Death After Death

It took another three weeks of walking, two run-ins with beast men, and an encounter with bandits that ended very poorly for them before Simon finally set eyes on pre-eruption Ionar. It turned out that his experience points didn’t go down on any of those days either, not even when he killed humans, which surprised Simon.

He’d expected morality to be deeply tied into that number, but it was more subjective than that. Apparently, since he didn’t have a problem killing bandits that got in his way, they didn’t weigh on his soul very much, and he still gained over 122 experience that day. That was still less than he gained when he killed the beastmen at 167 and 203, respectively, but it still pointed to a worldview that was slightly more subjective than he would have expected.

Those weren’t even the biggest days of the trip, though. Sometimes, when he did other things, he saw spikes, too. When he found an herb he hadn’t seen since his time in Abresse and picked a few to add to his growing collection or dried them, he made above-average progress on his score as well.

It wasn’t all violence and hardship, though. Honestly, the hiking was worse than the fighting, and on nights when he wasn’t fighting off men and monsters, he made steady progress on his armor. At this point, it was all down to making the engravings as nice and clean as possible so they could stand up to the terrible strain he expected to put them under.

When Simon was finally done with the main pattern on the breastplate, he put it in his campfire, and even after it had been sitting in the coals for twenty minutes, the back side of the metal stayed nice and cool. He was so pleased that his efforts had actually worked that his cheers echoed off the mountainside in a way that might have been embarrassing if anyone else was nearby that night as he celebrated his success.

“Well, if I can make the rest of it work this well, then maybe this time I can drown in lava instead of getting cooked alive,” he said with a laugh.

The next day, he was surprised to find that he’d gotten almost 300 experience the night before. That made some sense, given what he’d accomplished, but he was still pretty psyched.

“So it’s not what I do, but how I feel about it or what I learn?” he wondered aloud once he’d recorded the number.

That made sense. He learned a lot less from killing his thousandth goblin than he had from killing his first or second. He was sure of that. Pity this whole thing doesn’t have achievements, He thought with a smirk. I’d love to see those kinds of stats. Goblins killed. Nights slept outdoors. Number of Freya’s dead.