Death After Death 165-166

Ch. 165 - Wasted Effort

Simon splashed down in the water, confident that he wouldn’t drown. He didn’t, either. The portal opened beneath him and spat him out almost immediately. Last time, it had reminded him, somewhat uncomfortably, of a flushing toilet, but this time, it was more violent than that, and it took him a moment to figure out why that was the case, though, as he was flung sideways like a rag doll while water splashed around him. 

As he sat there on the dirt path, it came together a piece at a time. He had fallen through a vertical portal but came out of a horizontal portal, causing his trajectory to change ninety degrees as his momentum remained unchanged. 

“Let’s not have any more doors like this, please,” he muttered to himself as he dusted himself off and looked at the opening he’d emerged from. 

He was disappointed immediately. He’d hoped that because he’d already slain the ogre, this portal would dump him much closer to his objective than he had been the last time. That wasn’t the case, though, which meant that the cave he could see was the portal from the last level and that whatever lay inside wasn’t an ogre. 

“Because, of course, it isn’t,” he grumbled as he started walking. 

The last time he’d come, he was beaten and exhausted, but he was younger, too, and he wasn’t wearing 40 pounds of steel. All these factors made it a toss-up, and after less than an hour of hiking, he was already sucking wind. 

I’m not in a hurry, not yet anyway, he tried to tell himself as he struggled to remember just how long he had. He was pretty sure he slept the night there, and the inn wasn’t burned down until the following day. That gave him a day, and he was fairly sure, and though he didn’t have an exact measurement, he was fairly sure that he only had eight or ten miles to go.

“But why does this portal start me so far from my goal?” he wondered aloud to himself. 

That was what he chewed on as he walked. Though there were a few levels he could think of like that, there weren’t many. The village was an awful long way from where he started in the goblin level, for instance.

“But I never really proved that place was the point,” he told himself. “Honestly, it probably isn’t. The point of a level doesn’t seem to be after the exit.”

In this case, he didn’t know where the exit was, so he couldn’t say for sure that he was here to kill a dragon, but it seemed pretty damn likely. “It would be pretty funny if I was here, so close to the dragon, but that wasn’t the point,” he joked to himself. 

That thought was almost enough to make Simon double back and check that cave, but he resisted the urge. Not only was he unwilling to add a couple extra miles to his trip. He also decided it was unlikely that the exit portal would be the way he was supposed to go. He hadn’t yet found an example of that on any of the levels he’d been on so far. 

Still, as the day wore on, things weren’t as bad as he feared they would be. That was only because he had a subtle form of air conditioning built into his armor. Though the weight was still oppressive, he wasn’t roasted by the sun like he expected. Instead, when the metal got hot enough, it activated the runes he’d built for harvesting the heat of the volcano and started to cool him off. 

This took him quite a while to discover because, until that point, he’d been trying to walk in the shade as much as he could, but once he started walking in the sunlight, things cooled off nicely. Simon had been thinking about reworking the whole concept because of the unfortunate freezer burn the last encounter had caused, but given the mild heat, it actually worked quite nicely. It wasn’t enough to make him feel cold or anything, but it kept the heat of the day at bay. 

Periodically, on his rest breaks, Simon would talk to the mirror that he produced from his now much-depleted coin purse. For a while, this was just to tell it everything that had happened in case he needed to remember it in the future. Eventually, though, he went back to asking it questions and trying to understand his current rate of experience decay. 

It couldn’t offer him any concrete numbers in terms of how much life he’d burned with magic or how much life he had left, but for experience, at least, that was easier to study. 

When he asked it what his current total was, it promptly showed, ‘Experience Points: -534,319’. He hadn’t done any day-by-day calculations in a long time, but rough calculations made that feel about right. He averaged a hundred-plus experience a day, and it had been a few years since he’d started this study in Ionar. So, everything seemed to more or less lineup.  

It still wasn’t anywhere close to even, but he was halfway to the finish line and well under the minus one million number that had so terrified the few people who could see his aura up until this point.

“I wonder what it's going to look like when it gets into the positives?” he asked himself. He wished he could see it for himself at that moment. It might make something interesting to paint. 

The mirror responded, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,’ but he just ignored it. 

