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These days, uttering a few words of power was no big deal, but back-to-back uses of a greater word felt like they were giving him throat cancer. That was only one of the reasons he hadn’t tried the other words that had been burned into his memory, though.

He reflected on that while he healed for a few more days and watched the zombies dwindle to almost nothing. The other was uncertainty. There was still so much he didn’t know. He didn’t even fully understand how the sword he carried was powered, and he could examine those runes whenever he wanted. He needed to learn more, and though there were a couple opportunities to do exactly that on this level, he had not yet decided which one would be more beneficial once he made sure the zombies were finally purged.

Then, word came that an army was approaching. Simon thought he remembered this too, or at least a version of it. He certainly remembered fighting an army some nights; his nightmares would never let him quite forget something about an army losing, along with a castle and a mage. He was hoping to track that guy down one day, honestly. If there was some officially sanctioned order he could learn from, that would be worth the mistakes of a dozen lives, but so far, he hadn’t found his Hogwarts yet.

That wasn’t a mistake he was about to make this time, though. This time, he could already see the pieces fitting together. If the army was as big as the rumors and his memory said they were, then they’d almost certainly found the remaining adventurers he’d let flee with their lives. That meant that by now, their words had turned him into the devil himself, which meant that Simon needed to either prepare for a fight or make himself scarce.

To him, it seemed straightforward, but the people he’d saved weren’t very pleased when he told them he was going to have to disappear for a while.

“You can’t just leave,” Marken had wailed. “We need you! You’re the only one that can battle the zombies and the slimes!”

“I think the army can handle the cleanup at this point,” he said confidently. “And I’ll be back in a few weeks to make sure things turn out all right. So, if you need help, just keep ahead of them, and I’ll be back to save all of you a second time if I have to.”

While that was true, it was incidental. He had to come back to take the gate to the next level; he just hoped the assholes didn’t burn this place down first. He wasn’t sure what would happen if that was gone.

Simon could leave now, of course. He knew that. There were just enough embers left in Schwarzenbruck that part of him was worried that the zombie bonfire could reignite, and the last thing he wanted to do was come back here and do all of this over again. With his luck, he’d run into Freya, or Zombie Freya, and have a complete meltdown.

So, he was going to do what he’d been wanting to do for a long time: he was going to look for patient zero. A long time ago, Freya had told him of a Necromancer somewhere to the north, and right now, that sounded like as good a place to start as any. If there was a secret order of mages somewhere in this world, he was sure they’d persist in most or all the levels, but the evidence of what had created the zombies would really only exist in this one point in time if it still existed at all.

It wouldn’t really change anything, of course, but maybe it would give him some understanding into how all of this started, and with any luck at all, that might give him some insight into what was increasingly becoming the second most important question on his list. Why now?

The first question was obvious. He thought of it every day, even if he could barely bring himself to put it into words. What happened with Freya? Did he hurt her? Was she faithful? Could I have done more? He knew the answer to the last one, of course, but the rest? Well, they didn’t bear much thinking about. He would hold them way down deep like the terrible secrets that they were, and when he got to level 30, he’d ask Helades to answer them and give him what he deserved, whether that was absolution or condemnation.

Those were the thoughts that preoccupied him as he slowly made his way north to a part of this world he’d never been to. He’d never crossed the Black Fork, but from what he’d heard, the land up here got rougher and rougher until civilization petered out entirely. At least until you got over the mountains, that is. The whole reason the bridge was there was for trade, but that had been a dying thing for a long time, and no one seemed to know why.

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Still, he hoped he’d be able to find someone to ask for directions, but the entire road seemed to be practically abandoned. He came across two farmsteads and, after three nights of camping rough, a small village. All of them were burned out, and in the village, at least, there were still some zombies.

“Son of a bitch,” Simon cursed as he figured that out just before he pulled out his mace and started braining the bastards.

These zombies were old and slow and no real threat to him, but where there was one, there were probably more. Does that mean they’ve spread north, too, or to the coast? That was the thing about zombies; in a movie, they were impossible to hem in, and some always got free to start the process all over again.

