Before this trip, Simon had sidered the jungle level a pleasant pce. pared to some of the levels around it, it was a real garden spot, literally and figuratively. That was especially true by the water or at the top of the pyramid, farthest from where the pnts grew thickest; it aradise. Not only was it beautiful and warm, but he hadn’t seen a single mohat didn’t have roots on any of his visits here.

  He could see setting up a luxury resht there on the river so that all the other adventurers could e here for the mandatory beach episodes that had been in basically every anime he used to enjoy. After spending a week here, though, all of that ged. Now, after trying to clear out a megalithic stoy or temple plex or whatever this was supposed to be while dealing with pnts that just wanted him dead, he was pletely sick of this pce.

  It was awful.

  What had been pleasant warmth had bee swelteri, and now, away from the breeze that domihe open spaces by the river, the is were a stant nuisance. If you added that to swinging his sword arm over and over until he thought it would fall off, it had bee worse than almost any battlefield he’d been on so far. Even fighting the damn orcs, he’d never quite been this tired.

  He’d tried using the frost sword to freeze the rgest clusters, and that worked okay, but it took forever. After a little trial and error, he’d e down to using fire magid a machete, which was really just his long sword with the bde broken off so that he could swing it easier. Even though these things wouldn’t burn properly, once he’d gotten that rhythm down, he could clear a whole street in a few hours. However, the hard work and punishiook a real toll, and he was forced to take breaks stantly.

  Really, he felt like he was taking breaks more than he was w at this point, but it could hardly be helped. He had to spend more time by the river because he was almost out of potatoes. So, it was fish or starve, but as rexing as it was, it really slowed down progress. Especially sihe pnts seemed to be regrowing almost as fast as he was killing them.

  Purging a building or two of an rown rose bush felt great and all, but what was the point whehing was already resprouting when you went back the day? Even the ones he’d buro a crisp were starting to sprout again after a week. What was the point? It’s not like he could keep mowing this city down every week for the rest of his life.

  “I have to be missing something here,” Simon sighed as he walked back to his favorite stone, pulled off his boots, and slipped his feet into the cool water. “I don’t think that Hedes brought me here because this peeded a gardener. Even a gardener with a sword.”

  He smirked at that. He wasn’t even afraid of the biggest pnts anymore. They burned best of all, and as strong as their vine-like tendrils were, they moved so slowly that they were really only useful on targets that were sleeping like he’d been the first time he’d e here.

  And he definitely wasn’t about to let that happen again. These days, he stayed at the top of one of the lesser pyramids. It was only four stories tall, but even though that was a real hike, it was worth it food night’s sleep. None of the vines seemed to grow that high, and he had no i in finding out what death by slow digestio like.

  Awake or asleep, he no longer really felt like he was in dahe momearted using fire or ice, the biggest pnts that had actually spouted those giant ivorous blossoms would just close up to shield themselves from the worst of it and quietly die. They wouldn’t even give him the excuse that it was too hard to justify leaving.

  The only things that were even a threat anymore were those annoying needle-spitting blossoms. They’d gotten him a few times now, and their numbing poison spread pretty rapidly, but it wasn’t anything that lesser cure couldn’t fix. Ahout that little power would be pletely screwed, of course, but he wasn’t ed. He just took out the most likely clumps with lesser fire or distant fire first and then hacked away at the roots of the rest.

  The job had gotten so muhat he wasn’t even wearing his armor anymore. He couldn’t, not in this heat. Heat stroke was both a stant threat and a bigger dahan feeling his foot or arm start to go numb before he muttered a few magic words. Passing out because he overdid it could very well be a death senten this pce.

  Still, he wished he knew what he was supposed to be doing here. “This is pretty much the opposite of killing zombies oblins,” he pined, not sure what else he should be doing. “Why do you kill zombies and goblins? So you don’t get more zombies and goblins. But pnts in a juhere aren’t even any people around.”

  That had been his secret theory at the start of this. That he’d find some tribal remnant, he’d have to help. Helping people seemed to be an increasingly important theme i. After all, he’d helped those kids, he’d helped that doctor, and of course, he’d helped the people of Schwarzenbruck, but here there was no oo help, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with that information. He supposed that the task could have just as easily been to knock over the giant pyramid that domihis pce. Holy, that might have been easier than trying to kill all the ivorous pnts that swarmed it.

  Simo searg, though, certain that eventually, he’d find some dark secret they had to be proteg. He wasn’t sure if that was the right move, but it was the only one he had. If he didn’t find something in another week, he promised himself that he’d move on and give one of the ter levels a try.

