Death After Death Ch. 69 (Patreon)

Ch. 69 - Finishing a Level

The rats weren’t even the faintest threat to Simon anymore. He stomped one, kicked two, and skewered three on his sword in a series of precise thrusts. Then he spent a minute looking for the seventh rat before he decided that only six had spawned this time.

“I wonder why that is,” he said to himself as he flung the ugly collection of rodents from his blade and resheathed it, so he could look around, “more importantly, though - what the fuck is there to this room beyond the rats?”

It was a fair question. If he’d defeated any level in the pit, it was this one. He’d killed every creature in here dozens of times by now… but apparently, that wasn’t enough. The first few times he’d been through here, he’d poked around but hadn’t found anything but turnips and potatoes.

This time, he tore the place apart methodically, a shelf at a time, but he didn’t find much more than that either. For a while, Simon thought that there might be a nest and that the rats wouldn’t count as defeated until he killed it, too. After all, that’s what he’d done on the lizardman lair, wasn’t it? He’d smashed the nests, and that lair was almost certainly completed now.

In the end, with the room in ruins, he gave up. He even tried digging a little bit, and in a final twist of fate, he closed the trap door and then tried to reopen it to see what might be on top of this level, wherever he really was now. He hadn’t been able to reopen it, though. Wherever that door led to now, something heavy was sitting on top of it.

All in all, it had been a waste of time, but he had learned at least one new thing, and next time, he might bring an axe down to hack through the door and see if he could find out something new. So, he pocketed a few potatoes he could roast on the road, and then he went down another level. He wasn’t quite sure which level he wanted to explore this time, but wherever it was, he would definitely need to eat.

Simon exercised the same thoroughness on the trap floor, making it a point to slay every bat and trigger every single trap he came across… once he found the exit, of course. There were a couple, like the spiked pit, that could make escaping afterward difficult. On this floor, he found absolutely nothing new at all. He even dug to the bottom of the chest to make sure that there was no secret magic item hidden in it, and then he emptied it and checked underneath.

There was nothing there, though. “Very fucking funny, Helades,” he cursed, not exactly sure what he was supposed to do with this floor, either. “How could anyone say I didn’t do a hundred percent clear of this place?”

It was possible that he might need to take something from here and use it in another level, of course. He seemed to recall that Helades might have mentioned that in one of their conversations, but that was a really long time ago, and he wasn’t sure. If that were true, the situation would be hopeless though. Having to clear 99 levels was bad enough, but if he had to use them in combination with each other… well, he couldn’t do the math in his head, but that was a lot of combinations.

When he got to the goblin level, his torch was already low, but Simon didn’t care. He kept it burning until he found the first guard, and then he extinguished it in the thing’s face like a cigarette butt before drawing his bow. He didn’t even try to muffle the awful screams the goblin made. He wanted them to charge him.

After that, he cleared the level like a medieval first-person shooter. Every shot was a headshot, and there were no surprises left to find. When he reached the mouth of the cavern, he saw the last two goblins running away, and he took them out with two well-aimed shots in the back for good measure.

Once that was done, he recovered the arrows he could, though he decided that there was no way he was walking all the way down the slope to where the last two goblins were just for two lousy arrows because it would mean walking back up again. Ultimately, he decided that even if the thing he needed to do to beat this level was somewhere down there, he was going to skip it this trip because he wanted to go deeper.

“There’s literally an entire world down there,” he grumbled. “The gates should be somewhat close to the thing I’m supposed to do, right?”

That would have been the logical thing, but he wasn’t so sure that logic always applied to The Pit, or to Helades for that matter. Still, if he was going to be thorough about this, he couldn’t just skip this level. So, he explored the area around the outside of the cave to get some fresh air in the hopes he would find a second goblin nest nearby. That was not the case, so once that was done and Simon had rested, he went back in, and using part of the goblin bonfire as a new torch, he went back inside, looking for something he might have missed.

He found nothing, though. The only things in the cave besides the filthy goblin warren were the river, which went down to nowhere, and the tomb entrance. Simon was definitively not going back down that nightmare waterfall, so after a couple hours of searching and a quick lunch break, he descended into the tomb.

Here, he was tempted to use his magical force word to shatter the skeletons proactively, but something about the idea of spending a week of his life doing what he could do just as easily with his mace made him feel dirty. He wasn’t going to stop using magic, of course, but as he shattered the first skeleton and moved toward the second and third before they could rise, he promised himself he would only do it when he needed to.

