Death After Death Ch. 141-142 (Patreon)

Ch. 141 - A Bit of Preparation

The situation was much as Simon had left it and largely unchanged from his last few visits. There was trouble in the north. No one quite knew what it was or why it had stopped trade to the north, yet mercenaries had been hired and dispatched. In fact, asking around, it sounded like Butcher’s Bill had left a few hours before he’d arrived. 

He didn’t care about that, though. This time, he wasn’t looking for Freya. He wasn’t planning to help her or save her. He wasn’t even planning to visit the Barrow Mounds at all. Hell, if he had a better option for a forge, he wouldn’t even head north at all, but he knew of several villages up that way that had already been cleaned out by zombies.

So, aside from the occasional member of the walking dead he was sure he’d have to kill, that sounded just about right for Simon. It seemed strange that once he feared the zombies so much that the walls of the city seemed to be barely enough protection, and now he was comfortable with the idea that they might just walk up on him in the middle of something, but the reason was clear. He had magic for that sort of thing now. 

So, not only was he not at risk in a real sense, but with his plan, he could actually help people. He wasn’t sure if his hammer would attract them all, but he could act as a beacon and draw at least some of them to him, and that would save lives. 

Hell, that might even be enough to solve this level, he realized. For a second, that was enough to reconsider his whole plan. He definitely wanted to see that barrow. Should he try to rush up there first? Could he take the chance that Kell and company wouldn’t find it first and bury themselves alive? He wasn’t sure.

What he was sure about, though, was that he was hungry, so he paid an extra coin for a hearty stew and decided to sleep on it. The right answer wasn’t always apparent, but he usually got there eventually.

No one tried to kill him that night, though one old woman did give him the stink eye when he went out shopping for supplies the next morning. Simon decided there was no way the Butcher’s Bill would even find those mounds without his help. They’d been planning to follow the road north before he’d changed their plans, and he was happy to let them go off on their own little wild goose chase. 

Instead of devoting much time to worrying about them, though, Simon bought a mule with an attitude problem cheap, half a bag of nails in case he needed to reinforce wherever he was going to be sleeping, along with as much smoked sausage, potatoes, and hard bread as he could afford with the meager coins he had left. He bought a few fresh things, too, for the trip up, but the more delicious something was, the more expensive it was going to be, and he didn’t have much for luxuries these days. 

“You know, this sort of thing is more fun on easy mode,” he told his donkey as they left the market and headed toward the north gate. “But I had to go and throw all my gold away. Disappointing, isn’t it?”

He talked with the donkey more than he thought he would on the way up north. Honestly, he talked with it more than was probably healthy, but it wasn’t like there was anyone else around. The whole way up the abandoned village, he only saw one other person, and it was a sun-dried zombie that he dispatched with a sword stroke. 

When Simon got to the village he’d been thinking of, it was every bit as empty as he remembered it, and he set about securing the smithy to be his home away from home for the next few days or weeks, or however long it took to create a magical set of fire-resistant plate mail. 

First, he used the doors and windows of other buildings to seal the gaps in the place, and it was only then that he got ready to work. Only there was one problem. He didn’t even realize it until he’d already lit the forges and begun to stoke the fires that he was missing one key item to do all of this: a hammer. 

“Motherfucker,” he cursed as he tore the place apart, looking for it. It was nowhere to be found, though. He could probably make a crude hammer with the word for earth, but he didn’t want to. What he wanted was the blacksmith’s hammer that this blacksmith had used with this anvil. 

In the end, Simon let the fires burn back out in his search for the thing, but it was worth it. With a little effort and looking at every corpse that was scattered throughout the village, he eventually found the blacksmith, who was recognizable by his soot-stained hands and his leather apron. Fortunately, the man’s hammer was not far from him in the weeds, so Simon was finally able to get to work. 

Ironically, he didn’t even need a very large hammer at first for anything for the first few days. Instead, he mostly scribbled on the armor with charcoal as he outlined the patterns he knew he needed. Simon had been working on this design on and off for a long time. Certainly, since his time in Abresse, and in reality, probably longer in his head. 

