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“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.

“But I never really proved that place was the point,” he told himself. “Honestly, 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 back and 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 unlikely that 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 conditioning built into his armor. Though the weight was still oppressive, he wasn’t roasted by the sun like he expected. Instead, when the metal got hot enough, it activated the runes he’d built for harvesting the heat of the volcano 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 reworking the whole concept because of the unfortunate freezer burn the last encounter 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 coin purse. For a while, this was just to tell it everything that had happened in case he needed to remember it in the future. Eventually, though, he went back to asking it questions and trying to understand his current rate of experience decay.

It couldn’t offer him any concrete numbers in terms of how much life he’d burned with magic or how much life he had left, but for experience, at 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 calculations in a long time, but rough calculations made that feel about right. 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.

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It still wasn’t anywhere close to even, but he was halfway to the finish line and well under the minus one million number that 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 interesting to paint.

The mirror responded, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,’ but he just ignored it.

Simon spent the whole day walking, and by sunset, 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 and went into the valley beyond. He was only a few more hours away, and despite 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 mountainside to him. That was when Simon saw his first dragon soaring near a peak.

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

The distant reptile 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 second sunset as the valley was filled with flames.

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 last time for a moment. Those thoughts were lost, though, when it pulled up and out of the valley. The image he saw then was one that would be burned into his mind forever.

The dragon didn’t pass close to him, and certainly not close enough for him to try a spell, but even from this distance, it was clear that it was many times larger 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 twice and 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 needed to get there to help anyone who could might still be helped. Dragon slaying could wait for later.

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 village, though, there were only scattered fires and ashes.

Simon looked around and found a few bodies, but strangely, he didn’t find the caravan of dragon slayers 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 changed an awful lot of things since he was here last, 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 slayer? Was he supposed to slay 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 direction. “It might be nothing related to you.”

Even as he went, though, he knew he was right. He was pretty 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 lair was. If there were survivors in that direction, then they were part of all this.

Finding them was easier said than done, though. 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 and eventually heard the wagons he’d expected to find last night as dawn approached.

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

“Slain it?” Simon asked, stunned. “Weren’t you listening to me? Didn’t you see it fly overhead a few hours ago? 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 sense to Simon, so he left him behind and kept going up. Periodically, he would find another wagon. 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 of dragons in his life, though none as large as Icefang. That much he already knew. What Simon hadn’t known until this series of conversations was that it wasn’t anything approaching honorable battle. Instead, he would trick the dragon out of its cave and then set a trap for it so that when it returned, they didn’t have a chance.

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 come 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 needed to be here for. The whole thing felt 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.