Death After Death Ch. 39-40 (Patreon)

Two chapters brings Death After Death to 3 ahead of the public. I have three chapters on my schedule for next week, so if everything goes well, then next week Death After Death will finally be 5 ahead. I will of course keep posting extra chapters until it is 10 chapters ahead. 

Ch. 39 - One More Time

He could still taste the stew on his tongue as he made his usual breakfast of bread and cheese. That made Simon clench his fist in frustration as he tried to figure out what could have possibly happened. Sure - the proprietor hadn’t seemed to care for him, but she certainly didn’t poison him. After all - he’d had the same food and drink as Thomen and Yars had. Everyone else had been really great too. He doubted that they’d decided he was rich enough to kill in the middle of the night. They didn’t seem like the type, which meant that he was missing something.

“No,” he told himself. “You’re overcomplicating this, Simon. There are really only two options here. Either you died last night, or you didn’t. If you died, then it was probably that bandit motherfucker following you, and if you didn’t, then there’s a real possibility of some kind of glitch. Some rubber banding effect.”

He knew this wasn’t a game, of course, but the metaphor still worked. Who was to say that if he got far enough off track from what he needed to do, the magic at work here didn’t just put him back to start all over again? As a theory, it was worth exploring, but the only way to do that would be to walk all the way down that damn mountain again.

Simon sighed loudly at the thought. Just because he’d been able to survive a blizzard and hike for miles didn’t mean he wanted to do it over and over again. It would be worth it if he could spend a month or a year in civilization but for a single night?

“Kind of a pain in the ass,” he told himself as he lay back on his bed and tried to brainstorm something else that might be a better use of his time. All of his other ideas eventually led through the zombies, though, and he had zero wish to go there yet. No matter what he found, he was sure it was going to hurt. It always did.

So, after wasting half an hour, he finally grudgingly got ready and started the whole ordeal all over again. This time the only real change he made was to gather a couple smaller coins from the hidden treasure hoard on level two just in case he ran into someone that couldn’t make change for a whole gold piece. He didn’t know how many of one kind of coin exchanged for how many of another, of course, and the likelihood of being cheated was still high, but he could figure all that out later.

The trip through the snow was uneventful, and though he was still annoyed that he had to light his campfires with a flamethrower, he made it work. Once, on the second day, he smelled the smoke of someone else’s campfire, which told him someone else was out here, but he didn’t investigate.

“It’s probably just more bandits,” he told himself.

This time when Simon finally reached that main road, he thought about trying the other direction, but he was hungry, and he’d already spent the last three days wandering around the wilderness, so he wasn’t eager to spend a fourth when he knew where a perfectly lovely inn was. Instead, he strolled down the road like he didn’t have a care in the world, and though ambushing the ambushers would have been funny, he just let things play out as they had the first time, just to see what would happen.

“Sorry, sir, but we’re going to need for you to pay a toll for the upkeep of this fine road if you want to travel any closer to Wellingbrooke,” Luken said, stepping out into the road in just the same way as he had the last time.

“See, if you had just taken my money last time and let me by, you would never have had to see me again,” Simon said with a smile. “And if I did happen to come back through, you could have had a repeat customer, but you went and got greedy!”

That didn’t stop him from walking forward, though, and though Luken put his hands on the hilt of his sword, he didn’t draw it because the only thing Simon had in his hands was a large sack.

“Excuse me, sir,” Luken said, trying and failing to hide his confusion. “I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure, however, for a mere six pence will see you on your way with no harm done.”

“Yeah,” Simon agreed. “You said that last time too. This time though, I brought a little change.”

Simon didn’t pull silver out of his bag or even copper. Instead, he pulled out eight inches of steel in the form of his dagger and stabbed the other man in the heart before his sword was halfway out of his sheath.

Luken started to crumple, but Simon grabbed him by the collar and started to walk to the side of the road, using him as a body shield. “Next time, maybe just let me pass, and I won’t have to kill you every single time I walk this path.”

“But I…” A volley of arrows flew at Simon just as Luken gasped his final words. One went wide, just missing Simon’s head, but three embedded into the man he was using as a shield.

Simon winced as he saw the pain play across the other man’s face before the light left the bandit’s eyes. He knew exactly what that felt like, and he felt bad for the guy. At least it was a clean death, though. Simon tried hard to make sure that was what people got whenever he could, but when it came to a forest full of archers, sometimes that couldn’t be helped.