All that time, he’d known that he was the only source to power the thing, which he definitely didn’t want to do. 

He’d considered simply copying the runes on the blade that powered it, but he was fairly certain that none of this shit worked without some understanding. He could screech words of power until the cows came home, and if he didn’t do it with intent, they were meaningless. So, instead, he came up with a more convoluted plan: he was going to use the volcano itself to power the runes. 

He had to test it, of course, but in theory, he could use the fire rune with a few linking runes to harvest the incredible heat, and then he would use that to power protection runes along with the cold runes to keep it from cooking alive. In theory, the hotter it got, the more powerful the effect would become. If he didn’t find a way to screw it up in the process, of course. 

The result, at least how he imagined it, was somewhat like a wearable refrigerator, only it used magic instead of electricity and more magic instead of freon and insulation. It was at least an order of magnitude more complicated than the sword sheath he’d made before, and he ended up copying most of that from the frost sword. The end result was a series of ugly swirls, dotted here and there with strange cursive letters that grew off them like cancer.

Once he’d traced them all out onto the front and back of the breastplate and scratched them into place with his dagger, then he created the linking runes to ensure the magic stretched all the way to his gloves and boots. Those he’d stolen from the devil’s binding ring, but they were simple enough. 

They were like adding pipes so the water could flow, which stretched the credulity of his metaphor even further, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like he was going to ever be good at this shit. He just needed to make it work for a few minutes and save Ionar. After that, he could put it all behind him. 

Simon managed to avoid the interest of the undead until he’d done all the planning. It was only when he started pounding with the chisel into the warm metal that they began to seek out the source of the racket. After that, they became regular, if somewhat welcome, distractions. 

He’d spend a half hour banging away, and then when he heard the groaning and the moaning, he’d walk a little ways into the woods and kill anything he saw moving for a little exercise. Zombies that had aged this long were no threat. They were little more than practice dummies. For Simon, the challenge wasn’t in killing them but in doing it far enough away from where he was working that they didn’t add to the stink of the place. 

Each day, he made a little progress, and each day, he fought off another wave or two that it attracted. Eventually, it became like the weather. One day, it was sunny with a chance of zombies, and another, it was overcast and not a ghoul in sight. 

It took him a long time to realize what he was doing, though. “You’re really going to spend weeks of your life preparing for a freaking boss fight, huh, Simon?” he chastised himself. “What if you fuck it up? Are you going to go get that armor and do it all again?”

“Yeah, probably,” he acknowledged. “Daisy would be disappointed in me if I gave up now, wouldn’t you, Daisy?”

The mule whickered at him. It was very clear to Simon that such a grouchy beast did not like the name or being cooped up in a smoky blacksmith's shop, but he wasn’t about to leave it outside and let it be eaten by the prowling zombies. 

“See, she wants me to win,” he smiled. “She wants me to save Ionar.”

He kept working on the breastplate with his chisel. He’d had this conversation with himself more than once, and he knew how it went. At least, he thought he did. He did until he suddenly blurted out, “But you aren’t saving it, are you? You’re just going to go and put it out of its misery.”

Simon stopped what he was doing and considered those words. Going there after it was on fire wasn’t really saving it, was it? If you want to save it, you have to go there and stop it as soon as it starts, he thought to himself. 

His mind reeled at what that would entail. Now, suddenly, instead of spending weeks on a single attempt at a level, he was going to stretch that into what? Months? Years?

“I don’t even know how far Ionar is from here,” he said as he put down his chisel. He knew where it was, of course, as well as how to get there, but he had no idea how much time he had. Did the thing explode next month? In five years? He had no idea if he could take his time or rush, and that oversight annoyed him. 

Something told him he was going to spend the rest of the day turning over this new wrinkle in the back of his mind. At least, he would have. It was at that moment, when he was considering picking his hammer back up that he heard the voice of someone yelling from the road, “Please, is there anyone there? I… we have wounded.”

Simon’s whole world froze then. He knew that voice. He’d know it anywhere. Despite all he’d done to avoid her this run, Freya had found him again. It was fucking destiny, and he was starting to get pretty sick of it.

