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This house had a commanding view of the village from the hill it was on, and from the window Simon could see a particularly strange doorway in one of his neighbor\'s houses. Many of the buildings were on fire, but only one of them had snow blowing out its front door. It was close enough that Simon wouldn’t even have to join the fighting against whatever was attacking the town.

If it was the Warlock’s doing, Simon would have said demons, but if this was the next level, his money was on orcs. It didn’t matter either way, because there was little point in him sticking his neck out when the thing he was looking for was right here.

“I can’t save everyone,” he reminded himself in attempt to overshadow the twinge of guilt he felt as he investigated the chilly doorway. “And even if I did, they’d just die again next time.”

With that thought in mind, Simon walked through the door. He started shivering on the other side almost immediately, as he wondered what terrible monster he’d have to fight here. An elemental? A yeti? It didn’t matter much. If he didn’t get through this place pretty quick, the cold would kill him just as easily.

That looked to be what had happened to everyone else. Tucked amidst the snow drifts were a few bodies that had frozen solid without a mark on them. The buildings were in no better shape, and were thickly crusted in ice, even if nothing about them seemed to indicate they’d been built for harsh winters. It seemed to be a quaint European village that had just frozen over one day, which was obviously ridiculous.

After a few minutes of looking, though, his target became fairly obvious. In a sea of white, there was only one spot of color, in the temple at the end of the street. At first Simon thought that the baleful red color was a painting, but as he walked towards it, he watched it shift slowly from the orange red it started at to a slightly dimmer purple red.

It was definitely a sunset, and it was almost certainly somewhere warmer, which meant that it was the place to be, whether it was the next floor or not. Simon continued to trudge down the street, and by the time he got to the temple the light was coming from it had practically faded to the dark indigo gray of twilight. Simon didn’t think he was going that slow, but in the begining, the drifts had only been as high as his shins. By the time he reached the temple steps, they were all the way to his thighs, which made even a few steps fairly exhausting.

Simon barely spared a glance at the people that had died frozen in place in prayer, clustered around the altar. If it hadn’t been so freezing, he might have investigated it a bit more thoroughly, since there were a lot of them, but right now he couldn’t be bothered.

It wasn’t until he’d practically reached the door though that he realized there was a problem. The doorway had frozen over completely with translucent ice, so he could see the way forward, but he couldn’t reach it. Simon tried to shoulder check it a couple of times, but it didn’t budge. It had gotten thick enough that it was at least as strong as bank plexiglass, which meant that his sword would be almost as useless.

Fortunately, he still had one weapon that should be reasonably effective on ice.

Simon stopped for a second, stilling his mind. Unlike the last few times he’d cast this spell, this time he really needed to do a good job. He was already feeling tired, and while he had trouble feeling his fingers, his toes were already completely numb. He needed to get through this level fast, or he’d have to start all over, and he was not ready to find Freya dead on the floor again.

So Simon imagined a blast of fire that would have been more appropriate to a comic book than a fantasy novel. He pictured a rippling flame thrower-like stream of pure incandescent fury rippling with heat even in the current cold, and when he was ready - when he could see the icy barrier melt in his mind\'s eye, he finally intoned the words, “G̴̝̈́͒͠ḛ̷͕̮̕͘r̵̛̫̮̔͠ͅv̴̿̀͠ͅu̷̝͚̜̎u̴͚͈̎ḻ̸̣̈́ ̸̦̟̜̈́̍M̷̪̹̪̓̓͒e̴̪̎i̴͓̗̔̔͆ͅr̸̹͓͚͐̅è̵̛͇̱̾n̴̩̜̍.”

The result was extreme. The gout of fire that Simon summoned from whatever dark pit it came from vomited into existence even as the words tore themselves out of Simon’s throat. It sprayed against the ice with enough fury that for a moment the world was lost in steam. That was warm at least, and Simon was grateful for the reprieve. A few seconds later, when the steam finally died away, the ice was warped and obviously thinner, but still standing.

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“Fuck!” Simon yelled in frustration, not sure what to do. His vision had dimmed around the edges during the last spell, and he was fairly sure that he’d pass out if he tried to cast it again.

In frustration, he leaned against the barrier, banging his head against it lightly as he struggled to think of what he should do next. He didn’t have to think long. After only a few seconds of leaning on it, he felt the whole thing begin to lean forward. It occurred to his frostbitten mind too slowly that while he hadn’t melted through the barrier, he’d melted enough around the edges that it was no longer attached to anything, and that it was nothing but a freestanding block of ice which he rode ungracefully to the ground.

