Death After Death Ch. 139-140 (Patreon)

Ch. 139 - A Long Way from Anywhere

Simon didn’t have paper to document his journey. Instead, he used a stick to document his time. As near as he could tell, he was going to the south-west. Every day that he made good progress got a big notch, and every day that he made slow progress got a small one as he tried to go as straight a line as possible. He made thin lines through the days when he had to cross rivers but gave up just before he started a system to try to estimate grade and elevation. It simply wasn’t worth it.

After all, he didn’t need to know the best way over these mountains. This wasn’t a route he expected to take often. He just had to find the closest place he was familiar with and call it a day. Once that was done, he would be out of reasons to procrastinate, and he could get back to more important things. 

It took three days to reach the ridge of the mountain in a low place, and as much as he wanted to try summiting it, he was forced to acknowledge that he simply wasn’t in the right shape for it right now. Simon mentally added that to his bucket list as he made his way down the other side. 

On the way down, he found a boulder that afforded him a view of the next valley. Though he still had a long way to go through the pine trees and almost certainly a few more cold nights in his bedroll, he could see a river, and beyond it, he could see the thin brown line of a road, which instantly became his new goal. 

Simon didn’t sleep well in the nights that followed because he heard the distant screech of what he thought was an owlbear somewhere in the woods. The cries were enough to make him worry, but the thing never actually found him. Instead, he reached the river with nothing but a growing hunger and spent half a day casting into the water a very primitive fishing pole to solve that problem despite his aversion to fish. 

He wanted to cross it, but the thing was raging, and he’d have to go somewhere up or down river to find a better spot to ford it. While he sat there catching fat trout that he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to eat, he saw a man with a pair of horses leading a wagon down the muddy road. 

Simon would have loved to ask the man for directions, but given the noise of the river between them, that was impossible. Instead, Simon merely waved while the man looked at him strangely. 

“Probably not a lot of random fishermen just hanging out in fantasy land,” he nodded. 

That afternoon, Simon ate well, and despite the flashbacks that the smoky fish gave him to the beach at Ionar, he enjoyed the white, flaky flesh and reluctantly took seafood off of his ‘never eat again’ list. Then he moved far from the smells of food before making camp for the night in case the owlbear showed up. 

The following day, it took hours to find a good place to cross the river, and he still almost went for a swim more than once on the slick stones of the shallow section. Things were better after that, and he opted to go right when he reached the road on the fire shore. However, even with all the time that it took, he still wasn’t entirely dry by the time he caught up with that wagon hours later. 

He never should have caught up to it, of course, not at his walking speed. But the thing's rear wheels had been sucked deep into the muck, and the man seemed unable to free himself.

“I don’t have much,” the man said when he noticed him. “I’m just on my way back to the village and don’t want no trouble.” Given how nervous he was, he obviously thought that Simon was a bandit when he approached, but Simon just waved off the man’s concerns with a smile. 

“It’s cool,” Simon assured him. “Everything is cool. Let’s just get you unstuck from the mud. We’ll do this on three.” 

That’s almost all it took. A few hard shoves and the thing was free and clear in a few minutes. What had been a man stuck for hours was ended with only the minorest of interventions. It was enough to make him think about all the little nudges he’d been giving history with Heledes’ help. 

After that, the man offered Simon a lift, and he gladly took it. Just because he needed the exercise didn’t mean he wanted more, and he’d already been walking for days. “I appreciate the help,” the Merchant told him. “The name is Ennis, by the way, and I’m sorry I got the wrong idea. I just… well, you don’t see many men around here with a sword on their hip unless they mean to use it.”

“Who says I don’t mean to use it?” Simon said with a laugh. “I just hunt goblins and the like for coin. There’s no need to be a brigand when there are so many other ways to make money.”

“Aye,” the man agreed. “Maybe you could take time out of your day to teach the rest of the highwaymen that. They’re worse than ever this year. I had to pay three tolls just to get this far if you can believe it.”

Simon let the man gripe about the area and slowly began to flesh out the area that he was in. 