“Helades - if you want me to actually stop these things, why not just portal me to the dude that made them before he raises the first one?” he shouted in frustration.

She didn’t answer, but fortunately for him, at least, zombie tracks were remarkably easy to track. If they’d been fresh, anyone could have done it, but as it was, he was able to follow the weeks-old marks with his meager hunting skills as he moved north along the road before setting out to the west.

As he went, the scrubby plains and their patchy trees soon gave way to foothills that stood in the shadow of the giant, glacier-dotted mountains that loomed over his head to the north. They were similar to the Himalayas, or at least the pictures he’d seen, and much taller than the mountains on the goblin or wyvern levels.

Simon uttered a prayer of silent thanks when he saw he wasn’t going to have to hike up that monstrosity. Even if he had been in shape, it would have been miserable. As he was right now, it might well have been lethal.

Instead, the tracks broke west, heading toward the sea, which was still at least fifty miles away. He never got that far, though. Instead, he found a single zombie stuck in a rock crevice, and within a day, a very suspicious-looking barrow mound that had obviously been breached recently and the blasted ruin of the stone door lay scattered about.

“Now this is what I wanted, right here,” Simon said, appreciating that this was exactly the sort of RPG-style dungeon crawl he’d craved when all this started.

In a way, that was a marker of how far he’d come. While he was perfectly happy to explore this, he was hardly excited about it. Any number of nasty ambushes could await him down there. He stood there at the dark entrance, weighing the pros and cons of going in stealth or going in with a light.

“Ah fuck it,” he whispered, eventually deciding that seeing where he was going trumped hiding when it came to undead since they could probably see in the dark even if their master couldn’t. “Aufvarum Barom.” Lesser light.

Immediately, his mace began to glow with a dim blue light not so different from a glowstick, and he began to descend into the mound. He had no idea what to expect. On the one hand, the hill this thing was built into was less than a hundred feet across, but on the other, with his luck, it could be an infinite warren filled with the unquiet dead.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a little closer to the former than the latter. The thing was still bigger than he thought, but only because the claustrophobically tight hallway sank into the earth as it wound its way to the center. There were burial niches along the walls that were fortunately empty, though there were enough bone shards on the ground to make him feel pretty sure that not many of them had ever made it out of this pit.

That, of course, raised a bigger question. If the undead that were here had been slain here, then how did the zombie outbreak start? There were no clear answers, but eventually, the room opened up into a larger burial chamber that he hoped would fix that.

This place was definitely a tomb. The giant stone sarcophagus stood open in the center, and a steel sword pinned the still squirming occupant of the thing in place. If it couldn’t escape, though, Simon was inclined to ignore it for now as he studied the rest of the room.

There were several burnt-out candles and signs that some sort of ritual had taken place, but nothing concrete. It was only after searching the place for several minutes that he noticed that the simple crown on the head of the zombie was made of paper.

Simon reached for it and unfolded the thing to find a note with contents that were as baffling as everything else so far. ‘Sorry, I needed to borrow this. Maybe we can meet again in your next life and discuss why.’

It didn’t come right out and say it, but to him, it felt like the note was addressed specifically to him, or at least to the Pit’s hero, if not Simon himself. He only realized that it ended with a threat after he picked it up, but he didn’t care too much about that. Simon took the opportunity to crush the skull of the only danger in the room, but even as he did so, he realized he’d made a mistake.

First, the runes on the coffin glowed for a moment, and then that spread to the walls in a faint ripple of old magic. He turned to face the glow at the same time, he drew his sword, fearing an ambush from behind. None of that was enough, though, because he wasn’t attacked. Instead, the heavy stone ceiling above him just gave way.

“Gervuul Oon—” he shouted, trying to blast himself free and open a skylight above him.

There was no time, though. In the split second, he’d taken to come up with a plan, he was crushed to death by hundreds of pounds of stones, and he died instantly.