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“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Simon said, failing to hide how flustered the back handed compliment made him.

“No? The Simon who entered the pit would have said something like…” She cleared her throat, and when she started speaking again it was no longer her melodious voice, but Simon’s voice being played back at him. “Why does this place have such awful level design? Why didn’t you bother to include a tutorial for the magic system at least? What the FUCK was with that zombie level?”

Simon cringed at what she said, not just because it was a pitch perfect imitation of him, but because all of those had been questions that had run through his head before he settled on the one he had actually asked.

“None of those will help me understand how to beat this place,” he mumbled.

“That’s true,” she agreed. “All your life that stubborn competitiveness has held you back, but suddenly it\'s a strength. Don’t lose it. You’ll need it for what comes next.”

Simon let that veiled threat hang silently in the air for a few seconds, unanswered. He wasn’t going to let her distract him.

“The Pit was a mistake,” she said finally. “My mistake. It was one of many, of course. I’m not perfect. Even the nigh-omnipotent are not infallible.”

“What was your mistake?” Simon asked.

“I believed in someone too much, and took a leap of faith that didn’t end well. You see, once upon a time, there was a hero. His name is lost to time because this was a very, very long time ago, but he was the opposite of the person you are, in pretty much every way, Simon.” She explained, not even batting an eye at the casual insult. “He was tall and strong. He was brave and selfless. His previous life had been cut short when he defeated the Archdemon, and I told him that he could have whatever sort of life he wanted as a reward for doing so much good for so many.”

Helades stopped for a moment, just before the volcano looming over both of them rumbled to life. Its eruptions had been a constant background noise since Simon arrived in this city, but blasts that were loud enough to block out speaking like this had been a rarity. It must be getting worse out there, Simon thought.

“Do you know what he asked for?” she asked when the noise died down, smiling sadly.

“A bigger challenge?” Simon tried, taking a stab in the dark while he fumed about her comparison. If he was really the opposite of whoever this loser was, that would make him short, weak, cowardly and selfish, which obviously wasn’t the case. She just enjoyed picking on him like everyone else had.

“In a way, he did,” she answered, nodding her head slowly. “He told me he wanted to be born into a world that needed no hero. A world so peaceful and kind that he could simply enjoy life. I sadly had to inform him that such a world did not exist, and that even across the infinity of worlds I had access to, there would always be some darkness, and a need for champions to rise to the occasion.”

“Since this world did not exist, he asked to make one. He asked me to build him a great challenge so that he could cleanse the world, and then once that was done, he could be born anew within it.” She laughed then, and in that fiery light coming from the fire outside the palace, he could barely recognize the beatific goddess that he’d first met when this all started. “Can you believe it? What a crazy thing to ask? The chance to fight all the evil in the world? Such a thing could not be done, of course, but I realized it would be possible to change just the most pivotal moments in history and usher in a golden age that might be so long as to seem endless.”

“So every level in the pit is one of those moments?” Simon made no attempt to hide how stupid that sounded. “What do a bunch of rats in a basement or a few goblins in a cave have to do with changing the future or making the world a better place?”

“Even for a hero like him, such a feat would be extremely unlikely. So, to help him in the epic quest he sought, I wove the reality knot, that bound the infinite possible versions of this world together,” she continued, ignoring his question. “That way, he would have an infinite number of chances to create the world he sought to live in.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“So what happened?” Simon asked flippantly. “If he was such a great hero, shouldn’t the knot have unraveled after a few attempts into a nice happily ever after?”

“That was the plan,” she agreed sadly. “He should have been free a long time ago, but things… well, they didn’t turn out well, and so the pit is still here with you, and all the other souls trapped within it.”

The silence settled heavily over both of them, and Simon looked to his feet, trying to find the right way to break the awkward moment without sounding crass. Finally, he decided, and said, “Look, I don’t want to shit on this guy, but…” his words trailed off as he looked up and saw that the throne Helades had been sitting in was now empty.

“What a bitch,” he swore under his breath as he walked to one of the closest windows and looked at the city below. Most of it was on fire now, and the lava had long since cut him off from the bulk of the city.