It turned out that he was in the mountainous Kingdom of Charia, which was to the east of the Kingdoms of Brin and Montain. Though he’d spent more time in the latter, this place didn’t feel so terribly different. The mountains in the distance seemed a little taller, and the man’s accent was a touch thicker, but it all still felt familiar enough. That meant that the nearest big city to him was Adonan, which meant he was somewhere near the werewolf level and the level where a certain masquerade party went horribly wrong. 

It was interesting. He didn’t have his map in front of him, and if he had a mirror, he wouldn’t have taken a look with the skittish merchant looking over his shoulder. Still, it felt like he was sort of in the middle of three countries. He hadn’t quite figured out their size, but he could imagine himself being somewhere near the center of France, Germany, and Spain, or whatever country it was that was south of Germany. Until very recently, he’d had zero interest in geography. 

Now, he didn’t have a choice. It would also seem that he didn’t have a choice in dealing with Bandits because after they turned a corner, Simon could see three men loafing by the roadside who were obviously up to no good. 

“See what I mean,” Ennis sighed. “How’s a man supposed to make a living when everyone wants a cut.”

“Them?” Simon smirked. “You leave them to me.”

He waited until they got close and began their spiel about money to protect and maintain the road when Simon stood up and said, “Sorry boys, I already hijacked this wagon. You go and get your own.”

“You… what?” the talker said. “Listen, we get a cut of every cart that comes through here, I don’t care who owns it. The boss says that—”

“Well, then I shouldn’t be talking to you then, should I. I should be talking to your boss. Get him out here.”

“Your funeral,” the weaselly man smirked before yelling, “Boss! We got trouble!”

The man that came out of the underbrush was a head taller than Simon, and every inch of him, from his scowling face to his bulging girth, said he was nothing but a brute and a bully. Truthfully, he’d been planning on solving this as peacefully as possible with a little intimidation, but he could see that any attempts at that would be impossible. 

So, he didn’t bother to try. Instead, despite the smirk on the other man’s face, Simon said, “You’ve got about three seconds to get your goons out of my face and let us on your way, or there’s going to be real trouble here.”

“Trouble?” The man laughed, casually holding a bastard sword that probably weighed twice what Simon’s did. “What the hells do you think you’re on about. You’re the one who’s—”

Simon didn’t even wait for the man to finish. Instead, he drew his sword and brought it down hard in an exaggerated overhand chop that gave the man all the time in the world to get his sword up to block. It was a terrible move. It would put Simon off balance, and even as he recovered, the bigger man’s sword would come down and probably take a head or an arm if he was any good. 

That’s what should have happened, of course. Instead, Simon muttered, “Oonbetit,” just before he struck, sending a line of pure force through the man like a spectral guillotine. The result was cinematic if nothing else. 

All of the onlookers saw the two swords strike each other before Simon split the man in two, from stem to stern. That wasn’t what happened, though. In truth, the man had already been split apart before that ever happened and fell apart into two clean halves. It was a messy thing and not at all how he wanted it to go, but it wasn’t like he had a choice. 

The result was shock and fear. Even the horses made shrill noises of displeasure, and Ennis had to wrangle them in. 

“So are you going to let us by now, or are more people going to have to die,” Simon said in an annoyed tone as he flicked the blood clean from his blade. 

He might be acting confident, but he was nervous as hell. If all these people drew on him, he was going to need fire or lightning to keep Ennis from getting killed in the ensuing fight, and then he’d be a warlock to everyone the man talked to forever more. 

That isn’t what happened, though. Instead, Simon took out the biggest dude, and everyone else freaked out. A couple looked at each other, trying to gauge the amount of support they might have if they attacked Simon, but as soon as the first man turned and ran, most of the rest of them soon followed, leaving him the wagon and a bisected corpse all alone on the road. 

Simon sighed. “I’m sorry you had to see that; things can get ugly sometimes out here.”

The merchant nodded mutely as Simon dragged both sides of the body off the road by the man’s boots and helped himself to the bandit leader’s coin purse. They were a few miles down the road when Ennis finally asked, “So, are you hijacking me then? Are you really going to—”

“What?” Simon blurted out in surprise. “No. I was just trying to bluff my way past without bloodshed. That’s all.”

“You seem pretty good at bloodshed to me,” the merchant said quietly. 

