Death After Death PLUS 205-207

Ch. 205 - Enemies at the Gate

By the time he reached the palace steps, it was worse than he feared. There were almost no defenders left, though, in the swirling scrum of combat, it was hard to say for sure. Everyone was wearing the same uniforms. 

Simon didn’t worry about that yet though. Instead, he looked around for anyone that looked strange. There were certain to be other mages here, and as soon as he made himself a target, he would be a deadman unless he found them first. 

So, instead of opening up with pyrotechnics and killing the men nearest to him, he stood there, content to look like an old man with a sword who was way out of his depth as he studied the crowd. It took only a moment to find a dark-skinned man in robes near the gatehouse. He stood out like a sore thumb against the armored units that filled the plaza, and Simon instantly muttered, “Dnarth Vrazig,” striking him down with a bolt of distant lightning. 

The bolt from the blue did little besides kill a few other men near the enemy warlock, but the explosion that engulfed the warlock when he died knocked back dozens more men, tossing them like rag dolls. Simon had been counting on that strange death-activated magic. However, even as the inferno caused combat to cease for a moment and everyone wondered what happened, Simon ignored it. Instead, he was already searching for his next opponent. 

He found him across the yard near one of the walls. This one had figured out what was going on and had locked eyes with Simon in his final moment. He was too slow, though, and even as he opened his mouth, another lightning bolt was racing down from the sky. This one was also followed by an explosion. 

Suddenly, the attacker’s momentum was gone as they tried to figure out who was attacking them and from where. A moment ago, they had been moments from victory, and now that was in doubt. 

As all of this happened, Simon realized that he should probably be standing behind cover himself. True combat was not yet joined, but he was already in a sniper’s duel of sorts. 

It was only after another minute had passed and he found no other targets that Simon entered the fray on his own. He had to. Not only were there dozens and dozens of men already in the courtyard, but the legion he’d seen earlier was approaching the main gate, and he needed to drop the portcullis. 

There was no way for him to do that from hundreds of yards away, though. Even a major, distant word of force wouldn’t bite through the thick chains of the gates with this much distance between them. He didn’t have a mathematical model for magic yet, but there was definitely a sharp fall-off past a certain point, which meant he needed to cut a bloody swath through the field and get closer. 

At first, this was accomplished with his sword. He cleaved right through the first few men to cross his path in quick, casual strokes that severed heads and arms. He saved real magic until the alarm was raised, and he faced a wall of swords and shields. That was when he unleashed his true fury. 

“Gervuul Oonbetit!” he called out, using a greater word of force. 

This was not to blast them all away, though. This was a guillotine, and it rippled out and away from him in all directions like a drop of water in a still pond. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the twenty men arrayed against him came apart at the seams. 

Simon couldn’t enjoy their looks of terrible surprise as the survivors lost limbs and friends. Instead, he immediately cast a boundary of force to deflect the arrows that would certainly be fired at him next. He would have preferred to carve that one in the stone of the courtyard to make it longer lasting, but he could hardly stand still and wait for people to come to him. He was still only halfway across the corpse-strewn courtyard.

That was the sixth spell he’d cast in almost as many minutes, though, and even as Simon whispered his seventh, which was a word of lesser healing, to soothe his already aching throat, he could feel it taking a toll. 

How long has it been since I let loose like this? He wondered as he cut down another man brave enough to face him with his enchanted sword. 

There was only one answer to that question, of course, and that was the dual on the volcano rim so long ago. In this timeline, it was about a decade and a half in the past, but for Simon, it was decades and one life in the rearview mirror. 

It felt good to flex his muscles like this, but it was worrying too. Even in all his lives, he could still count the number of times he’d fought like this on one hand, and he knew well how unsustainable it was. He’d probably already slain fifty people, but because more kept coming, little had changed, except that now everyone was focused on him. 

Still, there was nothing he could do but watch arrows deflect harmlessly away from him as he cut down foes and continued to advance. When he neared the gates and could see the chains, he saw another warlock advancing alongside the unit that was already entering, and he wasted a precious moment, along with another month of his life, to strike that bastard down, too. This one must have known that there was some trouble because he had some sort of protective magic up, and it deflected the bolt wide, killing a swath of armored men instead. 

Simon blinked at that. Well, that’s new, he thought, even as he switched tactics. He cast again, but this time, he used a greater word of distant fire. The result was a tiny tornado of flames that descended on the man. He’d cast some kind of flame spell, too, but he either didn’t know the distant word or he’d chosen not to use it because the enemy warlock's flame fell well short of Simon even as the enemy caster was consumed by fire. 