Simon spent the whole day walking, and by sunset, he still wasn’t at his destination, but at least he could see it in the distance, where the road turned slightly up to the right and went into the valley beyond. He was only a few more hours away, and despite how exhausted he felt, he knew he would make it in time. 

That was when he heard the roar. It echoed through the whole of the valley above him, then down the mountainside to him. That was when Simon saw his first dragon soaring near a peak. 

“No, no, this isn’t supposed to be happening,” he told himself, “Not yet!”

The distant reptile ignored his words, though, and flew down into the valley. It dipped out of sight in that moment, but the wall of fire it unleashed momentarily became a second sunset as the valley was filled with flames. 

Simon’s mind warred between the sadness of all the people who must have died in the firestorm and the memory of having been in it the last time for a moment. Those thoughts were lost, though, when it pulled up and out of the valley. The image he saw then was one that would be burned into his mind forever. 

The dragon didn’t pass close to him, and certainly not close enough for him to try a spell, but even from this distance, it was clear that it was many times larger than the wyvern he’d brought down before. This wasn’t a beast. It was a force of nature, and its giant body covered in scales of tarnished bronze glittered red in the firelight as it soared skyward once more. 

After that, it circled twice and then turned and started flying back toward the mountain. By then, though, Simon was already stripping his armor off, a piece at a time, and tossing it aside into the bushes. He needed to get there to help anyone who could might still be helped. Dragon slaying could wait for later. 

Though his heart was in the right spot, he was already halfway to exhausted, and though suddenly weighing less made it easier, by the time he got to the village, though, there were only scattered fires and ashes. 

Simon looked around and found a few bodies, but strangely, he didn’t find the caravan of dragon slayers he had expected to find up here, devastated along with everyone else. “Did I do something to screw up the whole timeline?” he wondered aloud. 

That was certainly possible. He’d changed an awful lot of things since he was here last, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now. Was he still supposed to kill the dragon? Was he supposed to find that dragon slayer? Was he supposed to slay the dragon alone?

At night, in the dark, there wasn’t a lot he could do. It wasn’t until most of the wildfires had winked out, and he saw a cluster of campfires higher up on one of the mountains, that he thought that was his best lead. 

“It might just be trappers,” he told himself as he started hiking in that direction. “It might be nothing related to you.”

Even as he went, though, he knew he was right. He was pretty sure this was the way to the peak they’d mentioned before. Scribes peak? Quill peak? He couldn’t remember the name, only that it looked kind of like the tip of a quill jutting up against the sky and was supposedly where the dragon’s lair was. If there were survivors in that direction, then they were part of all this. 

Finding them was easier said than done, though. He quickly lost sight of the fires as he started climbing that slope, and it took him ages to find the path higher in the dark. Still, he persevered and eventually heard the wagons he’d expected to find last night as dawn approached. 

When he finally caught up to the long wagon train winding its way up the mountain and warned the first teamster that the village had been burned to the ground and that they were all in danger, the man just laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about that, none,” he answered, apparently not even a little bothered by the news. “Sir Anias has probably already slain the beast.”

“Slain it?” Simon asked, stunned. “Weren’t you listening to me? Didn’t you see it fly overhead a few hours ago? That monster is anything but dead.”

The wagon driver just chuckled at that and said, “That was then. It had its fun, but that time has passed.”

This guy wasn’t making any sense to Simon, so he left him behind and kept going up. Periodically, he would find another wagon. Sometimes, he would even chat with the man driving it up the long, winding road before he left them behind. 

Very slowly, a picture of what had happened came together. The man in charge of this outfit had killed a couple of dragons in his life, though none as large as Icefang. That much he already knew. What Simon hadn’t known until this series of conversations was that it wasn’t anything approaching honorable battle. Instead, he would trick the dragon out of its cave and then set a trap for it so that when it returned, they didn’t have a chance. 

No one seemed to know what this trap was. Some thought it was just a clever ambush, while others were fairly sure that it involved dark powers or a pact with a demon. It wasn’t their department, though. All of these people had apparently been hired to cart off the dragon’s hoard, except for a single group of hunters who said they’d come along to help butcher the giant thing. 

