Death After Death PLUS 294-296

Ch. 294 - Never Alone

For the first few minutes, Simon just enjoyed the change of scenery. As the distant rumble of the volcano faded along with the portal, he listened to the sound of rain softly pelting the leafy canopy above him. It both felt and smelled like peace, and he decided right away, as he pulled his cloak up over his head, that he needed more days like this one. 

While anywhere felt better than being in Ionar, this place felt special to him. He reflected on that as he started walking and decided that was because it had been one of his first real successes, and he was looking forward to seeing the children again. He’d always felt a little bad he hadn’t done more for them. Hell, I’ll escort them the whole way this time, he told himself. 

He was uncertain if he’d stay there for years and years to see what future troubles assailed them, but he certainly might. It had been a long time since he’d set Crowvar to rights, and he might enjoy a life of doing that with a larger city. 

Plus, I can see what else there is to Charia beyond vampires and zombies that way, he thought cheerfully. 

Just putting the volcano in the rearview was enough to improve his mood immensely. He’d have to deal with it again, of course, but that was a problem for him to deal with in another life. 

Simon didn’t allow himself to lose his focus completely in such thoughts, but he’d grown so powerful that he no longer felt the need to jump at shadows, even though he walked with his sword in his right hand and his runed walking stick in his left as he walked calmly through the forest, toward the road. However, after only five or six minutes, he knew that he was completely lost. 

That was annoying since he had no magical location spell to help him find his way. Fortunately, he could see the stars through the trees above him well enough to mark north, which meant that, at the very least, he wasn’t going in circles. 

“I didn’t even think that I could miss the road,” he complained to himself as he looked around for anything that might be familiar. He didn’t have any luck with that, though, and might have wandered around all night if not for the scream that rang out distantly. 

Simon cursed and, turning ninety degrees, ran toward it as he charged through the underbrush. It was the scream of a woman, which almost certainly meant Kaylee. While her death now would be enough to end her part in the massacre that lay a decade in their future, that still wasn’t enough of a reason to see a sweet young girl like her dead. 

The forest seemed interminable, but the screaming didn’t stop, and as he got a little closer, he could hear the irregular screeches of the beast, too. It was definitely the same monster as always, and that thought spurred him on all the harder. 

Fortunately, Simon arrived in time. He burst out of the foliage onto the road fifty yards from the site of the massacre. Instead of devouring children, the big, ugly bird was clawing desperately at the overturned wagon while the screaming continued inside it. The hole the eight-foot-tall super predator had made was big enough for it to get its whole beak in there now, and any second, it would tear the whole thing asunder and devour its quarry.

He didn’t hesitate. “Hey, ugly!” Simon called, leveling his sword at the thing. 

That didn’t get its attention, but the word of distant fire he launched next did. That splashed against the side of the thing’s face, setting its feathers and fur alight. The monster roared with agony and then, half-blind, turned to charge Simon, trailing oily black smoke. 

For just a moment, he was tempted to take it with his sword, but he was too out of practice for that. It was definitely doable. He could feign an attack, pivot around to its blind side, and then hack its spine. If he’d made his sword a vorpal weapon rather than a vampiric one, he probably would have tried it, but he didn’t want the kids he was about to rescue to be devoured when he fucked it up, so instead he used a word of force to behead it before it was halfway to him.

Then, once it stopped twitching, he carefully stepped around it and made his way to the wagon. He didn’t remember exactly how it looked the last time he was here, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t this rough. The thing looked ready to come apart, and he peeked through one of the holes that the beast had gouged with claws and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the boy and his maid were safe. 

“It’s okay,”  he told them both, forcing himself to smile as he remembered how much he’d scared them on at least one of his previous visits. He wasn’t sure which one. “You can come out now. No one’s going to hurt you.”

Both of them looked at him with fear in their eyes, but Simon could hardly blame them for that. They’d been slow to trust him last time, too. At least this time, they didn’t actually see me use any magic, so I don’t have to explain that part, he thought with a measure of relief. Eventually, they crawled out and joined him. Simon tried to stand between the children and the worst of the carnage, but the night did the heavy lifting there. 