It was beautiful, in a terrible sort of way, Simon thought. It was like a classical painting, not a real place. A painting wouldn’t have the smell of sulfur or the screams of the dying, though, he reminded himself as he tried to focus on what the goddess had said. It raised more questions than answers, and honestly it was pretty dumb of her to set something like this up in the first place. To trap someone in a place where they would die over and over again until they finally succeeded, it was…

Simon shook his head to clear it as he suddenly realized he was getting a bit too close for comfort to describing himself. What he’d done had been totally different from what the original hero had done, though. In that way at least they were total opposites. Still, the thought didn’t bear more thinking about right now, he decided, as he moved over to the portal to the eleventh level. If Helades was going to leave him hanging, that was one thing, but the last thing he was going to do was let her distract him and ruin his streak.

Walking up the portal, he had no better idea what he would be facing than when he saw it from afar. It was a dark forest at night, and though there seemed to be a thunderstorm in the distance, it was only drizzling where he was right now.

Simon thought about waiting here for the storm to die down completely, or for morning to dawn. He was sure that a city being destroyed by a volcano was a pretty big history altering sort of deal, but he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it. Even if he had an ice spell, there was no way he could cast it enough times to stop a volcano.

After a few more minutes of waiting, though, another large earthquake rocked the palace so hard he had trouble standing. That was what finally forced him out into the cold, wet darkness. As much as he didn’t relish the idea of fighting anything blind like this, getting rained on beat the hell out of being boiled alive when the eruption finally turned into a pyroclastic cloud, so with his sword and shield at the ready, Simon walked into the portal without looking back.

The forest was a damp, towering monstrosity, that felt more like the redwoods he’d visited once than the forest he’d navigated around the cabin or the temple he’d discovered since he’d been here, and there were no real landmarks to show him which way he should go for once, so this time he just went straight. He used the few glimpses of the moon he could occasionally see through the canopy and the patchy cloud cover as he stomped through the ferns that were almost as tall as he was.

The first hint that he had that he wasn’t alone was the screech that suddenly shattered the night. Simon looked around, shocked that the wyvern had somehow followed him, and expecting an attack at any moment, but nothing assaulted him except for the drizzling rain.

“It’s just the wildlife,” he told himself quietly as he continued on. Even forests in the real world were filled with all kinds of dangerous critters and strange noises. He’d learned that in the few months his parents had forced him to be in the scouts, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise. It was just a shock. That worked until he heard something crashing through the underbrush not far from him.

Leaning as close as he could to a nearby tree as he tried to figure out if the creature was moving towards or away from him. When he realized it was getting louder and louder, he held his breath. Moments later, a large dark shape burst out of a large clump of ferns not far from him.

In the darkness, Simon couldn’t make out what it was, but from its outline and its size, the only creature he could compare it to was a brown bear. For a long moment it looked around the area, its large golden eyes shining as they picked up the barest fragments of light, and then suddenly it was gone again, charging off in a different direction.

It wasn’t a coincidence. Simon was sure of that much. That thing was hunting him, and the last thing he wanted to do was give it a chance to try again, so he slowly counted off ten seconds to give himself a head start, and then he bolted, not even trying to be quiet. He just ran in the opposite direction as if his life depended on it.

A few seconds later, he heard the thing screech again. It was back on his trail, and that fear made him run that much faster as he tried to find the easiest path through the moonlit forest. Soon enough, he could hear it somewhere behind him, crashing and thrashing through every plant in the forest as it tried to catch its prey.

Up ahead, Simon saw some light, and he pumped his legs even quicker to try to reach it. Maybe there would be people there - someone that could help him, or a place to hide. When he broke through the final wall of underbrush, though, it wasn’t a building, or even people. It was the scene of a massacre.

Ahead of Simon was a deserted dirt road littered with half a dozen dead bodies, along with a couple of horses that had been practically ripped to pieces, and the remains of two wagons. The one to his left was on its side, and the one to his right was smashed to bits.

He had no idea what could have done this, but when the thing that was following him finally broke through the woods behind him, he had a pretty good idea. It was an owlbear, and Simon would have no trouble believing that its beak and talons could have done all the damage he was seeing. Simon dropped his sword and picked up the pike of a dead man before he whirled to face his enemy. For something this big, he definitely needed more reach than a longsword could hope to provide.