Chapter 120: Round Two
Simon spent the next six months the same way. Every morning, he drank three helmets of water and caught something with a crude spear from the jetty while he still had the energy to do so. Then, he would fill his clay pot with five or six gallons of seawater and begin to climb up the slope.
There, he would use fire and salt to methodically make it further up the street toward the main square, destroying every tendril of greenery in any building along the way. Nothing behind me. That was his motto. He’d already been through the woodchipper once, and he had no intention of doing this half-assed and being forced to try again.
After all, the plant couldn’t do shit to him. Not if he was careful. He’d been hit by spines a few times so far, but none of them had penetrated his armor, which he wore no matter how hot he got. His leathers fit him loosely now, even cinched all the way up. Since he could count his ribs when his shirt was off, that wasn’t a surprise.
He was tanned in a way he’d never been before, too, and in all the time it took to get that tan, he’d counted a hundred and eight shooting stars, nine ships, and no people. The only thing he hadn’t counted in all that time was the number of fish he’d eaten. He might never eat fish after this. He was so sick of them that he’d taken to freediving for clams, oysters, and even shrimp sometimes, though he had very few ways to cook any of them properly.
“I’m never going anywhere without a pan again,” he told himself as he hiked up the cliff with a jug of water that day.
No, not that day, he corrected himself mentally. The day.
Today was the day he was going after the central blossom. He’d already killed every trace of plant life between the road and the main square. It wouldn’t be the end of it. He’d still have the rest of Ionar proper, plus the palace grounds to purge, but as far as Simon was concerned, what he was doing today was half the battle. If he succeeded here, everything else was just clean up.
He’d avoided it for weeks as he laid the groundwork, but that had given him all the time in the world to study the terrible plant. It had been growing for many years, which for a flower was an eternity, so at this point it was the size of an gnarled old oak tree. Instead of foliage, though, was a giant leathery flower that was very nearly blood red compared to the marbled orange and red of most of the other large blossoms.
He’d already destroyed many that were more than large enough to swallow him whole. Even the largest of those was only half the size of the main plant, though, and today, after what was probably decades of unending growth, he was going to end it.