Chapter 97: Big Game
It took several minutes, but as soon Simon shook the intoxicating feeling of the life force pouring inside of him, he resolved to leave. Now that the bliss was fading, it left behind an oily residue. Some small part of him felt like whatever he’d done to earn the baleful aura that so many had reported had just been made worse. Like he’d done something he shouldn’t have.
That was certainly confirmed by the way that Millen and his son were looking at Simon. As they stared at the carpet of dead insects, their gaze became increasingly dark, and he knew it wasn’t going to end well. So, making an excuse that he had to go check on his belongings, he slipped off to the barn, and from there, he exited to the next level.
He’d lost count. He wasn’t sure if this was 25, 26, or 27. Hell, he might have reached level 29 for all he knew, but he knew he was getting close to Helades. “I just have to keep moving,” he told himself as he looked past the fog of his warm breath on the cold air to the moonlit woods. “I just have to…”
His words trailed off as the howl of distant wolves raised the hair on the back of his neck.
I just have to stay ahead of whatever the hell that is, he decided as he turned and started to jog in the opposite direction.
Simon wasn’t in the best shape yet. In fact, he still felt like he needed to lose 50 pounds, but right now, he wasn’t in the right space to fight. He was still wrestling with the narcotic sensations of what he’d done and the strange urge to do it again, and he was definitely not in the right headspace to fight wargs and goblins or whatever it was he was supposed to do on this level.
For that matter, he had no idea where he was either. The cold and the pine trees said he was somewhere high. So maybe he was in the mountains in the fall or the winter… Eventually, he ran out of gas, and he walked the way up the rest of the rise. It was only there that he started to put the pieces together slowly as he found the dim lights of a village below him.
It was a nice-looking place. Well, at least it was nicer than some of the other places he’d been to recently. It wasn’t the richest place, and it was almost certainly too small to be considered a town, but it probably had everything that he really needed in one quaint little community. There was a double handful of thatched roof houses in neat rows. Smoke was coming out of the chimneys of most of them in thin, wispy lines, and light was escaping from the cracks in the shutters.
The community was small, but the quality of the roads and the fencing said volumes to him about them at this point. He’d been in too many little towns and villages across the continent not to recognize the handiwork of a serious, healthy community.