Death After Death Ch. 159-160

Ch. 159 - Save Point

Elthena was never far from his mind on the voyage north, but by the time they’d made landfall, he’d made peace with it. This life was important, but this body was old and starting to get a little worn out, so he was going to lock in the events here as well as he could, then proceed further into the depths. He doubted he was anywhere close to in shape enough to slay a dragon at this point in his life, but he had the armor anyway, so he might as well try just the same. 

After he fixed it, of course. The heat and the impact had done some real damage, but it was hardly a priority. 

Simon returned to the little town of Blackwater with Daisy in tow, and after promising that he would not seek to return, the captain gave him a generous purse of gold and silver and wished him well. Simon would keep that promise, of course, but only in this life. In his next one, he would return to Ionar the day this ship put out to sea. 

He’d have to explain the missing scars or inflict them a second time, but neither of those options bore much thinking just yet. He wasn’t sure if the truth or the lie would be more harmful in this case. 

Instead, Simon spent some time in his least favorite town, listening to stories and getting a feel for the lay of the land after all these years. It turned out that the whole zombie thing was pretty much over. Every now and then, they’d find a body that made people think it might not be over yet, but usually, that was just a false alarm. 

That made sense, considering it had been the better part of a decade since he’d been back. Mercenaries had cleansed the area north of the bridge, and trade had long since restarted. Honestly, with the exception of a new statue in the center of town, the place was looking better than he’d ever seen it. The streets were bustling, the bars were full, and spirits were high. The only thing that ruined it was the fact that Kel was the one who had gotten all the credit for it. Kel, the asshole that had infected the town in more than one previous version of the level. Kel, the prick that had hidden his own wound until he’d turned and almost taken out his whole company. The man had very nearly gotten Freya killed, too. 

No, worse than that, he almost turned her into a fucking zombie! Simon though, fuming. 

He had no idea what Freya and the other survivors of the Butcher’s Bill had told the people of Schwarzenbruck, but it definitely wasn’t the truth. The only reason he didn’t waste a word of force to knock the thing over was because he wasn’t really in a position to be wasting weeks or months of his life. Physically, he was getting close to forty, but with all the magic he’d burned in those years and the lingering effects of the injuries that had healed as much as they were ever going to heal, he was probably pushing sixty at this point, which was as old as he’d ever been except for a brief moment on level 20. 

At least he didn’t see Freya, though. So there was that. He did see Brenna, though she wasn’t a barmaid anymore. She’d gotten married and had a couple kids in between now and the last time he was here, which he thought was fairly cute. 

Simon lingered long enough to get a feel for the place and verify that the portal still existed in the same spot it always did, which was a new piece of information. Note to self, the portal will exist for as long as what it's attached to exists, as long as I’m close to it. 

Stranger than the fact that the portal was still there, though, was where it led. This time, it didn’t lead to the cathedral as he’d expected it would. Instead, it led to the mountaintop where he’d slain the wyvern. I wonder what I screwed up to make that happen? Simon asked himself. In the end, it was a question he couldn’t really answer, but it was a good reminder. If he wanted to return to Ionar to resolve this, he needed to make sure he did nothing at all to disrupt any of the levels before this one. Hell, he needed to make sure he didn’t disrupt any levels between here and the eruption on level 10, either, which meant, for now, there was no wyvern hunting. 

Once he’d determined those things, he bought supplies and went north one final time to make sure there weren't any signs of lingering evil. It was a waste of his time. The way north wasn’t even remotely dangerous this time. It took him almost a week of searching to find a zombie, and it was a decayed thing that could do little more than moan and grasp toward the road from where its broken and decayed limbs were stuck in the mud.

Simon put it out of its misery, but that was the only useful thing he did on the whole trip. He stopped by the barrow mounds and found them a little more looted than they’d been on his previous trip but otherwise unchanged. The smithy that he’d used so much on his last trip had returned to use, and though the town it was attached to never really recovered, many of the other small towns and villages near the main road had.

In the end, three weeks after he set out from Schwarzenbruck just ahead of the first snow of the season, he returned with nothing to show for it but a runny nose. “Well, this level is as solved as solved gets,” he said to himself. 

Still, he took one night when he got back to town to rest at an inn and do some drinking before he headed out again. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. As much as he enjoyed the heavy stews and thick slices of meat that typified northern cuisine, it did make him miss the Mediterranean food he’d eaten for so long, even though he preferred this. It was just… different. Maybe it was even too different, but somewhere along the way, he started to feel homesick about a place that wasn’t really his home. 

None of that stopped him from following the plan, though. He was going back, just not with the dregs of life he had left. When he returned to Ionar, it would be fresh and ready to do what needed to be done. 