Ch. 142 - Harsh Reality

Simon walked outside to find the most ragged version of Kell’s little mercenary company that he’d seen to date. It was easy to see what had happened. The Butcher’s Bill had certainly lived up to their name today and paid the price. 

Instead of being over a dozen men and women, the little cult of personality was down to 5 members, a horse, and a cart piled with the bodies of the dead. The fact that they were at least bringing their dead home for burial touched him a little, though he worried about the possible biohazard.

Simon sighed and used a rag to wipe the soot off his face and his hands as best he could. He was soaked in sweat from the work he’d been doing, and he was sure he looked like a wild man, but he really didn’t care. 

Not at first. When he saw that Freya’s hand had a bloody bandage on it, though, well, his flinty heart melted a little. At least, it did until he saw that they’d tied up a zombie and put it in the cart they were lugging with them. That used up most of the sympathy he had right there, but the rest of it died when he looked closer and saw that it was Kell. 

“He’s the one that bit you, isn’t he?” Simon asked, pointing to the bound zombie that was still squirming on the pile of the dead. It wasn’t really a question, though. He already knew it was true. “You tried to save a zombie instead of killing one, and now you’re screwed.”

“I…” Freya said as tears started to tumble silently down her dirty face. No matter how angry he was, that was still enough to twist the knife in his soul. 

“We have to save him,” she continued. “Surely someone knows a way. It’s just a temporary madness. Perhaps a priest could—”

“That man,” Simon said, pointing at the squirming corpse, “Is not mad. He’s dead, and dead is dead. There is no bringing him back. All he can do is get free, kill other people, and condemn them to the same fate.”

The words were harsh, but he didn’t know what else to say. He knew more about magic than anyone he’d ever known at this point, and though there might be a way to bring back the dead, he did not yet know it. 

“I told ya,” Garth shouted. “We should put him out of his misery and be done with it. We can bring the bodies back to—”

“You should burn the bodies,” Simon said, looking over the group. In addition to Freya, it looked like the big man in the back, Hodge, had also been bitten. “You should kill the zombie, burn the bodies, and put those who've been bit out of their misery before they start to turn.” 

That caused all of the survivors to start screaming at each other. Some of them even drew blades as their accusations got louder, but Simon ignored them. Garth was a good guy, but he didn’t really care who lived or died in this group. He’d put them down himself if he had to. It would be easy. 

Well, it would be easy for most of them. “Tell me how long ago he bit you,” Simon asked Freya, taking her hand and unraveling the bandage. 

“L-last night,” she said haltingly. “H-he… he turned last night. We’d lost half the company, but then a few hours later, some of the wounded they…” 

She wasn’t able to get the rest of the story out, but that was fine. He had all the answers he needed. Her bite was already eight hours old, and the skin around the ragged wound was already going necrotic. It was probably too late for her, but it probably wasn’t good enough where Freya was concerned.

Simon studied her pupils, the pallor of her skin, and every other detail he could bring to bear from the years he’d spent as a healer as he tried to figure out what the right answer was here. Experience said that she was fucked, and that she’d only lasted this long because the bit was on a limb so far from her heart and her brain. Science said that something about the way that magic wiped out the virus or the bacteria was incomplete. It said that the relapse was caused by some reservoir of evil somewhere else in her body that caused it to flare back up.

It’s not science, though. He corrected himself. It’s magic. 

Was that the problem? Had he been so concerned with curing the body instead of the soul that he’d used magic to make people’s bodies whole while the rot spread on some more etheric level? Not for the first time, he wished he had that sight that let some people see the miasma that was his soul. However, before he could go further down that rabbit hole, there was a cry of alarm that derailed his train of thought. 

Hodge has been warding off his one-time friends with a blade, but before things could escalate further, he fell to the ground and started convulsing. That made the men who had been about to kill him pull back in alarm, which was something that Simon might have thought was funny under any other circumstances. Instead of smiling, though, he shouted. “You can kill him on the ground now, or you can kill him when he’s trying to kill you in less than a minute. The choice is yours.”

That stirred them to action. Instead of standing around trying to figure out what was happening, they started stabbing the man repeatedly, and though most of the blows were ineffective, eventually, one of them went through the neck, and the dead man stopped twitching. 

