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Essentially, he was already too late, and his heart sank. “Maybe you should try smoking 'em out,” Simon suggested helpfully after he introduced himself and bought the man a drink to try to get on his good side.

“Nah,” Nedden said with a shrug as he downed the mug in two quick swallows. “Hauling that much firewood is too much trouble for a handful of gobs, you know?”

“Well, the boy is inexperienced,” Simon continued, “It might be safer if you—”

“Bah!” the other mercenary said, wiping the foam from his mouth with a dirty sleeve. “The boy’s got bloody plate mail - greenskins ain't about to get through that, now, are they?”

The mercenary looked around, and the other men who were in there at that time of morning gave him grudging support. There were a few nods, but Simon couldn’t help but see some of his worst features in the mercenary. Not only was he fat enough that he obviously had trouble squeezing into his breastplate, but he was overwhelmingly confident, and it didn’t seem to have any basis.

Simon dropped the subject, not sure what he should do. Murdering this asshole before he caused any real harm would probably be the best answer, but that would have been wrong, even if Simon was quite sure that no one would miss him. Well, that and some part of him felt sympathy for a man that was obviously more talk than walk.

After another few moments, he resolved to get the man too drunk to fight. So, he ordered a round for the bar as he regaled all of them with stories about goblin shamans that were so connected to the forces of evil that they could use fire magic.

“I’ve heard that before,” one of the farmers chimed in. “But I don’t know anyone that claims to have seen it with their own eyes or nothing.”

Simon was about to brag about that when the boy and a couple of his father's men came into the bar, foiling Simon’s plan. While it was painful to see the eyes of someone he knew so well slide off him as if he was nothing but a stranger, it was less painful than realizing that he hadn’t seen either of the young men who were accompanying Gregor in the timeline where he’d healed his arm.

Suddenly, the whole story clicked into place. The uninjured man standing with the noose around his throat, the young mortally injured boy, and two missing guards. The only one that was going to survive this was the coward, and he wouldn’t survive this for long. Everyone else was walking into a trap with a fraud that they thought was an expert.

Simon cringed at how closely that description fit his first visit to town. If Simon had gone into the silver mine with his charge or accepted the Baron’s men, history very well could have played out in exactly the same way, with an adventurer who didn’t know as much as they claimed to leading the boy to his doom.

There were probably reflections to be made there on the nature of reality and time travel, but Simon didn’t have time for that just now. Instead, he turned to the group of men leaving the bar and said, “If you need one more sword, I’m game.”

“Four is more than sufficient, I would think,” Nedden said quickly. He might have acted confident, but Simon could see in his eyes that this was all about the silver, and he didn’t want to cut anyone else in.

He wanted to say he’d do it for free, but when Gregor appraised Simon for a moment, he froze up. The boy didn’t know him, but for a moment, it seemed like he did, but then it was over. Gregor was barely 16, and Simon had to admit he probably looked like shit at the pace he’d been traveling. So, instead of taking him seriously, he deferred to the man his father had hired, then he turned and left.

That only complicated things further. Trying to chase after them would only make Simon look pathetic, which was definitely not how he wanted to start their relationship. So he didn’t. He sat there, nursing a beer while he tried to figure out what to do next while the men around him gossiped about how, they didn’t think this was going to end well.

“Grown men die to goblins all the time,” the barkeep said, “I don’t see why the Baron is letting his son face them.”

“The boy’s got to grow up sooner or later,” another man said. “He can’t grow up to be half the man his Grandfather was if Lord Corwin coddles him.”

As the discussion grew more heated, Simon could almost see where this was going, and a few more things fell into place. The only way that the Viscount would survive or that anyone would know that the warrior who was supposed to guard him had fled was if a few men got riled up enough to go check on them. In a couple of hours, there would be a mob of aging farmers and out-of-work miners heading down to handle things, but that would already be too late. They might save his young friend’s life, but everything else…

Simon slammed his glass down and stormed out of the bar. He started following the group discreetly from a distance. He wasn’t planning to accompany them to the mine, though. Instead, he cut into the woods and watched as they got closer.

Then, once they were inside the mine, he waited. Simon had been all over these woods in the past few lives. While he might not know every inch, he certainly knew where the ventilation shafts were, and he waited at the first one for signs of the group’s approach.

There was the sound of battle once, but it was over quickly, and by the time they passed the ventilation shaft, they were still in good shape. So Simon followed them slowly toward the second, a couple of hundred yards further on.

It was there he heard the sounds of a real fight. Even knowing that charging into battle in an unfamiliar place was a terrible idea, he still didn’t hesitate. As soon as he heard the first human scream, he leaped down into the darkness.

Simon lit the torch with a word in midair as he pulled out his dagger with the other. Trying to draw his long sword in the tight confines of the vertical shaft would have been very ill-advised; it would have been impossible.

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Instead, he did the best with what he had and whispered “Aufvarum Oonbetit,” and used the words of lesser force to slow his fall so that he landed smoothly in the dusty mining tunnel that had been built to follow a winding vein 30 feet below ground, and it just so happened that there where three goblins directly under him when he landed.

Simon crushed one beneath his boots, narrowly dodging the upright spear that had almost impaled him. Then, without hesitating, he drove his dagger deep into the skull on his right, jabbed his torch in the face of the goblin on his left, and then, stepping back, drew his sword and looked for his next opponent.

There were other goblins here. Loads of them, but there were neither the people he was looking for nor their corpses, which meant that the Viscount’s party hadn’t made it this far.

Simon grinned at that. If there was no one around to see, then he could still use magic, and even though the goblins licked their lips as they saw the easy target they’d found, he unleashed his first spell.

