Death After Death Ch. 50-51 (Patreon)

Ch. 50 - A Quiet Life

It turned out not to be goblins. The villagers seemed to know that too, of course, but Simon hadn’t bothered to ask them. Instead, after a quiet ride to the source of the problem, he just tried the same trick he’d used last time. Suffocating them in their lair would be a fairly bloodless victory. Unfortunately, he found out the hard way that this wasn’t going to be like last time when half a dozen hobgoblins staggered out of the dank hole in the ground. Other than their dark olive skin, they had little in common with the goblins he’d fought so far, and they were definitely going to be a little tougher than their smaller cousins. They scattered the fire in all directions as they charged through the smoke looking for something to kill.

Simon hadn’t been ready for a counter-attack or the larger-than-expected opponents. None of them were. Still, he charged in before he remembered that this was the very last life he wanted to die in. He was just so used to fighting now that it was his first impulse, and he regretted it as he moved toward the opponents that were almost as large as he was.

They were vicious, too, but his boldness surprised him as much as it did his opponent, and between their coughing from the smoke and their squinting from the sun, he was certain that he and his men could make short work of the bastards. He was mostly right, but partway through the fight, when there were only three of the green skins left, Simon took a club to the back while he was gutting his second opponent that sent him sprawling. It hurt, but he didn’t think that anything was broken. He would have almost certainly been stomped to death if two of his fellow warriors hadn’t shot it with their crossbows, though.

After that, Simon was about to order his men to start rebuilding the fire when he noticed that one of them was hurt pretty bad. “The rest of you start the bonfire back up unless you want to go in and see if there are any of those big bastards left while I tend to Trav,” he said. From the expression of the other men, he realized that they probably thought he meant he was going to end his suffering with the point of his sword, but Simon doubted it would come to that.

The man had been raked across the belly with the foul claws of the hobgoblins, and he was bleeding badly enough that Simon was sure the abdominal wall had been ripped, which meant there might be all sorts of internal damage as well. Simon wasn’t much for science, and he barely remembered his high school biology test book, but still, he struggled to remember those crucial details as he soothed the wounded soldier.

“Easy there, man. The worst is over. You’re going to be okay,” Simon said, struggling to find something to say that wasn’t so generic and coming up empty. He’d shared a campfire with these men for all of two nights, and he knew next to nothing about him.

“I-I’m dying, aren’t I,” the man gasped as he lay there in obvious pain.

“Nah,” Simon lied. “I’ve seen way worse than this. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“A flesh wound?” he moaned in fear. “What is that? Does that mean it’s already diseased? Gods protect me!”

Simon realized the man would have no idea what he’d meant by the phrase flesh wound only after he said it, but he didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he gathered up the image in his mind of the wound knitting shut, the intestines returning to normal, and the blood pooling in the man’s abdominal cavity slowly being reabsorbed by the body before he whispered, “Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́,” under his breath. Simon could see that it wasn’t enough to fully heal such a large wound, but it did help, and he quickly reached for the bandages.

The last thing he wanted to do was reveal his magical powers. He knew exactly what would happen once he’d done that. Instead, he just made Trav comfortable. After all, Simon could always heal him again that night or on the way back home if necessary.

They stayed there the rest of the day, filling the lair with smoke, and when night came, they camped nearby and kept a watch on the entrance until morning. It was only then that Simon was completely satisfied that they’d done their job. They brought one of the heads back to the village on a spear and mounted it in the square to show everyone that they had nothing to worry about, and that night a feast was held in their honor.

The village wasn’t rich, so the food was meager, but Simon still enjoyed the crude folk music and the amusing medieval dances that he had no idea how to perform. Before the end of the night, he was all but propositioned by one of the women there. “Please allow me to show you my gratitude properly,” she’d breathed into his ear when she brought him another beer.

Simon politely declined, but the whole thing just made him miss Freya more, and so the next morning, they made haste back to the Baron to deliver the news of their success. The ride back gave him plenty of time to reflect on his strange little life. The life of a mercenary warrior certainly wasn’t what he would have chosen if he’d gotten a say in it. Being the Baron and actually managing all the details of the kingdom could have been fun. Playing a wizard in a tower studying how to make this magic system slightly less broken could have also been cool too, but even if he could figure out a way to reach that spot in one of his lives, he couldn’t imagine how he’d be able to do it without Freya by his side, and that was more important than anything else.

The trip back was uneventful, and Simon made his report only very briefly before he went to find his wife. Even that brief stopover was enough to chill him when the Baron’s eldest said, “Hobgoblins, you say? Are you sure? I had no idea. Is it possible fighting goblins might not be as simple as you claim it to be?” He’d actually laughed at that, and it had taken every ounce of Simon’s willpower not to draw his weapon. The man had known that they were being sent out against something a lot tougher, and he’d lied to him.

