Chapter 140: What needs to be Done
What Simon did was stick around. The name of that hamlet he found himself in turned out to be Wolvram, and though they didn’t like strangers much, they did have a goblin problem that was causing increasing amounts of trouble in their upland sheep pastures. Since it was one of the few real skills that Simon had, he was happy to help and made quick work of them with smoke and arrows.
He was bitten, but only once, while he purged all the local caves that he could wedge himself inside over the course of a week. When he came back with over thirty ears, no one gave him a hard time when he decided to stick around. They didn’t quite treat him as a hero or anything, but they no longer shunned him either.
After that, there was no reason to leave. Well, not right away. He helped out around the town as he slowly got in better shape. He mended fences, scared away bandits, and once it got cold, he spent a lot of time helping out at the small smithy near the center of town.
That wasn’t just because he was bored, though. For some of the projects he had in mind for the future, he was going to have to get better at that sort of work. It was one thing to speak a word of power, but it was quite another to carve it into something and let the magic do its work for you, and for some of the hard stuff that lay ahead, he was going to have to do better.
Not that it would be hard to do better, of course, he recalled in embarrassment as he remembered just how ugly that flaming sword had been and just how quickly it had drained years from his life.
Honestly, the winter was a little cold for the barn he slept in, but by the spring, he was already rehabbing a half-complete cottage that had burned down years before. Part of him kept telling him that he should get back on the road and at least travel to Adonan and make sure it was the town he thought it was in the place he thought it was. Truthfully, he didn’t need to, though. Every merchant said the same thing, and he doubted they were all lying.
Truthfully, this was the biggest danger of the Pit to him after fighting so many evils. It was making friends and settling down. After all, as cool as it would be to slay a dragon or close a portal to hell, it couldn’t compare to the pretty redhead that had been flirting with him for the last couple of months.
Rose was the real temptation. She was a vision of beauty right out of a Disney movie, and in a village this small, they ran into each other nearly every day, which made it even easier to imagine a future that involved her. He might have stayed with her forever if he hadn’t accidentally learned from one of the men he drank with that she’d been married before.
That didn’t bother Simon, of course. Being a 23-year-old widow in this world might make you an old maid, but on Earth, there would have been nothing wrong with that. Still, it wasn’t that she’d been married before. It was the man she’d been married to. He’d heard the name Brul tossed around before, but Simon hadn’t put two and two together until he’d heard that the guy in question was a cruel giant of a man who had made a living in less than savory easy.