“What about her,” Garth asked, “She’s bit too, right?”

“She is,” Simon agreed. “But if you try to kill Freya, you won’t live long enough to wonder how I murdered you.”

She probably needed to die. He knew that, but he wasn’t going to let a stranger brutalize her like that. For a moment, he thought about using magic to behead her quick and clean. It would have been the kindest thing to do, but he was too weak for that. Instead, he was going to try to save her. All this work carving runes had given him an idea. 

“Kill the zombie in your cart and keep traveling south,” Simon said finally. “I’ll take care of your friend, one way or the other.”

“But Frey’s part of the company,” one of the other men protested; at the same time, Freya said, “No, you can’t kill him!”

She tried to break away from Simon’s grip, but she was too weak for that now. She didn’t have a lot of time left. It was certainly less than an hour, but it was probably less than ten minutes before she was on the ground writhing and spitting as the evil claimed her body. 

“I admire your sentiments,” Simon said to Garth as he lifted Freya into both of his arms, “But I’m going to try something to save this woman and won't waste any more time talking. Go wait a mile down the road if you like, or follow me and die. The choice is yours.”

With that, Simon turned and walked back toward the blacksmith shop. He needed his mirror, and then he needed some space. No one followed him. 

“What are you going to do to me?” Freya asked softly. She was sweating now. 

“Whatever I can,” Simon said. Part of him knew that he should be devoting more time to making her feel at ease, but there was no room for that in his mind. He was already trying to figure out how he could more thoroughly purge her body of the disease or the curse that was ravaging her. He imagined that would be something like the summoning circle that was used to bind hell but with a few key differences. 

He just needed a sort of spiritual isolation chamber that he could flood with power so that not a single speck of evil could get away to blossom a second time. He’d never tried to save someone this far along, but even if it cost him a few years of life, it would be worth it; he owed her that much. 

Once Simon had his mirror, he headed for a barn not so far from the blacksmithy that had been his home base for a while. “Alright,” he explained. “I need to draw something on the ground, and then we’re going to try to do a little magic to save you, okay?”

“Witchcraft,” she breathed. “Was it you that did this? Did you create the zombies?”

Simon suppressed the smirk that came with it, remembering the last time he’d done this level. Instead, he shook his head and said, “I swear that the only thing I’ve ever done to zombies is kill them.”

“So then you’re going to steal my soul?” she asked weakly. Freya, as frightened as she looked, sat where he left her. 

“I’m probably going to give you a piece of mine,” he said after he whispered a few quiet commands to his mirror and brought up a diagram of the circle in question. 

He quickly discarded all the aspects of summoning or displacement. Instead, he started dragging his heel around in the dirt, scratching in the outline of a circle. Then, once that was done, he started roughing in the runes that would seal the space with the handle of a pitchfork. Once he had all of those added, he started adding the runes for greater cure and greater healing. It was only as an afterthought that he added runes for transfer to the thing. 

It wasn’t a spell he didn’t think he’d ever cast personally again, but it was crucial for the power circuits of these complex circles, and in this case, it would draw power from the surrounding world. That probably included him, of course, but this way, he could share the load with the nearby trees and animals and whatever else, which should blunt the blow.  

“This is magic?” she asked in confusion. 

Simon ignored the question. None of this was magic. It was preparation, and it was ugly, but only for a moment. He was going as fast as he could, but even as he did so, he wasn’t sure that it was fast enough. 

“Vosden,” he said after a moment of concentration, fixing it all in his mind. 

The runes he needed weren’t ugly things scrawled into the dirt. They were crisp, straight things that existed in his mind. Fortunately, he had a way he could carve something like that into the earth fairly quickly. 

Suddenly, all the ugly squiggles he’d made melted into the earth as lines straightened and curves meshed more clearly. In seconds, all of his ugly preparations had faded. They were replaced by something that looked sort of like a crop circle or a particularly complicated piece of graffiti. 

“None of that was magic,” he said with a smile, ignoring the stricken look on the woman’s face. “That’s what we're going to do next.”