Elthena was never far from his mind on the voyage north, but by the time they’d made landfall, he’d made peace with it. This life was important, but this body was old and starting to get a little worn out, so he was going to lock in the events here as well as he could, then proceed further into the depths. He doubted he was anywhere close to in shape enough to slay a dragon at this point in his life, but he had the armor anyway, so he might as well try just the same.

After he fixed it, of course. The heat and the impact had done some real damage, but it was hardly a priority.

Simon returned to the little town of Blackwater with Daisy in tow, and after promising that he would not seek to return, the captain gave him a generous purse of gold and silver and wished him well. Simon would keep that promise, of course, but only in this life. In his next one, he would return to Ionar the day this ship put out to sea.

He’d have to explain the missing scars or inflict them a second time, but neither of those options bore much thinking just yet. He wasn’t sure if the truth or the lie would be more harmful in this case.

Instead, Simon spent some time in his least favorite town, listening to stories and getting a feel for the lay of the land after all these years. It turned out that the whole zombie thing was pretty much over. Every now and then, they’d find a body that made people think it might not be over yet, but usually, that was just a false alarm.

That made sense, considering it had been the better part of a decade since he’d been back. Mercenaries had cleansed the area north of the bridge, and trade had long since restarted. Honestly, with the exception of a new statue in the center of town, the place was looking better than he’d ever seen it. The streets were bustling, the bars were full, and spirits were high. The only thing that ruined it was the fact that Kel was the one who had gotten all the credit for it. Kel, the asshole that had infected the town in more than one previous version of the level. Kel, the prick that had hidden his own wound until he’d turned and almost taken out his whole company. The man had very nearly gotten Freya killed, too.

No, worse than that, he almost turned her into a fucking zombie! Simon though, fuming.

He had no idea what Freya and the other survivors of the Butcher’s Bill had told the people of Schwarzenbruck, but it definitely wasn’t the truth. The only reason he didn’t waste a word of force to knock the thing over was because he wasn’t really in a position to be wasting weeks or months of his life. Physically, he was getting close to forty, but with all the magic he’d burned in those years and the lingering effects of the injuries that had healed as much as they were ever going to heal, he was probably pushing sixty at this point, which was as old as he’d ever been except for a brief moment on level 20.

At least he didn’t see Freya, though. So there was that. He did see Brenna, though she wasn’t a barmaid anymore. She’d gotten married and had a couple kids in between now and the last time he was here, which he thought was fairly cute.

Simon lingered long enough to get a feel for the place and verify that the portal still existed in the same spot it always did, which was a new piece of information. Note to self, the portal will exist for as long as what it's attached to exists, as long as I’m close to it.

Stranger than the fact that the portal was still there, though, was where it led. This time, it didn’t lead to the cathedral as he’d expected it would. Instead, it led to the mountaintop where he’d slain the wyvern. I wonder what I screwed up to make that happen? Simon asked himself. In the end, it was a question he couldn’t really answer, but it was a good reminder. If he wanted to return to Ionar to resolve this, he needed to make sure he did nothing at all to disrupt any of the levels before this one. Hell, he needed to make sure he didn’t disrupt any levels between here and the eruption on level 10, either, which meant, for now, there was no wyvern hunting.

Once he’d determined those things, he bought supplies and went north one final time to make sure there weren't any signs of lingering evil. It was a waste of his time. The way north wasn’t even remotely dangerous this time. It took him almost a week of searching to find a zombie, and it was a decayed thing that could do little more than moan and grasp toward the road from where its broken and decayed limbs were stuck in the mud.

Simon put it out of its misery, but that was the only useful thing he did on the whole trip. He stopped by the barrow mounds and found them a little more looted than they’d been on his previous trip but otherwise unchanged. The smithy that he’d used so much on his last trip had returned to use, and though the town it was attached to never really recovered, many of the other small towns and villages near the main road had.

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In the end, three weeks after he set out from Schwarzenbruck just ahead of the first snow of the season, he returned with nothing to show for it but a runny nose. “Well, this level is as solved as solved gets,” he said to himself.

Still, he took one night when he got back to town to rest at an inn and do some drinking before he headed out again. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. As much as he enjoyed the heavy stews and thick slices of meat that typified northern cuisine, it did make him miss the Mediterranean food he’d eaten for so long, even though he preferred this. It was just… different. Maybe it was even too different, but somewhere along the way, he started to feel homesick about a place that wasn’t really his home.