The wyvern level was just as Simon had left it any number of times in the past, and once he made sure that nothing was about to swoop down and eat him, he made his way toward the ruins that held the exit. There, he found the cathedral waiting for him, which was, in its own way, a relief, even though it was one of the weirder levels, and he never really felt comfortable in it. 

Still, it was better than finding yet another level he’d already beaten. That was something he worried about sometimes in bed at night, just before he drifted off to sleep. There was always the possibility that he would do something and reset all the progress he’d made so far. That wouldn’t be the end of the world normally, but right now, he had a life on pause he was eager to pick back up, so he was keeping a careful eye open for signs that things might be spinning out of control.

Still, as he stepped through the door and shut it behind him, he couldn’t help but wonder if today was the day he would finally solve this level. After all, it was level 13, so it was months or years past his life in Ionar. Nothing he did here would affect that, so it might be worth a shot. 

This time, the devil was eating, and when Simon approached, the well-dressed monster raised his wine glass in a toast to him. “I’d wish you a long life, but it would seem you already had one,” the devil said, laughing at his own joke. 

“I’ve had a nice time, I’m glad to see you’ve missed me,” Simon answered dismissively as he approached the circle and began to read the runes once more. 

In the past, he’d had a lot of trouble with that, given their distorted nature, but he’d done a lot of magic study between the last time he’d come through this level and now, and he was able to read much of the circle without effort. Only the most tortured sections required real study. 

“Oh, but I have, I have,” the red-skinned man said with a smile before cutting another bite of whatever it was he was eating on his fine china. “I see so many of you heroes, but to see the same ones over and over? Well, that gets rarer as time goes on; I'm sure you’ve guessed the reasons by now.” 

Simon had hoped to tell the devil his own name and surprise him, but it didn’t seem to be written on the ring. Whoever had cast this spell had meant to open a gateway to hell, not a particular demon, which made it all the stranger. Why would someone want that? 

He didn’t know, but he did know that the devil had nothing useful to add, so Simon tuned him out and focused on the task at hand, tracing the runes back further and further until he finally isolated the power. The thing was both powered by hell and summoned hell, which seemed like a paradox waiting to happen, but this was magic, and he was pretty sure that sometimes making sense was entirely optional. 

For a moment, he thought he’d found the solution, but it was only when he reached for it that he realized it was wrong. If he wiped out the rune that powered the thing the way it was laid out, the circle would stop working before hell vanished, which was, of course, exactly what he didn’t want. 

“Finally found my weakness, have you?” the devil feigned, concerned over what was obviously the wrong rune. Simon pretended to hesitate just to screw with the monster, but he wasn’t dumb enough to take any reaction from this thing, positive or negative, for advice. 

What he needed was to make hell disappear before the circle faded, which meant the summoning rune itself, which was a combination of distance and boundary with a couple of other symbols he couldn’t recognize. That was where he decided the weak point in the spell was, ultimately. The union of distance and boundary. It was there that the space where the summoned area could exist was defined, and if he undefined it, well, the rest of the circle should just keep right on existing even with nothing in it. 

“Are you sure,” the demon asked as Simon pretended to waiver. “Maybe you’d better go around another time or two until you’re sure.”

“Oh?” Simon asked as his hand moved above the rune he planned to scrub away, “will you miss these little chats of ours?”

“I have plenty of other heroes I can talk with, but if you close the gate… well, you might live to regret it,” he said, feigning sympathy. “It’s one of the only ways out of your little prison you see… It’s a loophole, and I think we could yet—”

Simon looked the bastard in the eyes as he wiped away the rune and watched the portal into the yawning fiery pit start to close. It wasn’t even a tense moment. He knew he was right the moment he saw the fear in the demon’s eyes, and he took pleasure in watching the thing vanish completely. 

Simon stood and watched as the portal slammed shut and the twisted, floating pieces of the church slowly fitted back together. A few seconds after he’d wiped away the rune and the demon’s smug smile, all that was left of the entire thing was a chalk outline, which Simon took another couple of minutes to scrub away so that no one else got any ideas. 

Then, once that was done, he walked over to the portal and stepped through it to the next level, which was a farm field he’d seen before.

Ch. 160 - Words of Warning

When Simon walked out into that sunny field from the barn, he knew exactly where he was and exactly what was going to happen, but he wasn’t sure exactly what to do. Well, he knew that he needed to convince the family that lived here of the danger that was coming, but how exactly to do that was an open question. 

What he knew for sure, though, was that using magic was probably not going to last time; if Aaric was to be believed, it had some pretty negative side effects for the family that lived here, and he didn’t exactly have another spell that was subtle enough to—

“Hey! Who are you!” the voice of a young boy called out, derailing Simon’s train of thought. “What in the hells are you doing in our barn?”