That one did enough damage to his throat that he coughed up blood for a moment and very nearly lost his life when a brave young soldier tried to take advantage of his moment of distraction. He didn’t succeed. 

One could not parry a sword with an infinitely sharp edge. So, he lost his life right as the secondary explosion sent the unit marching toward Simon into chaos. He died bravely, at least, which was more than Simon could say about almost everyone else at this point. Few people dared to approach him now. He didn’t blame them. 

When he finally reached the gatehouse, his chest was heaving from exhaustion, but he let that delay him only a moment before he said the painful words of greater force in an attempt to shear them in half and bring the portcullis down. 

It didn't work, though, and he only coughed up blood for his effort. I thought that would be enough, he said, looking as the sheered through arm thick steel links. 

One side was cut clean through, and that seemed to be enough to force the other side to bend, yet it didn’t. It was too high for him to reach with his blade, too, and if he leaped up with a word of force, the enemy would definitely spot him and redouble their focus on him. 

Annoyed, he used a word of lesser healing on his throat as he contemplated his options. Another greater word is out, he told himself. And a regular word of force won’t cut it. What does that leave me. I don’t really need to cut it. I just need to weaken in a little and…

Simon’s words trailed off as he realized that if he needed to weaken metal, then he could just use the words of weaken metal and watch the thing warp and corrode over several seconds.  Then he said the painful words, “Vrazig Vosden.” 

The spell had no visual effect, but the entropy was apparent immediately as the steel began rapidly corroding. After that, all he needed to do was hold the line and wait for it to fail under its own weight. 

I’ve won, he thought to himself. No, we won.

Even if the gate hadn’t dropped yet. It would. He could already hear the chain creaking under the heavy weight, and even if someone struck him down right now, he would still seal the palace away from the advancing forces long enough to let the defenders regroup. 

But will that be enough? He wondered. 

The three Murani warlocks he’d struck down already had surely been central to whatever conspiracy was happening here, but what if there were more. When Simon was spent, couldn't they just force the gates back open? Part of him thought that he should stride out there and continue to do battle for as long as he could. It thought he should purge the city of every last traitor, but the rest of him knew that he was approaching his limits and that he should lie down.

He couldn’t do that yet, either. All he could do was stand at that threshold, fighting and waiting for the damn gate to drop. 

“He’ll be a good King,” Simon told himself as he stopped relying on his sword even a little. Instead, he switched to purely destructive magic. Even a blood-sucking dagger or a sword that could slice through steel bordered on useless when they were wielded by arms of lead. 

So, instead, he used lightning and fire. He didn’t even bother to try to use major words anymore. He was too spent for that. Instead, his world narrowed to a simple rhythm. Simon would shout a word of power and then whisper the words of lesser healing to fix his throat. 

Simon had done a lot of things before. One thing he’d never done, though, was use so much magic in such a short period of time, and it was taking a toll. Still, he promised himself he would stand there forever until the damn gate closed. It would be any second now. He could see the chain link starting to stretch and deform as it parted. 

No matter how good his pronunciation or how precise he imagined the effects, every word burned as he spoke it now. Still, the men opposing him died by the score, and the few arrows shot in his direction scattered off the boundary of force protection he’d established earlier. 

Simon couldn’t keep fighting, though, not forever. No one could. Eventually, he couldn’t even gasp another light healing spell to soothe his burning throat. He’d burned so brightly and for so long that when the portcullis finally slammed shut inches in front of him, he had no strength left to him. First, his dagger slipped from his grasp, and then after one more slash from his sword, it fell as well, tumbling end over end until it embedded in the stone of the courtyard. 

I couldn’t have used thirty years of power in this battle, could I? He wondered, staggering against the gatehouse. 

A few men still alive in the courtyard eyed him warily, like he might have some trick left up his sleeve. He didn’t, of course. The only trick he had left was to stay standing. 

“If you run… If you jump the walls and flee the city, I may not send you straight to hell with the rest of your friends,” Simon croaked with a ruined voice. As painful as speaking was, at least these words didn’t burn his fraying vocal cords when he said them.

That was all it took. Suddenly, the few scattered survivors were running for their lives. Simon had nothing left, but how could they know that. He’d slain hundreds of men, and those few who remained wanted to live. 

