The situation was much as Simon had left it and largely unchanged from his last few visits. There was trouble in the north. No one quite knew what it was or why it had stopped trade to the north, yet mercenaries had been hired and dispatched. In fact, asking around, it sounded like Butcher’s Bill had left a few hours before he’d arrived.

He didn’t care about that, though. This time, he wasn’t looking for Freya. He wasn’t planning to help her or save her. He wasn’t even planning to visit the Barrow Mounds at all. Hell, if he had a better option for a forge, he wouldn’t even head north at all, but he knew of several villages up that way that had already been cleaned out by zombies.

So, aside from the occasional member of the walking dead he was sure he’d have to kill, that sounded just about right for Simon. It seemed strange that once he feared the zombies so much that the walls of the city seemed to be barely enough protection, and now he was comfortable with the idea that they might just walk up on him in the middle of something, but the reason was clear. He had magic for that sort of thing now.

So, not only was he not at risk in a real sense, but with his plan, he could actually help people. He wasn’t sure if his hammer would attract them all, but he could act as a beacon and draw at least some of them to him, and that would save lives.

Hell, that might even be enough to solve this level, he realized. For a second, that was enough to reconsider his whole plan. He definitely wanted to see that barrow. Should he try to rush up there first? Could he take the chance that Kell and company wouldn’t find it first and bury themselves alive? He wasn’t sure.

What he was sure about, though, was that he was hungry, so he paid an extra coin for a hearty stew and decided to sleep on it. The right answer wasn’t always apparent, but he usually got there eventually.

No one tried to kill him that night, though one old woman did give him the stink eye when he went out shopping for supplies the next morning. Simon decided there was no way the Butcher’s Bill would even find those mounds without his help. They’d been planning to follow the road north before he’d changed their plans, and he was happy to let them go off on their own little wild goose chase.

Instead of devoting much time to worrying about them, though, Simon bought a mule with an attitude problem cheap, half a bag of nails in case he needed to reinforce wherever he was going to be sleeping, along with as much smoked sausage, potatoes, and hard bread as he could afford with the meager coins he had left. He bought a few fresh things, too, for the trip up, but the more delicious something was, the more expensive it was going to be, and he didn’t have much for luxuries these days.

“You know, this sort of thing is more fun on easy mode,” he told his donkey as they left the market and headed toward the north gate. “But I had to go and throw all my gold away. Disappointing, isn’t it?”

He talked with the donkey more than he thought he would on the way up north. Honestly, he talked with it more than was probably healthy, but it wasn’t like there was anyone else around. The whole way up the abandoned village, he only saw one other person, and it was a sun-dried zombie that he dispatched with a sword stroke.

When Simon got to the village he’d been thinking of, it was every bit as empty as he remembered it, and he set about securing the smithy to be his home away from home for the next few days or weeks, or however long it took to create a magical set of fire-resistant plate mail.

First, he used the doors and windows of other buildings to seal the gaps in the place, and it was only then that he got ready to work. Only there was one problem. He didn’t even realize it until he’d already lit the forges and begun to stoke the fires that he was missing one key item to do all of this: a hammer.

“Motherfucker,” he cursed as he tore the place apart, looking for it. It was nowhere to be found, though. He could probably make a crude hammer with the word for earth, but he didn’t want to. What he wanted was the blacksmith’s hammer that this blacksmith had used with this anvil.

In the end, Simon let the fires burn back out in his search for the thing, but it was worth it. With a little effort and looking at every corpse that was scattered throughout the village, he eventually found the blacksmith, who was recognizable by his soot-stained hands and his leather apron. Fortunately, the man’s hammer was not far from him in the weeds, so Simon was finally able to get to work.

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Ironically, he didn’t even need a very large hammer at first for anything for the first few days. Instead, he mostly scribbled on the armor with charcoal as he outlined the patterns he knew he needed. Simon had been working on this design on and off for a long time. Certainly, since his time in Abresse, and in reality, probably longer in his head.

All that time, he’d known that he was the only source to power the thing, which he definitely didn’t want to do.

