It took several minutes, but as soon Simon shook the intoxicating feeling of the life force pouring inside of him, he resolved to leave. Now that the bliss was fading, it left behind an oily residue. Some small part of him felt like whatever he’d done to earn the baleful aura that so many had reported had just been made worse. Like he’d done something, he shouldn’t have. 

That was certainly confirmed by the way that Millen and his son were looking at Simon. As they stared at the carpet of dead insects, their gaze became increasingly dark, and he knew it wasn’t going to end well. So, making an excuse that he had to go check on his belongings, he slipped off to the barn, and from there, he exited to the next level. 

He’d lost count. He wasn’t sure if this was 25, 26, or 27. Hell, he might have reached level 29 for all he knew, but he knew he was getting close to Helades. “I just have to keep moving,” he told himself as he looked past the fog of his warm breath on the cold air to the moonlit woods. “I just have to…”

His words trailed off as the howl of distant wolves raised the hair on the back of his neck. 

I just have to stay ahead of whatever the hell that is, he decided as he turned and started to jog in the opposite direction. 

Simon wasn’t in the best shape yet. In fact, he still felt like he needed to lose 50 pounds, but right now, he wasn’t in the right space to fight. He was still wrestling with the narcotic sensations of what he’d done and the strange urge to do it again, and he was definitely not in the right headspace to fight wargs and goblins or whatever it was he was supposed to do on this level. 

For that matter, he had no idea where he was either. The cold and the pine trees said he was somewhere high. So maybe he was in the mountains in the fall or the winter… Eventually, he ran out of gas, and he walked the way up the rest of the rise. It was only there that he started to put the pieces together slowly as he found the dim lights of a village below him.

It was a nice-looking place. Well, at least it was nicer than some of the other places he’d been to recently. It wasn’t the richest place, and it was almost certainly too small to be considered a town, but it probably had everything that he really needed in one quaint little community. There was a double handful of thatched roof houses in neat rows. Smoke was coming out of the chimneys of most of them in thin, wispy lines, and light was escaping from the cracks in the shutters.

The community was small, but the quality of the roads and the fencing said volumes to him about them at this point. He’d been in too many little towns and villages across the continent not to recognize the handiwork of a serious, healthy community. 

Even if he hadn’t been able to pick out those details from here, the neat row of shops on the small square and the whitewashed stone temple that everything else was clustered around to some degree said the same thing. This was a place he’d have been happy to live; it just probably wouldn’t be tonight. 

They’d probably be too insular to welcome a stranger like me for more than a night or two, he thought glumly. 

As he stood there, judging the place and deciding the best way down, he heard another howl in the distance. This one was far away but still closer than before. So, he started down the hill at a more moderate pace. 

There was no telling what he might trip and fall over in the moonlit darkness, and casting light while he was this exposed definitely wasn’t a good idea. It was the best part of a mile away, so there was no way he was running the whole way anyway. 

As it turned out, he probably wasn’t going to get there in time, though, because, of course, he wasn’t. Simon sighed as he heard the crashing in the bushes somewhere behind him, near the crest of the hill, and was somewhat disappointed to pull out the cutlass he had in his hand instead of his preferred long sword.

“Oh, right,” he said dumbly as he realized he’d lost that long ago.  

He stopped running, and when he saw an outlying farmstead, he started backing in that direction instead as he watched the darkness behind him, searching for what it was that was about to attack him. Truthfully, he’d been expecting something scarier, but when a pack of snarling wolves crested the rise and scented the air, he relaxed a little. 

His very first instinct was to suck the life out of them with a word of transfer, but he suppressed that instinct ruthlessly. He definitely wasn’t doing that again any time soon. Instead, he waited to see what they would do, and when they bolted and started toward him, he whispered, “Dnarth Vrazig,” distant lightning, and brought a bolt from the blue down on the heads of the rabid animals, scattering them in all directions. 

Simon shrugged. That probably wasn’t enough to clear the leave, but it bought him some breathing room, and as he turned around to continue on his way, he breathed a sigh of relief. 

Only, it wasn’t over. Something howled, and when he turned around, he saw the body of the pack leader pulling itself back to his feet. It was almost twice as big as the rest, and he hadn’t really noticed that in the dark, several hundred yards away. Now that it stood there alone, though, it was impossible to miss. 

