Death After Death PLUS 342-344

Ch. 342 - Regeneration

After a short lifetime of training, Simon still didn’t feel ready, but he still opened up the trapdoor and threw himself into the fray anyway. That wasn’t because he was sure he’d be successful, but because he knew he had to sink or swim. Waiting forever, until he was good enough, was a dangerous game, and neither his doppelganger’s magic nor his own training could mend his broken confidence.

You’ve killed the troll before, he told himself. Psyching himself up for what came next. You’ve killed lots of things; wyverns, goblins, and even ogres. All of that was true, but most of that involved magic these days, or at least magic weapons. Right now he had neither, but he’d promised himself that if the village’s smithy was still standing when the troll was dead, he’d at least craft something to help him deal with the orcs. 

Right now he didn’t worry about that, though. He just jumped through the trapdoor and into the level beyond. Crossing the boundary from a vertical entrance to a horizontal exit was difficult, so he left his sword sheathed so he could focus on the lit torches in his other hand. 

Simon succeeded in his attempt to avoid burning himself, but he failed in his effort to do so gracefully, and ended his summersault sprawled out just inside the covered bridge he remembered so well. He was only feet from the troll, and just managed to get to his feet as the thing leveled his angry red gaze in Simon’s direction and growled. 

Simon’s triple torch was nothing like the spray of a greater word of fire, but it was enough to make the thing hesitate, and rather than pounce, it took a nervous half step back as its bulging muscles tensed, letting Simon get a good look at the ugly thing for the first time in a very long time. 

The troll was nearly nine feet tall, with green skin, yellow teeth, and black wiry hair that fell in a greasy mane past its shoulders. No part of it was beautiful. The word he would have used was cancerous, actually, because even the warts that the thing had looked more like malformed tumors to his fairly extensive medical experience now. The monster might regenerate fast enough to live forever, but that growth came at a cost, and that cost was its misshapen anatomy. 

At a glance, Simon could see a lot of anatomical errors. Some of the ribs were crooked, and one of the legs was slightly longer than the other. He didn’t have time to give the troll a thorough examination, though, so he saw nothing that would work to his advantage; he had to act, now before this thing ripped his face off.

So as Simon drew his faithful sword, he thrust the bundle of torches toward the thing, making it take two steps back so quickly that it almost tripped over its own floppy feet. That worked great, but the second he lashed out to strike the thing’s knee ligament to try to fell the bastard, it all went to shit. 

Simon knew he didn’t connect with the delicate joint the way he intended when the blow against bone made his whole arm shake. He didn’t know he’d screwed up, though, until the thing bellowed louder than a church bell and dove at him.

Note to self, it hates pain more than fire, he thought as he tried to get clear of its rage. Had the blow landed as intended, the troll would have crumpled, giving Simon all the time in the world to get around behind it and find some more fatal spot. Instead, all he had done was turn himself from the hunter to the hunted. 

Simon darted between the giant’s legs, noting that the crippling wound he’d tried to give the thing was all but healed. He didn’t get away clean, though, and the troll kicked him with its heel, sending him sprawling toward the town.

Simon ran toward the well, desperate for anything he could put between him and the long loping stride of the troll. He didn’t make it before he felt the monster’s large hands close around his abdomen. Simon sliced down, shearing off a few rubbery fingers, but that didn’t stop it from hoisting him into the air and toward its mouth. 

As the thing thrust Simon into its slavering maw, the most he could do was jam his bundle of torches into the creature’s left eye. That reflexive scream of pain was followed by a bite that acted as an ugly yellow guillotine, ending his suffering almost before it started. 

The darkness passed by almost too quickly for him to register it, but the death he felt. It echoed through him, and when he woke up in bed, with his eyes wide, he could still feel the tingling. Is this some byproduct of my soul still not fitting quite right? He asked himself as he quickly tried to move all of his fingers and toes. When that went well, he sat up and decided that the violent death had probably helped him settle back into his flesh a little better.  

“Well, that didn’t go nearly as well as I would have hoped,” he said to himself as he reached for the bottle of red wine. “I thought I’d at least get a few licks in.”

Some part of him was frustrated that he couldn’t just smite the thing and be done with it. He could, of course. He could destroy it utterly with a few words, but that wouldn’t help his long-term goal, and while he’d tricked the Magi into thinking he had the sight, he doubted he could get away with that in a group of witchhunters. If some of the older members had a finely honed sense of clarity, they’d be able to see the magic in Simon’s every action, so it was best to push that away as quickly as he could.

