It took several minutes, but as soon Simon shook the intoxig feeling of the life force p 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 doo 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 firmed by the way that Millen and his son were looking at Simon. As they stared at the carpet of dead is, their gaze became increasingly dark, and he k wasn’t going to end well. So, making an excuse that he had to go che his belongings, he slipped off to the barn, and from there, he exited to the level.

  He’d lost t. 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 Hedes. “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 nebsp;

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

  Simon wasn’t in the best shape yet. In fact, he still felt like he o lose 50 pounds, but right now, he wasn’t in the right space to fight. He was still wrestling with the narcotisations 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 pirees 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 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 vilge below him.

  It was a nice-looking pce. Well, at least it was han some of the other pces he’d been to retly. It wasn’t the richest pce, and it was almost certainly too small to be sidered a town, but it probably had everything that he really needed in one quaint little unity. There was a double handful of thatched roof houses i rows. Smoke was ing out of the eys of most of them in thin, wispy lines, and light was esg from the cracks in the shutters.

  The unity was small, but the quality of the roads and the feng said volumes to him about them at this point. He’d been in too many little towns and vilges across the ti not the handiwork of a serious, healthy unity.

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

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

  As he stood there, judging the pd deg the best way down, he heard another howl in the distahis one was far away but still closer than before. So, he started down the hill at a more moderate pabsp;

  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, he crest of the hill, and was somewhat disappoio pull out the cutss he had in his hand instead of his preferred long sword.

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

  He stopped running, and when he saw an outlying farmstead, he started bag in that dire instead as he watched the darkness behind him, searg for what it was that was about to attack him. Truthfully, he’d been expeg something scarier, but when a pack of snarling wolves crested the rise and sted the air, he rexed 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 dires.

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

  Only, it wasn’t over. Something howled, and wheurned 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 alohough, it was impossible to miss.

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

  The thing charged fain. 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 quid with a nd of force through its heart like a real hunter would do with a bullet, shouting, “Oo!”

  That was enough to stagger it, and though, for a brief sed, it looked like it might keep moving, Simon leased 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 mier, he heard the sound of something chasing him again, and he didn’t o 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 fme.

  He was ed 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 ao go down so easily.

  Simon bolted for the door of the cottage, praying it en. 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 mohan a fantasy monster, anyway.

  What’s ? He cursed himself internally. Fug vampires?

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

  He lost that thought as he heard the sound of the thiing up again. Simon bemoahe fact that he didn’t have a single silver 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 a-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 beh 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 cws that aimed for his heart in a killing blow with his bde, 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 uhe force, along with a couple of Simon’s ribs.

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

  Instead, the werewolf had what looked to be a seizure and crouched there on Simon as he began to spasm aually shrink. It took him only a few seds to figure out why. They weren’t itage 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 fusion, 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 distin was less clear. Moment by moment it was being 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 defted, and its teeth and cws 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 bato pce as they shrank at different rates. It was a disturbing sight, but no less disturbing than watg the nighttime in the doorway slowly fade to a few of the pnts that surrouhem.

  In the end, he was left alone in ay, burned-out vilge with nothing but a naked, unsan who had been a wolf moments before. For a moment, Simon almost put the poor bastard out of his misery with the cutss that was still clutched in his hand. He resisted the urge, though. Instead, he left his assaint where he y ao try to find the man some clothes while he looked for survivors.

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