Chapter 114: Beneath it All
The following day Simon felt like shit. This wasn’t just because the life energy he’d stolen from the would-be thief had faded to some degree. It was also because he’d done it at all. He was definitely looking and feeling better than before he’d dropped a nuke on the graveyard, but he was still pretty far from one hundred percent.
Draining the life of a man had felt worlds better than draining the life of a swarm of insects. It was dangerously good, and though, in this instance, he could certainly say what he’d done was self-defense, it was a small fig leaf for such a terrible thing.
Would it have been any better if I’d beheaded him with a word of force or stopped his heart with a bolt of lightning instead, he wondered. At least this way, the asshole lived.
Whether he lived or died wasn’t the problem, though. The worst part, though, was that Simon craved to do it again. That craving was enough to make him decide that Zyvon was the most dangerous word he knew, and yet it haunted him.
As he lay there with a headache, trying to ignore the clatter of crockery from the first floor and the sound of wagons from the street beyond, some small part of him whispered that he could easily steal a little strength from any one of them, just to silence the throbbing in his head. No one would know.
Well, no one but his experience score, for whatever that was worth. He still hadn’t gotten a straight answer out of the mirror. Baring a better question, that was probably what he was going to ask Helades about someday on level 40. That was a long way off, though.
For now, he forced himself to get out of bed and move. He might lose weight if he lay there and wasted away, but he was never going to get stronger like that. Instead, he explored the backstreets, looking for someone to fight. When that didn’t happen, he went beyond the walls of the city, looking for monsters to slay instead.
Sadly, this wasn’t a video game, and there were no areas to grind. So, at sunset, he returned to the inn.
There, at least, he made a conscious effort not to get drunk again. Though it was understandable when he’d been hurting, he was past that now. He’d been heading down a dark road with that sort of behavior. He had no wish to add alcoholism to his list of achievements. Instead, he listened as people talked, and he tried to learn more about the city he found himself in.