Death After Death PLUS 183-184

Ch. 183 - Something To Do

This time it wasn’t a question of where he wanted to spend his time, it was a matter of how he wanted to spend this life, and Simon spent several days considering that question. At this point his lives were stretching for decades rather than ending in weeks, so in a way, he was picking what kind of play-through he wanted to have. Maybe picking my major would be a better choice, he added as he reflected on his previous life. 

It was that thought that made him decide he definitely wasn’t going to do what he’d planned. Once he finished recording every fact worth remembering into his ever-expanding personal library, he’d thought about going to Liepzen and living a similar lie for as long as he had the last time in a different library. It was sensible. The facts were all fresh in his head, after all. Surely, he’d be able to learn the most by comparing what he’d read in Darndelle and the Broken Tower. 

But it sounded incredibly dull. He’d spent years reading and tinkering, and right now, he wanted to do what? Besides seeing Elthena, he wasn’t sure, but seeing his sword leaning against the wall, called to him more than a little, and he wondered what enchantment he might put on it when the time was right. 

Strangely, though, he didn’t feel like enchanting anything. He wanted to in theory, but he knew exactly how much work that was. It would be weeks and months to set everything up, depending on what he wanted to do, and right now, that all just looked like more waiting to him. Truthfully he was chaffing at spending so much time just talking to the damn mirror for day after tedious day, but he knew if he stopped, he’d never pick that back up again, and he’d forget an awful lot. 

“You know, you do a terrible job and holding up your side of the conversation,” he told the mirror at one of the points he felt like giving up on this part of the project. 

‘I do not understand the point you are making,’ the thing said after only a slight delay. 

“Exactly,” he laughed. “That’s the problem.”

Simon managed to put up with the boredom for almost two weeks before he gave up. In that time his only real entertainment was hunting, fishing, and thwarting the increasingly aggressive goblin raids. 

Simon had never tried to stay on this level for so long. Indeed, he remembered a time when he regarded staying here for five days as impossible. This time, though, he looked forward to the sunset raids that only intensified day after day. 

The first time they tried to burn him out was on day four. Simon didn’t even have to resort to magic for the half a dozen little bastards. He just took out the shaman with a well-aimed shot, then plinked off a few more of the buggers before they scattered. He’d been forced to use his crossbow ammo for that fight because he was saving his good arrows for hunting. Still, it worked well enough. 

After the shaman was dead, he hoped to see more new monsters he hadn’t seen before, but instead, it was just more angry swarms of goblins. Without the spells splashing against the side of his cabin, though, he finally got a workout with his sword. 

Even five- or six-on-one, the goblins were only challenging in that he wasn’t half the swordsman he’d been a couple lives ago. Simon was happy to take that frustration out on them, though. “Note to self,” he told himself, gasping for breath after he finished night eight’s fight, “Don’t stop sword fighting for like thirty years, between two lives.”

Shockingly, the last really good fight he’d had was against the monster in the volcano, and that was a long time ago. Still, slowly, but surely some of it came back to him, and by the time he decided he was ready to go, he felt like bandits wouldn’t be an imminent danger for him. 

Of course, the skeletons almost proved him wrong. Simon hadn’t fought them in decades, either, and it was the first time he struggled against them in a long time. They didn’t wound him, of course, at least, not badly, but it took a little bit to clear the room enough that he could take down the death knight in a good clean fight.

Afterward, he paused and took the Blackheart out of the knight’s chest to examine it more closely. That, at least, was interesting, and he paused only long enough to gather some silver and use a lesser word of earth to make a mirror so he could compare his current analysis to his previous notes. He decided he wasn’t far off. The thing used runes of Uuvellum to create anti-life and area effects, forcing the dead to come to life. Whether the original sorcerer had done so to keep himself alive and if it had worked. 

“From my brief stint as a zombie, I’m leaning toward no on that one,” he decided before he put it carefully back. Then, he gathered as much gold and silver as he could before he continued on his way. 

This time, he didn’t dig down into the subchamber. Instead, he just took the exit to the Wyvern level. 

“A handful of silver is enough to get to where I’m going.” He decided. “I only have half a decade to waste before I go back to Ionar.” 

