d never had. It had been so happy that Simon woke up with a smile on his fatil he remembered the truth. She was dead, and nothing could ge that. Not even trag her down and trying to make it work all ain.

  It was a heartbreaking moment as he tried to recile the false, joyful existeh the grim reality. He sat there on that stranger’s bed, trying to put those raw, ragged emotions bato the box deep inside himself.

  He hadn’t killed her, and he’d done his best to save her, but he should never have left her alone. He khat now. He khat put her blood on his hands to some degree and that there was nothing he could do to fix that now.

  He should have fixed it by fleeing the orcs rather than ing her for days and days as he tried to defend the Crowvar. No, he should have taken her from that pce as soon as he’d realized what a creep the lord of the area and his son were. He would probably have beeer off takio some deserted piece of try nd and building her a log .

  Monsters would no doubt have attacked them eventually. He khat. At least they would have died together, though. That wouldn’t have been a death that tormented him half as much as the one he was forced to remember now.

  Only when he’d gotten himself under trol did Simon finally rise with renewed purpose. He was going to figure out just what the hell made a city of the dead a worthwhile stop on his whirlwind trip through hell, no matter how many times he had to heal himself of this disease until he found it.

  The city was no friendlier in dawn’s light than he remembered it from his st visit. Here and there, doors were daubed with red X’s that meant they tained bodies, but Simohe truth after his vain search st night. Those marks were from some earlier point in the pgue. Before, whoever had been trying to keep order had given up. Now, there were piles of bodies ireets, nearby already full carts loaded with corpses ed in funeral shrouds.

  It was a mess, and it only took a little searg to realize that anyone who had survived this had done so by managing to flee a long time ago. That wasn’t the iing part to him, though. The iing part was that after walking down a few streets in the daylight, he was sure that he’d been here before.

  The first time he’d been to this level, it had just struck him as a shithole little town, but to be fair, his impression of Hurag while it was still a bustling little city the first time he’d walked through hadn’t been much different. It was still a little shithole wedged between two rivers. It was still pretty much that same little shithole of course, though it had a few more stone buildings that he remembered, but now it was full of the dead.

  That mystery solved, Simon thought about walking to the temple of Ethryes and leaving. However, to be ho, he wasn’t totally sure where that was, and the idea of a temple full of dead priests who cked the magic to even save themselves was more than a little depressing. So, he headed slowly back toward the south, which was where he thought it would be, avoiding the worst swarms of flies where he could.

  Eventually he stopped, as he discovered what he could only describe as a primitive hospital in the main market. There, under pavilios, were dozens of cots id out in orderly rows, and Simo pelled to explore it.

  From the looks of the corpses, some of them had been dead for days, but a few, he end, looked like they might still be alive. Really, it was like a macabre museum dispy. The oldest bodies were already bloating and rotting, but as he moved back, he could see the boils swell, and the bd blue streaks started to spread across the skin. It rogression out of a medical textbook and equal parts disgusting and fasating.

  Simon quickly checked for a pulse but found none. All the likely didates were still and cold, and though he didn’t regret trying to help them, he suddenly felt an overp o wash his hands.

  As he walked over to the small fountain on the north wall, he found something else that was still familiar. There, sprawled out on the ground, was a man wearing a pgue mask made of leather and vas, just like he’d seen in video games. That was an oddity that was enough to make him wonder. Was it possible that this was some isekaied person from his world?

  Sadly, he’d never get the ce to ask a dead mahought as he bent down to retrieve the thing for a closer look. “Don’t mind me, pal - it looks like you don’t really his anymore,” Simon said as he undid the strap. “You —”

  As he removed the mask, though, he found another surprise. The man was still breathing, faintly at least. For a moment, Simon backpedaled, worried the man might be about to turn into a zombie.

  He put his hand on his hilt, but as soon as the stranger blinked and tried to speak, Simon rexed. This guy wasn’t about to devour his flesh. He was as weak as a kitten, and unless Simon did something, he definitely wasn’t going to make it.