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The rest, though, even though he’d been deep fried in molten lava, it had been kinda cool. Running just above flowing magma and slaying elementals. It was probably the most cinematic thing he’d done so far in the pit, and if anything, the lesson was that he still wasn’t thinking big enough. He’d spent what? Two years of his life on that run? Three? It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d spent ten, because he’d reset himself again anyway. He needed to get used to using more magic each run. He’d get a lot farther, he needed to.

“Hey, mirror, next time I decide that I’m going to go to level 10 to fight a freaking volcano, remind me that it’s not a good idea,” he said, not bothering to look away from the rafters.

“Actually,” he said, sitting up, “Show me my experience points.”

‘Experience Points: -993,361,’ the mirror typed.

Simon tried to do the math on that. He was pretty sure he’d died twice since the last time he’d looked, and that time, he was still at basically negative one million.

“Well, I’m still basically at negative one million now,” he laughed. “Hmmm…”

Two deaths, maybe three levels cleared, and no particularly good or bad memories. He had killed some pretty big monsters, though - maybe that accounted for the shift. Still, even at this pace, it would take… three hundred thousand more deaths before he got back to zero?

“There has to be a way to speed that up,” he said to himself. “Maybe if I meet whoever wrote that fucking note they can explain it to me.”

He had no interest in speeding things up right now, though. Instead, he went outside, picked up his fishing pole, and went to the stream to do some thinking about everything he’d just gone through.

Especially after an ugly death, the last thing he wanted was to go right back and do it again. He needed to slow down and reflect on everything that was happening to him.

By noon, Simon had caught and gutted two trout, but he still hadn’t come any closer to locking his thoughts into place. What was he supposed to do on levels eight and ten? One was ruins, and one was about to be, so what was the point? How would either of those make the world a better place?

The only thing he’d really learned last trip, besides the fact that fire elementals definitely existed, was that the levels seemed to span a longer section of time than he’d thought. If this was a game or a movie, then all of these bad things would be happening more or less simultaneously. The whole idea would be to stomp out every ember of evil before it could ignite some new threat, but this seemed more complicated. It was like a Rube-Goldberg Device that seemed almost random.

This outbreak of zombies needed to be stopped, and this wyvern needed to be killed, but this plague was okay to happen, and this town could totally burn to the ground. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to it.

Worst of all was Gregor. In the grand scheme of things, he almost certainly didn’t matter, at least as far as the pit was concerned. He and his family were just random NPCs that he probably shouldn’t have ever met. He had, though, and he’d grown attached to them, and it was a shame to see the bitter, broken old man that the fierce, kind-hearted boy had become.

Simon could blame himself, of course. He probably would no matter what, even though he knew it wasn’t his fault. As he fried his fish in bacon grease over low heat, he couldn’t help but obsess about it though.

The Gregor he’d known once upon a time would have still turned out okay, even without an arm. It was his missing father that had likely caused everything else to happen. He sighed and flipped his fish as he remembered the desperate battle that had caused him to get stabbed in the back.

“So what’s the right answer then?” Simon asked himself. “Do I go back and stop the war?”

Honestly, it wasn’t the worst idea. Killing all of the goblins hadn’t solved that particular level, and the portal was an awful long way from the capital, but it wasn’t inconceivable that was what he was supposed to do. After all, a war of succession would cost countless lives, but how the hell was he supposed to stop a war?

He thought about that long and hard as he ate. Technically, this whole thing was probably an elaborate side quest, but some part of him wouldn’t accept that he needed to go straight to 30 until he’d done something to save Gregor.

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In the end, he slept on it, but that didn’t change his answer when he woke up in the morning. He was going to play peacemaker. He just wasn’t sure exactly how.

Simon geared up as usual and didn’t let those thoughts distract him as he killed rats, bats, and goblins. It was only when he reached the mouth of the snowy cave and looked out at the wintry valleys below that he made his decision. He was going to go to the capital and kill the King’s brother.

“If there’s no brother, then there’s no one to dispute the line of succession, and if there’s no dispute about that, then there’s no war, right?” he told himself as he walked down the mountain.

It made sense to him, and that was all that mattered. Simon took it easy on the way down, and he stopped early the day the snowstorm always struck, using the time to build himself a small shelter of pine branches in the lee of a boulder. It was still cold, but with a good fire and a couple baked potatoes, it was hardly miserable, and he made it down the mountain without issue.