Simon nodded but said nothing. Truthfully, he was too good at bloodshed and wished he was better at solving situations like that without resorting to violence. However, if he had to choose between an innocent man and a bad man, the bad man was going down every time. 

The two of them rode together for two days, and when they reached the next village, Ennis waited for Simon to leave the wagon to see about buying supplies before the man took off as quick as he could. By the time Simon returned with a loaf of bread to share for lunch, Ennis was half a mile down the road. 

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Simon said, wondering what he should do now.

Ch. 140 - What needs to be Done

What Simon did was stick around. The name of that hamlet he found himself in turned out to be Wolvram, and though they didn’t like strangers much, they did have a goblin problem that was causing increasing amounts of trouble in their upland sheep pastures. Since it was one of the few real skills that Simon had, he was happy to help and made quick work of them with smoke and arrows.

He was bitten, but only once, while he purged all the local caves that he could wedge himself inside over the course of a week. When he came back with over thirty ears, no one gave him a hard time when he decided to stick around. They didn’t quite treat him as a hero or anything, but they no longer shunned him either. 

After that, there was no reason to leave. Well, not right away. He helped out around the town as he slowly got in better shape. He mended fences, scared away bandits, and once it got cold, he spent a lot of time helping out at the small smithy near the center of town. 

That wasn’t just because he was bored, though. For some of the projects he had in mind for the future, he was going to have to get better at that sort of work. It was one thing to speak a word of power, but it was quite another to carve it into something and let the magic do its work for you, and for some of the hard stuff that lay ahead, he was going to have to do better. 

Not that it would be hard to do better, of course, he recalled in embarrassment as he remembered just how ugly that flaming sword had been and just how quickly it had drained years from his life. 

Honestly, the winter was a little cold for the barn he slept in, but by the spring, he was already rehabbing a half-complete cottage that had burned down years before. Part of him kept telling him that he should get back on the road and at least travel to Adonan and make sure it was the town he thought it was in the place he thought it was. Truthfully, he didn’t need to, though. Every merchant said the same thing, and he doubted they were all lying.

Truthfully, this was the biggest danger of the Pit to him after fighting so many evils. It was making friends and settling down. After all, as cool as it would be to slay a dragon or close a portal to hell, it couldn’t compare to the pretty redhead that had been flirting with him for the last couple of months. 

Rose was the real temptation. She was a vision of beauty right out of a Disney movie, and in a village this small, they ran into each other nearly every day, which made it even easier to imagine a future that involved her. He might have stayed with her forever if he hadn’t accidentally learned from one of the men he drank with that she’d been married before. 

That didn’t bother Simon, of course. Being a 23-year-old widow in this world might make you an old maid, but on Earth, there would have been nothing wrong with that. Still, it wasn’t that she’d been married before. It was the man she’d been married to. He’d heard the name Brul tossed around before, but Simon hadn’t put two and two together until he’d heard that the guy in question was a cruel giant of a man who had made a living in less than savory easy. 

“That Brul was a real pieecce of work before someone up and split the bastard in two, but I reckon you’d be a better match for her than he ever wassss,” the town drunk explained as if he was blessing a marriage that had already happened, but that was all it took for things to fall into place for Simon, and he started to pack his few positions immediately.

Suddenly, it all made sense. She’d shown zero interest in him for the first few months, then suddenly, she’d been all over him. Rose knew exactly what he’d done to her husband. By now, she had to have. Neither he nor Ennis had told anyone, but the timing was impossible to hide. 

“So she just wanted me to let my guard down so she could have her vengeance, huh?” he asked himself as he started walking in the dark back the way he’d come. 

The idea of spending a night in Rose’s bed was probably worth a death or two as long as they were relatively painless. That said, he was done dying in stupid ways and letting a widow murder you in your sleep definitely qualified as stupid. 

Besides, he’d slacked off long enough. Another couple of months like this, and he’d probably spend the rest of his life here. It was just too easy to put down roots and enjoy a quiet life after so much bloodshed.    

Simon spent a lot of time wondering about that on the way back to the river. Just what were all the heroes in the Pit doing? He thought to himself as he walked through the night. 

