Simohe six months the same way. Every m, he drank three helmets of water and caught something with a crude spear from the jetty while he still had the energy to do so. Then, he would fill his cy pot with five or six gallons of seawater and begin to climb up the slope.

  There, he would use fire and salt to methodically make it further up the street toward the main square, destroying every tendril of greenery in any building along the way. Nothing behihat was his motto. He’d already been through the wood chipper once, and he had no iion of doing this half-assed and being forced tain.

  After all, the pnt couldn’t do shit to him. Not if he was careful. He’d been hit by spines a few times so far, but none of them had peed his armor, which he wore no matter how hot he got. His leathers fit him loosely now, even ched all the . Since he could t his ribs when his shirt was off, that wasn’t a surprise.

  He was tanned in a way he’d never been before, too, and in all the time it took to get that tan, he’d ted a hundred a shooting stars, nine ships, and no people. The only thing he hadn’t ted in all that time was the number of fish he’d eaten. He might never eat fish after this. He was so sick of them that he’d taken to freediving for cms, oysters, and even shrimp sometimes, though he had very few ways to cook any of them properly.

  “I’m never going anywhere without a pan again,” he told himself as he hiked up the cliff with a jug of water that day.

  No, not that day, he corrected himself mentally. The day.

  Today was the day he was going after the tral blossom. He’d already killed every trace of pnt life between the road and the main square. It wouldn’t be the end of it. He’d still have the rest of Ionar proper, plus the pace grounds te, but as far as Simon was ed, what he was doing today was half the battle. If he succeeded here, everything else was just up.

  He’d avoided it for weeks as he id the groundwork, but that had given him all the time in the world to study the terrible pnt. It had been growing for many years, which for a flower was ay, so at this point it was the size of an gnarled old oak tree. Instead of foliage, though, was a giahery flower that was very nearly blood pared to the marbled e and red of most of the e blossoms.

  He’d already destroyed many that were more than rge enough to swallow him whole. Even the rgest of those was only half the size of the main pnt, though, and today, after what robably decades of unending growth, he was going to end it.

  Simon started the battle with the words of distant fire. It made the thing scream but did little to effect it. It simply closed its giant flower until the fmes had passed. That was something that was rgely true for the e blossoms he’d defeated up until now, but it was still a vital step because that sudden burst of fme was enough to destroy or cripple most of the smaller needle-spitting blossoms.

  Ohat was done, he advanced with his freshly sharpened sword. The tendrils attacked him before he was even halfway across the square. The smaller ones moved so slowly that they were only effective against prey that had already been immobilized, but these rger ones were as thick as his thigh and could be wielded like clubs. They were the hazard that o go.

  Simon wove between them, hag as he went, and over the space of a few minutes, he covered the square iicky green sap of his enemy. That was all he o do to reach the trunk. At least, that had been all he’d had to do in the past. This time, though, whe close, the thing unched a cloud of evil-looking, red pollen at him. Simon staggered back, with his eyes and his mouth closed, and it was only when he was far enough away that he felt like the strong sea breeze had sed the air that he allowed himself to breathe again.

  “Got yourself a rick, huh?” he said, studying the residue in his hair as much as the strange creature that had released it.

  He felt normal, but he had no idea what that shit did, so he used a word of lesser cure, just in case, then he went back to retrieve his jug of water. This thing was full of surprises. Fortunately, he was too.

  Simon ran at it again, but this time from a slightly different dire, and he was wable to dump half of the jug ohings roots before it could turn enough to try to dose him again. Before it succeeded in spraying him though, the thorny mouth at the ter of the monstrous blossom started to scream.

  This wasn’t the first time that one of the flowers had made him. He’d heard them growl on several occasions whehought they were about to get an easy feel. This was the first time that he’d heard such a keening wail, though, and he backed away, fearing arange sonic attack almost as much as the pollen. Simon backed away once more until his vision cleared, but the third time he advanced, he vowed he wouldn’t stop hag at it until the thing was finally dead.

  That’s exactly what he did, and it was messy work. He chopped at it until the tip of his sword broke off, but there was nothing it could do to defend itself anymore. No other part of it was in rao strike at him. Thanks to all his hard work, it was isoted and defenseless.