As the retreat of the men arrayed against him threatened to become a rout, he finally lost the ability to stand as well, and he slowly sank against the wall until he was just sitting there, leaning against the cool stone. As he sat there, he took in the carnage of what he’d done, but even that wasn’t enough to make him regret it. If this makes me a murderer, then so be it, he decided.  

His only regret was that he hadn’t locked in this level in a way to save the progress. That meant that everything he’d done to raise Seyom was gone, and the idea of reliving all of this just to try to raise him even better was too heartbreaking and complicated. “If only I’d killed that damn wyvern,” he whispered to himself as the darkness took him.

Ch. 206 - The End of the Beginning

After he collapsed at the end of the last battle, as disappointing as it was, Simon expected to wake up in his cabin all over again. That’s not what happened.

Instead, he drifted in and out of sleep in a bed that was much more comfortable and far too white to belong to him. It occurred to him only after several days that he was not, in fact, dreaming it. He was lying in a bed somewhere in the palace. He could barely move, and even opening his eyes was too much work at first, but in time, he could feel the Elthena’s dry, cool hands holding his. Eventually, he could even squeeze them back, but only softly. 

It turned out that she’d been talking to him the whole time, but it took days to differentiate that from the background birdsong or other people speaking in the same room. He had to focus to a painful degree to understand even part of what she was saying. He didn’t need to understand her to know that they’d won, though. If they hadn’t, the sound of birds would have been replaced by the sound of battle, and the smell of Elthena’s perfume would have been lost in the smell of burning. 

In a way, the fugue state he was trapped in felt like brain damage, and that idea sent a chill down his spine. Given that he could still think and reflect when he was half asleep, though, it was probably something closer to exhaustion, complete and utter exhaustion.

He was certainly tired. He’d burned through years, or perhaps decades, of life in a single hour. He’d channeled enough energy that he should have become a bonfire himself, but somehow, he did not. Somehow, he didn’t even die, but he was dying now; he was sure of that much. 

In the days that followed, even as some parts of him healed and his mind became clearer, other parts of him, like his heart and his lungs, labored ever harder to keep up. He’d burned through an entire season of his life just to win a single fight. But I did win it, he told himself. That’s all that matters. I won. It would have been worth it at twice the price. 

It took days for him to be able to meaningfully interact with the woman who should have been his wife or the boy that was his son. Each of those moments was brief because sleep was always chasing at his heels, but they were still nice. Most times, he would wake up to find Seyom or Elthena sitting by his bedside. Whether this meant that they were always there or he only awoke when they were, Simon couldn’t say, but he found their presence infinitely comforting. 

All he could do was bask in their affectionate words or listen to them offer updates on the situation. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was answer them. His efforts had completely fried his vocal cords, and when he tried to talk now, only hacking coughs came out. 

So, he stopped trying to answer. Part of him regretted that he couldn’t tell them to burn his papers or destroy his weapons, but he didn’t let that bother him too much. His notes were cryptic enough that copying them would be difficult. Instead of worrying about what he wanted to say or do, he simply did his best to bask in the time they had left together because he knew it would be over soon. 

Then, one day, he fell asleep, and he never woke up again, at least not in Ionar. He lingered there between life and death, lost in the darkness for a long time. Or, at least, long enough to be frustrating. Eventually, though, when he woke up, it was on the same lumpy bed that it always was. 

He felt whole and rejuvenated when that happened, but he also felt greatly saddened by it. He’d finally gotten a perfect sort of life, and then he’d lost it. “That’s just the way of these things,” he muttered, testing his voice even as he reached for the bottle of wine. 

He sat there in silence for a long time this time. He didn’t ask the mirror questions, nor did he try to drown his sorrows. Instead, he just reflected on his life and what he might have done differently. Would it have been worth pressing myself less hard to spend more time with them? He wondered. If he could have been victorious with less effort, then maybe. He supposed that his real mistake in all of this might have been urgency, but if he’d pushed himself less hard, he still would have been laid up for days or weeks. If our enemies would have regrouped in that time, well… 

He let that question linger. He had no good answer for it, and the more lives he lived, the less interested he was in second-guessing himself. Even if he made a mistake, fixing it would be difficult or impossible, and getting caught in that loop was a trap. In this case, at least, he couldn’t revisit that moment because it no longer existed, which made things easier but also more heartbreaking. 