If this place really was full of millions of people, all trying to accomplish the same goal, how many of them had gone insane? How many of them were living quiet, enjoyable lives? How many of them were even striving toward the larger goal after a few deaths? 

Though he wouldn’t have thought it possible in the beginning, he now thought the latter hazard was bigger than the former. It was easier to be happy than it was to be insane once you had a little magic up your sleeve. He reminded himself of that as he left this small bit of happiness behind. He’d find more somewhere. The world was a big place. 

These thoughts occupied Simons's mind more than they should have, so it wasn’t a complete surprise when he suddenly realized he’d walked at least a day past his intended destination. Normally at this point, he would have sighed, grumbled a bit, and turned around, but as he looked at the familiar thing, he found himself smiling as another piece dropped into place. 

Right now, he was looking at a covered bridge, which was not something he'd seen every day. What was more, in the distance, on the far side of the river, he could see a windmill slowly turning in the breeze. That was when he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d been here before. Standing on the side of the river he'd never reached on the way back to his cabin, Simon made one more unintentional discovery. He hadn't even been looking for this spot, but suddenly, he had a new location for his map.

The woods where he’d heard an owlbear were the same woods where he’d killed an owlbear. “Imagine my shock,” he said with a smile as he turned and headed back toward the cabin. 

Simon arrived at his little home away from home three days later. He encountered a second surprise: the place was trashed. Not in the goblin way, either. It was more like he’d seen it the one time he’d come back up through the trapdoor in level two. It was almost like someone had been looking for something. The mirror was shattered into tiny pieces and strangest of all, there was a single muddy footprint just inside the door that belonged to a boot, not a tiny clawed foot. 

“Weird,” Simon said, not sure what to make of all of this. 

The trapdoor was closed but exposed, and for a moment, he allowed himself to hope that whoever had done all this had accidentally fallen down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, but he knew that wasn’t possible. Without him around to open the portals, it just led to the root cellar. 

Simon sat there for several minutes, trying to decide what more he should do before he finally shrugged and headed downstairs. He had a date with the knight and a plan for what he was doing next with all that armor. 

Simon went into the crypt only slightly cautiously because, for once, he didn’t have his mace, thanks to whoever had ransacked the cabin. He needn’t have worried, though. These things moved so slowly now that he was in halfway decent shape again that he couldn’t believe he’d ever found them difficult. Once that was done, and the skeleton knight was lying beheaded on the floor, Simon began removing the man’s armor a piece at a time and giving it a good look. It was cold, even though his leather gauntlets, but the lines and markings on the armor itself were strictly heraldic and decorative. He would have to change that.

He didn’t plan to do that right here, though. Instead, he wanted to study the dark heart and better understand the careful designs that had been inlay on its ebony surface. After he stacked up all of the armor he was going to need and stuffed it in a sack along with its matching sword, he moved back to the glittering artifact and began to unravel it one glyph at a time. There were still parts that he didn’t understand, but what he found was a circuit dominated by life and transfer runes, just like the golem, and powered by something he couldn’t quite tease out. 

It was a complex, compound glyph that was surrounded by a boundary rune. It’s almost like a name, maybe? Simon thought, studying it. It could be. It could be powered by heaven or hell or a god or the soul of a dead archmage. He had no idea how to read that mark, and that meant that the mystery was still very much beyond him.  Still, he spent hours on the floor going back and forth between the mirror-bound notes on the golem and even the hell circle and the dark heart before he finally gave up and rubbed his aching eyes. 

Part of him thought about smashing the thing right there, but he knew he couldn’t do that. Not yet. He wasn’t done with this level. So, instead, he did the next best thing and hid it in the helmet of one of the dead knights in pieces on the floor. Simon doubted that would be enough to reset the level, but it would be enough to give whoever came here to use it later a hard time. 

Then, when all that was done, he used the key to unlock the gate, and he entered the very familiar inn. He found it crowded as usual, but there were no zombies, and for now, that’s all he could hope for. Simon smiled when he didn’t see Freya around and then flagged down his least favorite barmaid, Brenna. Then, while she smiled and tried to pretend like there was a heart in there somewhere, he used a couple of his coppers to order a beer and get the lay of the land.