He waited for a lull in the action, then he leaned around to one side of the trunk and yelled “G̴̝̈́͒͠ḛ̷͕̮̕͘r̵̛̫̮̔͠ͅv̴̿̀͠ͅu̷̝͚̜̎u̴͚͈̎ḻ̸̣̈́ ̸̦̟̜̈́̍M̷̪̹̪̓̓͒e̴̪̎i̴͓̗̔̔͆ͅr̸̹͓͚͐̅è̵̛͇̱̾n̴̩̜̍,” as he channeled all his rage and anger into a gout of flame that eradicated the vegetation between him and the bandits that were trying to kill him. The energy surged through him so hard that it grayed the edges of his vision for a moment, and when the fiery streamers subsided, he slowly pulled out and loaded his crossbow to make sure there weren’t survivors.

He knew, of course, that the kid he’d spared last time was still out there somewhere. If he’d been on the other side of the road last time, he probably was this time too, which meant that he might have to take the feral bastard down. Secretly, Simon hoped that the little brat had run off because the last thing he wanted to do was shoot a starving kid in the back, even if that decision might come back to haunt him.

No arrows came at him this time, so Simon finished off his fallen foes, then helped himself to the coins in Luken’s pockets as the only restitution the man could offer for wasting his time before he continued on his way.

The rest of the journey was utterly uneventful, and this time when Simon reached the village of Wellingbrooke, he went straight for the inn and paid for a real meal and a drink in his stolen silver. The proprietor still gave him the stink eye as she made change, but right now, Simon just didn’t care. He wanted something warm and filling. It turned out that dinner wasn’t for hours yet, though, so she brought him cold cuts smeared with stone ground mustard on some bread that wasn’t quite stale, but it would be in a few more hours. While it wasn’t as good as the dinner he’d eaten here last night, just being able to taste something as simple as mustard again was amazing, so he made do.

Simon whiled away the rest of the day much the same as he’d done the last time. This time the only difference was that he stretched his legs exploring the hamlet before dinner rather than sitting in his room, and after dinner, he did a bit less drinking and a little more winning. Surprisingly Yars turned out to be just as good a loser as he was a winner, which Simon thought was a rare trait. Rather than bluster when he’d turned into the night’s biggest loser, he just patted Simon on the back and said, “Now, you be sure to stick around for a few days and give me a chance to win all that back!”

That was enough to make Simon smile as he wandered up to his room and made himself comfortable on the lumpy mattress. Last time her fell asleep like a rock, but this time he found himself laying there, staring up at the ceiling for the better part of an hour once he got tired of tossing and turning as he worried as soon as he closed his eyes his small victory was going to be snatched from his hands and he was going to be put back in that awful little cabin again. He knew that Helades didn’t want him to be happy, of course. He’d known that from pretty much the first minute he’d met her, but to think that she would just break her own game or punishment incarnation or whatever and snatch him back to the pit just because he’d figured a clever way out of her clutches, it was just…

Simon’s endless internal monologue came to a screeching halt when he heard the door swing open with only the faintest scraping. Sound as it brushed against one of his boots. The room was dark, but not entirely pitch black, so he could see a short shape as what he could only imagine that brat he’d spared earlier snuck into his room to finish him off.

His muscles tensed as he lay there, waiting to pounce, and it was only when he saw the gleam of light on the edge of the blade that he reached up and grabbed the slender wrists of the wielder, yanking it away from them in a brief struggle, and sending them backwards hard enough into the shutters to knock them open.

Simon was surprised by two things then. The first was that he was holding a meat cleaver, not the dagger he’d expected, and the second was that the person that had been about to strike him dead wasn’t the young boy but the innkeeper herself.

“Just what in the fuck is going on,” Simon spat as he gestured at her with her own weapon, making her shrink away from the reprisal she feared.

“I just… you were…” The woman was older than him, but not by much, and all the poison that had been in her gaze until now had been replaced with fear.

“Out with it, woman,” Simon yelled, not caring who heard. “Choosing to Keep your reasons for assassinating me a secret will cost you your life!”

“I-I would never harm a fly,” she whimpered nonsensically, “But th-theres a darkness in you. Anyone who trucks with evil so much has to—”

“Evil?” he asked, utterly baffled by the accusation. “I’m the damn hero; what are you talking about. There’s no evil here except a crazy woman with a meat cleaver!” To emphasize his point, Simon buried the weapon into the wood of the windowsill.

“The taint of your spirit does not lie!” she hissed, and then seeing him weaponless, she chose that moment to try to dart past him and down the hall.

Simon was baffled by her words and didn’t try to stop her. He just stood there stunned for almost a minute as his intoxicated mind tried to work through everything that had just happened. It was only then that he realized her next move might be to rally the town watch or a few brave adventurers to strike him down. It was that thought that finally spurred him to action, and he began to pack.

He supposed that it was bad news that people could see the ’taint of his spirit,’ whatever that was supposed to mean, but as he quickly packed his things, he decided that, ultimately, this was good news. After all, the crazy bitch that had sent him back to his own private hell hadn’t been Helades. It had only been some innkeeper with a magic power he just hadn’t seen before.