The whole thing boggled Simon's mind. Both that this was something that was actually happening and that it was something he apparently needed to be here for. The whole thing felt like a big waste of his time, but he wouldn’t really be able to say for sure until he reached the mountain peak and saw for himself.

Ch. 166 - Bloodbath

Simon didn’t arrive near the top of the peak by dawn, and by then, he was completely spent. He’d been up for more than a day, counting the ride back to the smith, and half of that time was spent walking around in full plate, which had not been one of his better ideas. 

So, rather than keep going, he found a patch of grass off the beaten path before the treeline and passed out to grab a short nap. His sleep was fitful, and he woke up many times, but by noon, he could no longer sleep, even in the shade. Instead, he got up and kept going. 

It turned out that he didn’t have far to go. He realized that as soon as he saw many of the wagons parked next to each other near the top. A few minutes later, he noticed the giant cave entrance, which led into the creature’s lair, and right after that, he saw the dead dragon lying there. 

It was an awful sight, made even worse by the awesome nature of the beast he’d seen the night before. Even lying on its side, dead to the world, the giant corpse would have covered a football field. From nose to tail, it might even be longer. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t see too well from here. 

What he could see was that it was impossible to see how the dragon had died now because they’d already carved away too much of the corpse. At first, he didn’t really understand what they were doing and why they were using tools more appropriate to felling a tree than butchering a corpse, but then he saw the way they were carefully slicing away the scaled skin and pulling out the teeth and horns. Then, it all made sense. That stuff was probably worth as much as the glittering hoard he could see in the distance. 

Beyond that, though, everything was blood. Blood flowed out of the giant open wounds that these men were carving into it. It was splattered on the walls, sprayed across the treasure, and pooled on the floors so high that the men in boots waded in it up to their ankles. It had been a giant among mortals, but now it was just a giant mess, and lines of men were gathering it up and buckets and then walking out to the edge of a cliff where they were dumping it out. 

As he passed the line of wagons and approached the entrance, one of the men with an air of authority yelled at him. “We aren’t paying you to stand around, old man. If you want a piece of this, get to work. That blood won’t get itself out of there!”

For a moment, the urge to kill the man was strong, just because of the bloody nature of the scene. He resisted, though. If these guys thought he was just another hand, well, there wasn’t a better disguise to get close to things that he could think of, so he went with it. 

Simon spent the next few hours doing exactly what everyone else was doing: dumping the blood of the dragon into the valley below. As the day wore on, a giant flock of carrion feeders gathered above them, making the whole scene even stranger. 

Simon was determined not to be distracted by any of that, though. Instead, he kept his ears open and learned everything he could about what had happened here. People talked freely about it, of course. They talked about how much they were going to get paid and how cool it was that the job was already done. They even talked about how the dragon wasn’t nearly as tough as they thought it would be, and when Simon let them know that the village was no more, his fellow workers shrugged it off. “Just the price of doing business,” someone said. “Better them than me,” another added. 

He was disgusted by those responses, of course, but he tried not to let it show. Instead, he kept his head down and learned, especially about their leader. There was no mystery why Sir Anias was called the Red Knight now. The man had practically bathed in blood. According to some people, he’d slain dozens of dragons, and according to others, it was only his second or third one. 

Simon wasn’t even aware that there were dozens of dragons in the whole world. He’d heard a few stories of them before, and he’d heard a few bards sing about them. Even after he’d read some detailed accounts while searching for information about the Blackheart, he’d consigned them to myth more than a real threat he might have to face one day. He wasn’t sure exactly how he was supposed to face something so huge, though, or for that matter, how the Red Knight had done it. 

Sir Anias didn’t answer that question directly, even though several people asked him in earshot of Simon over the course of the day. He'd even caught the man's eye once; he'd given Simon a weird look but said nothing to him. Every time, all he would do was simply stand there, strike a pose, and say something like, “Everything has a weakness; you just need to know where to look for it,” which was less than useless. 

While Simon did all this, gallon by gallon and bucket by bucket, the floor was returned to something close to dry. After it was merely sticky and slimy with the occasional puddle, some of the men switched to something even worse: hauling off slabs of flesh that that were in the way of gathering the valuable scales and treasure. 

