Simon spshed down ier, fident that he wouldn’t drown. He didn’t, either. The portal opened beh him and spat him out almost immediately. Last time, it had reminded him, somewhat unfortably, 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 spshed 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 ge y degrees as his momentum remained unged.

  “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 sin the ogre, this portal would dump him much closer to his objective than he had bee time. That wasn’t the case, though, which meant that the cave he could see was the portal from the st level and that whatever y inside wasn’t an ogre.

  “Because, of course, it isn’t,” he grumbled as he started walking.

  The st time he’d e, he was beaten and exhausted, but he was youoo, and he wasn’t wearing 40 pounds of steel. All these faade it a toss-up, and after less than an hour of hiking, he was already sug 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 retty 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 a 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 vilge was an awful long way from where he started in the goblin level, for instance.

  “But I never really proved that pce was the point,” he told himself. “Holy, it probably isn’t. The point of a level doesn’t seem to be after the exit.”

  In this case, he didn’t know where the exit was, so he couldn’t say for sure that he was here to kill a dragon, but it seemed pretty damn likely. “It would be pretty funny if I was here, so close to the dragon, but that wasn’t the point,” he joked to himself.

  That thought was almost enough to make Simon double bad check that cave, but he resisted the urge. Not only was he unwilling to add a couple extra miles to his trip. He also decided it was uhat the exit portal would be the way he was supposed to go. He hadn’t yet found an example of that on any of the levels he’d been on so far.

  Still, as the day wore on, things weren’t as bad as he feared they would be. That was only because he had a subtle form of air ditioning built into his armor. Though the weight was still oppressive, he wasn’t roasted by the sun like he expected. Instead, wheal got hot enough, it activated the runes he’d built for harvesting the heat of the volo and started to cool him off.

  This took him quite a while to discover because, until that point, he’d been trying to walk in the shade as much as he could, but once he started walking in the sunlight, things cooled off nicely. Simon had been thinking about rew the whole cept because of the unfortunate freezer bur enter had caused, but given the mild heat, it actually worked quite nicely. It wasn’t enough to make him feel cold or anything, but it kept the heat of the day at bay.

  Periodically, on his rest breaks, Simon would talk to the mirror that he produced from his now much-depleted purse. For a while, this was just to tell it everything that had happened in case he o remember it iure. Eventually, though, he went back to asking it questions and trying to uand his current rate of experience decay.

  It couldn’t offer him any crete numbers in terms of how much life he’d burned with magic or how much life he had left, but for experie least, that was easier to study.

  When he asked it what his current total was, it promptly showed, ‘Experience Points: -534,319’. He hadn’t done any day-by-day calcutions in a long time, but rough calade that feel abht. He averaged a hundred-plus experience a day, and it had been a few years since he’d started this study in Ionar. So, everything seemed to more or less lineup.

  It still wasn’t anywhere close to even, but he was halfway to the finish line and well uhe minus one million hat had so terrified the few people who could see his aura up until this point.

  “I wonder what it's going to look like when it gets into the positives?” he asked himself. He wished he could see it for himself at that moment. It might make something iing to paint.

  The mirror responded, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t uand the question,’ but he just ig.

  Simohe whole day walking, and by su, he still wasn’t at his destination, but at least he could see it in the distance, where the road turned slightly up to the right a into the valley beyond. He was only a few more hours away, ae how exhausted he felt, he knew he would make it in time.

  That was when he heard the roar. It echoed through the whole of the valley above him, then down the mountaio him. That was when Simon saw his first dragon s near a peak.

  “No, no, this isn’t supposed to be happening,” he told himself, “Not yet!”

  The distaile ignored his words, though, and flew down into the valley. It dipped out of sight in that moment, but the wall of fire it unleashed momentarily became a sed su as the valley was filled with fmes.

  Simon’s mind warred between the sadness of all the people who must have died in the firestorm and the memory of having been in it the st time for a moment. Those thoughts were lost, though, when it pulled up and out of the valley. The image he saw then was ohat would be burned into his mind forever.

  The dragon didn’t pass close to him, aainly not close enough for him to try a spell, but even from this dista was clear that it was many times rger than the wyvern he’d brought down before. This wasn’t a beast. It was a force of nature, and its giant body covered in scales of tarnished bronze glittered red in the firelight as it soared skyward once more.

  After that, it circled twid then turned and started flying back toward the mountain. By then, though, Simon was already stripping his armor off, a piece at a time, and tossing it aside into the bushes. He o get there to help anyone who could might still be helped. Dragon sying could wait for ter.

  Though his heart was in the right spot, he was already halfway to exhausted, and though suddenly weighing less made it easier, by the time he got to the vilge, though, there were only scattered fires and ashes.

  Simon looked around and found a few bodies, but strangely, he didn’t find the caravan on syers he had expected to find up here, devastated along with everyone else. “Did I do something to screw up the whole timeline?” he wondered aloud.

  That was certainly possible. He’d ged an awful lot of things since he was here st, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now. Was he still supposed to kill the dragon? Was he supposed to find that dragon syer? Was he supposed to sy the dragon alone?

  At night, in the dark, there wasn’t a lot he could do. It wasn’t until most of the wildfires had winked out, and he saw a cluster of campfires higher up on one of the mountains, that he thought that was his best lead.

  “It might just be trappers,” he told himself as he started hiking in that dire. “It might be nothied to you.”

  Even as he went, though, he knew he was right. He retty sure this was the way to the peak they’d mentioned before. Scribes peak? Quill peak? He couldn’t remember the name, only that it looked kind of like the tip of a quill jutting up against the sky and was supposedly where the dragon’s ir was. If there were survivors in that dire, then they were part of all this.

  Finding them was easier said than dohough. He quickly lost sight of the fires as he started climbing that slope, and it took him ages to find the path higher in the dark. Still, he persevered aually heard the wagons he’d expected to find st night as daroached.

  When he finally caught up to the long wagon train winding its the mountain and warhe first teamster that the vilge had been buro the ground and that they were all in dahe man just ughed. “I wouldn’t worry about that, none,” he answered, apparently not even a little bothered by the news. “Sir Anias has probably already sin the beast.”

  “Sin it?” Simon asked, stunned. “Weren’t you listening to me? Didn’t you see it fly overhead a few ho? That monster is anything but dead.”

  The wagon driver just chuckled at that and said, “That was then. It had its fun, but that time has passed.”

  This guy wasn’t making any seo Simon, so he left him behind a going up. Periodically, he would find anon. Sometimes, he would even chat with the man driving it up the long, winding road before he left them behind.

  Very slowly, a picture of what had happened came together. The man in charge of this outfit had killed a couple ons in his life, though none as rge as Ig. That much he already knew. What Simon hadn’t known until this series of versations was that it wasn’t anything approag honorable battle. Instead, he would trick the dragon out of its cave and the a trap for it so that when it returhey didn’t have a bsp;

  No one seemed to know what this trap was. Some thought it was just a clever ambush, while others were fairly sure that it involved dark powers or a pact with a demon. It wasn’t their department, though. All of these people had apparently been hired to cart off the dragon’s hoard, except for a single group of hunters who said they’d e along to help butcher the giant thing.

  The whole thing boggled Simon's mind. Both that this was something that was actually happening and that it was something he apparently o be here for. The whole thi like a big waste of his time, but he wouldn’t really be able to say for sure until he reached the mountain peak and saw for himself.