“Barn, child?” Simon asked, pretending to be a little older than he already looked. When he turned around, he saw the boy recoil from some of his more obvious scars, but he was polite enough not to say anything. “Come now, tell me where your parents are. I’ve come to warn them.”

“Warn them of what?” Aaric asked, more eager than afraid. “What’s going to happen.”

Simon shook his head and insisted that he had to speak with his father. So, Aaric begrudgingly led him out to the field where the man was working the plow. 

They made no secret of their approach, and when Millen saw Simon approaching with his boy, he stiffened and stopped. “What can I do for you, stranger,” he asked. He wasn’t quite unfriendly, but he certainly wasn’t friendly either. That combination was enough to make Simon try the direct approach. 

“I’m here to warn you,” Simon said, “You and everyone else on my way west. A dark cloud is coming. You know what that means, don’t you?”

Millen looked confused for a moment, then he figured it out and looked to young Aaric with a touch of fear. “Are you sure?” the farmer asked. “When? How?”

His questions came as a barrage, and Simon answered them as calmly as he could. “It has been foreseen,” Simon said, choosing not to provide any source for the statement, mostly because he didn’t know who these people might find to be a credible authority. “That is all that matters, and tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, the swarm will pass through this valley.”

Millen looked deeply conflicted, and he tried to push Simon for more answers, but he just shook his head. “I must take my leave,” he insisted, “There are others to warn and shelter to find.”

“Warn them about what, papa?” Aaric asked, but both of the adults ignored him. 

“There’s not much in the way of shelter around here,” the farmer said finally. “Even less where animals are concerned.”

“It’s not the animals I’m concerned about,” Simon said brusquely.

“You would be if you had to eat them,” Millen said, shaking his head, “If the swarmers really do come, this field and all the other ones like it will be gone. We’ll need what little we can save.”

“Fair enough,” Simon agreed, turning to leave, surprised that his words had been accepted so readily. This was either a regular problem or at least something that had happened in living memory. 

“Wait, where are you going?” Millen asked. 

“It’s as I said,” Simon answered, “Lots of other people to warn and many more miles to walk before nightfall.”

“Would you speak with the village elder with me? Over there in Screeton?” Millen asked, pointing toward the hills to the north.  “I… If I try to tell him that something bad is going to happen, he’s liable to ignore me, but if you do it… an outsider… well, he’s got to listen. If we can get him to reopen the old tin mine, then maybe that can give the herds a chance.”

“What about your neighbors?” Simon asked. “Are you really more concerned about your horses and your sheep than them?”

“The boy can warn them, can’t you, Aaric?” Millen asked. 

“I can… if I knew what it was I’m supposed to be warning them about…” the boy said, obviously ready to explode from anticipation. 

“Just tell them that black swarmers have been sighted, and they’re on the way. Tell them to head to the village, and we’ll take shelter in the mine.”

It took more than a little willpower for Simon to resist the urge to smirk as the eager young boy paled as his father told him about bugs that could devour everything in sight in the space of only an hour or two. One moment, he’d been ready to pick up a sword and be a hero, and the next, he looked like he might faint. Simon remembered the lad being a little braver in their brief goblin hunt, but then one goblin was a lot less scary than a cloud of thousands of vampiric bugs. 

After that, he and Millen stopped briefly by their cabin, where he briefly introduced his wife, who was spinning, and his daughter, who was helping to make dinner. Neither woman looked at him very kindly, but Simon was used to it. He was old and disfigured. That apparently made him perfect to deliver mysterious messages but utterly unsuited to speak with women in places where he hadn’t saved their kingdom. 

Just as well, Simon thought as Millen explained things, and the women sprang up to start packing. It’s not like I’m all that interested in looking at anyone else anymore, either. 

The village elder was an older man who quizzed Simon several times as to where he got this information and why he thought it could be trusted. That was reasonable enough, but Simon was already too into his role of mysterious old prophet and gave his best Obi-Wan impression as he answered questions with questions and spoke in mysterious generalities. 

“For Gods’ sake, Sir, it’s just a day. Two at the worst.” Millen barked finally. “If he’s wrong, we lose a little time, but if he’s right…”

Simon could tell that outburst only weakened their argument, but he said nothing. This was the sort of man who did not like to have his authority questioned, and even though Simon was old enough for many to consider him an elder at this point, it was obvious that the village elder, only a few years his senior, felt no need to do likewise.

Even after an hour of mysterious warnings, the elder was on the verge of telling them both to go pound sand before other men and women started to show up, demanding answers. After that, things just sort of fell into place, and eventually, the steel-haired old man told them that he would allow the mine to be reopened.