His logic on that was pretty straightforward. The wyvern level was the level before the volcano level. That meant that somewhere between tomorrow and a couple of years from now, he was going to fight that thing, and then about four years later, his lover was going to refuse to marry him and send him away. 

Which meant that in the meantime, he’d fight and maybe do a little exploring. Simon’s map had largely been filled in through the Kingdom of Brin and up to the Northlands. Likewise, he’d traveled past Ionia all the way to Abresse and the seas beyond that. 

So his blank spots were mostly Ionia in the west and the mountainous Kingdom of Chiara in the mountains to the east of all of this. Chiara was almost a complete mystery, but in Ionia, at least, he knew where the cities along the coast and on the islands were.

The Kingdom was a large peninsula surrounded by a scattering of islands off the coast to the west and south. Knowing the names on the map and what those places were actually like, though, well, there was a world of difference between those two. 

And this time, once the volcano exploded, he was going to start purging other parts of this supposed curse. At least, he would once he learned more about it. He was resolved. In this life, he was going to solve Ionia. Well, probably not solve, he corrected himself. I doubt I can go fix everything, then come back and kill the wyvern a decade from now, and Helades will let that count. 

Understand was a more doable goal. By the time this was done, he was going to figure out everything he needed to know to fix it. “That should be easy enough,” he said to himself as he made his way down the mountain.

He spotted the wyvern half a dozen times over the next few days, and each time, he crouched behind a boulder or a tree and waited for it to turn toward him. Fortunately, it never did. However, on the second day, someone else’s fortune obviously wore out, and Simon spotted it carrying the corpse of someone back to its nest. 

“That’s probably the thing I’m supposed to prevent,” he decided. Simon didn’t take the failure to heart, but he did decide to go and investigate where it was the wyvern had taken off from, even if it meant a little extra walking. 

He spent the trip wondering just how many levels had minor, almost petty events. “Kill this owlbear, and those children live. Stop this plague in that village, but let everyone die first,” he said to himself, looking for the logic. “Oh, and don’t forget to bring this village food so everyone doesn’t starve to death.”

He’d hoped that his intensive study of history for a few years would have given him a better perspective on this issue, but he still found it more than a little confusing. All he could do was hope that if he found this guy’s wagon or whatever, this level would make a little more sense.

Simon was huffing and puffing that evening when he found the sight of the battle. There was no wagon, but even so, it was pretty unmistakable. There were other corpses, along with the remains of two horses. The first lay atop the dead man, and the second split into two gory halves. One half of it lay in the middle of the road where a vulture had claimed ownership, and the other half of it was up a tree where the ravens were having a party. 

Simon left them alone and decided that he wasn’t camping anywhere near there. Before he left, though, he took the coin purse off the corpses, and then he dug through both sets of saddlebags. Mostly, he found camping supplies for people traveling light. He helped himself to some of those since it would reduce his need for hunting. 

More interestingly, though, was a sealed letter that he found on the half a horse. There was no name on it. All there was was the impression of a signet ring on the wax seal. Simon thought it looked like Brin Hearldy, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. 

Inside, there were some names, but not enough that he’d ever find who this had been meant for. ‘Dearest Antonia, we have been betrayed. If this letter reaches you before the worst should befall you, I urge you to kill your brother and flee south. I will meet you in Abresse. Look for my ship. L.’

“So, this woman never gets this letter, and the worst befalls her, and what? She gets killed? He gets heartbroken and commits suicide?” he said aloud as he talked himself through the sequence of events. “I can’t even find who sent it because he didn’t even sign his damn name!”

Simon crumpled up the letter and threw it away. Then, he started walking to the northwest. He couldn’t sleep until he put some distance between himself and the wyvern nest, but even without the frustrating letter, going this way was clearly the right choice. He’d never gone this way around these mountains before, and he wanted to approach Ionia from a new direction. 

That was one part of the world where he knew what went where, thanks to the map in the Queen’s library. This time, instead of approaching the northern reaches of Ionia through the mountains and starting in the south, he was going to travel around the mountains to the north and then travel south along the shore. It would be a lot of walking, but he was sure he could find plenty of paying mercenary work. The people of Ionia weren’t very trusting, but they weren’t especially peaceful, either, and during his time in the capital, he’d never seen a sell sword go hungry.  