Simon’s training went better the second time around. That wasn’t because his hands shook less, or because he remembered what it was like to die at the hands of a monster either. It was because he could fight goblins. 

Some part of him had planned to train for another couple months, until he lost weight, but that quickly proved impossible. While the goblins were great for fighting each night, most battles left him with minor wounds, and after only a few nights, he realized that those would quickly become a bigger problem than his flabby ass.

Simon bandaged and disinfected them, of course, but not using magic to simply erase the injury was crippling himself almost as much as not using it to shape his body. Remember the mage hunters, Simon told himself each time he was tempted to use a spell to solve a problem. That helped in the moment, but it did not help him win the fight. 

Unfortunately, nothing else did either. Simon’s second time through the gate, he managed to disembowel the troll, but that didn’t keep it from picking him up and slamming him into the covered bridge like a rag doll, hard enough to shatter his spine. His third attempt went better, but only because he threatened it with fire rather than the sword. That got him almost to the first row of houses, which was where he planned to fight it. Unfortunately, a loose cobble ended all of that, and the troll stomped on him, pasting his internal organs. 

Simon found the whole thing to be frustrating, but less because of his physical infirmities, which were all but gone now, and more about his reliance on magic. He’d thought about it loads of times in the past, but this brought it all home to him in the worst way. What am I really capable of without spells or items? He asked himself as the first fingers of doubt crept in. 

“Anything I damn well want,” he told himself, pushing those doubts away. No matter how many times he died, Simon wasn’t the sort of man to be shaken so easily anymore. Still, as long as he ran from the thing, or fought it, he didn’t have much success. It wasn’t until his sixth death that he combined the two and made real progress. 

By that point he’d become quite adept at the flip from horizontal to vertical, and the troll’s shying away from fire. So, he used those moments to cripple it, at least long enough to get away. The first time he’d had a whole damn pike to do this, and though he considered making one, he’d have a terrible time getting it through the trapdoor. Instead, he threw one of his torches in the creature’s face, and then, when it shrieked in panic, he darted between its legs, leaving his sword in the meat of its calf, and making it run with a limp that exaggerated its already unbalanced legs. 

Well, dart was probably a little generous. In his hopelessly round body, Simon couldn’t dart; that was half the reason he couldn’t escape the thing. A few days of fighting goblins had donealmost nothing to slim him down, and he jiggled the whole way to the first home. Still, that was enough, and it bought him the time he needed to slam the door shut and dive out the window while the troll was chasing him down. 

From there, Simon quickly got rid of his remaining torches, tossing them in the smithy where he could get them later. While he was there, he snagged a mostly finished greataxe that was only sharp on one side to replace his missing sword. Simon wasn’t very skilled with axes, but for a monster like a troll, it might do enough damage to slow it. 

For the next few minutes, he laid low, letting the troll tear apart the house that Simon had vanished into, before stalking around fruitlessly in search of its prey. Simon yelled to get the thing’s attention several times before retreating again, into or behind other buildings, and only once did the beast get close enough that he had to use his axe to remove most of its left hand. 

Simon had planned to lead it into the same barn where it had burned alive last time, but the creature refused to play along. Instead, after the best part of an hour of hide and seek, he managed to get it to the lumberyard. That would have been an easy place to burn it alive as it stalked him between the slabs of drying wood. Sadly, Simon couldn’t use a word of fire to light them up, and he couldn’t carry a torch while he stayed hidden. 

Instead, he had to lure the thing beneath a heavy load of suspended posts that had been abandoned in the chaos, and then cut the rope and drop several hundred pounds of wood on the troll. That wasn’t enough to stop it, but it did stun it long enough that Simon could get close and drive the axe through its throat, all the way to its spine, further taxing its powers of regeneration.

While it flailed, Simon got fire, and then set the wood alight. By then, the thing was half free, so he had to fetch a wood axe and batter it back into submission, at least until the flames were high enough that he was forced to retreat from them with only minor bruises and burns.

As far as his victories went, this one wouldn’t rank, but he was still proud of it. As he watched the thing crisp and writhe, he appreciated that it had all been done without magic, and wondered how much life force one might drain from a troll to power a spell.  

My cleverness and its stupidity had more to do with it than anything, he told himself. As much as he would have preferred to meet the thing in a stand-up fight, he wasn’t there yet. 