He could work with that, even if he wasn’t sure if she was seeing the magic he’d used, his connection to the pit or something deeper like his massive experience point debt, but either way, it was useful information and something to watch out for.

Ch. 40 - A New City

Simon woke the ferryman and paid the drunk a full silver to take him across the river before sunrise. Judging from the way the man reacted, immediately switching from confused anger to helpful friendliness as he judged the coin, Simon was sure that’s he’d over paid, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to outrun whatever the consequences of sparing that woman’s life were going to be.

Soon enough they were on the water and being poled across at a speed that was barely fast enough to fight the current while the ferryman yammered on and.

“In a hurry eh? Where are you off to then?” he asked, slurring only slightly. “Liepzen or Hurag?”

“Which one’s closer?” Simon asked.

“Well Liepzen is the bigger city, so it has better roads, if you head straight east,” the ferryman opined, “but if you bear south along the river you’ll eventually get to Hurag, So I’d say it’s about the same.”

“I guess I’ll just flip a coin then,” Simon answered. “One is just as good as the other.”

“Ah,” the ferryman gave him a knowing nod. “So this is the kind of hurry where you’re eager to be away from somewhere, not to somewhere. I see. Which is it? The law or the ladies?”

Simon just looked at him blankly at that, making the man laugh so loudly that he’d probabll.ly woken up people in town. “I know, I know, none of my business. I’ll just shut up now before I say something we both regret.”

He didn’t of course. Whether because of the beer he wreaked of or because of his nature the man prattled on and on the whole ten minute trip, but he did learn a few things worth knowing without coming off as too much of an outsider. They were apparently in some place called the Kingdom of Brin, and that things had been going well for as long as anyone could remember, but that the king was sick and the ferryman worried that things might not be lasting much longer.

He tuned most of the rest of the details out as he realized he was obviously getting closer to some quest. The man might as well have a golden exclamation mark over his head telling him where to go which annoyed Simon for reasons he didn’t fully understand.

Once on the other bank, Simon thanked the man curtly and left while he was still talking about whatever sprang to his mind and laughing at his own jokes.

At the first fork in the road Simon decided to go south. A sick king in a big city just seemed a little much for him, and he wasn’t looking for the spotlight just yet. He spent much of the day walking alone, though he did pass by a few merchants that eyed him suspiciously like he was some kind of highwayman.

That night his instincts were proven correct as he listened to some men chatting between drinks at the inn he stopped for the night at. It seemed that lots of mercenaries were traveling north and expecting work to be coming sooner rather than later. “The way I hear it, the King’s son is paying more, but only because the King's brother has far more men,” a swarthy man with an axe told the man sitting across the trestle table from him between mouthfuls of roast chicken.

“So what you’re saying is I can be a well paid dead man, or I can get just enough coins to keep me from starving to death? Sounds like business as usual to me,” a red haired man in chain mail answered.

Everyone at the table laughed at that, and Simon joined them even if he didn’t think it was funny. He just wanted to stay out of it. He’d done more dying than everyone else in the room combined, and he was certain that coin wasn’t a good enough reason to take sides in a brewing civil war.

“What about you,” the burly man next to Simon asked while he was trying hard to mind his own business.

“Me?” Simon asked. “I’m going to sit this one out I think. I’m going to… visit family in Hurag.”

“Well, I think they’ll be safe there,” the man nodded, “But it’s good that you’ll be there for them just in case.”

It struck Simon as more than a little odd that the common room was packed with mercenaries that had already decided who they were going to serve, but they had no problem eating with men they might be killing in a week or a month. The inn was all out of rooms, but after he’d finished eating and shared a couple drinks with the crowd he found himself a place in the hay loft above the stables and called it a night before things got too rowdy.

It took Simon two more nights to get to the outskirts of Hurag. It might count as a city in this world, but Simon would have been surprised if it had more than 5,000 people in it. The city gates were merely a gate at the end of the bridge that formed the northern entrance to the place, but there were no city walls attached to it. Instead, it was a few acres of land sheltered between two rivers, and a squat ugly castle on a hill lording over the whole place on a low rise.

The southern part of the city that wasn’t sheltered by the rivers seemed to have a city wall of some sort, but mostly the place struck him as having more in common with a squatters camp or a shanty town than the sort of fantasy city he was used to seeing in his games and movies. The homes were pressed close together to use every scrap of space, and the streets reeked of sewage. Unlike the charming little villages he’d seen along the way, this definitely wasn’t a place that Simon planned to stay long.

Still - it was the first time he’d seen more than fifty people at once since he’d come to the pit, so he told himself he would stay the night at least, just for the novelty of it. After a little searching, Simon found a place that was willing to let him stay the night near the river, where the smell wasn’t quite so bad, and then he spent the rest of the day looking around. Eventually, he found the market, and after haggling with a merchant decided to make his first purchases of this miserable life, so he could finally be outfitted as a proper adventurer.