“What are we going to do!” Eddek wailed, trying not to cry. “Everyone is dead! How will we live to see the sunrise!”

Simon felt bad for the kid and assured him it was going to be okay. “It’s a terrible thing,” he agreed, “but there’s a miller’s family not far from here. We’ll stay the night there, and then in the morning, we’ll continue on. Charia is not so far away. It's a lot of walking, but we’ll manage.”

“I’m not sure that we should go off with you,” Kayla said. “Eddek’s father will hear of this, and when he does, he’ll send for someone and—”

“I get it,” Simon agreed. “You don’t have to trust me. Maybe just accept that I’m not quite as bad as the owlbear, and we can work on the rest later.”

Their conversation continued, and slowly, after a few minutes, after he’d built up some trust, Eddek started to tell him about where he was going and why he was going. It was a festival in Adonan, the capital of Charia. Simon had long since forgotten the particulars of this conversation, but as it slowly came back to him, it all sounded right. 

The only anomalous thing was that he was pretty sure that Kayla had only been the young lord's surviving servant on most of the occasions. There’d been another girl, at least once, but he’d seen such strange behavior in the loops between Freya and Breena as well, and it wasn’t like he could ask the girl about it. She was a little more withdrawn than her master, but Simon suspected that had been the case before, too. 

“You’re never alone,” Simon said, trying to reassure them when Eddek sounded like he might be about to start whining again. “You just need to…”

Simon whirled at the sound of rustling in the bushes, drawing his sword on instinct. He’d killed the owlbear already, so there shouldn’t be anything dangerous around here. But he was wrong. Even as he watched, a second owlbear stepped out of the woods. The thing was huge and at least a foot taller than the one he’d just killed, but it still managed to move with a predatory grace that he found unsettling. 

The thing’s giant golden eyes took in the scene, and as soon as it saw the burned carcass of the other one, it let loose a terrible screech and then charged Simon. 

Did that make this one the male or the female of the species? He wondered as he opened his mouth to shout a word of power. He supposed it didn’t matter. He’d killed one-half of a mated pair already from the looks of things, and neither the size of these beasties nor the prospect that he was about to orphan a nest of things somewhere stopped him from doing what needed to be done. 

“Oonbetit!” he yelled, sending out a line of pure, sharpened force into the thing. 

It was too late to use something blunt or even add a greater word. He had enough time to speak two syllables before the thing reached him, not four. That should have been enough. It would have been enough if he could have stepped back a few steps, but that’s where the children were, huddling safely under their wrecked wagon. 

So even though he sliced the predator neatly in two, from crotch to groin, the left half of the thing still managed to crash into him, slamming him against the wagon. It was like he'd been kicked by a mule, and though the wooden wall of the wagon broke beneath their weight, Simon tried to push the weight off of him. It was only a few hundred pounds of bloody bird. He should have been able to do that much. 

Unfortunately, one of the shattered planks had been transformed by their crash into a wooden spear, and it stabbed through both Simon and the carcass, deflating one of his lungs and pinning them together. Even that was fixable with magic. He’d been hurt worse and thought it likely that he could make a full recovery, even from such an ugly wound. The real problem was that he couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t sure if his ribs were cracked or broken, but with this thing on top of him, the real problem was that he’d had the wind knocked out of him and no way to fix it. 

“Sir Simon!” Eddek shouted, immediately running to his aid. 

Isn’t that ironic, he thought, struggling weakly as he watched the boy try and fail to pull several hundred pounds of owlbear off him without success. I would have killed for this scenario only a life or two ago. 

Simon’s last thought before the darkness took him was hoping that the kids would be okay. He wouldn’t be there to save them, but with any luck, they’d make it to the miller he’d mentioned. 

Ch. 295 - A Wasted Chance

Simon didn’t even bother to open his eyes when he felt the familiar bed beneath him. Instead, he drew the breath he’d been denied and said, “That’s not how things were supposed to go.” He allowed himself a moment to contemplate the situation and decide if his death had been caused by his overconfidence or other factors he should address, but eventually decided it was just bad luck. 