  Even after he felled it, though, and the thing’s keening screech ceased, the battle still wasn’t done. He still had to dig up the seed itself. If he didn’t, in a day or a week, it would start sprouting all ain. That was just its nature, and by now, he had learned not to uimate it.

  No matter how hot the va or how thick the crust of sto left behind, this awful thing would reach the surfad blossom once more. Even if he drow ier, he was sure that o had dried off, it would spring to life all ain. In that se was the most terrible creature he’d ever faced. It was more tenacious than all the zombies he’d ever killed, put together, and if he’d left it lying anywhere besides this desote pce, he was sure it would have eaten half a ti by now.

  That was the only silver lining to this, Simon decided as he poked around in its stump with his sword looking for dark, fist sized objeo matter how deep he prodded, though, he saw nothing promising.

  “Yeah, it’s like a dandelion,” he nodded. “You gotta pull those out by the roots, or they always e back.”

  “Gervuul Oo,” he yelled, starting to feel a little hoarse.

  He’d used a lot of minor words today but didn’t use a log of major words during his time on Ionar. There was no point. The enemy he faced wasn’t powerful. At this point, it wasn’t even dangerous if you were prepared. It was, however, so numerous as to be nearly endless.

  The stump came out of the ground and ulled a few feet in the sky by a titanic force that shattered the nearby cobblestones. It came out roots and all, and it was there, at the very bottom of the loap root, that he finally found it.

  Simon hat it was already starting to sprout new life, even as he’d killed its old form. He immediately chopped it off of the now-dead body of its former host with a single quick stroke of his bde before he sheathed it.

  Then, he dumped what water he had left on it to stimy and further growth, then he pulled his purse full of gold s from under his breastpte, and said, “Meiren,” heating them so mud so quickly that they became molten almost instantly, and burned right through the thiher, drizzling down on the cursed thing.

  Simon had to use a word of fire a sed time, along with the word of earth, to make sure the thing was fully enclosed and sealed in a metal shell that it could not escape from. It was only when that was dohat he retreated to his safe area to rest in the shade for a little bit and decide what to do .

  He figured it would still take months more to kill everything else, even with the heart cut out of this monster, but over the hour, every viopped twitg, and every bit of foliage began to ge colors. First, it faded to yellows and browns, and then, even before the sun started to dip below the horizon, almost all of them were bbsp;

  He was overjoyed but unwilling to be fooled. He wasted no daylight looking for evidehat somewhere, some part of this pnt tio thrive. Simon finally made his way down from the ruins well after nightfall, after he’d checked to make sure every single vine and tendril really was wilting.

  He was exhausted after what he’d aplished, but not so exhausted that he hadn’t used a few words of distant fire to create a fireworks dispy to celebrate the event. Even if no one else had seen it, he decided that wasting six months of his life to mark his triumph was more than worth it.

  Once he was reached the beach he looked at the golden orb he held in his hand, thearted walking out to the jetty to finish this. There were a lot of pces he could put this gleaming evil seed. He could take it with him. He could leave it on the cliff, but in the end, given its weakness for salt water he decided the safest pce for this thing to end up was the sea.

  After all, no matter where he buried it, ohis thing’s tainer got damaged, it would grow again. He retty sure that’s what had happened in the sewers. Someone had died trying to steal it or possess it or something, aually, it had grown up and ed the city. If he had tools, he would have built a salt-filled time capsule and buried it in the deepest part of the o. He didn’t, though.

  Instead, he used the word of earth three times. Twice to turn twe rocks into hemispherical shells to tain his golden artifact, and then, one more time, to meld them into a stohat he hoped would protect its precious cargo for thousands of years. Then, ohat was done, he stood on the farthest point of the a stoy and u with a word of force hundreds of yards out into the water where no one would ever find it again.

  Even after that victory, though, he sat on the beach for several days w how much this ohing had already ged history. How many ships didn’t stop here that would have? Hoeople that were supposed to never met? Other than g the zombie outbreak, this robably the biggest sihing he’d doo alter the flow of the world events since he started, and it had been on act.

  There was no way to fix it now, of course. He would have to get on with his adventure eventually. Still, for a couple nights, he basked in that wonderful feeling of pletion and wondered if there was any way to truly fix what it was he’d done.