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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.

That last one startled him, and he spent the next hour wondering what dark part of his soul that had come from. He’d saved Freya and moved on. His inner demons could go take a hike, just like he was doing.

The road through the mountains was a long one, and he spent most nights working on the other bits for the arms and legs. It wasn’t done yet, but he was sure it was going to work as long as he was slow and careful. The only complication was the sword since the gauntlet that used it already had magic on it, but he ignored that for now. He didn’t think that the two spells would interact too badly.

Eventually, all journeys come to an end, though, and this one was no different. He’d seen the lightly steaming caldera of the volcano he’d come to kill for almost a week before he finally got close enough to it that he could see Ionar on the far side of it, where the land met the sea.

As he stood there on the rise, he had to admit that it was more than a little beautiful. On every other trip here, he’d only seen it in ruins or in the process of being destroyed. Now, he could see the beautiful white buildings standing in stark contrast to the volcano they wrapped around and the blue skies beyond. It was bigger than he remembered it, and he wondered just how much of the city had already been buried under lava and ash before he saw it the first time. In the night of fire and lava, he’d seen so often, there were always thousands fleeing the upper city to the harbor far below. Now that he was looking at it, though, he was fairly sure that there had to be at least ten thousand people living here, making it fairly large as cities went.

The sprawling city spread partway up the volcano and all the way down the cliffs, but it was the palace that was the real show-stopper. It was a building Simon had been in many times, but only as a door to somewhere else. Now, he could appreciate it as the palace it was, nestled among its surrounding gardens.

“This is definitely a place people would pay to go on vacation,” he said as he eyed the cliffs and beaches.

On all his previous trips, he’d always assumed that this place existed solely because of sea trade. While that was certainly the majority of the traffic, the overland route he’d just threaded his way through was surprisingly well-maintained and just active enough for bandits to think it was worth the trouble to harass men traveling alone.

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Simon didn’t feel the least bit bad for using them for a bit of archery practice. He was just glad that they hadn’t hurt Daisy or spooked her into running off a cliff. Some of the roads through the mountains had been perilous.

Now, though, all of that was behind him. He was here, and fortunately, the volcano had not yet blown its top, which was good because it had taken him a whole season to get here. Still, even as the weather in the north turned colder, it was still balmy here on the coast, and he decided to enjoy it.

Simon spent those first few days relaxing during the day and working on his armor at night. It was only when he’d lingered in the inn for over a week that people started to ask questions.

Where was he going? Was he waiting for a ship? How much longer would he be here? The innkeeper didn’t seem inhospitable, per se, and was happy to keep taking Simon’s silver, but the longer he stayed, the more comfortable the man felt being nosy, apparently.

As bothersome as that could be, even that daily nuisance annoyed Simon less than the seafood, though. For the first few days, he’d lived off mutton since fish dominated the menu of the city. There were some other things he hadn’t had in a long time, too, like feta cheese and white wine, which helped liven things up. He avoided the fish but found that octopus, scallops, and clams weren’t so bad once he started to get tired of lamb. That was ironic, of course, since his dislike of fish was making him tire of everything else on the menu.

Simon eventually found a villa overlooking the sea near enough to the volcano to rent out not too far from the market square and hung a shingle above the door, calling himself an apothecary and healer. He had plenty of herbs from his trip across the continent, and much of what he didn’t have he could buy.

That, along with some bandages, some basic knowledge of sterilization and wound cleanliness, and the occasional minor miracle, was all he really needed. The locals were skittish of an outsider for the first few weeks. That was especially true for one who seemed fluent in their language but still had what was described as a strong accent, but Simon couldn’t hear it.

Still, after a couple minor miracles that might have cost him a week or a year of his life and a few sick kids that walked away from death’s door in one piece, he was accepted by almost everyone. That was about the time he’d finished his armor after almost a month in Ionar, which was fortunate timing because once it was complete, he had to test it. The very last thing he wanted to do after all this preparation was to put it on after the eruption and find that it didn’t work.

So, once he was ready, he took a brief trip into the mountains with his reliable mule, Daisy. He told his regular patients that it was to collect some herbs, which he would also do, but really, it was so he could stand in a bonfire where no one could see how crazy he was.

He hiked until he hadn’t seen a living soul for a day, worrying the whole time that the volcano would pick that moment to erupt. It didn’t, though, and once his bonfire was burning brightly, he finally got all dressed up in the armor he’d worked on for so long.

Even though he was certain it was going to work, it was still with great apprehension. That wasn’t enough to stop him, though. If I fuck this up, all I’ll have to face are burned feet and injured pride, Simon told himself, and I can heal my feet.

The worst would actually be if the volcano exploded, and after all this, he wasn’t ready to stop the monsters that came out of it. That would be far worse than any injuries he might get from testing. It was that thought that made him close his face mask and step into the raging inferno he’d built.

The result was nothing. He cringed for a moment, waiting to feel the fire’s sting through one of the parts of the armor, but it never happened. Instead, he stood there, dancing around in his armor while the fire burned around him. This time, he didn’t cheer quite so loudly as he had last time, but he was still thrilled, and in the morning, when he started back to town with some slightly charred plate mail, he pronounced it a complete success and had almost 200 experience to show for it.

That night, when he returned, he treated himself to a small feast and decided on his next goal. He was going to investigate the caldera itself. Why shouldn’t I? He thought as he made his way through some pan-fried calamari. It beats waiting around waiting for this to happen.

Still, he put it off until his first morning without patients waiting to see him. As much as he wanted to climb the volcano, he had to balance that out with more menial tasks. After all, his travels had largely exhausted his funds. Without paying customers, he would eventually be forced to start fishing again one day, and that was the last thing he wanted.

The hike to the rim took almost all day. It wasn’t just steep; it was that there was no real path to go that high. There was a shrine halfway up that was decorated with wilted flowers and other trivialities, but there were no inscriptions he could find. Past that, the last three hundred feet of the trip was more rock climbing than hiking, which was not something he had any practice with.

Ultimately, when he reached the very top anyway, the view was disappointing. Part of him had expected to see bubbling hot lava or something similarly cool. He was disappointed. Instead of bubbling magma, there was only cracked black stone, spotted here and there with small geysers of steam. At least, that’s all he saw at first.

After a short break and a long drink from his water skin, before he headed back down, he noticed something else: fire elementals. Well, at least something that looked like them. They weren’t blazing with fire, though. Instead, they seemed to be made out of smoke and steam, which made them halfway invisible as they wandered around the floor of the caldera.

That blew him away, and he stayed up there until an hour before sunset before he hurriedly started climbing back down. Part of him wanted to stay until after dark to see if they lit up, but he knew that was a terrible idea. Even if they did, it wasn’t worth staying up here until sunrise, which was how much longer he’d have to watch them because if he tried to climb down in the dark, he would break his neck for sure.