In the end, the skeletons of the tomb were even less of a challenge than he remembered them being, and he made a point to disarm the knight, sending its blade flying before he beheaded his old nemesis. Once that was done, he had a look at the skeleton knight’s armor rather than the blade. After all - no one had made a sword that nice for the dead. This man had wielded it in life and been buried with it.

As Simon suspected, the gauntlets themselves had runes of protection, and the scabbard had boundary nullification runes to turn it off to dispel the effect when it wasn’t in use. That didn’t surprise him, though he did wonder if he’d caused some kind of cold effect like the temple he’d visited on all the worlds that he hadn’t resheathed the sword.

“Helades said that items drain a lot of life force, so who knows,” he told himself as he pried free one of the gauntlets and then put it on to put the sword away.

Maybe that was all he had to do for this level. Maybe it hadn’t counted before because he hadn’t put this thing away. It was only when Simon was about to put it back on the tomb that he realized he was being a moron. He didn’t have to put it back. He had to take it with him.

Not even because that was probably the victory condition either, but because he wanted to wield a badass frost blade! He laughed at how hyperfocused he’d been about what he was missing and that he’d almost forgotten how much he actually wanted this thing.

He smiled as he belted it on, leaving his normal sword behind in its place. It was a little heavier and a few inches longer than what he was used to, but it felt good there. Since he’d first come into The Pit, Simon had wanted a magic weapon, and now he had one. More importantly, this was something he could study when he had the time to understand a bit more about magic and magic items.

It was with that confidence and a smile on his face that he walked into the next level to face the slime. Here, he was certain there could be any number of things to do with this level since it was open to the sky. He’d never tried to climb the walls of this sinkhole before because they’d looked awful crumbly, but for a few months of his life, he imagined he could jump up there pretty easily.

He wasn’t going to, though, not today. Today, he’d thought of a new synergy he was going to explore that he’d never considered before. He turned his attention to the stream that stood between him and the door and tried to decide where the slime was hiding.

He probed the water several times with the sword, leaving a little layer of ice before he found it. The clear ooze reared up to strike at him, but Simon jumped back clumsily, almost landing on his ass. Cursing the body he was stuck with, he retreated before his enemy as he circled around it and maneuvered to the door.

It was only when he was right in front of it that he put his plan into motion. “Oonbetit Uuvellum!” he shouted. Force barrier. Idly, he wondered if using two words was two months or if it was still just one, but he didn’t let that stop him from imagining the flat wall of invisible force that would spring into existence for a moment to stop the thing from eating his face.

As it flattened itself out against the invisible wall, he stabbed it in the center of its mass, forcing it to keep that shape to some extent as it began to freeze solid over the next few seconds. Its periphery still writhed and reached for him, but with its center frozen, its movements were sluggish and ineffective. Soon, it was nothing but an ice cube that was round on bottom and flat on top, and that was just about what Simon wanted.

He tried to push it but found it didn’t slide as well on the rough stone as he’d hoped.

“Modern problems require modern solutions,” he said with a laugh, using his water skin to create a path in front of the slime, which quickly froze. He repeated this several times until he had a wide, slick track of ice to move the slime on. Then he pushed forward the frozen block of slime like it was that curling game that people played in the Olympics.

When he got to the door, he didn’t even need to turn the handle. He’d gotten enough momentum that he just forced the door open and sent the fifty or sixty pounds of ice clattering across the room, where it knocked over the table.

Simon was winded by the effort but not so distracted to forget that there was almost always a zombie to his right as he entered. Even as he stepped inside, he pulled his sword free, and this time, the thing didn’t even have time to charge him before he’d quickly beheaded it.

He was admiring his own handiwork when the door flew open. His knuckles went white on the hilt of his sword as he heard it. He knew what that meant even before he turned around.

She opened her mouth and pointed the pitchfork at him, but before she could say a word, he yelled, “Back the fuck off,” holding his sword at the ready.

She made to jab him with her pitchfork, but he sliced the end off effortlessly, leaving her with nothing but a pole that was a foot shorter than it had been. She looked at it and at the fog of condensation that was coming off his sword a bit more seriously now and stepped back.

As she did, he advanced. She tossed down her now worthless weapon and raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. That wasn’t enough to stop him from bringing the tip of his sword close enough to her neck that he was sure she could feel the unearthly cold radiating off of it.