When Simon woke up in the fresh air and the empty bed of his , a small part of him had died. He felt more hurt by Freya’s death than he had been by any of his deaths. The pain he felt as he thought of her was worse than the first time the skeleton knight had killed him or the time the slime had suffocated him to death. His disused emotions had stayed in their lockbox where they belonged for so long, that feeling this sense of loss for a sweet young woman was devastating.

  Freya had actually liked him. She thought he was funny, and cute, and now she was dead. He would have happily died a dozen times to prevent that, but now he would never get the bsp;

  Or would he?

  It was only after he’d spent several minutes just ying there and feeling sorry for himself that he realized she was still down there on the sixth floor. Maybe not the version of her that remembered him, but she was still the girl he’d been close to falling in love with. Surely if he saved her again, and they spent a few days together it would be just like it was before, wouldn’t it?

  With that thought in mind, Simon quickly started to get ready. He’d promised himself he would take the levels he had on loid slow to use them for practice, but he threw all that out the window, charging into the depths as soon as he was geared up. He didn’t even bother t food - just his ons, his armor, and a si torch. It was all he his wasn’t about learning or even progressing. This was about Freya and filling the hole in his heart that should never have been there in the first pbsp;

  He rushed heedlessly through level after level, killing what he o and no more to get past the challenge. Being apart from his girl when he kly where to find her ecial kind of torment. The only thing that even slowed him down was the slime, but as soon as he forced it from the water, he bur to ashes with two simple words. He was a little surprised at how much more effective his fire spell was than it had been st time, but he didn’t have time to try to uand why.

  He just rushed on to the door that led to his favorite besieged inn. In the ba where he always appeared, he found the same zombie that always tried to eat him, and Simon dispatched it with a si ch of his mace. Theurned, ready to go find Freya, when suddenly the door burst open, and the blond girl with the pitchfork that had killed him not so long ago was standing there.

  “Who are you,” she demanded. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” She jabbed the air a couple of times just as she did before, but this time Simon was actually still capable of speech as he had nothing but a scratchy throat. The woman was the same busty blond wearing the same dirty blue dress as st time. Her eyes were hard, and she had a bloody bandage c a wound on one arm. Even if he didn’t have first-hand experiehat she was the killing type, he would have believed it just from her appearanbsp;

  “Woah, easy there!” he said, bag away. “I’m a friend of Freya’s. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Her pitchfork lowered almost immediately, and a sad look crossed her face. “A friend… of Freya’s?” She opened her mouth and was about to say something else, but the sound of breaking wood ripped through the room, and they both turo face it.

  The boards on one of the windows had failed, almost identically to the st time he was here. That made sehe levels were always very simir, but never quite exactly the same.

  “Hold on,” Simon said, pushing past her. “Let’s take care of this, and then we find her. It was only after he said he was a friend that he realized that might cause him problems ter when he was talking to her, so he was happy for the interruption.

  This time, one of the zombies made it all the way in before he brai, and he had to kill three more to block the hole before he went for the trestle table like he did st time. “A little help here?” he asked. This time there was no help ing, and he had to push it all the way to the window by himself. When he looked around, he saw the blond girl was still here, but she’d sat down at one of the tables and was drinking some kind of liquor straight from the bottle. She might be feistier, but she wasn’t in a much better pce than his Freya had been. That made sense. He wouldn’t want to know ahat could live through a situation so awful and e out the other side ued by it.

  “So, where’s Freya at,” Simon asked, as he walked back to the table and tried not to show how out of breath he was. Her only answer was a distant look in her eyes, and another swig from the bottle.

  Simon sat down and tried again. “Is everything okay? Look, if more try to get in I promise I’ll protect you, but first I want to make sure that—”

  “She didn’t make it,” the woman said, looking at the floor instead of at him. “Okay? She didn’t make it, and there was nothing I could do. She’s gone.”

  “Gohat’s not possible.” Simoed. “She has to be here. There’s no way out of this pce. I’ve looked.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s—” the woman tried to reply.

  “Freya!” Simon shouted. “Freya, where are you!” The other woman shook her head as he got up and started looking for her. The longer Simon looked, the louder he shouted until eventually, on the edge of hysteria, he found her in one of the guest rooms of the sed floor. At some point i few days she’d been turned into a zombie, and after that someone had mercifully put her down. It was a horrendous, gut-wreng moment for Simon.