He’d been aware of his surroundings, acted fast, and struck his enemy down in seconds. It was only bad luck that the stinking carcass of the owlbear had crushed him the way it did. It was pretty ironic that I finally got staked, though, he thought, smiling slightly. 

That joy vanished as soon as he opened his eyes and saw the same Simon that he always found on this level. The original, worthless me, he thought, looking down at himself with distaste. Every time he came back, the failure he’d once been was there to greet him, and really, he was getting sick of it. 

Simon stood, glancing at the mirror he stood in front of it before he closed his eyes and concentrated. For a moment, he allowed himself to feel how soft and weak he was. He rolled his neck and shoulders, feeling the way his body settled heavily around him like a suit of armor made from whale blubber. 

“Time to do something about this,” he said to himself as he started imagining the best version of himself. 

Even the best version of Simon was not an Adonis. He didn’t ripple with muscles or have hair down to his shoulders. He just looked the way that Simon usually did after a few years of life. He had defined muscles, visible collar bones, and no more fat than any peasant he might encounter on the road. He was just the way a man should be, and once he’d fixed that image of himself in his mind, he said the words. “Gervuul Celdura Hyakk.”

This was the first time he’d tried to use a greater word of flesh shaping. It was probably overkill, but he was sick of looking this way, and he had no wish to use a normal word once now and once in a few hours or a day.

The change was sudden, and once the magic had taken hold, Simon opened his eyes so he could watch what was happening without tainting the effect. While the shifting of his skin was disturbing, it was the pain that was worse. A greater word was perhaps five times more magic than he needed for this effect, so it happened in the space of seconds, and the pain of that, as organs shifted and fat sublimated, was so bad that it almost brought him to his knees. It would have if it had taken more than a few seconds to complete. When the process ended as abruptly as it had started, he only took a staggering step forward and examined his face in the mirror. 

“Fucking hell,” Simon whispered, bringing his hand to his cheek. It was an impressive display, but it left him wishing he’d learned the word that the Magi had for lesser increase. That would have really made things easier. 

Simon flexed and moved, making sure he hadn’t done anything tragic to his body, and when he was satisfied that, except for a little soreness, he was fine, he checked his character sheet briefly on the mirror, noting that he’d gained one death, and less than a thousand experience from the last time he’d checked. 

“Well, it’s not like it would have the chance to change much,” Simon reminded himself. “That was just a few days ago.”

After that, he checked the accessible levels and noted somewhat glumly that the owlbear level had, in fact, been solved, which dashed his plans. “I guess someone really wants me to go take care of Ionar,” he sighed. 

‘Level 10 - A volcano in Ionar.

Level 12 - A bridge troll and an abandoned village.

Level 16 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.

Level 19 - Lizard men in a swamp.

Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.

Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.

Level 22 - A costume party.

Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.

Level 34 - ?????”

Simon had been planning to take the levels mostly in order, but he’d been willing to allow himself a decade-long sidequest with the kids. That was harder to justify now that he’d have to track them down. In theory, he could find them, of course. He knew where that road was. He could go, build a hut, and build a quiet life just waiting for that group to come down that road, but that would be years of effort and more than a little petulant. 

Not that handling Ionar won’t be years of effort, too, he thought as he grabbed some wood and stoked the lingering coals in his stove with them so that he could make some lunch. 

Realistically, he could go to Ionar right now. He even had an idea for how to beat the lava titan, but doing it the fast way would lock in the partial destruction of that community forever, and he no longer had a shortcut level to get him anywhere close. Queen Elthna hadn’t even ascended to the throne yet. 

“So it’s going to cost me two decades to save it the old-fashioned way, then?” he said to himself as he considered his plans,  “Best not screw it up then.”

As Simon fried up his sausages and grasped the bread in their grease to make himself a nice sandwich, he pondered where he should go in this life. Hepollyon came to mind first, but he dismissed it almost as quickly. Though he felt like he’d been close to a breakthrough when it came to how he saw the world, he couldn’t bring himself to do that. 

Feeling a wave of nostalgia, his next thought was to go back to Baron Corwin’s land and settle down. Gregor had probably been born a few years ago. It would be a while before he grew up into a fine young man, and Simon would love to see that. 

