Death After Death Ch. 96 and 97 (Patreon)

Ch. 96 - Dark Clouds

The next day, Aaric greeted Simon with sweetbreads and more questions about what it was like to fight centaurs. Apparently, they were a growing problem in the region. Simon was careful not to be anywhere near the door that might or might not be a portal, and when the boy opened it, it was to Simon's great relief the child did not vanish into a shadowy netherworld.

Instead, the two chatted for a few minutes as they looked for his father and found the man already hard at work. “I trust you’ll be on your way then?” Millen asked in a tone that made it clear that it was time for Simon to move on.

“Of course,” Simon agreed, “but before I do, I’d be happy to lend you a few hours if you have any work that needs doing.”

He’d thought about slipping the man a coin, but all he had right now was gold, and the man was likely to be suspicious, insulted, or both if he offered him such a lordly sum. Besides, he still hadn’t figured out what it was he was supposed to be doing here.

Every portal was supposed to door to a place that needed fixing, but other than Millen’s complaints about how the harvest wouldn’t be as good as it had been last year or mentions that banditry was on the rise further to the north where Simon had claimed to be heading to, it looked pretty damn idyllic.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to give up on this level and move on, but even though he was rushing to level 30 so he could give Helades a piece of his mind, having some idea of what he was up against for next time would be nice.

"Well, if you want to chop a cord or two of firewood while me and Aaric start reaping the wheat and barley, that would be mighty nice of you," the man said with a thin smile. Still, I think you’d best be back on the road by noon or so. It’s a long walk to the next village.

Benjamin nodded at that. He was still woefully out of shape, and a little time with an axe would do him some good. He struggled a bit at first to cut the logs that had been dragged near the house into smaller pieces, but once he gave the axe a good sharpening, things went faster.

For the next few hours, Simon lost himself in the easy rhythm of steel against wood as he delimbed the dead wood and then chopped the log into smaller pieces that he could break up into billets. This wasn’t the first time he’d done this since he came to The Pit, but it was enough to make him wonder how it was humanity had ever managed to do this before they’d invented the chainsaw.

Still, he worked on it for hour after hour, and it was only when the horizon started to darken that he looked up. “Did it really get that late?” he asked himself as he looked up.

Thankfully, he hadn’t just spent the last eight hours cutting wood, he realized as he saw the storm clouds. He set down the axe and sat on his chopping stump as he wondered whether he should head out now or wait until the storm passed, but the answer he came up with was a frightening one. That wasn’t any sort of storm he’d ever seen before.

There was no lightning for one. That was what had tipped him off. However, as the cloud got closer and closer, well, it was just a uniform pall of darkness, and once he started to hear the buzzing, he was on his feet.

At first, Simon had thought that he was imagining it, but as it got louder and louder, there was no denying it, and once he saw Aaric and his father running in from the fields, he’d finally figured out why he was there. He just wasn’t sure what he should do about it.

“Are those locusts?” Simon yelled as the men ran toward him.

“Worse than that!” Millen Answered. “Black swarmers are like flying leaches with teeth! They’d much rather suck a man dry than devour the crop! We need to get inside and cover the windows before they get here!”

Simon was torn with whether or not he should stay outside and try to do something or rush inside with them. Ultimately, it was their urgency that convinced him. He moved with the two men as they snatched up the girls and moved with them inside before slamming the shutters closed.

After that, Simon did whatever he could to help. He rolled up a carpet and shoved it under the door. He helped the youngest girl shove bedding into the slats of one of the windows. This wasn’t like a modern house, though. It wasn’t capable of being hermetically sealed.

He didn’t realize that until he saw Nora building a fire and tried to understand why. It was plenty warm enough, but they needed to block the chimney before the swarm found that as a way inside.

The buzzing was incessant now. It was both loud and high-pitched enough to put his teeth on edge.

“Alright,” Millen said to his family. “Nobody panic. It’s going to be okay. They’ll get the chickens and the goats, and then they’ll move on, and we can… Sweetie, it will be okay, I promise,”

Simon could tell that the man had some sort of speech prepared for that moment, which meant that this had happened before, but that all collapsed when his youngest daughter, Benna, broke down into tears. He looked at the walls and the flimsy thatched roof, trying to figure out whether they were safe or not. That was when the first few bugs started to break in.

