Chapter 78: Cataclysm
The ride back to the mountain was far more enjoyable for Simon than his brief stay in Slany. The weather was mild, and the things he could kill to get the unreasonable level of anger he felt about the whole thing out of his system were plentiful.
He beheaded three highwaymen who thought they deserved his purse more than he did with a single word of force, he broke up a bar fight at a tavern he was staying in before it could get too ugly, and he took on a brief side quest to kill a young troll free of charge before it could do much more than decimate the sheep herds of the surrounding villages. The last one was the most interesting, and the villagers did try to pay him for reducing it to ashes, but he wasn’t interested in their coins.
He needed to get back on task. He needed to go deeper. There was nothing here for him.
That was what he told himself as he let the horse free once he stopped on the road not so far from his destination, but he still thought about it on that miserable climb all the way back up to the top. None of those insistences to his brain kept him from thinking about it the whole way back, though.
It was ironic because he’d hoped to find some comfort, but instead, he’d only found new things to feel guilty about, and they followed him all the way to the gate, which led to the end of the world. It was here he got his priorities straight as he watched the volcano erupt in the background and saw the people streaming toward the sea.
He’d love to know what he was supposed to do here. Maybe even more than the jungle level. He simply had no idea what it was supposed to entail. Fight the volcano? Save all of the people? Save just one person?
“Who fucking knows,” he signed as he watched another round of volcanic bombs launch in the sky and reign down as he turned toward the palace and the portal it contained. “I mean, I could try to get a bunch of these people to follow me through there. But right now, it leads to… where?”
He wasn’t sure. The owl bear level was gone because he’d saved the kids. At least, he was pretty sure that was why it was gone. He’d killed the troll, too, so if that was enough to solve the bridge, then that put him in what? The gateway to hell, he realized.
Yeah, he definitely wasn’t taking anyone to that level until he figured it out. Maybe one day, if he still hadn’t solved this particular riddle, he could find a nice safe level to send all these refugees to. Well, safer, he corrected himself.