He purchased a fine leather backpack because he was tired of carrying a sack everywhere he went. Then, once he has somewhere to put his things, he also bought a bedroll, a second water skin to use for beer, a coin purse, two shirts that mostly fit, and a tinderbox and flint which he couldn’t wait to learn how to use so that he could stop lighting campfires with a flamethrower.

That night he agonized over whether he should stay another few days, so he could have someone let out his leathers a little, so they would finally fit right, but the food wasn’t so great, and that night someone tried to break into his room. The sneak thief had either been trying to get to know him better or rob him blind, but his paranoia about what had happened a few days ago was still fresh, and the sound of him unsheathing his sword was enough to send the man running for his life down the stairs.

. . .

The next place Simon slowly worked his way south through several villages before he found the little town of Slany, just big enough for a few amenities, an inn, and a local Lord. Simon only found out that last detail on the third day when he was invited to the Lord’s manor for dinner the following evening, which he accepted, but only because he feared the alternative.

The next evening he was announced as Simon of Schwarzenbruck because he could think of no other city name that sounded even vaguely appropriate, before he was introduced to Baron Corwin, his wife Elanna, and his three sons: Gregor the third, Harver, and Scott.

Simon was on his best behavior and stuck to the character he’d spent last night inventing for himself. He was pretending to be a traveling mercenary and scholar, and figured that between his ability to read and write and his encyclopedic knowledge of monsters would make it an easy role to pull off.

And it did, for a while. Simon managed to create a little restrained laughter when he told them about his only encounter with a wyvern. He even got the hint reasonably quickly that he shouldn’t talk about things like the carrion crawler with a lady present, but he was taken completely off guard, when lord Corwin asked, “It’s interesting that you say you’re from Schwarzenbruck, because I have an aunt from near there, and her accent is completely different from yours.”

For a moment Simon thought they were going to see through his flimsy disguise and summon the guards to drag him to the dungeons even though he was fairly sure there was nothing beneath this manor more threatening than a wine cellar. Then as he could feel the beads of sweat starting to form on his forehead he managed to choke out, “Well - I’ve been traveling most of my life.”

Just like that, a gentle murmur of laughter passed through the room, and the Lord’s eldest said, “Quite so,” and all the tension vanished just in time for the soup course, giving him ample time to think about what he’d just learned. Where he was - the people knew of Schwarzenbruck. Somehow that didn’t feel like a very common name to Simon, so it was entirely possible that it was the same Schwarzenbruck, though he didn’t see how, since it was on a completely different floor of the dungeon. Did things loop back around like that?

After the squash soup came a white wine and an herb braised lamb. Though it wasn’t something Simon ever saw himself trying, he was surprised at how good both of them were, though he chocked that up to living on a steady diet of bread and cheese for the last eternity.

After that the conversation turned to the Kings health, and the baron hoped he lived another hundred years, and then problems with the region and in particular the silver mines that was the Baron’s main source of income.

“We can talk about that later though,” he cautioned his son who had brought it up. “That’s not fit dinner conversation and must wait until after dessert.”

The aforementioned dessert turned out to be a cake that was too dry, and not nearly sweet enough for Simon’s tastes, with layers of thin pastry alternating between layers of jam, but he ate it just the same, and would have second if they’d been offered.

It was only once all that was done that he, the lord, and his eldest son retreated to the study for snuff and brandy. Simon declined the snuff, but took a tumbler full of the golden liquid. He drank it while the Lord finally took the time to explain what the real problem was, and why he’d invited Simon in the first place.

“It’s goblins,” Baron Corwin said, “I’m fairly certain, even if no one has yet produced a corpse of the missing or the things making my workers go missing. This wouldn’t be the first time they’ve been found in the silver mine, but with the… shall we say, troubles, in the capital, it would seem that you are the only mercenary in the area I can ask to handle this little problem for me. Time is money after all, and I’ve had the pit shut down for a week now.”

The choice of words almost made Simon spit out his drink, but he played it cool. “I mean, yeah, I could probably handle that for you, but what’s in it for me?” Simon asked. He wasn’t afraid of facing down a few goblins, but that was what a mercenary was supposed to ask, wasn’t it?

“I’m prepared to offer you half a shilling per ear which is the going rate I believe, I’d be willing to offer a little bonus on top of that though, If you could take young Gregor here, keep him safe, and make sure he gets the lions share of the credit, though.”

“I don’t care who gets the credit,” Simon answered, “And I don’t really need the money either, but I do need a place to stay for a whole and work through some things. I don’t suppose you have a spare cottage around you could loan me for a few weeks or months.”

“I’m  sure we can make arrangements for something like that,” the Baron said, shaking his hand. “In times like these I’m happy to keep an extra man or two whose good with a sword around.”