Simon studied his socks with an intensity usually reserved for facing down dire opponents in that moment as he struggled not to cry. Then, when he’d mastered the emotion, he got up and said, “Alright, Mirror, you know the drill, show me my character sheet.”

The mirror complied and brought up the sheet in its faint blue writing. 

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

Deaths: 43

Experience Points: 3,084

Skills: Agriculture [Below Average], Archery [Below Average], Armor (light) [Below Average], Armor (heavy) [Poor], Armor (medium) [Below Average], Art [Excellent], Athletics [Below Average], Baking [Below Average], Cooking [Below Average], Craft [Excellent], Deception [Below Average], Escape [Poor], Fishing [Average], Healing [Excellent], History [Excellent], investigate [Excellent], Maces [Average], Navigation [Above Average], Research [Excellent], Ride [Average], Search [Average], Sneak [Average], Spears [Below Average], Spell Casting [Excellent], Steal [Poor], Swimming [Below Average], and Swords [Above Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum (disperse, minor), Barom (illusion, light), Celdura (plan, shape), Delzam (cure, order), Dnarth (connection, distant, hidden), Gelthic (ice, death, weakness), Gervuul (greater, power), Hyakk (flesh, healing), Karesh (location, protection, understanding), Meiren (creation, fire, life), Oonbetit (focused, force, motion), Uuvellum (anti-, null, boundary), Vosden (earth, growth, metal, strength), Vrazig (lightning, ruin, quickening, wind), Zyvon (transfer, plants, water)’

He reviewed the whole sheet with passing interest, but his mind wasn’t really on it, so it took a while to notice that his experience total had finally turned positive. “Huh, well, that’s not the silver lining I was expecting,” he said to himself, “but I’ll take it.”

Truthfully, he still had no idea what that was for beyond an indicator of how miserable he was. He occasionally thought about asking Helades, but after the last way she’d cut him to ribbons with the mirror, well, he’d wait until it was more important. He’d long since learned the truth. The mirror showed him these things because he thought that they were important. What she thought was important, and the Pit thought were important, though, were entirely different. 

Other than clearing levels, he wasn’t sure exactly what either of them thought were important. He didn’t need the mirror to show him what he needed to do there, at least. He had to decide when he was going to purge the Darkheart on level 4, which would certainly unlock several or perhaps many levels after that. Then he had to kill a wyvern and deal with the fallout of helping Aaric escape. After that, it was back to the dragon and the vampire, along with whatever else unlocked as a result. In theory, it was a short list, but there was nothing simple about it. 

“The real problem is the Darkheart,” he said aloud as he worked through the problem. “The right thing to do is to do all of the floors in order so they can’t reset and screw me over later, but if I do that, I’ll probably reset all of Ionar. Am I really okay with that?”

It had to be done someday, but even if he never got to relive the life he’d just finished living, the idea of erasing it in his quest to go deeper struck him as entirely too soon. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet, and for as long as he wasn’t ready to do that, going deeper into the Pit was probably a fool's errand. 

“I could go try to learn more about the dragon,” he suggested to himself before taking another sip of wine. “That at least would be useful. Maybe this time, instead of trying to kill it, I can try to save it and see what that does.”

The idea of trying to save a dragon made him chuckle, which was useful in that it finally cracked the feeling of despair that he was shrouded in. He’d probably get cooked for his trouble if he tried, but he was kind of in the mood for a throwaway life anyway. 

“If I’m going there, though, I need to get in better shape because I’ll never make it in time like this.”

Simon had no idea why the start of the level was so far away from the finish, but it certainly made it an oddity. Most levels had entrances and exits within fifty feet of each other. Only a few, like the owlbear level, were spread out, and that was presumably to make sure that he found the wreckage of the caravan on his way to the covered bridge. 

“If I had one level to go back and do again, it would probably be that one,” he decided as he put on his boots and forced himself from bed. “Saving them wasn’t enough. Something bad happened to those kids down the road, and fixing that would do a world of good.”

He didn’t feel that way about a lot of levels, of course. Usually, it was just the places where he’d left loved ones behind that stuck with him, but in a few, he felt like he could have done more. His most recent life made even that outlook more complicated. 

After all, all of his good deeds had allowed a war to happen that he was pretty sure hadn’t happened before. If it had, it would certainly have been smaller in scope before his meddling. That further reinforced that the good and evil of everything he did was ambiguous at best. It also further drew into question what Helades whole point was.