“But only for two days!” he snapped, glaring at Simon, “And it will not be on my head if goblins or worse get you while you are hiding from shadows and the lies of some charlatan.”

After that, Simon almost had to shelter with them. Not only did he want to see what was going to happen, but the idea of fighting more goblins practically called to him. He hated the way that the little bastards stunk, of course, but he’d been looking for an excuse to see if he was worth a damn in a fight anymore, and they would be a better test than most. Besides, if things went the same as they did last time, he’d be seeing Aaric in a few levels, and this time, he’d want to leave behind some fond memories. 

Simon spent that afternoon ripping down old boards and helping to round up and drive innumerable goats and sheep toward the mine. It was a complete mess, but it wasn’t hard work, and the sheer chaos of trying to save everyone and everything from their tiny, local Armageddon made him laugh more than once. By the time he was done, he was a little sunburned but happy enough that he went whole hours at a time without thinking about Elthena. 

Simon, along with pretty much everyone else, spent the night in the old mines that night. Not many people actually slept. It was hard to do much sleeping with the sounds of hundreds of frightened animals echoing through the tunnels. 

Most people at least tried to sleep, though. Simon prowled the farthest end of the oldest tunnels, though, searching for anything that didn’t belong. That deep, there was water dripping from the ceiling in places, which made sense because he’d been told the lower tunnels were long flooded, which was why the place was closed. As much as part of him wished to find goblins, he came up empty, though. The closest he got was when he was ambushed by young Aaric sometime after midnight. 

“You find any monsters yet?” he asked, scaring Simon half to death. 

“No, the only monsters down here are you, and whoever that is that’s snoring so loud,” Simon quipped, continuing to search for as long as his torch allowed. 

“That’s just Mister Branaugh,” Aaric said with a laugh. He was a boy on the cusp of manhood, and he tried to act serious, but there was glee just beneath the surface, waiting to burst free at any moment. “And if there are no monsters, what are you doing all the way down here?”

“Well, the only way to make sure there are no monsters is to keep looking for them,” Simon said with a shake of his head, suddenly feeling very old. “Because as soon as you stop looking, that’s when they pounce. How’s the front door looking?”

“It’s all sealed up,” Aaric answered with a shrug. “Dad finished helping with that hours ago. Tight, too, with cloth wedged in all the cracks, just like you said.”

Simon nodded. Part of him wanted to go cast a spell to reinforce it, but he knew that would only get him into trouble. No, he’d already done his part, and the only magic he’d needed was a little foreknowledge that played on people's fears. 

Sometime that morning, he finally went to sleep, sure that the place was safe enough for a short nap at least. Despite the sounds of baaing and mooing, he actually managed to fall asleep, which was a minor miracle in its own right. He slept soundly, too, right up until the bounding and the shouting. 

Once Simon had scoured the back of the tunnels, he’d made his way slowly to the entrance, where he’d fallen asleep, not far from the barricade, in case anything bad happened. That turned out to be a good idea because sometime that morning, something bad started to happen. 

Not everyone had believed his warnings. Though some people, had decided to sleep in their own beds despite Simon’s pleas, the village elder had joined them at the last minute, marking him as a coward among other things. He had no doubt they were looking forward to mocking him when they all left the tunnels in a day or two, and nothing had happened, but that wasn’t how things worked out.

Instead, when the bugs were sighted on the horizon, they came running. First, there were only a couple pounding on the door and begging to be let in, but more and more came after that. It was an awful moment because there was nothing to do. This wasn’t a modern door with a deadbolt that they could open for just a second like in a horror movie. 

This was a barricade that had been hammered together from the existing planks that had sealed the mine for years, along with scraps from dozens of houses and farms. Even if they could take it apart without destroying it, it would take hours to put it all back in place, and from the sound of things, they didn’t have hours. They had minutes. They might even have less. 

Arguments erupted then between those who said that something had to be done and those who insisted nothing could be done. Simon didn’t join in the arguments on either side; he just walked to the barricade, drew his sword, and stood there as a barrier between those who might do something stupid and the place they would have to stand to do it. 

It wasn’t his preferred answer, and there were more than a few men in here with him who could probably take him at this point if they wanted to try. That didn’t matter, though. What mattered was that there were too many women and children in here to take any chances, and he wasn’t going to let them all get eaten alive because someone they cared about hadn’t heard the warning. 

There were some hard looks and a few threats, but once the shouting and the begging turned to screams, no one talked about opening the door again. It was a settled matter. If they opened it, then everyone would die, and that was apparently all the deterrent anyone needed.