Some of these were set on skewers for the feast that had been planned tonight, but the rest were dumped off the cliffside one at a time. That part was much harder work than the blood and the way that the thing's dead, milky eye looked at his as he did so made Simon feel like a grave robber more than anything. 

That night, they ate well, and the Dragonslayer promised every man they’d receive more than their contracted share. “This bitch had more coin than I ever thought possible. It might take two trips just to get it all down the mountain!”

A wave of cheers went up at that, and the admonishments that “Anyone caught thieving would be thrown off the cliff with the rest of the useless meat did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm.” 

Simon had no enthusiasm, though. He had some of the charred meat just to taste dragon. It was pretty good, and the fact that he’d definitely worked up a hunger with all the hard work over the last couple of days made it even better. Mythological barbecue had never been on his bucket list, but some part of him enjoyed it. 

The taste was largely spoiled for him because of the attitude of the people he was surrounded by. This way of treating such a majestic creature like an industrial strip mining operation left him picking listlessly at his meal. It just didn’t feel right. 

That night, he slept like the dead, and in the morning, they repeated the previous day all over again. This time, they weren’t hauling blood and meat, though, so much as gold and silver. The dragon’s hoard contained many strange objects. This wasn’t limited to decaying chests or gems as large as his fist, either. There were weapons scattered around, along with other items that obviously had magical properties. 

Simon dearly wanted to study those, but when he saw the men destroying the most obvious examples of such priceless artifacts, he knew he’d get treated the same way. I’ll just have to find a way to get at those next time, he thought to himself.

Of course, that thought led to others, and soon, he was wondering if he didn’t have to save the town or kill the dragon at all. Perhaps I just need one of these pieces of treasure for a future level, he thought to himself. Which one exactly, though, was a complete mystery. 

It wasn’t even a mystery he could really solve, not until later levels. He had no firm evidence for this, of course, but he was pretty sure the slime was put there for the zombie level, and the death knight was in front of the volcano level for a reason. He wasn’t about to waste a question to Helades confirming it, but he was sure enough. If that was the case, then whatever was on the next level might well be solved by something in this room. 

The vultures he was working with didn’t seem particularly interested in any of that, though. They just wanted to break anything they were afraid of and melt down the pieces for the gold they contained, and as far as Simon was concerned, that was like burning hundred-dollar bills to get a few pennies out of the deal. 

He did his best to ignore that, though, and focused on the task at hand: carrying gold coins out, one bucket at a time. He might have done that all day if one of the men working nearby had not said, “What the hell?” making him stop what he was doing and look over. 

The other man’s dark, scraggly beard almost entirely hid his look of shock, but Simon could see the whites of his eyes clearly enough to know that something in the chest he’d just opened up had spooked him. “What is it?” Simon asked, trying not to seem too interested. “More evil magic? Human remains?”

“Nuh-uh,” the man said with a shake of his head as he stepped back and gestured at it. “It’s none of that shite. It’s a road or something… I think…”

This piqued Simon’s interest, and he looked and found it was indeed a muddy-looking road on a drizzly day, with a forest in the distance. He didn’t recognize the area specifically, but it was definitely somewhere in the north. There were a few crates scattered around in view, but otherwise, there was nothing visible to give any clues as to what might be going on there. One thing was for sure, though, Simon had found the gate to the next level. 

The fact that it was in the Dragon’s Hoard seemed less than ideal. What if I need to use it again? He wondered. What if this big beasty is alive next time?

Still, he wasn’t about to hesitate now. He had a lot more questions about this level, but he was fairly certain that he could get the answer to some things on the next level and make his next trip here more productive. So Simon said, “Wow, that is crazy. You better go get the boss to take a look at this,” as he closed the lid. “I’ll stay here to make sure no one tries to mess with it.”

The bearded man squinted at him for a moment as he searched for some ulterior motive, but when he couldn’t find one, he just said, “That’s right. Don’t want you stealing my credit for finding this!”

The man waddled off, looking quite pleased with himself, and Simon waited until he was far enough away that he couldn’t intervene. Then he opened the chest back up, shoved a handful of gold in his pocket, and grabbed the closest sword before he dove through and slammed the lid shut behind him. 

Yesterday, Simon had vanished down a well in full view of everyone, and today, it was an ancient treasure chest. I need to stop making this a habit, he thought with a smile.