Simon wasn’t about to get bogged down into that quagmire, though. He’d already decided on his current quest: get his fat ass in shape. That was going to be done with magic, of course, but given how much power he’d channeled recently, he was still feeling a bit fragile. It was probably all in his head, of course, but he wanted to try some new things he’d decided against in the battle for Ionar, and he had a ready supply of goblins he could burn, which would certainly take his mind off of everything that had just happened.

Ch. 207 - Getting Into Gear

Mentally and Morally, Simon was deeply opposed to blood magic, but after he’d seen what the Murani had done with some of their spells, he understood the appeal. Whether he was willing to do something like that to an actual human was out of the question, but a goblin was something he was more open to, even if he hadn’t decided one way or the other. 

Thanks to the coma he’d drifted in and out of for who knew how long, what should have been a desperate need to devour their life force was just the slightest tickle at the back of his skull. That wasn’t the driver. It was that he’d allowed secrecy to stymy his creativity in his final years in Ionar. Until that final battle, he’d worked hard to keep his secrets under wraps for reasons that were both personal and political. 

If he’d had the chance to run back to his rooms, he could have retrieved some of the rune-carved arrowheads he’d crafted to try. They weren’t quite grenades or shoulder-fired missiles or anything, but it would have been fun to see them in action just the same. Simon had other ideas, too. Honestly, he probably had too many. He still wasn’t sure how far he wanted to go down the road of magical warfare, but he did kind of want to test some of his ideas out on the little green vermin while they were around. 

They could help him lose weight. He definitely needed that. Being back at the beginning of things felt like he’d been shoved into someone else’s body. He no longer recognized, or even identified with, who he’d been when he’d come here.

It is nice to feel young again, though, Simon thought as he walked outside and into the sunlight.  

He’d felt old for so long that he’d kind of forgotten what it was like. He’d just stayed fiftyish for a decade. Even with his excess weight now, he could feel the difference in his joints and in his lungs, and for a while, he just stood there, feeling the breeze and the heat of the sun play upon his skin.

It was only when he felt revitalized that he walked to the stream. This time, it wasn’t to fish or get some cool, clean water. He just wanted that soft, clean sand to draw in as he tried to come up with the right tool for the job. 

He had a sword and a dagger, and though neither one was of particular quality, they were both acceptable enough to be imprinted with magic. The question was what spell to fix them with. Having grown old more than once now, Simon was becoming stingy with his years, and he wasn’t so happy to fritter them away as he had in the past. 

“Age catches up to you quick, even on runs where my not-wife doesn’t make me wait a for A FUCKING DECADE to see my son,” he grumbled to himself. 

When he arrived at the river, he found a rock in a shady spot to sit on and said, “Okay, mirror, bring up my notes on Meiren.” 

This was another trick he hadn’t discovered until he’d been fifty for three or four years. Calling the mirror did not require a physical mirror. It only required a reflective surface. A stream wasn’t ideal because it made the letters blur at times, but now that he had good eyes again, that hardly mattered. 

He studied his notes for a moment and drew a few lines on the bank nearby. Then he brought up Vosden, Hyakk, and Celdura and made a few more notes. Up until now, he’d always used drain to drain literal life energy for himself, but that had been from convenience as much as habit. In his last life, all he’d really needed was to stay a little younger, a little longer. 

He’d done experiments that had transferred other things, though, like heat and hardness. He’d been able to make a steel chest piece as fragile as glass and a cotton frock as hard as leather in that way. So, he knew he was only nibbling around larger ideas. 

So, if he wanted to go pay the dragon a visit, he was going to try siphoning physical health, strength, and fitness from the little green bastards. “Maybe that won’t be quite so addictive,” he told himself. 

The fact was that even as good as Simon was at drawing human anatomy at this point, he still didn’t trust himself to alter his own fat and muscle cells without mutilating or crippling himself. That was something that the body needed to sort out. He just needed to give it the resources to do it. 

So, he spent the afternoon sketching in the soil with a stick, and when he had a good idea of what the final rune needed to look like, he returned to his cottage to work out the final formulation. He did this by mixing a little water with wood ash to create something closer to paint than ink and then drawing the final design carefully on his mirror. That took an hour, and since it was so complicated, he opted to make the designs on the opposite faces of the blade different to spread out the impact. 

