Chapter 165: Wasted Effort
Simon splashed down in the water, confident that he wouldn’t drown. He didn’t, either. The portal opened beneath him and spat him out almost immediately. Last time, it had reminded him, somewhat uncomfortably, of a flushing toilet, but this time, it was more violent than that, and it took him a moment to figure out why that was the case, though, as he was flung sideways like a rag doll while water splashed around him.
As he sat there on the dirt path, it came together a piece at a time. He had fallen through a vertical portal but came out of a horizontal portal, causing his trajectory to change ninety degrees as his momentum remained unchanged.
“Let’s not have any more doors like this, please,” he muttered to himself as he dusted himself off and looked at the opening he’d emerged from.
He was disappointed immediately. He’d hoped that because he’d already slain the ogre, this portal would dump him much closer to his objective than he had been the last time. That wasn’t the case, though, which meant that the cave he could see was the portal from the last level and that whatever lay inside wasn’t an ogre.
“Because, of course, it isn’t,” he grumbled as he started walking.
The last time he’d come, he was beaten and exhausted, but he was younger, too, and he wasn’t wearing 40 pounds of steel. All these factors made it a toss-up, and after less than an hour of hiking, he was already sucking wind.
I’m not in a hurry, not yet anyway, he tried to tell himself as he struggled to remember just how long he had. He was pretty sure he slept the night there, and the inn wasn’t burned down until the following day. That gave him a day, and he was fairly sure, and though he didn’t have an exact measurement, he was fairly sure that he only had eight or ten miles to go.
“But why does this portal start me so far from my goal?” he wondered aloud to himself.
That was what he chewed on as he walked. Though there were a few levels he could think of like that, there weren’t many. The village was an awful long way from where he started in the goblin level, for instance.