Ch. 184 - Out of the Way

Simon didn’t miss a lot of things about the Broken Tower, but after a week of sleeping on rocks and damp grass, he did miss the bed he’d had there. It was almost as hard as the stone floor it sat on, but at least he’d slept like the dead. So, most mornings, he used his recently returned ability to speak to continue on, and as soon as he had the chance to splurge and get a room at an inn, he did so. 

The little village of Elbenval was too small to matter; in fact, it was barely big enough to be noted on his ever-widening map.  It was little more than two dozen homes and a few fields next to the neglected trade road he was walking along.

What it was good for, though, was information. For the price of a few beers spread around the small common room, he heard every scrap of gossip in the county. Mostly, that was about people who didn’t matter and feuds that would never go beyond the families who held their grudges for generations, but it was entertaining, at least, and he did learn a few useful facts. The two most important things he learned were that he was approaching the western limits of Brin and that the Viscount was a petty old weasel with a bandit problem. 

While Simon didn’t have so little money that he had to go track down assholes like that, he definitely wanted to. He could use the funds to get a mule and a backpack, or maybe even a horse once he could hike for a day without wanting to die. 

In the morning, on the way out of town, Simon checked the notice board, promising three golden crowns for information leading to the whereabouts of the Bandit leader, Ennis, ironically enough. The notice had a picture of the man on it, but it was a likeness drawn by what appeared to be a child. Beyond showing that the man in question had a mustache, it was less than useless. 

Still, after Simon had finished feeling wounded by the sloppy handwriting of the man who had written the wanted poster, he folded it up and pocketed it.  It might be useless for identifying his target, but it did say where his men had been recently seen, in places that weren’t so far up the road from here. More importantly, it spelled the reward out very clearly, which was what Simon was really after. His experience with Varten and the centaurs had taught him to get things like this in writing. 

Simon spent two more days traveling through the area. He approached every roadside grove of trees with caution, though he needn’t have. When he finally found his bandits, it was he who caught them by surprise. Toward sunset on his third day north, Simon smelled wood smoke on the wind and followed it. While he’d found the bandit camp, it was just a dozen half-starved farmers, not the rogue's gallery of bloody-thirsty killers he’d been promised. 

This disappointed Simon because he’d been looking forward to a real fight. He thought he might even get the chance to throw around a few fire spells. Sadly, that turned out not to be the case. Instead, when he sat down at their fire and asked about the fire, he got more humor than hostility. 

“If that skinflint has the three gold coins to actually pay that reward, I’ll give you my thumbs!” Most of these men couldn't read, so Simon read the thing aloud before he gave the flyer to the man on his left, and it slowly passed around the fire. When it reached Ennis, the man had a hearty laugh at the illustration.

“Even if he had, it ain’t like he’s capable of giving the things away,” another man laughed. 

Slowly, in dribs and drabs, a not-so-unfamiliar story came out. The domain of Viscount Bracken wasn’t as large as the ones that belonged to Barons Corwin or Raithwaite, but it was every bit as mismanaged as the latter, and the men in question were more like tax cheats than bandits. Even tax cheats wasn’t very appropriate since, in their version of events, he charged them enough to run them off their land, and then he still pursued them for debts they had no way to pay after their plots had been seized. 

“Not a lot of good nobles in this land, is there?” Simon asked after he took a sip from the wineskin being passed around. 

“If there’s a single one, they must live pretty damn far away,” the man to Simon’s right said, “Because I ain’t never seen em.”

That brought another chorus of laughs, but it wasn’t something Simon could refute. He agreed with the man. The rulers of every city he’d seen mostly seemed to care about the area around the capital, but everywhere else, well… as long as they paid their taxes, it was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation. 

“So is this the part when you take my head to see if he pays up?” Ennis said finally. 

“Seems like an awful hassle,” Simon answered with a shrug. 

“Didn’t think so,” Ennis said, spitting into the dark. “You don’t look much like a bounty hunter yourself.”

“Don’t let the flab fool you, I’m just a little out of practice, that’s all,” Simon answered. “Once upon a time, I used to fight centaurs down south, but lately, it's just been goblins and whatnot.”