In the end, when he finally sat back to appreciate it, he was satisfied by what he’d made. It was certainly one of the most complicated works of artifice he’d made so far, and if he’d had to construct the thing with acid and clay, he probably would have had to try a dozen times to make it with magic that wouldn’t be a problem. 

The front side held Aufvarum Zyvon Hyakk Vosden, but the back side was marked with Aufvarum Aufvarum Zyvon. While he expected the main rune set of lesser transfer of health and strength to do the lion's share of the work, he also included the crippled alternate rune of lesser lesser transfer as well. 

It was very inefficient. What he needed was a way to use greater drain in a single thrust and then harvest that energy for later use, either as to give him a day of life every day or else to fuel the spells he cast. He just didn’t know how to do that yet. He’d figure it out, though. Every experiment like this was one step closer in the grand scheme of things. 

When the runes were ready, he stilled his mind and meditated on his sword for several minutes. It was only when he could see the glowing designs on the surface of the chipped blade that he finally said the words, “Celdura Vosden.”

Part of him feared the pain of casting magic again, but with a new throat and a new life, there was no sting, and the magic rippled out from him harmlessly, changing nothing except for the composition of metals in his blade in a very precise pattern. 

Simon studied both sides, noticing the way that the silver and steel glinted slightly differently in the light. Then, once he’d done that, he pronounced himself satisfied and started to don his armor. He hated the way the tight leather made him feel like it was a sausage casing around his body, but there was nothing for it. Maybe after I kill a couple of goblins, things will start to loosen up a bit, he thought. 

When all was in preparation, he started a fire and cooked one of his sausages. This wasn’t for eating, though; it was for bait. Once it was half cooked and sizzling, he tied it to some twine and then went out into the dark woods to find a likely tree branch to secure it to. 

As he went, Simon observed that things got darker and darker until he could hardly see at all unless he was looking up toward the sky. When the foliage got thick enough that even that didn’t work, he finally whispered, “Aufvarum Barom Oonbetit.” And watched the world spring back into focus. 

The spell was essentially the opposite of the limited invisibility spell he'd invented a couple years ago. Rather than making his body repulse light, though, his eyes attracted the limited light of his current surroundings, making everything that much brighter. He imagined that they probably reflected creepily right now, like a cat's eyes, but he wasn't particularly interested in hiding right now. He wanted the bastards to find him.

The magic made things a touch hazy at first, but after only a few seconds, he could see almost as well as he might in daylight. On some level, it felt like the waste of a week, but he hated being bitten by goblins, and it cost him less to cast lesser light focusing on his retinas than it would to cure and heal wounds after the fact. 

“Of course, I won’t be able to go back to the cabin for a few hours,” he thought to himself, but then, he didn’t plan to. He planned to spend hours murdering goblins and seeing what that did for his lackluster physique. While he didn’t want to look like a body builder or anything, he would settle for not looking like the Doughboy.  

Simon didn’t have to wait long for the first goblin to show interest in the smell of cooked meat. That’s probably how they eventually find my cabin, he thought to himself as he watched the vermin approach. 

Unfortunately, it never got its meal. Instead, Simon waited for it to reach the tree and start climbing before he pinned it to the bark with his blade. He didn’t even try to kill it with that first stroke. He just let it scream and rage helplessly while he focused on the sensations coursing up his sword arm. He felt the trickle of pure life essence, as he expected, but he felt another stranger sensation, too. It was too little to say for sure that it was working as expected, but it was definitely the first sign that it might be. 

If it turns me into the incredible goblin hulk, I can always reset the hard way and start over, he told himself. He didn’t want that. He didn’t even think it was likely, but when one started working with fuzzy concepts, it certainly wasn’t impossible. Simon supposed that siphoning intelligence, skills, or even more intangible things like Karma or Memories off of other humans might be possible with a similar spell, but he had no intention of trying. At least, he had no intention of trying yet. He could replace his body, even if it became a zombie, but his mind? If he screwed that up, it was screwed up forever. 

I’m still dealing with problems because of Helades stupid potion, he thought dispassionately as he watched the goblin weaken visibly. 

After half a minute of struggling, the goblin’s body ceased its struggles, and Simon released it, letting its corpse flop lifelessly to the ground. It hadn’t contributed much, but it had been an excellent test subject, and it had done its job. It had rung the dinner bell, and even now, he could hear other members of the goblin tribe racing through the forest, howling for blood. 

The goblin life was kill or be killed. Sometimes, he didn’t even think they cared which side they were on, so long as it happened and it was bloody.