Chapter 148: The Waiting Game
Simon hiked to the top of the volcano twice more in the weeks that followed, but neither trip turned up anything new. The most he got out of it was a picture of one of the half-visible elementals that he sketched out as best he could. He was no artist, but he’d been improving slowly. According to his mirror, his art skill had advanced above poor and was now merely below average, and he’d take that as a win considering the crude materials he had to work with.
Still, as much as the otherworldly creatures might fascinate him, he didn’t learn anything more about them. It is kind of odd that it is one of the few magical creatures I’ve seen so far, he thought to himself one day as he was cleaning his small house. No sooner had the thought formed than he realized how ridiculous that was.
“You mean besides the dragon, the basilisk, and the ogre?” he laughed at himself after he thought about it for a second.
He had, in fact, fought a lot of different magical creatures. Hell, goblins, skeletons, and zombies were all definitely magical, too, and he’d fought more of them than anything else. The difference in his mind was that they had been real.
He hadn’t exactly gotten a chance to study a dragon up close or anything, but the wyvern he’d blasted out of the sky was something he could have dissected if he’d wanted to. He could have preserved it and mounted it like a dinosaur in a museum, but the fire elementals, or whatever it was they were, that was something else entirely. It was entirely outside his experience, and other than a few run-ins with ghosts, they were unique.
That made the whole thing pretty damn magical to him. In the days that followed, even after he stopped going up the volcano, the image lingered with him, though he wasn’t completely sure why. After all, he had a sword that radiated cold and a suit of plate mail that was immune to fire that he’d built himself. That was magical, too, but again, it was something he could put his hands on and understand.
Every day, he waited for the volcano to erupt, and every day it did nothing. So Simon waited, and he prepared. He started going to the gym, which was a little too naked and Greco-Roman for his tastes. He never oiled himself up in olive oil and wrestled with grown men, but he did enjoy the natural hot springs that fed the bathes of the complex, and in time, he found a couple of guys to practice his sword fighting with so he didn’t get too rusty.
Some of his sparring partners found it strange that a doctor knew how to wield a blade so well, but Simon let the mystery linger. When the rumor started to spread that he’d been a field healer for the army in the Kingdom of Brin, he didn’t do anything to stop it. He didn’t care what people believed, as long as it wasn’t that he was a warlock.
Indeed, rumors aside, life became pretty mundane after that. Things became routine. He hid his weapons and armor in a magic-carved hollow beneath the trunk he used to store rarely used medicines, and he waited for the day to be a hero.