To Simon, they looked like giant termites or ants more than anything, and Aaric was up on his feet, immediately swatting them with a blanket. They were tough little buggers, though, and they were back up in an instant. After a few attempts, he discovered that it took a good hard strike with a piece of firewood to stop them for good. By the time he’d swatted one, though, five more had found their way in through some chink in their armor.

The little girls were screaming now, and everyone was doing what they could, but it was clear to Simon that this was likely a doomed effort. In a few minutes, there might be hundreds of these things inside the house.

Quickly, he ran through a list of options he could try in his head. Force was out of the question because of how precisely it needed to be targeted. Fire and ice might hurt the swarm, but firing it blind wasn’t likely to be particularly effective.

For a moment, Simon was sure that made boundary his only option. Surely, he could make this building proof against more bugs for a minute or two, but if that stretched into hours, he wasn’t so sure. Even if he stuck to the normal command words, he probably wasn’t good for more than 10 or 15 in a row…

Scanning his mental list one more time, he realized there was one more option. It was something he’d never tried before, though. Transfer. Stealing other people’s life lifeforce was wrong, so he’d never actually tried it before, but…

Is it possible to target a whole swarm rather than a single member of the swarm? He thought as he picked up one of the half-crushed bugs and examined it?

There were dozens of the ugly things in here with them now, and he could feel three of them biting him even now, but it wasn’t so painful after a moment. They had some sort of anesthetic component to whatever it was they were doing, so he ignored it and focused on trying to connect to the swarm that all of them were a part of.

Simon hadn’t focused hard on the visualization part of magic for a long time since he’d gotten to be pretty good at it, but he knew that it mattered as much as saying the words, and he focused hard on that now.

He imagined that all of them were connected. Not physically, but that each bug in the swarm was just another cell in the body and that by biting him, they were connecting themselves to him. He had no idea if that would actually work, but in that moment, he believed that it did, and as he envisioned his draining spell sucking the life out of all of them, he whispered, “Gervuul Zyvon.” Greater transfer.

For a second, it felt like he was holding on to a live wire as the bug in his grip squirmed and spasmed one more time before it ceased moving forever. If the other bugs in the room had stopped moving, too, he couldn’t say for sure because his world had been reduced to the strange, narcotic sensation that was currently consuming him.

A river of lifeforce was flowing into him right now, and each drop in that river was the life of one of these awful little bugs. Simon had never tried any hard drugs before. He’d been drunk plenty of times and tried weed on a few occasions, but what he was enduring right now was well past any of that. This was mainlining something dark and terrible, and somewhere past the feelings of power and hunger and the faint buzzing, there was a feeling of bliss like he’d never known, and as his body went boneless and limp, he lay there on the floor listening to the sound of rain pouring down around the small two room cottage.

No, not rain, he realized, lying there. Bugs. Tens of thousands of bugs.

That mental image took away some part of the beauty of the moment, but that was fine. It was enough to force him to his feet as he lurched toward the door.

“No, Simon, don’t open that! ” Millen yelled. He was too late to stop Simon, though. Everyone was.

There was no danger on the other side of the door, just the same disgusting image he’d imagined before. From here, all the way to the edge of the fields was a black twitching carpet of dead and dying bugs.

Looking to the sky, Simon could still see a few of them, but he knew he’d done it, and honestly, he might never have felt more powerful than he did at that moment.

“It’s over, he breathed.

“What’s over? Did you…” Millen started to ask, but his words trailed off into silence as he beheld the truly biblical sight of the slaughtered swarm.

Simon wanted to take credit or something like that, but honestly, the way he felt even standing was pretty challenging. So, instead, he stood there with a dumb smile on his face while the family that had crowded around him in the doorway got down on their knees and thanked the gods above for their little miracle.

Once the shock had worn off, Millen demanded, “Did you have anything to do with this? Did you know that…”

Simon just shook his head. “You have that backward, man. I was planning to get on the road right about now. If not for you, those creepy crawlers would have eaten me alive!” he said, deciding that was the best possible lie he could come up with on short notice.

He could see that they were still clearly suspicious of him, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it besides crunch through three inches of bugs as he helped them check on the barnyard animals that had, shockingly, mostly survived this bizarre event.