That should have been funny, but instead he decided that it didn’t bode well for the road ahead. He didn’t really like that he basically had to use the same strategy he’d used the first time, too. He’d just done it with regular fire instead of words of power. 

“You’re sure you’re going to be able to take out those orcs?” he asked himself. He’d breezed through there one time like Thor and still gotten a skull fracture for his trouble. After this performance, he wasn’t sure he’d have any better luck the second time around. 

Ch. 343 - A Ways to Go

The little town’s name turned out to be Olven’s Bridge, or more simply, Olvens, though Simon didn’t learn that for two days. He spent those first few hours after the troll's death trying to keep the fire from spreading any more than it needed to. After that, he borrowed some food, and then he got to work. 

Despite the fact that the troll had maimed and shredded him a number of times, on the life he’d finally killed the thing, he’d come away almost completely unscathed, and needed little more than a bandage to partially immobilize a slightly sprained ankle. Once he’d taken care of that, though, he got to work. Whoever lived here would be back eventually, and he didn’t want to have to explain too much about why he was carving runes into metal. 

No, this isn’t witchcraft, he told himself as he got to work. Honest, now please put down the pitchforks and torches, and we can discuss this like civilized people. 

The imaginary mob in his head wasn’t very impressed by that, but then he didn’t expect them to be, and after he’d had his soul shredded so recently by a witch or a demon, he really didn’t blame them. Some menaces deserved to be put down like rabid animals. 

Simon chose some very simple designs for this life. Using magic, he could combine many effects into one. He could create a sword that could be strong or sharp, and he could make a dagger that could alternate between life draining and healing, but doing such things manually, well, that would take a long time; simple, single-purpose objects were far easier. They were just a single rune, with one or two interface points depending on the magic involved. 

Of course, even that simplicity required exacting care; the clumsier the rune, the less effective it would be. Something that was noticeably imperfect would only be half as effective, and noticeably imperfect was about as well as he could do right now, without the acids and clays he needed to make something great. 

“Less effective matters less when it’s powered by the life force of the people you’re killing,” he reminded himself as he hammered. Although Simon had quite the wishlist of things he wanted to make, for now, he needed a good sword that could help him slice and dice threats like trolls without resorting to spells, and a weapon he could use to heal. 

Once he had a better situation, he could see about making fancier things like a new divining rod or an amulet that would hide him from other divinatory efforts. He was even considering making himself something that cut him off from magic entirely. It would interfere with his ability to use the very weapons he was making now, but in certain circumstances, it was better to be safe than sorry.

It was his insistent hammering that finally brought the locals to return, at least that's what they told him when they finally made their appearance. At first, it was one family, then two. 

“I thought if the smith had returned, it must have meant… well, who are you?” the first woman asked. 

“I’m no one important,” Simon insisted, “Just passing through.”

No one bought that. Certainly not once he admitted that he’d killed the troll. He’d tried to avoid that. He still had work to do to get himself where he wanted to be for the next level, but as long as they feared that the monster would come back at nightfall, they wouldn’t get out of his hair and insisted that he needed to flee while he could. 

“There wasn’t much fighting,” Simon told them, seeking to downplay his heroic status this time. “I just lured it into a bad spot and then burned it alive. It’s the only way to deal with trolls.”

That news caused a flood of people to reappear. By the fourth day, half of the town’s population had returned, and by the fifth, the smith had come back as well. By then, at least Simon had finished everything he needed to do at the forge, at least for the moment. 

He still had a long way to go with files and polishing cloths to get the marks where he wanted. Then he’d need to conceal them with some molten silver, but that could wait until later. Unfortunately, the longer he stayed, the less time he had. After a certain critical mass, he’d become a fixture at the local tavern and was forced to tell his story every night as new arrivals returned. 

Simon took this last bit as a challenge, and rather than letting the story grow in incredulity as these things usually did, he tried to make himself sound more and more irrelevant. By the end of the second week, the troll basically killed itself in his tale, but no one believed him, and Simon became known for his modesty as much as his bravery. 

When the owner of the lumberyard finally realized that his place of business had been the sole casualty amongst the town, besides the people it had killed on its rampage, he was understandably upset. That attitude was almost enough to put Simon off helping him, but he wanted to be in better shape before he faced off against the orcs on the next level, and helping to rebuild the place he’d burned to the ground was as good a reason as any to stick around for a while. 