He’d considered simply copying the runes on the blade that powered it, but he was fairly certain that none of this shit worked without some understanding. He could screech words of power until the cows came home, and if he didn’t do it with intent, they were meaningless. So, instead, he came up with a more convoluted plan: he was going to use the volcano itself to power the runes.

He had to test it, of course, but in theory, he could use the fire rune with a few linking runes to harvest the incredible heat, and then he would use that to power protection runes along with the cold runes to keep it from cooking alive. In theory, the hotter it got, the more powerful the effect would become. If he didn’t find a way to screw it up in the process, of course.

The result, at least how he imagined it, was somewhat like a wearable refrigerator, only it used magic instead of electricity and more magic instead of freon and insulation. It was at least an order of magnitude more complicated than the sword sheath he’d made before, and he ended up copying most of that from the frost sword. The end result was a series of ugly swirls, dotted here and there with strange cursive letters that grew off them like cancer.

Once he’d traced them all out onto the front and back of the breastplate and scratched them into place with his dagger, then he created the linking runes to ensure the magic stretched all the way to his gloves and boots. Those he’d stolen from the devil’s binding ring, but they were simple enough.

They were like adding pipes so the water could flow, which stretched the credulity of his metaphor even further, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like he was going to ever be good at this shit. He just needed to make it work for a few minutes and save Ionar. After that, he could put it all behind him.

Simon managed to avoid the interest of the undead until he’d done all the planning. It was only when he started pounding with the chisel into the warm metal that they began to seek out the source of the racket. After that, they became regular, if somewhat welcome, distractions.

He’d spend a half hour banging away, and then when he heard the groaning and the moaning, he’d walk a little ways into the woods and kill anything he saw moving for a little exercise. Zombies that had aged this long were no threat. They were little more than practice dummies. For Simon, the challenge wasn’t in killing them but in doing it far enough away from where he was working that they didn’t add to the stink of the place.

Each day, he made a little progress, and each day, he fought off another wave or two that it attracted. Eventually, it became like the weather. One day, it was sunny with a chance of zombies, and another, it was overcast and not a ghoul in sight.

It took him a long time to realize what he was doing, though. “You’re really going to spend weeks of your life preparing for a freaking boss fight, huh, Simon?” he chastised himself. “What if you fuck it up? Are you going to go get that armor and do it all again?”

“Yeah, probably,” he acknowledged. “Daisy would be disappointed in me if I gave up now, wouldn’t you, Daisy?”

The mule whickered at him. It was very clear to Simon that such a grouchy beast did not like the name or being cooped up in a smoky blacksmith's shop, but he wasn’t about to leave it outside and let it be eaten by the prowling zombies.

“See, she wants me to win,” he smiled. “She wants me to save Ionar.”

He kept working on the breastplate with his chisel. He’d had this conversation with himself more than once, and he knew how it went. At least, he thought he did. He did until he suddenly blurted out, “But you aren’t saving it, are you? You’re just going to go and put it out of its misery.”

Simon stopped what he was doing and considered those words. Going there after it was on fire wasn’t really saving it, was it? If you want to save it, you have to go there and stop it as soon as it starts, he thought to himself.

His mind reeled at what that would entail. Now, suddenly, instead of spending weeks on a single attempt at a level, he was going to stretch that into what? Months? Years?

“I don’t even know how far Ionar is from here,” he said as he put down his chisel. He knew where it was, of course, as well as how to get there, but he had no idea how much time he had. Did the thing explode next month? In five years? He had no idea if he could take his time or rush, and that oversight annoyed him.

Something told him he was going to spend the rest of the day turning over this new wrinkle in the back of his mind. At least, he would have. It was at that moment, when he was considering picking his hammer back up that he heard the voice of someone yelling from the road, “Please, is there anyone there? I… we have wounded.”

Simon’s whole world froze then. He knew that voice. He’d know it anywhere. Despite all he’d done to avoid her this run, Freya had found him again. It was fucking destiny, and he was starting to get pretty sick of it.