He quickly decided against that, too. Remembering the time he’d almost run into himself, arriving in that town only a few days after Daisy kicked him in the head, Simon decided that crossing paths with himself was a terrible idea. “At a minimum, I could undo everything I accomplished on level four and make everything that much worse.”

Simon considered all of those things as he ate and decided that he needed to go somewhere where no one knew him, which, ironically, made Brin’s capital a good capital. Except for the few lives he’d spent trying to avert war, he’d spent almost no time there, and it would let him look at several things that interested him, including just how deep the Unspoken’s claws were sunken into the kingdom. 

There’s still a chance I could fuck things up there and undo something important, Simon thought as he deliberated. Ultimately, he decided not to go for that reason. The idea that he couldn’t visit these places for the most tenuous of reasons was frustrating, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a whole wide world to explore. 

How many other hidden wonders out there, like Hepollyon, are just waiting to be found? He asked himself. I can always visit some of the cities again in the future when they aren’t important anymore. 

That cheered Simon up because that was exactly what he was doing as he solved levels. He was moving forward into the future. Level 33 was about seven decades into the future, and when you stacked on a few decades more, he’d been over a century into the future. He’d seen both how much that had changed the world and how little it had as well, but if he could start each run a century into the future, well, that would finally let him see the impact of some of the decisions he’d made so far.   

Instead, he decided to check out Abreese. Even a small risk of undoing what he considered to be a well-tied-off portion of history was too great of a risk for him these days. He was tying up loose ends now, not unraveling them. 

While the southern city-state wasn’t as large as Brin’s capital, it was a place he’d only ever been to on the ship levels, and he had fond memories of his time spent learning to heal people there; theoretically, his two unrelated timelines there wouldn’t even overlap, which was important to him for reasons he couldn’t quite into words. 

“I wonder how Abresse is this time of year, anyway,” Simon said to no one in particular as he tried to imagine the life he should live this time and what his priorities were. 

He needed to be able to fight, but more than that, he needed to focus on his magical studies. Was an urban location the best place for that? Probably not, but when things progressed from theoretical to practical testing, he could always move out into the country. Being a doctor was a very lucrative profession if he didn’t give his services away for free like he had on his last visit. 

This time, Simon didn’t linger in his cabin. He just geared up, marked his blade with runes of lesser transfer, and headed out, seeking to outpace the lingering annoyance that his situation had ended up like this. It wasn’t even that he had to waste decades. He’d find some way to spend that time. What bothered him was that he had to go back to Ionar in a way that wasn’t on his terms. 

As he began hiking, though, that metamorphosized into a more philosophical outlook. What if he had to do this again. “What if I decide I need to solve level 99 like this?” he asked himself as he tricked through the wilderness at the southeast corner of his valley. “Would I really spend two hundred years just chilling to wait for the right moment?”

He was pretty sure that he would. It wasn’t even technically impossible. The hardest part wouldn’t even be avoiding detection now that he could change his face with ease. It would be finding something to do for all of that time. “Especially something worth doing that doesn’t get anyone’s attention,” he muttered as he climbed up the steep slope. 

When he reached the ridge top, he found a large boulder to scale for a better look. Below him, the steep slopes gave way to verdant lands. The landscape was pleasant in a way that he would have enjoyed painting if not for the lack of any specific point of interest. If there had been a city or even a waterfall, it would have made a lovely picture. Instead, the best it could muster were scattered clumps of patchy forest, a winding, sluggish river cloaked in swamp, and a couple scattered hamlets and farmsteads too small to be called a village. 

“Oh well,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve had worse starts.”

Ch. 296 - A New Path

Simon had intended to walk straight to Abreese, past the plains that surrounded Crowvar and the desert to the south of them, without any real distractions. Oh, he’d have to do some hunting and fishing on his way south, and when a small group of bandits demanded his money or his life Simon quickly dispatched them without a single spell. 

He’d been trying not to kill so many people, and noted that it dropped his experience by a couple of hundred points, but if they wanted to force the issue, he’d oblige them. He left their weapons to rot, but did use their coins and jewelry to fill up his empty coin purse. He even put on a gold ring topped with a large citrine stone, just because he liked the look of it. 