It was already autumn here, and would start to get cold soon, but even the depths of winter wouldn’t be as cold as his time in Charia had been, so Simon wasn’t worried, and felling thick trees with an axe and dragging them to the mill with a draft horse was as close to zen as he’d had in a lifetime or two, so he enjoyed that even after it got cold enough that he could see his breath every morning. 

“You know, you don’t have to help Mister Barnet just because he blames you for burning down his yard,” the waitress told him now and then when Simon came back in the evenings to eat. “You could have burned down half of Olvens, and it still would have been worth it to get rid of that troll.”

Simon agreed, but rarely said so. Whenever he did, Hattie would start talking about how he should be rewarded, and she seemed more than happy to be the one who would do the honors if he ever got drunk enough to. As a woman in her thirties she was certainly pretty enough that most men would be honored; she struck him as an older, calmer version of Brenna, but Simon didn’t give in to that temptation, or any of the other temptations that came with being a local hero, especially not once he started really losing weight and looked a bit more like his heroic reputation would suggest. 

Maybe next time I die, I’ll try using a nature-powered spell with a circle, Simon told himself as he watched the pounds melt off slowly, day by day, and resisted the urge to try it right now. 

As he understood it, as long as the magic took place outside of himself, it did very little to affect his clarity, and while the last couple lives had been a useful reminder at how much he hated being like this, he wasn’t sure he had the patience to lose this weight the old fashioned way, ever again. Still, he was committed; he’d never find this Sybil woman without the sight, not when she could hide behind the same sorts of wards that he could. 

Body issues aside, Simon enjoyed his stay in the small town. As long as he spent his days swinging an axe, he could still eat and drink pretty well most nights, so that part was hardly a hardship. He almost enjoyed watching the waterwheel-powered lumbermill, and it gave him several ideas for how he might improve his own future endeavors the next time he needed to make paper or some other industrial commodity. 

Simon ended up staying until the midwinter feast, but that was only because rumors that there might be another troll lurking upstream kept him there. He was ready to leave after his first month, but instead, he stayed long enough to make a divining rod and go on the hunt. It turned out there wasn’t one more troll in the region; there were three.

One was small enough that it did its best to avoid fighting altogether, and Simon had to smoke it out of the small forest crag that was its lair to hack it to pieces. The other two were harder. One made its home in an old coal mine that had been long since abandoned, two days to the southeast. The third lived under a bridge a day’s ride to the north. It hadn’t been safe to cross for years at night, or sometimes even during the day when it was overcast.

It was the third one that was hardest, because it was by far the biggest of the three. It was a corpulent thing that had grown so large that it couldn’t even find a cave wide enough for its bulk.

Simon handled that one last. He fed the second troll a wagon full of dummies that had been made out of burlap sacks filled with slaughterhouse leavings soaked in lamp oil. It wasn’t smart enough to discover the trap, and when Simon set it on fire with a burning arrow, the hardest part of the whole trap was keeping it from running back into the mine. There was no point in burning down a whole coal mine just to kill one lousy troll. 

Compared to those two, the last one was a canny bastard. It had a nose for treachery, and it left Simon’s decoys to rot. He had to try several times to bring it down from where it hid in the murky waters between the stone bridge supports on the far bank. 

Eventually, he was forced to use a mirror to drive it out. He waited until the waters of the River Kojin had frozen completely so it could not easily hide beneath the waters, and then, when the sun was as high in the sky as it would get at noon, he used a pair of large, borrowed mirrors that had been mounted in a small cart and tormented the thing. 

At nearly twelve feet tall, Simon didn’t stand a chance, even now that he was in much better shape. The thing's arms were simply too long. Fortunately, the sunlight did a much better job than even his magical sword ever would. Those sunbeams that probed the shadows made the ugly green monster smoke and sizzle even from a hundred yards away. Each time it would adjust itself, in an attempt to hide, but all Simon needed to do was move his little wagon, and then he was back at it.

These beams of light weren’t enough to kill it, but there were enough to turn vast stretches of its exposed flesh to stone, and by the time night fell, it was a sclerotic beast that moved with all the grace of a hermit crab. 

Not even that was enough to stop it from emerging from its lair to hunt for Simon when the hated sun finally set, though. Against anyone else, those patches of stony flesh might have served as a sort of platemail, but Simon’s blade sheared right through it like it was hard cheese, and he made quick work of the thing now that it had been weakened. He was only struck hard once, when he tried to get greedy and go in for the kill before removing the troll’s last limb.

