Death After Death

The rats weren’t even the faintest threat to Simon anymore. He stomped one, kicked two, and skewered three on his sword in a series of precise thrusts. Then he spent a minute looking for the seventh rat before he decided that only six had spawned this time.

“I wonder why that is,” he said to himself as he flung the ugly collection of rodents from his blade and resheathed it, so he could look around, “more importantly, though - what the fuck is there to this room beyond the rats?”

It was a fair question. If he’d defeated any level in the pit, it was this one. He’d killed every creature in here dozens of times by now… but apparently, that wasn’t enough. The first few times he’d been through here, he’d poked around but hadn’t found anything but turnips and potatoes.

This time, he tore the place apart methodically, a shelf at a time, but he didn’t find much more than that either. For a while, Simon thought that there might be a nest and that the rats wouldn’t count as defeated until he killed it, too. After all, that’s what he’d done on the lizardman lair, wasn’t it? He’d smashed the nests, and that level was almost certainly completed now.

In the end, with the room in ruins, he gave up. He even tried digging a little bit, and in a final twist of fate, he closed the trap door and then tried to reopen it to see what might be on top of this level, wherever he really was now. He hadn’t been able to reopen it, though. Wherever that door led to now, something heavy was sitting on top of it.

All in all, it had been a waste of time, but he had learned at least one new thing, and next time, he might bring an axe down to hack through the door and see if he could find out something new. So, he pocketed a few potatoes he could roast on the road, and then he went down another level. He wasn’t quite sure which level he wanted to explore this time, but wherever it was, he would definitely need to eat.

Simon exercised the same thoroughness on the trap floor, making it a point to slay every bat and trigger every single trap he came across… once he found the exit, of course. There were a couple, like the spiked pit, that could make escaping afterward difficult. On this floor, he found absolutely nothing new at all. He even dug to the bottom of the chest to make sure that there was no secret magic item hidden in it, and then he emptied it and checked underneath.

There was nothing there, though. “Very fucking funny, Helades,” he cursed, not exactly sure what he was supposed to do with this floor, either. “How could anyone say I didn’t do a hundred percent clear of this place?”

It was possible that he might need to take something from here and use it in another level, of course. He seemed to recall that Helades might have mentioned that in one of their conversations, but that was a really long time ago, and he wasn’t sure. If that were true, the situation would be hopeless though. Having to clear 99 levels was bad enough, but if he had to use them in combination with each other… well, he couldn’t do the math in his head, but that was a lot of combinations.