Simon shook his head to clear it of the cobwebs and slowly stood up. It was a chilly night, but compared to where he’d just been, it was practically a sauna, and he basked in the relative warmth, even if he might have complained about it at any other time.

It was only after he appreciated the fact that he wasn’t going to freeze to death that Simon slowly looked around. He was in a town somewhat bigger than a village, or maybe the rural part of a small city. He wasn’t sure. In either case, though, it had a ghetto, and he was in it.

Maybe it was worse than that, he realized, as he looked around. Maybe it wasn’t a ghetto. Maybe everyone was dead. The doors to several houses stood open, and many others had a red X painted across them.

Simon walked over to the closest building with an open door, and knocked gently. “Hello,” he called out softly into the darkness, but there was no response.

If no one was actually here, then this would be a good place for Simon to take a little nap, he decided, as he slowly shut the door behind him.

“Hello,” he called out again, a little louder this time, “Anyone here? Anyone?” He couldn’t see many details, but the place looked pretty run down. There were stains on the walls and floors, and trash laying at random by the walls. The place stank too, but not like goblin bad or anything. He didn’t care, though. He was only going to be here for a few hours. He could tolerate anything that long.

After a quick search of the two room hovel, Simon quickly decided that no one would mind if he stayed here, so he put a chair against the door to give him warning for any uninvited guests, and passed out in the bed.

He’d intended only to sleep for a couple of hours, but it wasn’t until the sun shining through a crack in the shutter lanced painfully into his eyes that he finally woke up.

“That fire spell really takes it out of you,” he said to himself, stretching. It was kind of stupid, though, he decided as he thought about it. Mana and stamina were supposed to be two entirely separate systems, but every time he cast one big spell, he felt completely worn out.

When Simon sat up, he was only barely able to stifle a scream, and all his thoughts on system design disappeared. What he’d taken to be a pile of trash or clothes against the far wall was a decaying human corpse. A shiver went through him as he realized he was almost certainly sleeping in a dead man’s bed. It didn’t get any better when he looked around and saw suspicious dark stains on the blankets he’d just spent the night using.

Simon jumped out of bed. He needed to leave now, before he could think about this anymore. He was definitely going to be sick if…

There were two more corpses in the living room. One was a child, curled up by the hearth, and one was a man slumped over the far side of the table. As Simon bolted for the door, it dawned on him where he’d seen X’s like that on doors before. In a game he’d played about the plague.

It wasn’t that thought that made him vomit, but it was what he thought about as he heaved his guts out in the street. He hadn’t just been staying in the house of a dead man. He’d been sleeping in the bed of a dead family… while their corpses slowly moldered in the dark. It was vile, but for once he couldn’t blame Helades.

If she hadn’t frozen him solid, he would have recognized the signs, of course, but he was the one that had slept in that bed without giving everything a thorough look. Simon spent the next few minutes trying to assure himself that even if he got infected by the worst plague imaginable, he’d still leave it behind when some monster ripped him in half.

“Keep it together. It’s gross, but it’s not your biggest problem,” Simon told himself as he paced the streets. After half an hour of walking and seeing nothing made of stone or over two stories, he finally decided that he was walking through a town, or at least the remnants of one. The buildings might be standing, but everything that made it a living place was already dead.

At first, he was merely searching for the next gate, but after a while he would have settled for finding anyone alive at all. There was no one, though. He hoped that eventually he would at least find the fantasy equivalent of plague doctors and corpse collectors, but the closest he got was a cart full of corpses near the end of a muddy street.

Even the people who were supposed to be picking up the pieces had perished.

Simon finally found his way to the temple. But it, too, was crowded with bodies. “Jeez,” he said, trying to pick his way through without stepping on any of them, “You know your fantasy world sucks when your divine magic can’t even cure the plague. I mean, zombies I get, but the plague?”

He finally found the way out of this awful place in the center shrine of the temple to the Goddess Ethryes, whoever that was. The rest of the room was a pristine white, except for the corpses on the floor, but the other door didn’t lead to the rear of the building. Instead, it led to a swamp. Normally Simon would have hated the idea of tramping through the mud, but somehow today it seemed cleaner than the city of the dead he was in now, and so he stepped through without any hesitation.

“Well, I have no idea where I’m going,” Simon said as he looked around the sandbar and took in the shallow muck in every direction. “But I’m getting there in a hurry.” He smiled. His streak was back up to at least four, and by his count he was on level 18 or 19, which made him feel like a badass.