“Even so,” the Baron stepped in to smooth things over. “You managed to deal with the problem and come back unharmed. Excellent work.”

“Well, not unharmed,” Simon corrected him, “but I think that Trav will pull through.”

“Yes, I had heard something about that,” the old man said, “Apparently, in addition to your other talents, you are a gifted healer.”

Simon just shrugged, not sure what to say, and after a little more discussion, he left. His next stop was the inn, but Freya wasn’t there, so he tried their home and was pleased to find her cleaning up their little hovel. When he first saw her, she seemed upset, and he thought he was about to get yelled at, but as soon as the door creaked and she turned, she ran to him and hugged him like she was afraid he was going to vanish at any moment.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I-I heard that someone came back from your little adventure and was hurt pretty bad. I feared the worst, and…” her words dissolved into tears as she beat her hand importantly against his chest. “How could you think any of this is okay? What if you’d died? What if you’d left me in this strange place already a widow!”

“It’s going to be okay,” Simon said, trying to soothe her by stroking her hair. “Everything is going to be just fine. I mean, look at this lovely home. You’ve—”

“The gods can take it for all I care,” she spat. “We could leave tonight. We still have the wagon; we could—”

“What happened here?” Simon asked, noticing the small bandage on her arm. For a moment, he had a flashback of the time Breanna had hidden a wound and then turned into a zombie and bitten him. He felt the sudden impulse to undo the bandage and check to make sure it wasn’t a bite, but he suppressed it.

“Oh, I just cut myself in here while I was… cleaning up,” She looked like she was on the verge of tears again, and Simon didn’t understand, but he did his best to make her feel safe.

Freya clung to him all night, except for when she was cooking over the low fire he’d made with some of the cutlery they’d saved from their trip. “I believe someone called all this junk,” she said, smiling.

Simon didn’t care about the dig. He just cared that it was the first time she’d really looked happy all day. That night he told her about the fight and about the man that had almost died under his command. He blamed the Baron for sending him without the proper information and the people of the region for not warning them, but as he drifted off to sleep, he knew the truth. It had been his fault for not investigating more before he’d sought out the confrontation. They could have watched and waited or done some scouting and asked around to figure out that they needed to prepare more. They didn’t, though, because he’d been so certain it wasn’t going to be a challenge.

He was going to have to work on that.

The rest of the week they spent cleaning and building. Simon used an axe to make some new posts for their fence, and he hired a carpenter to fix their doors and shutters, so the place should be less drafty, but by the time he was called away again almost two weeks later, their house was finally starting to look like a home, and that brought him a measure of joy and peace that was almost indescribable. The last conversation he had with his wife was about what they should plant in their garden in the spring, and then he was off on the road again, dreaming about a herb garden and perhaps a nice spinning wheel for her if he could find one.

This second mission was against the centaurs that had been raiding villages and herds to the east. Centaurs were rare creatures in games, so Simon hadn’t had much experience with them, but the reality was fairly terrifying when he saw one for the first time. The creatures were huge and bestial. They were taller than him at the shoulder, and they had huge sharp teeth and dead eyes that made them look more like animals than men.

It turned out that the creatures favored short bows that they could fire while they ran at speed, which made them almost impossible to fight or capture. Simon was shot twice in their first encounter and was forced to lay there in pain for most of the day until he could get enough privacy to heal himself.

Thereafter, he was more careful. They retreated and spent a day practicing with whatever the men had on them, be it a long bow, a crossbow, or a sling, and after that, they recruited a likely shepherd in a dangerous area, and they waited among the rocks and the sheep for the centaurs to reappear. As the nine of them galloped toward the shepherd kicking up a trail of dust in their wake, the man drove his flock back further into the rough ground, and when the centaurs moved to follow, Simon and the dozen men he’d brought with him sprang from their hiding places and took down several of the monsters before the centaurs even knew they were endangered.

This time Simon was not able to bring his men back unscathed, but after a few minutes of fierce fighting, only three centaurs were left to retreat, and all but two of Simon’s men had survived the encounter.

This time there would be no celebration because their survival had been a near thing. If Simon had met them on an open field of battle to “put the fear of house Raithewait in them,” as the Baron had suggested, Simon was quite sure they’d all be dead by now. No, this time, all he wanted to do was go home and kiss his beautiful wife, and appreciate that he’d survived.

Ch. 51 - Insurmountable

The next few months were among the most satisfying days that Simon had ever known. He’d spend a few days on the road helping to defend the Barony from some monster or another. Then he’d come home to spend weeks with his wife as they slowly turned their strange situation into a life together.