There were a few more jokes at Simon’s expense, but they didn’t mean anything by it. Honestly, he didn’t blame them. He went to bed that night trying to decide if he should make this his problem, and he woke up deciding that he should just continue on his way and leave these men to their fate. He would have done just too if the riders hadn’t arrived while he was packing up the canvas tap he used as a tent. 

One of the men was making try bread when the sound of galloping filled the glen they’d made their hideout. Everyone looked around in confusion, and Simon readied a spell as he thought he’d see a wall of heavy horse coming over the rise, but it turned out to be only five men with lances. That changed things a bit. 

“We outnumber them already,” Simon laughed as he unlimbered his bow and drew an arrow. 

The five soldiers had paused on the rise not far from them, and one of them lifted his faceplate to make an announcement about coming peacefully; Simon wasn’t really interested in peacefully this morning, though. Instead, he put an arrow in the eye of the man doing the walking at fifty feet. 

“In the name of your Lord, the Viscount of—” he started. His screaming spoiled the rest of whatever it was he’d been about to say, spooking the horses and sending them in all directions. 

“What are you doing?” the supposed bandit nearest to Simon gasped as Simon drew his sword. 

“Five riders? Three crowns?” This Viscount fella really doesn't take you guys seriously, Simon answered with a smile. “I’m just teaching him a lesson on that. After this, the price should go way up.”

Simon took the head off the first man to charge him with a word of force as he parried Simons's strike. It had been a clumsy thing, and Simon never had a chance of taking the man from this angle, but then, he’d never intended to. The blow had been for show because he couldn’t exactly strike people dead with lightning and expect to make friends. Just pretending to take the man’s head off with a lucky blow would keep people from asking questions later, and for now, all Simon needed was plausible deniability. 

Well, plausible deniability and a damn mount, he thought as he pushed the rider off of his horse and then mounted it. It had been a long time since he’d ridden a horse and even longer since he’d fought from one, but he found it came back to him, more or less. 

With a yank on the reigns, he wheeled and spurred the animal toward the nearest soldier with his heels. The move was clumsy enough that it would have embarrassed him once upon a time. He wasn’t great on horseback these days, but that didn’t matter. These soldiers weren’t going to kill him, and even if they did, this fight was completely pointless. 

What mattered wasn’t the details of the peasant's cause or who had wronged who. What mattered was that he was having fun. He was on the side of the angels, he was having a good time, and he was remembering how to be a badass, which was what he needed as much as he needed to reach Ionar one day. 

While the other bandits clustered together, brandishing their pitchforks and short swords like a pathetic porcupine, he fought with lucky soldier number three. The last soldier was green but not entirely untrained, and as they crossed swords, he managed to give Simon a glancing wound that skittered painfully across three of his ribs. Unfortunately, he paid for it by taking a sword thrust to the chest. Simon rode by, leaving it impaled in the other man as they both slowly came to a halt. 

The other two men had seen enough. They turned tail and ran as fast as they arrived. Simon didn’t try to stop them, either. Instead, he just took a breath to make sure the man hadn’t broken a rib or punctured a lung. Then, he used a whispered word of lesser healing to staunch the bleeding. He didn’t try to heal it completely. A wound would make him look more human. No one would be inclined to call him a warlock if he just looked like a foolhardy asshole that didn’t always win. 

He pretended to check his wound, then satisfied that he wasn’t going to die, he rode over to the man who was bleeding out on his sword and took it back. Once that was cleaned and resheathed, only then did he approach the men he’d technically just fought beside. 

By day, they looked even more hungry and ragged than they had by the fire the night before. To call any of them bandits was an insult to bandits, but for better or worse, he’d taken up their cause. It had nothing to do with this level or with his plans, but he had half a decade to kill. He could play hero every now and then when he found the right cause. 

“Didn’t look like a bounty hunter, huh?” Simon laughed. “Probably never seen a centaur?”

There was some nervous laughter then because no one knew where he was going with any of this. 

“What say we go string up a tax collector or two and see if your Viscount takes you seriously then, eh?” Simon asked, giving them a manic grin. 

A ragged cheer went up at that, but really, his mind had already moved on. He was trying to think of the last time he’d felt this way; the answer didn’t completely surprise him. It was when he’d fought for Crowvar. I might hate that place, but I did miss this, he decided instantly, as he tried to figure out how he could turn his little rag tags bandits into something worthy of the name.