  So, that’s just what he did. Over the four days, he made forays into different parts of the city. Each time he was looking for a secret door or an evil temple that might have spawhis little nightmare so that he could hack at its roots instead of his branches, but he never located one.

  Twice, he’d found crypts to desd into. There, the most iing things he’d discovered were enough legible pictographs to figure out that this pce had been the capital of a vast empire before it crumbled away. It was hard to make sense of everything because he cked the text to uand all the metaphors, but it in to see that the brighter the aplishments, the older the sarcophagus.

  He got more of an In vibe than an Aztec vibe from them, though. They were war-like, sure, but he hadn’t found any evidehat they ducted ritual sacrifi an industrial scale or anything. They hadn’t seemed to discover words of power either, because he found no new ones in any of his reading sessions.

  Even when he pried opeombs themselves, all he found were jade-decorated corpses that had long since decayed to bone and dust. There was nothing there to take or to threaten him. This struck Simon as strange, because sometimes iangles of the pnts he’d find scraps of cloth or the bones of their victims, but that meant that people would have been here i few months or years, wouldn’t it?

  How long did bones even st when they were exposed to the weather? How long did articles of clothing? He didn’t know, but the flig evidence meant that the city he was currently hag his way through had been abandoned for a couple of years or a couple of turies. He wasn’t sure which was more likely, but none of that stopped him fr to find out.

  Simon was hag away at the charred remains of the cluster he’d just cleared out when he felt the sting. He barely registered it at first because he was too busy trying to see if he had finally uhed some secret worth finding. He hadn’t, though. He’d only found another partially colpsed building with a few scattered pictographs that were still legible.

  He pulled the needle from his ned grunted in annoya the blood-tipped barb before he cast it aside. Then he opened his mouth to speak the sing words that would make this minor problem go away. Only no sounds came out.

  ‘Aufvarum Delzam,’ he tried to shout. No words were formed, though. Instead, there were only a few squeaking sounds mixed in with the sound of dry heaving as air exited his lungs, but his vocal cords did nothing to shape it.

  The pnt had paralyzed his rynx, he suddenly realized with horror. By intelligence or ce, it had taken away his most potent on, and suddenly he felt helpless.

  It’s okay, he tried to tell himself as he slowly backed away. Everything in this area was somewhere between cooked and halfway dead. He just had to go somewhere safe and wait for this to wear off. As he started walking away, though, he dropped his sword and looked down at his sck fingers in horror. He willed himself to ch them bato a fist, but instead, all they did was tremble.

  Simon didn’t o see anything else, he just turned and ran. He’d never been dosed long enough to watch it spread like this, and the speed was truly horrifying. It had only been a couple of minutes, and already it had reached his hands.

  He could feel his heart slowing now, too. It didn’t stop it, of course. Stopping it would be a mercy, and the Pit was hat kind. Instead, it forced him to slow as his baarted to fail, and his energy levels deed precipitously.

  He reached the pyramid safe haven he’d e to rely on, but he never reached the cubby he’d been sleeping in. He only got five stairs up before his legs gave out. He mao crawl up awo, but after that, all he could do was y there and pant.

  Simon’s heart pounded in his chest as he watched helplessly while tendrils from a nearby alley he hadn’t pletely finished purging slowly crawled toward him over the fifteen minutes. When they finally reached him, he couldn’t evehe tentacle ing around him so slowly that it took almost an hour before it started dragging him toward the charred maw of the blossom he hadn’t finished eradig by his feet.

  This had the unwele be of giving him an excellent view of what was about to happen to him. In fact, Simon couldn’t look away. The paralytic was so powerful that he couldn’t blink. All he could do was stare at the giant scorched blossom and the giah-like thorns in the ter that were slowly spreading wider and wider to aodate the rge meal.

  Simon focused all of his energy to whisper even one of the words of power he knew. Cure. Fire. Ice. Force. Anything.

  His mind was clear, but his throat tio be paralyzed. The only motion he could aplish was the shallowest of breathing. That was the only thing that kept him from hyperventiting as he watched the pnt’s teeth start to shred his boots, pants, aually his legs.

  He couldn’t look away, but now at least he was grateful that he couldn’t feel any pain, because what was happening to his body looked agonizing. It was like getting your hand caught in the garbage disposal or one of those safety videos where something terrible happens to someone in a factory.

  He could only watch as the motion of the thorns drew him in abject horror. Fortunately, he passed out from blood loss before the thing had gotten past his knees, and he was finally freed from the horror of that ending.