She was never happy to see him leave, but she was always overjoyed to see him come home, and that was enough for him. Little by little, they made a thousand minor touches that slowly turned their life from bearable to amazing. Simon learned to redo the plaster walls, and though he never quite mastered the brickwork, the man he hired did a good enough job that Freya never complained about smoke while she was cooking again.

It seemed like every time he left Crowvar, he came back with some souvenir. When they rousted a nest of bandits just before the first snow, Simon chose to take a nice set of stolen silverware as his prize from that tidy little horde. After that was gnoll raiders, where he found a lovely necklace for Freya, which she swooned over. In the spring, he was called upon to defeat an actual goblin infestation and then to put down a tax rebellion. In the former case, he finally found a lovely spinning wheel in a house where the occupants had been murdered. In the latter, he actually chose to give a few gold coins from his stash away to resolve the situation peacefully when he decided that the Baron was in the wrong.

He didn’t want to spend those coins, of course. He knew they’d never get that sort of windfall again. However, his only other option was to crush the skull of the headman and hang every poor bastard without a coin to their name or join them and overthrow the Baron. Simon was fairly sure he could do the latter, but the chaos that would have been introduced into his life would have been awful. He needed peace to enjoy this time with Freya more than he needed a couple of gold coins anyway.

He felt like both of them were improving and growing closer all the time, which made their time apart that much more unbearable. While she learned to spin yarn and knit it into a blanket to replace the threadbare one that had barely got them through winter, he focused on other things that were almost as important.

Simon spent the winter getting halfway decent with his long bow and forcing the men he fought beside so often to train to work together a little better. Quite frankly, he thought their performance was a little embarrassing because everyone used a different weapon and style. Still, it took forever to improve that situation. He doubted they’d have even made the effort if they didn’t secretly call him the miracle worker behind his back.

That was a rumor he’d tried to quash, but it had only grown since that first fight. Even the Baron had pulled him aside to ask if it was true that he had magical healing powers. Simon had learned the hard way that the more he denied it, the more they believed. Now he just ignored it and tried not to add more fuel to the fire. Still - it was hard to do that when you watched someone bleeding out on the battlefield and knew you could save them with a few whispered words.

These days he tried to heal just the internal part of the wound. That way, he left it bleeding but no longer life-threatening to allay suspicion. However, even with that little trick, people still noticed that of all the Baron’s patrols, his routinely came back with the fewest casualties. So, they tried things his way and practiced things like shield walls and short bows, and by spring, he had a halfway capable fighting force.

By spring, everything felt like it was starting to fall into a routine for the first time since he’d entered the pit. That was when Freya told him that she was pregnant.

“Really? Are you sure?” he asked. That was apparently the wrong answer because after she stopped crying, she wouldn’t speak to him for hours.

That night they had a fight, and he apologized, but he wasn’t really sure what he was apologizing for. He was the one with his mind blown, after all. He was only thirty, after all. Was he even ready to be a dad? It wasn’t a conversation he’d ever planned on having in his life. Still, eventually, he acted excited enough to placate her while he processed his own feeling on the subject.

Simon tried to look on the bright side. This was among the smallest curveballs Hellades could have thrown him. It was only a few days later that they heard the news that the orcs were coming.

Two days after Simon got the Baron to agree to let him take some time off from the field, a messenger came to let them know that a war band of orcs had been sighted in the east and seemed to be heading this way. For the last month, they had been dealing with increased centaur activity, and suddenly everything snapped into place: the centaurs were moving further west and waring with the humans because the orcs were displacing them. It was grim news, and though the lord of Crowvar kept it a secret for as long as he could so as not to cause a panic, the panic still came when refugees fleeing the path of danger arrived in the walled town.

“Are we going to leave?” Freya asked. “They say that the horde has thousands of warriors. There’s no way anyone could defend against that.”

“If everyone is saying something, it’s almost certainly wrong,” Simon sighed, slumping into bed with her. He explained that the reality was somewhere between dozens and hundreds of orc warriors. While that was still enough to kill 3 times their weight in men, Crowvar had more than enough men that could hold a sword or a crossbow to fend them off.

In truth, Simon was more than a little worried. Not just for his wife but also for his unborn child, that was just starting to grow inside her. He couldn’t leave, though. The road hadn’t been a good place when it was just the two of them, and there was no way they’d be able to manage as her body began to swell with life.

He didn’t tell her any of that, though. Instead, he told her he would think about it while they fell asleep. His mind was already made up, though, and in the morning, he went before the Baron to suggest a plan that was a feverish combination of various action and fantasy movies he’d seen.

“Sire, we must defeat this army, but the only place we can hope to do so is here. We must let them come here and even lure them here if necessary, and then we must break them against the eastern walls,” Simon said as passionately as he could.

“The eastern walls, you say? And why is that?” the Baron asked. “My son thinks we should be prepared to retreat to the tower and wait for them to lose interest. Rumors say their army is too big to hold back until the Count or even the King sends reinforcements.”