That leg had given it just enough leverage to send Simon a dozen feet through the air into a nearby elm tree. While it did not survive long to appreciate its minor victory, Simon did let it suffer for longer than it needed to, as he used his dagger to do the Lion’s share of the healing. 

Ch. 344 - Lightning Strikes Twice

Just after midnight, after an evening of dancing and feasting, Simon left Olven’s Bridge via the gateway in their local church and disappeared from the lives of the locals forever. He left behind a short note in his room thanking them for their hospitality, a newly rebuilt lumber yard, and a trail of dead trolls, and took with him only a new pot helmet in addition to the gear he’d already had.

Where he appeared looked largely the same as it had the last time he was here. Then he’d come with a dark grimoire, and he’d almost skipped the fight to head straight to the next level. I only stayed so I could read the damn thing, he recalled to his shame as he looked down the street toward the door that led to the next level.

This time, things were different, and not just because he saw a swamp through that door instead of snow drifts. That could wait. He wasn’t here to complete a level. He was here to kill some orcs, and save some lives, and after that was done, well, he would see. 

Simon drew his sword and took up his shield as he moved toward the sounds of fighting in the center of the village. He’d checked his mirror, and he hadn’t started taking very detailed notes when he’d first come here, but he recalled that there’d been about a dozen last time.

“You screw this up and you’re going to have to try this again without a magic sword,” he reminded himself as he headed toward the sounds of fighting. 

Really, though, the reminder was unnecessary. He’d almost gotten brained here his first go around because he’d thought of orcs as big goblins instead of the terrifyingly strong monsters they’d proved to be in his plains campaigns near Crowvar. Now he had a much healthier respect for them, and while he was curious about things like where the orcs might have come from, or exactly where Rivenwood was, for now he was focused slowly on the enemy.

Before Simon was even halfway to the center of town, the first two appeared out of the smoke from one of the small homes that lined the street. The red blood that splattered both of them left no doubt as to what they’d just been doing. 

Only one of them even saw Simon as he approached them, and he offered Simon a toothy grin as he raised his broken bastard sword for the battle he expected. There was no battle, though. Simon lashed out with his blade at maximum extension, slicing through the blade and the neck of its wielder in a single, silent motion. 

The second orc was only turning to face the two of them as the first orc’s head fell from his shoulders, and Simon struck out a second time. The second orc was too far away for Simon to fully behead him, but he still passed through the orc’s trachea and jugular veins, leaving the thing to choke on its own blood as he moved down the street. 

That was the ideal way these fights could be handled. It was the way he would handle all of them if he could. With a magic blade, he doubted that many orcs stood a chance against him one-on-one. Two on one was closer to fair, but beyond that, things would get dicey, because as much as Simon could dish it out, he certainly couldn’t take it. 

Fortunately, that wasn’t an immediate concern. As he pressed forward, he continued to find orcs in ones and twos. Sometimes they saw him and attacked, but more often they were busy fighting or devouring someone else, making them easy prey. By the time Simon got to eight kills, he was feeling pretty good about that, since there wasn’t much else he could feel good about in a village this ravaged. 

There can’t be too many of them left, he told himself as he moved forward toward the center of things. He was hoping there were four or less, but when he reached the center of the village, he saw five, including one holding a staff that looked suspiciously magical to him. 

Last time I blew up everyone in the square with a lightning bolt, Simon reminded himself. So this guy might have been here last time too, who’s to say? 

Simon made a mental note to interrogate the orc’s soul if he could later. He didn’t even know if that was possible, but he wanted to try. All thoughts of experimentation vanished, though, when he saw what such a large group was doing. They’d heard a whole group of survivors together. Most of them seemed to be kids, and the orcs were about to feast. 

Simon couldn’t let that happen. Even though he knew the right answer was to wait for the group to break up into smaller bands and take them out a pair at a time, he couldn’t wait. 

He sprinted toward the warlock orc first, and took him through the spine before ending that broad swing several inches into the next orc’s chest. That was the point where he should have stepped back, but instead, he stepped over one of the squalling children and charged the next orc as well. 

This one at least saw what happened to it and looked at its club in confusion as Simon sliced right through it, before he fell over dead. He considered going around the circle to the next one after that, but everyone was too ready now. Instead, he took two quick side steps, moving to one side to get the kids out of the line of fire. 

Then he shouted, “Run! Hide! I’ll hold these ugly bastards off!” As a boast, it was a good one, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be successful.