None of that stopped him from following the plan, though. He was going back, just not with the dregs of life he had left. When he returned to Ionar, it would be fresh and ready to do what needed to be done.

The wyvern level was just as Simon had left it any number of times in the past, and once he made sure that nothing was about to swoop down and eat him, he made his way toward the ruins that held the exit. There, he found the cathedral waiting for him, which was, in its own way, a relief, even though it was one of the weirder levels, and he never really felt comfortable in it.

Still, it was better than finding yet another level he’d already beaten. That was something he worried about sometimes in bed at night, just before he drifted off to sleep. There was always the possibility that he would do something and reset all the progress he’d made so far. That wouldn’t be the end of the world normally, but right now, he had a life on pause he was eager to pick back up, so he was keeping a careful eye open for signs that things might be spinning out of control.

Still, as he stepped through the door and shut it behind him, he couldn’t help but wonder if today was the day he would finally solve this level. After all, it was level 13, so it was months or years past his life in Ionar. Nothing he did here would affect that, so it might be worth a shot.

This time, the devil was eating, and when Simon approached, the well-dressed monster raised his wine glass in a toast to him. “I’d wish you a long life, but it would seem you already had one,” the devil said, laughing at his own joke.

“I’ve had a nice time, I’m glad to see you’ve missed me,” Simon answered dismissively as he approached the circle and began to read the runes once more.

In the past, he’d had a lot of trouble with that, given their distorted nature, but he’d done a lot of magic study between the last time he’d come through this level and now, and he was able to read much of the circle without effort. Only the most tortured sections required real study.

“Oh, but I have, I have,” the red-skinned man said with a smile before cutting another bite of whatever it was he was eating on his fine china. “I see so many of you heroes, but to see the same ones over and over? Well, that gets rarer as time goes on; I'm sure you’ve guessed the reasons by now.”

Simon had hoped to tell the devil his own name and surprise him, but it didn’t seem to be written on the ring. Whoever had cast this spell had meant to open a gateway to hell, not a particular demon, which made it all the stranger. Why would someone want that?

He didn’t know, but he did know that the devil had nothing useful to add, so Simon tuned him out and focused on the task at hand, tracing the runes back further and further until he finally isolated the power. The thing was both powered by hell and summoned hell, which seemed like a paradox waiting to happen, but this was magic, and he was pretty sure that sometimes making sense was entirely optional.

For a moment, he thought he’d found the solution, but it was only when he reached for it that he realized it was wrong. If he wiped out the rune that powered the thing the way it was laid out, the circle would stop working before hell vanished, which was, of course, exactly what he didn’t want.

“Finally found my weakness, have you?” the devil feigned, concerned over what was obviously the wrong rune. Simon pretended to hesitate just to screw with the monster, but he wasn’t dumb enough to take any reaction from this thing, positive or negative, for advice.

What he needed was to make hell disappear before the circle faded, which meant the summoning rune itself, which was a combination of distance and boundary with a couple of other symbols he couldn’t recognize. That was where he decided the weak point in the spell was, ultimately. The union of distance and boundary. It was there that the space where the summoned area could exist was defined, and if he undefined it, well, the rest of the circle should just keep right on existing even with nothing in it.

“Are you sure,” the demon asked as Simon pretended to waiver. “Maybe you’d better go around another time or two until you’re sure.”

“Oh?” Simon asked as his hand moved above the rune he planned to scrub away, “will you miss these little chats of ours?”

“I have plenty of other heroes I can talk with, but if you close the gate… well, you might live to regret it,” he said, feigning sympathy. “It’s one of the only ways out of your little prison you see… It’s a loophole, and I think we could yet—”

Simon looked the bastard in the eyes as he wiped away the rune and watched the portal into the yawning fiery pit start to close. It wasn’t even a tense moment. He knew he was right the moment he saw the fear in the demon’s eyes, and he took pleasure in watching the thing vanish completely.

Simon stood and watched as the portal slammed shut and the twisted, floating pieces of the church slowly fitted back together. A few seconds after he’d wiped away the rune and the demon’s smug smile, all that was left of the entire thing was a chalk outline, which Simon took another couple of minutes to scrub away so that no one else got any ideas.

Then, once that was done, he walked over to the portal and stepped through it to the next level, which was a farm field he’d seen before.