Chapter 67: A Life Well Lived
Moments later, the monster’s head rolled free of its body and tumbled down the sandy slope, leaving a smeared trail of purple blood behind it. Exhausted, Simon stabbed his flaming sword into the creature’s corpse one final time and shouted, “Helades!”
He paused for breath a moment, then started walking back toward the front of the temple where most of the other statues were. He thought he’d made it through the fight completely unscathed, but after a few steps, he discovered the truth. The basilisk had almost gotten him on his last run, and his left leg from the calf down had been turned to stone.
Simon paused partway to his destination and shouted again, “Helades! I’m on level twenty, and you owe me my question!” Then, before he kept moving, he tried a couple of middle-powered spells to see what could be done about his foot. Healing did nothing, but curing returned it to flesh, though he noticed that he’d lost all feeling, which made it worse than before. As a stone limb, it had been like walking with a peg leg, but now it was like walking with a dead piece of flesh.
“Which it probably is,” he muttered to himself as he staggered on and tried not to think of the leg rotting while it was still attached to him.
It was fine. He’d rest and then use a greater heal or something in a few hours. As he limped up the slope, he wondered if it might be smarter to cut the possibly dead limb off and create a new one with greater heal. He wasn’t sure. He’d reattached a finger on one of his men with lesser heal once, and that had worked well enough, but he’d never tried to grow a new limb before.
Simon shrugged. There was a first time for everything.
When he reached the first statue, he toppled it over with a shove, shattering the thing. He took the head and threw it further up the slope towards the center of the group and then staggered on to the next one. “Helades! You told me I could ask a question, and last time I was here, you did all the talking!”
Simon looked around to see if she’d appeared, and when she was still nowhere to be found, he continued breaking statues. God, he was exhausted. In the movies, they always said things like, ‘I’m getting too old for this shit.’ He’d always thought that was dumb, but right now, he felt literally too old for this shit.
Still, the exhaustion of the fight wasn’t enough to stop him, and slowly but surely, he made a pile of heads. When he had almost two dozen of them there on the flagstones of the temple’s stairs, he finally took cover behind a pillar and whispered, “Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼,” imagining them being crushed downward like a vice.