He kept an easy smile on his face while they did that, but he knew he was going to have to get the hell out of there just as soon as he could. Hopefully, the next level would give him someplace to lie down and get his shit together because he was not at the top of his game right now.

Ch. 97 - Big Game

It took several minutes, but as soon Simon shook the intoxicating feeling of the life force pouring inside of him, he resolved to leave. Now that the bliss was fading, it left behind an oily residue. Some small part of him felt like whatever he’d done to earn the baleful aura that so many had reported had just been made worse. Like he’d done something, he shouldn’t have.

That was certainly confirmed by the way that Millen and his son were looking at Simon. As they stared at the carpet of dead insects, their gaze became increasingly dark, and he knew it wasn’t going to end well. So, making an excuse that he had to go check on his belongings, he slipped off to the barn, and from there, he exited to the next level.

He’d lost count. He wasn’t sure if this was 25, 26, or 27. Hell, he might have reached level 29 for all he knew, but he knew he was getting close to Helades. “I just have to keep moving,” he told himself as he looked past the fog of his warm breath on the cold air to the moonlit woods. “I just have to…”

His words trailed off as the howl of distant wolves raised the hair on the back of his neck.

I just have to stay ahead of whatever the hell that is, he decided as he turned and started to jog in the opposite direction.

Simon wasn’t in the best shape yet. In fact, he still felt like he needed to lose 50 pounds, but right now, he wasn’t in the right space to fight. He was still wrestling with the narcotic sensations of what he’d done and the strange urge to do it again, and he was definitely not in the right headspace to fight wargs and goblins or whatever it was he was supposed to do on this level.

For that matter, he had no idea where he was either. The cold and the pine trees said he was somewhere high. So maybe he was in the mountains in the fall or the winter… Eventually, he ran out of gas, and he walked the way up the rest of the rise. It was only there that he started to put the pieces together slowly as he found the dim lights of a village below him.

It was a nice-looking place. Well, at least it was nicer than some of the other places he’d been to recently. It wasn’t the richest place, and it was almost certainly too small to be considered a town, but it probably had everything that he really needed in one quaint little community. There was a double handful of thatched roof houses in neat rows. Smoke was coming out of the chimneys of most of them in thin, wispy lines, and light was escaping from the cracks in the shutters.

The community was small, but the quality of the roads and the fencing said volumes to him about them at this point. He’d been in too many little towns and villages across the continent not to recognize the handiwork of a serious, healthy community.

Even if he hadn’t been able to pick out those details from here, the neat row of shops on the small square and the whitewashed stone temple that everything else was clustered around to some degree said the same thing. This was a place he’d have been happy to live; it just probably wouldn’t be tonight.

They’d probably be too insular to welcome a stranger like me for more than a night or two, he thought glumly.

As he stood there, judging the place and deciding the best way down, he heard another howl in the distance. This one was far away but still closer than before. So, he started down the hill at a more moderate pace.

There was no telling what he might trip and fall over in the moonlit darkness, and casting light while he was this exposed definitely wasn’t a good idea. It was the best part of a mile away, so there was no way he was running the whole way anyway.

As it turned out, he probably wasn’t going to get there in time, though, because, of course, he wasn’t. Simon sighed as he heard the crashing in the bushes somewhere behind him, near the crest of the hill, and was somewhat disappointed to pull out the cutlass he had in his hand instead of his preferred long sword.

“Oh, right,” he said dumbly as he realized he’d lost that long ago.

He stopped running, and when he saw an outlying farmstead, he started backing in that direction instead as he watched the darkness behind him, searching for what it was that was about to attack him. Truthfully, he’d been expecting something scarier, but when a pack of snarling wolves crested the rise and scented the air, he relaxed a little.

His very first instinct was to suck the life out of them with a word of transfer, but he suppressed that instinct ruthlessly. He definitely wasn’t doing that again any time soon. Instead, he waited to see what they would do, and when they bolted and started toward him, he whispered, “Dnarth Vrazig,” distant lightning, and brought a bolt from the blue down on the heads of the rabid animals, scattering them in all directions.

Simon shrugged. That probably wasn’t enough to clear the leave, but it bought him some breathing room, and as he turned around to continue on his way, he breathed a sigh of relief.