  He just stood there, g like a baby, for several minutes, and it was only after he pulled himself together that he slowly came downstairs auro the table with the woman that arently the sole survivor in this version of the level. Was there a fifty-fifty ce that he would get either one, he wondered? Could he just kill himself and try again in the hopes of beied with Freya? Well he could of course, the question was should he. While he rummaged through his thoughts and tried what to do , the two of them just sat in near silence while the zombies moaned and shuffled outside.

  “Did you know her well?” The other woman asked finally.

  “I would have liked to know her better,” Simon said, not looking up.

  “I hear you,” she agreed, sounding slightly drunk as she passed Simotle. He took a long swing of something that burned as it went down. It was too raw and fiery to be called whiskey, but it robably its distant cousin somehow. “I wao know a lot of things. What the sea smelled like. If a girl from Schwarzenbruck could ever amount to anything. How Helfun son kissed. But then the world ended, and I never got the ce. It’s a tough break for both of us.”

  “She was just such a sweet girl.” Simon whined. “I don’t know how this could happen to her.”

  “Look out on those streets. Every mohere was a good guy or a sweet girl only a day or two ago. It ain’t her fault any more than it was theirs.” Simon shrugged. She wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t want to agree to anything that would make her death or the way it affected him feel less special. The two sat there for a while, slowly getting drunker and more philosophical, but her of those things helped Simon to climb out of the morass of hopelessness and self-pity that he was slowly sinking into.

  Eventually, the barmaid said,“let’s have a tumble. Maybe the st one before the world ends. What do you say?”

  Simon looked over at her like he’d misheard the woman, but between the way she was smiling at him and the fact that she’d let the left strap of her dress slide off her shoulder in a way that practically let her tits spill out left no room for doubt.

  “We ’t,” Simon said, ign the way his body respoo the beauty. “I don’t even know your name, and you're drunk. That’s ly the way these things are supposed to work.”

  “Well I’m Brenna, and the dead arely supposed to be rising from the grave her, but here they are,” she said, standing up and walking over to him. She grabbed the other strap ahe dress fall, pooling at her feet. “e on. O fling before we all go off to meet our maker. There’s no harm in it.”

  For Simon, this was a surreal situation. Not only was he actively grieving the loss of someone, which he swore he’d never do, because it was stupid, but he was being hit on by a woman ay hotter than he’d ever been with in his whole life… and he was turning her down.

  She’d stripped down to her slippers, her small clothes, and the bandage on her arm while he protested; she was a wet dream if he’d ever seen one, aurned away respectfully from her near nudity to look at the floor once more. Even with that quick glimpse it had been impossible not to notice how flushed with drink and desire she was. Bae she would have been a bikini model or a starlet, but here she was just the sed serving girl in a backwater town.

  She walked around him, slowly admiring him and plimenting him, and in a way that was almost more attractive to Simon than the amount of skin she’d put on dispy. Whearted to undo his shoulder straps, he didn’t fight back as much as he should. This wasn’t really wrong after all. It only felt wrong.

  By the time he saw Freya again, he would already be at least one life removed from whatever he did with Breanna today. It would be like it never even happened. Part of Simhat he’d already given up trying to fight what was going to happe, but he was too numb to care as they walked up the stairs. Now he was just looking to justify why it was okay to himself, but he khat was just the alcohol talking, and that he’d regret it tomorrow.

  Somehow he still couldn’t make himself stop though as she started to kiss his neck, and grope him under his breastpte. “Please,” she pleaded. “Just one more time… I so badly. I…”

  Her words trailed off as she moaned in his ear, and while she gasped and trembled, his sed thoughts grew to a cresdo. As much as he would love to spend the night with her, he khat his heart wasn’t in it. “Brenna, you’re a beautiful woman, but we ’t do this. My heart belongs to— Ah what the fuck!” He suddenly pulled away as he felt her bite him. Simon whipped around to see that all the panting and the moaning she’d been doing for the st few seds hadn’t been some kind of forepy; she’d bee somethihan human.

  And she’d just bitten him.

  That thought barely had time to sink in as he fumbled for a on. The only thing in reach was the bottle they’d been drinking from, but that shattered wheruck her a her rgely unfazed. She s him again, and he fended her off as best he could, but without his bracers on she mao bite him one more time before he put her down by smashing her head into the ter several times. She was strong, but she didn’t weigh much, and a broken neck put zombies out of a as easily as breaking their skull.

  After that, all that Simon could do was stare in horror at his wound. This was not good, not fug good at all.