Chapter 64: Dead City
There were a lot of parts about his last journey this deep that were a little hazy to Simon. For instance, it wasn’t until he was standing at the block of ice that he could really remember if the swamp level or the plague level came first. One thing he was certain of, though, was that he wasn’t staying in the same house he’d slept in last time, just feet away from a corpse.
“That shit was vile,” he muttered to himself as he started walking down the street, groping blindly in the dark for the next door.
Even after a minute, the 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 flaming sword just to have a torch to see with.
“This is an awfully complex flashlight,” he said with a laugh. As he spoke, he noted how crude the lines of his glyphs and runes were, compared to the handwork of the orb he’d examined only a few minutes before and the way the fire sizzled unevenly across the blade. “But hey - whatever works, right?”
The flaming sword gave him enough light to navigate and see, but every home he tried was either barred from the inside or contained 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 continue 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 working on his enchanting project. The rest had all been recovery, so it didn’t really count, but even so, a perfect run would be like 5 years at that pace.
“Ain’t nobody got time for that,” he sighed.
Less than ten minutes later, 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.