Only, it wasn’t over. Something howled, and when he turned around, he saw the body of the pack leader pulling itself back to his feet. It was almost twice as big as the rest, and he hadn’t really noticed that in the dark, several hundred yards away. Now that it stood there alone, though, it was impossible to miss.

“Tough bastard, are you?” Simon murmured to himself.

The thing charged forward again. Somehow, it seemed faster than it had before. For a moment, he was tempted to try lightning again, but instead, he decided to kill it quick and clean with a land of force through its heart like a real hunter would do with a bullet, shouting, “Oonbetit!”

That was enough to stagger it, and though, for a brief second, it looked like it might keep moving, Simon was pleased to watch it finally fall into a pool of its own blood less than a hundred yards from him. This time, he didn’t wait to see what happened. He just turned around and started running. It was good that he did, too, because less than a minute later, he heard the sound of something chasing him again, and he didn’t need to look over his shoulder to see what it was.

“What are you?” he gasped. “The Terminator’s dog?”

When it was right on his heels, he shouted, “Gervuul Meiren,” turning it into a fireball with a greater word of flame.

He was concerned now. He could taste the iron of his own blood, and he felt his throat giving out from using too much magic too quickly. There was nothing for it, though. It was this or death, and he was too close to his answers to go down so easily.

Simon bolted for the door of the cottage, praying it was open. He’d finally figured out what he was fighting, and if fire didn’t put it down, he didn’t have anything that would. He was not equipped to fight werewolves. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he would. They were more of a horror monster than a fantasy monster, anyway.

What’s next? He cursed himself internally. Fucking vampires?

Honestly, that was entirely possible. He’d never imagined a swarm of carnivorous locust bugs trying to devour whole farms, either.

He lost that thought as he heard the sound of the thing getting up again. Simon bemoaned the fact that he didn’t have a single silver coin on him. A single word of lesser force would be enough to make his own silver bullet and bring that thing down, but right now, all of his magic bordered on uselessness.

When he reached the door, he tried to force his way inside, but it was locked or barred. “Help!” he yelled. “This thing is trying to kill me!”

Despite his pounding, there was no answer, so Simon turned around and prepared to fight for his life. In the end, that seemed unlikely, though. This thing no longer really looked like a wolf. It looked like an eight-foot-tall beast man standing on his hind legs with burned patches in its fur and bright pink scar tissue that was already starting to disappear beneath the fur.

When it charged Simon, he knew he was screwed, but that didn’t stop him from doing his best. He deflected the massive claws that aimed for his heart in a killing blow with his blade, driving them deep into the wood of the door instead.

That did nothing for the rest of the thing’s body, which came barreling down on him like a freight train. The door he was braced against cracked under the force, along with a couple of Simon’s ribs.

They collapsed on the ground in a tangle of limbs, and Simon was sure that he was about to get his throat torn out by the slavering jaws that were inches above him and that moments later, everyone else in this home would meet a similar fate.

Instead, the werewolf had what looked to be a seizure and crouched there on Simon as he began to spasm and eventually shrink. It took him only a few seconds to figure out why. They weren’t in the cottage he’d just been standing in front of. They were in the burned-out ruins of a different cottage, and it was somewhere else, on some other level.

Most importantly, though. On that level, it was daytime, and the light was causing this thing some serious problems. It roared in confusion, but even as it did so, it fell off of Simon and started to spasm violently as it began to shrink.

Though the thing had looked disturbingly humanoid, it had definitely been an animal. Now, that distinction was less clear. Moment by moment it was becoming something closer to human, but it was turning into a real horror show along the way.

Its jaw deformed as its hair shrank to nothing, granting Simon a better view than he would have liked. Then, its giant muscles deflated, and its teeth and claws began to shrink somehow, even though Simon couldn’t think of a single way that would be biologically possible. After that, he watched the various bones lock back into place as they shrank at different rates. It was a disturbing sight, but no less disturbing than watching the nighttime in the doorway slowly fade to a few of the plants that surrounded them.

In the end, he was left alone in an empty, burned-out village with nothing but a naked, unconscious man who had been a wolf moments before. For a moment, Simon almost put the poor bastard out of his misery with the cutlass that was still clutched in his hand. He resisted the urge, though. Instead, he left his assailant where he lay and went to try to find the man some clothes while he looked for survivors.

He had no idea what was going on in either level, but he was damn sure going to get some answers.