Still, as carefree as that leg of the journey was, all of that stopped when he found the first town of any size. Along the way, he’d passed through several villages and traded some labor for a place to sleep at a handful of farmsteads as he made his way south. 

He’d never gone quite this way, so he couldn’t recall having seen it before, but it seemed to be a simple, prosperous town with enough population for two and three-story buildings along its main street and a scattering of farmhouses spread more widely before it faded entirely into rich farm fields. It even had a mill on the river that cascaded down from the mountain and a temple at the end of the main street. It would have been lovely if someone hadn’t recently tried to burn half of it to the ground. 

Simon could smell the damage even before he could see it, and when he was close enough to hear people talking over the sound of work, it was impossible to miss the fresh char stains on whitewashed buildings. A day or two ago, this place had been idyllic, but now, it looked like a warzone, and he only needed to see the occasional green splash of blood to know who had done all this, even if they’d done a pretty good job of piling up the corpses and burning them.

Don’t get involved, he told himself as he approached the place that he only found out after several conversations was named Ordanvale. You have things to do that have nothing to do with any of this. 

He knew he wouldn’t listen, though. He had two decades to kill, and as much as he wanted to study runes and work on projects that would help him kill Brogan, none of that would stand up to people in obvious need. He could spare a lot more than a day of his life for the right cause. 

Before he could help anyone, though, the first thing he needed to do was find out what happened, and as was so often the case in this part of the country, the answer turned out to be goblins. 

“Last night was worse than usual,” the town’s headman explained while he carted half a dozen dead to a graveyard. While others worked on repairing roofs and some of the ad-hoc defenses that had sprung up around the place. 

Simon asked why they hadn’t just purged their lairs, but the man’s answer only disappointed him. “Even with the bounties we have fer goblin ears, there always seem to be more of them, and after a few smaller raids last night, they showed up in force for the first time in an age.”

As he spoke, Simon felt bad he’d never noticed this place before. Across all of his lives, it had burned down almost fifty times, and he’d never done anything about it. There’s a thousand other towns and villages like this throughout the world, he reminded himself as they walked. 

Simon didn’t stay to watch him bury the bodies or even to help. That felt too much like an imposition; funerals were for family, not strangers with swords on their belts. He did stay to help, but only for a few hours. He spent that time bandaging the wounded and using words of lesser healing on the worst cases. 

They needed it, too, because they didn’t seem to have a real healer. When he asked about that, someone said, “Mari’s helping the worst cases. We can wait.” On that, Simon was skeptical; many of the bites he examined were already infected. Goblins had filthy mouths. 

People were leery of strangers, but not so much that they were willing to refuse his help when it was obvious that he knew what he was doing; Simon hadn’t been a full-time healer for several lives, but he’d never forget the basics at this point, even if someone turned him to stone for a thousand years. 

Once that was done, he thought about seeing how the healer was coming along with her cases, but since the sun was getting low in the sky he decided to help in a more timely way, with his sword. So, he asked around and learned all he needed to about the area where the goblin’s lairs seemed to concentrate, he was off again. This time, he left everything behind at the headman’s house except his weapons and armor. He didn’t really have anything worth stealing, but he didn’t want to be any louder and clumsier than he needed to be when he was fighting green skins. 

The sun was getting lower by this point, but that didn’t worry Simon. The tracks were clear and easy to follow, and it was clear to him from the very beginning that the place was infested. There were probably closer to hundreds than dozens, but he wasn’t afraid of them. 

When he arrived at the first cave, he killed the lone sentry with an arrow. Although the shot was perfectly routine, he almost made a catastrophic error and used the arrow of fire he’d created earlier for the white cloaks that had never shown up. 

That would have been embarrassing, he thought ruefully as he dragged the corpse away. Trying to ambush these monsters, I end up waking all of them up. 

After that, he followed his sense of smell as much as the tracks to look for other nests. He ended up finding three, which was about right. Goblins were an invasive species, and they spread as long and as hard as food and geology allowed. In this case, the clearings around all three holes were muddy things that had been practically denuded of small plants. Even the tree bark was patchy, for that was their nature. 

