Chapter 37: Achievement Unlocked
Ultimately, his plan was a simple one: bring what he needed, kill a few goblins, and chill out for a few months or years. “Lifetimes, maybe,” he mumbled as he laced up his armor again.
In between inventing Saturday morning cartoons that should have existed but never did and trying to remember what color Freya’s eyes were, he’d given a lot of thought about the mistakes he’d made in the dungeon, and the biggest ones was abandoning his search to find somewhere else to be rather than going ever deeper into the madness.
After all, he knew for a fact that the zombie level was huge. He’d wandered for dozens and dozens of miles in it. Surely other levels were like that too. So, now that he could summon fire on command, he was going to do what he should have done a long time ago. Grab some food from level one, some gold from level two, and use fire magic on level three to survive the freezing cold long enough to get down from those damn mountains and find some nice little medieval city to chill in for a while. He had no idea how long a pile of gold would keep him in women and wine, he thought with a shrug as he belted on his sword and scabbard, and wadded up his blankets into a satchel, but he was sure the food and the company would be better than here.
Killing the rats was almost a nostalgic experience for Simon. “Did you miss me,” he asked as he stomped the last one into oblivion before he picked through the potatoes and the turnips by torchlight. The root cellar was a dusty one, and much of the contents of both sacks were well on their way to spoiling, but he managed to find a few pounds of good vegetables and combined them into the sturdiest sack before he continued on his way to level two.
In his past few attempts, he’d gotten to the point where he could get through these traps in just a few minutes, but that was because he’d memorized each trap so thoroughly that he could identify each of them by the small scuffs and scrapes from the previous times they’d been triggered. He no longer trusted his memory, though. So, this time he took his time, slowly killing bats and searching hallways as he went. He still managed to avoid all of them, of course, and it took less than half an hour to scoop up a double handful of gold. In the end, all it cost him was a second torch, and that was immensely preferable to falling in that damn spike pit or getting crushed to death.
After that, the goblins were easy. His scabbed-over knuckles throbbed as he ran the first one through. It wasn’t a clean kill, and the little bastard had a chance to scream before he was silenced forever, which led to Simon being briefly pinned down by that damn archer until he took it out with the crossbow, but after that, it was a bloodbath in his favor, and though he was worn out by the time he’d finished chopping goblins into pieces, it was a good sort of tired, and he was grateful for the workout.
“You guys have had years to get your act together,” he gasped for breath as he berated the corpse of his final opponent. “But in all that time, you still haven’t figured out how to kill me or how to put an extra guard back in your cave. Pathetic.”
It was funny. Up until yesterday, he’d hated the idea of exercise and avoided it whenever possible, but something about being turned into a statue for years and years changed that. He might still hate the getting out of breath or the sweating part when he overdid it, but for the movement itself, he was very grateful.
Simon’s gaze drifted over to the stone door that led to the skeleton crypt before he got up and started walking down through the snow. He felt a little bad that he couldn’t go try that fight out on this run. It would be the best way to determine how rusty he’d gotten, but there was no way back, so once he was there, he pretty much had to keep going until at least the zombie level, which wasn’t happening. Not only did he have no wish to dredge up those memories again, but the next off-ramp from all the awful was what? The wyvern level?