When he reached the road to Wellingbrooke, he found the familiar bandits just where he’d left them, and he flipped Luken a silver as soon as the man opened his mouth to begin his familiar speech. Simon didn’t condone the highway robbery exactly, but he was tired of killing this group over and over again.

“Such a generous traveler,” Luken Smiled, “Maybe you’d pay extra for some protection; after all, it’s a—”

“A man that travels alone is the sort you and your friends should worry about the most,” Simon said, not even bothering to slow down as he walked by the cocky highwayman. “Do yourself a favor. Take the coin, keep the change, and live to fight another day.”

For a moment, he thought that the bandit was going to give the signal, and they were going to have to do this dance all over again. He didn’t, though. For whatever reason, the man just stood there and let him pass, and none of his hidden friends struck either. It was good. It was pretty much the best outcome for everyone; he was down a silver he didn’t really need, and they weren’t another stain on his already bloody hands.

In Wellingbrooke he stayed at his least favorite inn, but when he paid for his room he fixed the woman behind the counter with a stern gaze and said, “I know what you see, and I want no trouble. You understand? I’ll be gone in the morning.”

She scowled and short-changed him but otherwise said nothing. The food was decent, but he resisted the urge to have a few beers, knowing how that had turned out in the past. In the evening, he still embedded his dagger deep into the door frame to lock the door the best he could, but no one tried to sneak in and murder him. It was a nice change of pace, and he made a mental note to do that again if he ever came this way so that next time he could get a little drunk and play dice with the other men downstairs.

Today wasn’t the day for drinking, though. It was time for more traveling. Simon paid the ferryman to cross the river, enduring twenty minutes of his prattle before he reached the far side and began heading due east toward Liepzen.

He’d considered getting a horse, but he wasn’t in that much of a hurry, and he definitely needed to lose some weight. So, he walked all the way to the capital of the region, building his map of the way the world was laid out in his mind as he went. He stayed in one more inn and shared the fire of two merchants heading west. In both places, Simon encountered mercenaries eager to swear allegiance to the King’s brother, Duke of the northern lands of the Kingdom of Brin.

Simon said he planned to do the same, but only to make friends. In truth, he had no idea how he’d accomplish what he needed to do. Deciding to kill the man was one thing, but accomplishing it was quite another. So, he laughed and joked and tried not to get too drunk at each encounter as he learned pieces of the truth.

Apparently the King’s son was weak and young, and as the aging man got sicker and sicker, war between the two claimants appeared all but certain. Simon already knew all that. Actually, he knew more than everyone else; he knew that the King would die within weeks and war would begin shortly thereafter, reaching the sleepy town of Slany a few months from now. That was a certainty unless he stopped it. What he didn’t know until now was that the Duke was a hard but well-respected man who would surely become King in the absence of the 12-year-old heir and his scheming advisors.

That was almost enough to make Simon change tactics and go after the boy instead, but murdering a twelve-year-old simply wasn’t going to happen, and he was sure that there would be less chaos if the legitimate heir took the throne.

So, when he walked into Liepzen, he was a man on a mission, and the beautiful gothic architecture of the capital city aside, he quickly made his home at the inn closest to the cathedral that was frequented by the royal family. This wasn’t because he had the gold to pay for good food and a clean inn, though. It was because here he could see the path of the claimants as they strolled by several times a week with their entourage as they prayed for the health of the king from his third-story window.

It was in the second week he was staying there, after looking at the proud warrior and the young prince, that he finally pulled the trigger, so to speak. He’d been putting it off for days even after he formulated his plan, but once the skies clouded over and he saw the approaching carriage, Simon knew that he was out of time.

“Dnarth Vrazig,” he whispered from his window as the man made a speech on the steps of the church. Distant lightning.

It was a hundred yards away, and Simon hadn’t been entirely certain it was going to work, but then a single bolt of lightning arced down from the stormy sky above, striking him and the guard closest to him.

Simon winced at that. The last thing he wanted to do was get anyone else hurt, but he doubted very much that either of them would survive.

A few minutes later, he was proven right. Neither of the men would ever rise again. Simon mourned the dead and felt bad about what he’d done, but weighed against the bodies of the thousands of people who would have died if this hadn’t happened, he wasn’t really sure what to say.

At least he got the effect that he wanted. By the time dinner came around, the small inn was packed with people gossiping about Duke Brin, who was struck down by the gods for hubris and daring to upset the order of things by seeking to replace the true heir.

Simon smiled at that. It was a nice, clean explanation that a simple medieval mind could believe, freeing him up to go pay Baron Corwin and his son another visit.