Three entrances to the same tunnels or three different caves? Simon wondered. There was no way to tell. Normally, he would have left all three open and explored them at his leisure, but as things stood, he didn’t want the poor people of Ordenvale to have to deal with another night of blood and fire. So, he collapsed the second and third entrances he’d found with a word of major earth.

In each case, the spell took the form of a complete collapse of the first dozen or so feet of the tunnel. Compared to what he’d done in the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles, it was hardly violent. In fact, it was almost natural. It was as if a mudslide simply erased the two holes, which weren’t so far apart.

Two large spells back to back were enough to make him taste blood, but he ignored it. He wouldn’t need much magic going forward. Even rusty as he was, fighting goblins was a little beneath him at that point, but that didn’t stop him from enjoying it. 

Still, it was enough to agitate the local goblins, and by the time he returned to the first lair, perhaps twenty had boiled out of the hole, even though the sun was still an hour from setting. So much for my element of surprise, Simon sighed as he pulled out his magic arrow and took careful aim at one of the goblins toward the middle of the group. 

Simon loosed the arrow and enjoyed the fireball that followed. It wasn’t as bright as it might have been if he’d struck a human, but then, the rest of the goblins were much weaker than a human would be as well, and none of them stood a chance.

Moments later, he was walking through the smokey clearing and heading for the tunnel with his shield and dagger in his hand. His dagger lacked any enchantment runes on it because he hadn’t thought he’d need them. He considered skipping that step because Simon wanted his voice to hold out for at least a few more healing words that he’d undoubtedly need as he descended into the agitated lair. Instead, he paused and decided to try an experiment.

Despite the rising clamor coming from the depths, he paused to consider a new runic configuration he hadn’t tried before. Then, when he fixed it in his mind, he inscribed it on his dagger. It hurt, but with any luck, that would be the last spell he’d need to speak tonight. 

He’d never tried to inscribe a word of healing on a weapon before, but there was a first time for everything. For a moment, he’d considered trying to use a greater word. It would have been possible; there was room on the knife. It wasn’t like the word of transfer. The reason he didn’t use that one in a more powerful way was because he didn’t want to become hopelessly addicted to the narcotic effects of life force. 

That wasn’t going to be an issue with straight healing, though. Healing rarely felt good. It usually felt a little painful or very disturbing. The only reason he didn’t use a word of greater healing was because he wasn’t sure the material would be able to handle the strain of repeated uses. 

Once that was complete, Simon charged into the churning, cramped darkness. He was immediately overwhelmed by the smell, but he ignored it and focused on the first goblin to cross his path. The thing snarled viciously at him before letting out a high-pitched war cry and jabbing at him with a spear, but all that got it was losing the tip of his weapon as Simon lopped it off before he crushed the thing against the wall with his shield. 

After that, it didn’t get up again, but Simon barely made it two steps deeper into the warren before the next two appeared. This was nothing, and truthfully, he was expecting much worse before this was done. Neither lasted more than a few seconds against Simon. The second one actually died trying to flee as Simon cleaved open its comrade.

Simon followed it a bit too eagerly. He struck the killing blow, but in doing so, he opened himself up to his first wound. He chastised himself for that. Sloppy. Focus, and it will hurt less. That one managed to surprise him, but only because it skulked in the shadows behind an outcropping. 

Still, it wasn’t even a setback. Not really. By the time it lost its head, Simon’s wound had already closed, which was enough to make him smile grimly, but even as he did so, he took one last glance back to make sure he was far enough in the cave, and then he whispered what he hoped would be his last spell for the night, “Celdura Barom.” 

As he did so, the light blossomed across the shadowy conditions. In fact, it became almost painfully bright, which was a big change considering a moment ago, it had been so dark that he’d missed an ambush. It proved to be the correct move because, almost immediately, he saw half a dozen pairs of eyes lurking in the deeper shadows not far ahead of him. 

Simon let his eyes drift across like he hadn’t seen them. There was a lot of killing left to be done tonight. It was pretty much the tip of the iceberg.