Simon carefully explained that the orcs moved like a wave of locusts and that they carried no supplies with them, so they could not stay in one place for any length of time. Then he explained his plan. “They will attack from the east because that is the direction they come from, and they will attack at night because all green skins hate the light, but we will be ready. They have no siege engines or scaling ladders, so we will line the walls with men wielding spears and keep them from gaining a foothold while we pepper them with arrows.”

“Arrows will just make an orc angry,” Varten said haughtily. “Don’t you know anything?”

“I know you can bring anything down with enough arrows,” Simon snapped, almost saying bullets by accident. “We will hold them in place, we will weaken them, and then in the morning, when they are trying to decide whether to retreat, we will launch our cavalry from the tree line and crush their weakened force against the wall and obliterate it.”

“What you describe is a fine plan, Simon,” the Baron said wearily, “but it would take many more men than we have, and these orcs will be here within a fortnight.”

“More soldiers would be better, but I do not think we need too many,” Simon answered. “We will keep most of them on their horses in the wood while we put a bow or a spear in the hand of every farmer and refugee that’s old enough to wield them, and we shall tell them that they are all that stands between their family and a gruesome death.”

Eventually, the Baron saw things Simon’s way and agreed to the plan, which infuriated his son. “This plan is reckless to the point of danger. No man will follow it,” Varten declared, storming out of the room.

Simon didn’t actually think he was completely wrong. It was reckless, but only a little. In the movies, the orcs would have had giant trolls to knock down the walls or catapults, but here they were just savages using salvaged weapons to murder and devour everything they could find, and Simon would be ready for them.

Every day more people pressed into the small town for the slender promise of safety offered by their walls, and every day, the people worked as hard as they could to prepare. Blacksmiths worked late into the night, and Simon drilled the men on the plan. An orc’s main advantage was size and strength, and his plan aimed to deny them both.

On the day the horde was sighted from the tower, Simon pressed a dagger into Freya’s hand and promised to keep her safe even as she cursed him for not fleeing when they had the chance. She was almost six months pregnant now, and travel beyond the market would have been impossible, but that didn’t matter.

To her, all that mattered now was that he was safe, but just the opposite was true for him. He was going to keep her safe no matter what. So, with a look of grim determination, he strode out into the twilight to prepare for the long night ahead.

The orcs reached the walls just before midnight, and Simon called for the first volley of death moments later. Their supply of arrows was not infinite, of course, but they would make sure that every single shaft ended up splattered in green blood before the end of the night.

Simon took to the walls sometime past one in the morning when one of the defenders was yanked off into the milling crowd below. Most of the orcs tried to climb the walls without success, but some of them had grapples and would hook onto the top bricks, and they did their best to bring down the ancient fortification one brick at a time. It was working too, and it hadn’t been part of Simon’s plan. As Varten had mentioned, they shrugged off arrows and instead used their massive strength to pull chunks of masonry off into their fellows as they sought to lower the walls enough to gain entry.

It almost worked. Despite severing every grapnel he could, they still almost managed to create a breach in the southern part of the western wall. In the end, it was only dawn that saved them. As false dawn began to light up the eastern horizon, the warriors began to have second thoughts about whether or not to continue the assault. It was too late for second thoughts, though, because even as they turned to leave, the horn blew, and the cavalry appeared on the far side.

Simon ordered the gates open then and sent every man still capable of swinging a sword outside to join them. There had been perhaps three hundred orcs at the beginning of the night, and even though there was only half that number now, that would still be too much for the knights that were charging in to save the day. The result was a bloody melee that lasted for hours, but for all their strength, the orcs were wounded and exhausted, and in the end, they were wiped out to the last man, inflicting only several dozen casualties on their enemies for all their effort.

Simon was elated. Some of the soldiers wept that morning, embracing each other in the greatest victory that part of the world had seen in some time. Simon would have loved to join them. Instead, he hurried home because there was one person he needed to share this victory with more than anyone else.

“We did it, baby, we’re safe and…” Simon never finished that sentence as the words died in his throat. Both Freya and Varten turned toward the sound of his speech, but it was too late. He’d already seen them kissing.

It should have been the most joyous day of Simon’s life. For once in his life, he was the hero. He’d saved the day. He couldn’t celebrate, though, because when he came home, he opened the door to find his beloved wife in the arms of another man.

Author's Note: Wait - you mean after all the suffering I put Simon through so far, I wasn't just going to give him a happy ending and turn this story into a slice of life story filled with mercenary hijinks and awkward marital problems?! 

I understand that Simons emotional health and growing need for companionship might not be most people's favorite part of the story, but I think it's crucial for his development. I only hope that all of you will enjoy the pay off.