“Gervuul Vrazig!” he barked, sending a streak of blue chain lighting through the majority of the enemies he faced with a greater word.

Everywhere his magic struck, the goblins flopped over or sank bonelessly to the floor, but even as those that were still living looked around in alarm, he was charging them with his sword in hand. Just like that, what should have been a sure thing for the greenskins became a complete rout.

Simon was stabbed a couple of times, but the little bastards didn’t hit anything serious, and soon enough, the cavern was empty save for the corpses of his opponents. Only then, when he’d broken their spirit and stopped the trickle that would have no doubt become a flood, did he turn to look for Gregor’s party.

He found them 50 yards back toward the exit, where Gregor and one of his father’s men faced off against four remaining goblins. The other soldier lay on the ground along with the corpses of a dozen green skins, though Simon couldn’t determine if the man was living or dead, and there was no trace of the Nedden, who had almost certainly fled as soon as his cakewalk turned into a rout.

Simon dispatched two of the ugly buggers before they even knew he was there. The remaining two quickly found themselves outnumbered and unable to flee, and had messy deaths that were quicker than they deserved.

Once all that was done, Simon began to order the two of them around. “You there, watch my back while I see what we can do for your friend!” he ordered the soldier, “And you, Viscount—”

“Wha- why are you here?” Gregor asked. “We left you at the tavern because Nedden said we didn’t need you. Why did you come anyway?”

“Later,” Simon said. “I need to see what can be done for this man, so you make sure nothing is coming from the other side.”

He was concerned there might be more goblin attacks, of course, but that wasn’t the reason he pointed the two remaining men in opposite directions. It was so that neither of them would be looking at him as he probed the wounds.

The guard had been stabbed in several places and was covered in blood, but his pulse was still strong. So Simon muttered a few words of lesser healing to partially close the man’s wounds and a word of cure to reduce the chance that infection would take him out, and then they made a crude litter from a cloak and goblin spears and dragged the unconscious man to safety.

They were halfway to town before they met the mob that Simon had predicted that morning. Honestly, he thought they would come earlier, he thought to himself, but he said nothing. Instead, he let Gregor do the talking.

As it turned out, they had started marshaling together as soon as the stable boy caught Nedden trying to skip town. That mental image was enough to make Simon laugh, but he held back, trying not to undermine the seriousness of the situation.

When all of them returned to Slany, and things were explained to Baron Corwin, the man embraced Simon publicly and told him, “You saved my son. You can have any reward you choose. You have but to name it.”

“Dinner sounds good,” Simon said, causing a gale of disbelieving laughter. “I’m just glad we could save everyone this time.”

“I’m not sure that everyone is going to live,” the Baron said, shaking his head. “There’s no reason I can think of to spare that cowardly mercenary’s life.”

“No?” Simon asked. “Not even to celebrate your son’s safe return? I would think that the greatest punishment of all we could offer a man like that would be letting him live with the knowledge of what he’s done.”

That wasn’t the real reason that Simon wanted to spare him. It was because it was very easy for him to look at Nedden and see the man he’d once been, and he wasn’t particularly inclined to be too harsh on himself from two dozen lives ago.

Baron Corwin was initially unconvinced, but eventually, after he calmed down, he agreed that branding the man a coward and exiling him from Corwin lands would be punishment enough. After that, Simon’s time on this level played out much as it did before for the next few weeks. Simon spent a great deal of time with young Gregor, and though his father quickly banished Nedden from his lands, the Lord kept Simon around to do odd jobs for Baron Corwin.

He mostly kept to himself, focusing on studying what little he knew of the words of power and his experiments. He was mostly just biding his time to see how the impending civil war would play out, but surprisingly, it never did. Simon waited for the other shoe to drop, first for weeks and then for months, but the rumors that came to town were more about gossip and scandal than wars on the horizon. The King’s renewed health dispelled them completely.

After six months, Simon started to think that he should move on, but by then, he’d started a flirtation with Trinna, the baker. She was a cute, motherly woman who’d lost her husband years before when they were both young. There was just something about her sad beauty that struck him just right, long after the charm of her wonderful bread had faded into the background.

It was the last thing he’d meant to happen, but somehow, it felt right. He still loved Freya, of course, but it had been many years and several deaths since he’d seen his beloved last, and something about reliving the same life over and over had started to dull those sharp edges.

So, instead, he stayed. He bought a plot of land, intent on becoming a part of Slany’s little community, and then he set about building himself a house and a livelihood. They weren’t exactly an item or anything. Not yet. Dating wasn’t quite a thing here, but despite the cloud that still hovered over him, he thought he might propose to her anyway.

The other levels would always be there, of course. He could do those any day, but he was fairly sure this would be the last time he’d get to watch Gregor grow up, thanks to all of his hard work.

He spent years there in Slany, and the war never came. So, Simon stayed. He experimented with magic, he practiced swordplay with his friends, and most importantly he always found another reason to stick around a little longer.

During that time in Slany, he learned lots of little mundane things he’d never known before, like how to split fence rails, tie knots, and of course bake bread. At times, Simon considered moving on, but there was never much urgency in that thought; it became a thing he thought about at night before bed, and quickly forgot each morning when he woke up with a list of things to do on his mind.

Unfortunately, all of that was cut short one day while he was hauling logs from the forest. He'd taken a break on the last hill before he was home since it was a place that offered him a perfect view of the home he built with his own two hands. He was just noticing that a bit of the thatching needed to be redone when a skittish mule he hadn’t been paying enough attention to kicked him hard in the side of his head, ending his well-earned break forever.