Even after that flurry of fighting, though, there were still three left around him, which was two too many. Worse, they’d seen how easily he’d taken down the first few, and while orcs had a room temperature IQ, they weren’t exactly stupid. They were pack hunters too, and as the three of them spread out to all sides, Simon knew he was fucked. 

Still, he didn’t regret it. Fighting through this again a second time, or even a third, would be harder, but he’d figure it out. He’d memorize where every one of these monsters was and how they fought. 

Better I refight this battle a dozen times than I let one more person die that doesn’t need to, Simon told himself as he charged the orc to his left. 

It was a bad idea, of course. He knew that. The orc was ready for him; he was faster than Simon and stronger than him, but standing there and waiting for all three of them to attack him at once was an even worse idea. 

This time, he lashed out at the hulking green warrior with the edge of his shield. The thing knew enough to fear him, and flinched away, but in this case it was afraid of the wrong thing, and while it was watching Simon’s shield, he flicked out his sword and severed the monster’s leg, just above the knee, before he stepped back. 

Simon pivoted immediately, and even as the maimed orc bellowed in pain, the other two were charging him. He quickly stepped to his left, to limit the charge lanes available to them, and to stay away from the strong hands of the orc flailing on the ground. 

That bought him a few seconds of time, but the orc he was fighting with now had a spear, and he lashed out at Simon repeatedly, fast enough that Simon couldn’t pivot and take up the offensive himself. All he could do was remove the last few inches of the orc's weapon on each strike. 

First, he took the stone spearhead, then the region past it. Still, even dull that weapon was still dangerously thick, and with enough strength, you could get stabbed to death with a baseball bat. 

A few seconds later, Simon found out he was wrong when a feint led to a jab getting through under his shield. A baseball bat couldn’t stab right through you, but it could try, and it would break several ribs in the process. 

It hurt like hell, but even as he took the blow, he grabbed the shaft with his off hand. So, when the orc pulled back, he yanked Simon forward with it, practically off his feet. Simon had been ready for that, but no one else was. Suddenly, he was right in the asshole’s face, but more importantly, his sword was buried in the big orc’s chest. 

The oaf looked at him in surprise, more than pain, as Simon pulled the weapon free with a wide and bloody side slash. That was as far as he got. Even before he turned to face the final orc, he took a club to the side of his head that made his helmet ring like a gong. 

The blow didn’t quite drive him to unconsciousness, but it knocked him hard enough to send him spinning before he fell to his knees. Simon’s shield stayed on his arm, but only because it was fastened to it; his sword left his numb fingers and flew off somewhere into the darkness to clatter off the cobbles. 

Simon was less concerned about that, though, than he was about the ringing in his ears or the taste of blood in his mouth. Even as he struggled through that brain fog, though, he realized what was going to come next, and he raised his shield in time for it to be splintered by a blow that would have taken his head off. 

Simon ignored the fact that his left arm had been broken bad enough that it hung limply at a nearly ninety-degree angle. That was a later problem. For now, he drew his dagger with his right hand, and instead of running, he took advantage of how open the orc had left himself as he pulled back for another overhead deathblow. 

Simon drove that dagger up with all the force he could muster. He didn’t try to stab him in the dick or cut off his balls in some kind of juvenile gesture of defiance, either. He jammed it deep into the meat of the orc’s inner thigh and then let himself fall forward, dragging the weapon down through the creature’s ugly green flesh with the weight of his body. 

He was going for the warrior’s femoral artery, but he had no idea if he got it or not. All he could say for sure was that there was blood everywhere, and the orc’s attack went wide as it roared in pain and staggered back. 

Simon didn’t let go, though. He twisted the knife and waited for the inevitable deathblow. In this position, he was defenseless, and while the life energy that trickled through his blade was easing the fog of the concussion he was no doubt suffering from, that wouldn’t be enough to save him. 

Only that death blow never landed. Before the orc could adjust to the changing circumstances, another warrior charged out of the smoke and the fire that was the north side of the square. He wasn’t alone, either. There was another with him, and a third trailing behind him. 

The tide has turned, Simon thought as unconsciousness clawed around the edge of his vision. It wouldn’t get here soon enough to save him, but it would get here just the same. 

He watched a pitchfork embed in the orc’s chest, followed by a sword. The monster swung widely at the three of them, trying to keep them away, but they were coordinating their attack, so it didn’t have much luck. Simon could hear them shouting to one another, but over the sound of the ringing in his ears, their words were meaningless, and darkness took him even as the orc collapsed on top of him.