“Tough bastard, are you?” Simon murmured to himself.

The thing charged forward again. Somehow, it seemed faster than it had before. For a moment, he was tempted to try lightning again, but instead, he decided to kill it quick and clean with a land of force through its heart like a real hunter would do with a bullet, shouting, “Oonbetit!” 

That was enough to stagger it, and though, for a brief second, it looked like it might keep moving, Simon was pleased to watch it finally fall into a pool of its own blood less than a hundred yards from him. This time, he didn’t wait to see what happened. He just turned around and started running. It was good that he did, too, because less than a minute later, he heard the sound of something chasing him again, and he didn’t need to look over his shoulder to see what it was. 

“What are you?” he gasped. “The Terminator’s dog?”

When it was right on his heels, he shouted, “Gervuul Meiren,” turning it into a fireball with a greater word of flame. 

He was concerned now. He could taste the iron of his own blood, and he felt his throat giving out from using too much magic too quickly. There was nothing for it, though. It was this or death, and he was too close to his answers to go down so easily. 

Simon bolted for the door of the cottage, praying it was open. He’d finally figured out what he was fighting, and if fire didn’t put it down, he didn’t have anything that would. He was not equipped to fight werewolves. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he would. They were more of a horror monster than a fantasy monster, anyway. 

What’s next? He cursed himself internally. Fucking vampires?

Honestly, that was entirely possible. He’d never imagined a swarm of carnivorous locust bugs trying to devour whole farms, either. 

He lost that thought as he heard the sound of the thing getting up again. Simon bemoaned the fact that he didn’t have a single silver coin on him. A single word of lesser force would be enough to make his own silver bullet and bring that thing down, but right now, all of his magic bordered on uselessness. 

When he reached the door, he tried to force his way inside, but it was locked or barred. “Help!” he yelled. “This thing is trying to kill me!”

Despite his pounding, there was no answer, so Simon turned around and prepared to fight for his life. In the end, that seemed unlikely, though. This thing no longer really looked like a wolf. It looked like an eight-foot-tall beast man standing on his hind legs with burned patches in its fur and bright pink scar tissue that was already starting to disappear beneath the fur. 

When it charged Simon, he knew he was screwed, but that didn’t stop him from doing his best. He deflected the massive claws that aimed for his heart in a killing blow with his blade, driving them deep into the wood of the door instead. 

That did nothing for the rest of the thing’s body, which came barreling down on him like a freight train. The door he was braced against cracked under the force, along with a couple of Simon’s ribs. 

They collapsed on the ground in a tangle of limbs, and Simon was sure that he was about to get his throat torn out by the slavering jaws that were inches above him and that moments later, everyone else in this home would meet a similar fate. 

Instead, the werewolf had what looked to be a seizure and crouched there on Simon as he began to spasm and eventually shrink. It took him only a few seconds to figure out why. They weren’t in the cottage he’d just been standing in front of. They were in the burned-out ruins of a different cottage, and it was somewhere else, on some other level.

Most importantly, though. On that level, it was daytime, and the light was causing this thing some serious problems. It roared in confusion, but even as it did so, it fell off of Simon and started to spasm violently as it began to shrink. 

Though the thing had looked disturbingly humanoid, it had definitely been an animal. Now, that distinction was less clear. Moment by moment it was becoming something closer to human, but it was turning into a real horror show along the way. 

Its jaw deformed as its hair shrank to nothing, granting Simon a better view than he would have liked. Then, its giant muscles deflated, and its teeth and claws began to shrink somehow, even though Simon couldn’t think of a single way that would be biologically possible. After that, he watched the various bones lock back into place as they shrank at different rates. It was a disturbing sight, but no less disturbing than watching the nighttime in the doorway slowly fade to a few of the plants that surrounded them. 

In the end, he was left alone in an empty, burned-out village with nothing but a naked, unconscious man who had been a wolf moments before. For a moment, Simon almost put the poor bastard out of his misery with the cutlass that was still clutched in his hand. He resisted the urge, though. Instead, he left his assailant where he lay and went to try to find the man some clothes while he looked for survivors. 

He had no idea what was going on in either level, but he was damn sure going to get some answers.