Death After Death Ch. 147-148

Ch. 147 - Picture Perfect

It took another three weeks of walking, two run-ins with beast men, and an encounter with bandits that ended very poorly for them before Simon finally set eyes on pre-eruption Ionar. It turned out that his experience points didn’t go down on any of those days either, not even when he killed humans, which surprised Simon. 

He’d expected morality to be deeply tied into that number, but it was more subjective than that. Apparently, since he didn’t have a problem killing bandits that got in his way, they didn’t weigh on his soul very much, and he still gained over 122 experience that day. That was still less than he gained when he killed the beastmen at 167 and 203, respectively, but it still pointed to a worldview that was slightly more subjective than he would have expected. 

Those weren’t even the biggest days of the trip, though. Sometimes, when he did other things, he saw spikes, too. When he found an herb he hadn’t seen since his time in Abresse and picked a few to add to his growing collection or dried them, he made above-average progress on his score as well. 

It wasn’t all violence and hardship, though. Honestly, the hiking was worse than the fighting, and on nights when he wasn’t fighting off men and monsters, he made steady progress on his armor. At this point, it was all down to making the engravings as nice and clean as possible so they could stand up to the terrible strain he expected to put them under. 

When Simon was finally done with the main pattern on the breastplate, he put it in his campfire, and even after it had been sitting in the coals for twenty minutes, the back side of the metal stayed nice and cool. He was so pleased that his efforts had actually worked that his cheers echoed off the mountainside in a way that might have been embarrassing if anyone else was nearby that night as he celebrated his success. 

“Well, if I can make the rest of it work this well, then maybe this time I can drown in lava instead of getting cooked alive,” he said with a laugh. 

The next day, he was surprised to find that he’d gotten almost 300 experience the night before. That made some sense, given what he’d accomplished, but he was still pretty psyched. 

“So it’s not what I do, but how I feel about it or what I learn?” he wondered aloud once he’d recorded the number. 

That made sense. He learned a lot less from killing his thousandth goblin than he had from killing his first or second. He was sure of that. Pity this whole thing doesn’t have achievements, He thought with a smirk. I’d love to see those kinds of stats. Goblins killed. Nights slept outdoors. Number of Freya’s dead.

That last one startled him, and he spent the next hour wondering what dark part of his soul that had come from. He’d saved Freya and moved on. His inner demons could go take a hike, just like he was doing.

The road through the mountains was a long one, and he spent most nights working on the other bits for the arms and legs. It wasn’t done yet, but he was sure it was going to work as long as he was slow and careful. The only complication was the sword since the gauntlet that used it already had magic on it, but he ignored that for now. He didn’t think that the two spells would interact too badly. 

Eventually, all journeys come to an end, though, and this one was no different. He’d seen the lightly steaming caldera of the volcano he’d come to kill for almost a week before he finally got close enough to it that he could see Ionar on the far side of it, where the land met the sea.

As he stood there on the rise, he had to admit that it was more than a little beautiful. On every other trip here, he’d only seen it in ruins or in the process of being destroyed. Now, he could see the beautiful white buildings standing in stark contrast to the volcano they wrapped around and the blue skies beyond. It was bigger than he remembered it, and he wondered just how much of the city had already been buried under lava and ash before he saw it the first time. In the night of fire and lava, he’d seen so often, there were always thousands fleeing the upper city to the harbor far below. Now that he was looking at it, though, he was fairly sure that there had to be at least ten thousand people living here, making it fairly large as cities went.

The sprawling city spread partway up the volcano and all the way down the cliffs, but it was the palace that was the real show-stopper. It was a building Simon had been in many times, but only as a door to somewhere else. Now, he could appreciate it as the palace it was, nestled among its surrounding gardens.

“This is definitely a place people would pay to go on vacation,” he said as he eyed the cliffs and beaches. 

On all his previous trips, he’d always assumed that this place existed solely because of sea trade. While that was certainly the majority of the traffic, the overland route he’d just threaded his way through was surprisingly well-maintained and just active enough for bandits to think it was worth the trouble to harass men traveling alone. 

Simon didn’t feel the least bit bad for using them for a bit of archery practice. He was just glad that they hadn’t hurt Daisy or spooked her into running off a cliff. Some of the roads through the mountains had been perilous. 

Now, though, all of that was behind him. He was here, and fortunately, the volcano had not yet blown its top, which was good because it had taken him a whole season to get here. Still, even as the weather in the north turned colder, it was still balmy here on the coast, and he decided to enjoy it. 

Simon spent those first few days relaxing during the day and working on his armor at night. It was only when he’d lingered in the inn for over a week that people started to ask questions. 

Where was he going? Was he waiting for a ship? How much longer would he be here? The innkeeper didn’t seem inhospitable, per se, and was happy to keep taking Simon’s silver, but the longer he stayed, the more comfortable the man felt being nosy, apparently. 

As bothersome as that could be, even that daily nuisance annoyed Simon less than the seafood, though. For the first few days, he’d lived off mutton since fish dominated the menu of the city. There were some other things he hadn’t had in a long time, too, like feta cheese and white wine, which helped liven things up. He avoided the fish but found that octopus, scallops, and clams weren’t so bad once he started to get tired of lamb. That was ironic, of course, since his dislike of fish was making him tire of everything else on the menu.

Simon eventually found a villa overlooking the sea near enough to the volcano to rent out not too far from the market square and hung a shingle above the door, calling himself an apothecary and healer. He had plenty of herbs from his trip across the continent, and much of what he didn’t have he could buy. 

That, along with some bandages, some basic knowledge of sterilization and wound cleanliness, and the occasional minor miracle, was all he really needed. The locals were skittish of an outsider for the first few weeks. That was especially true for one who seemed fluent in their language but still had what was described as a strong accent, but Simon couldn’t hear it. 

Still, after a couple minor miracles that might have cost him a week or a year of his life and a few sick kids that walked away from death’s door in one piece, he was accepted by almost everyone. That was about the time he’d finished his armor after almost a month in Ionar, which was fortunate timing because once it was complete, he had to test it. The very last thing he wanted to do after all this preparation was to put it on after the eruption and find that it didn’t work. 

So, once he was ready, he took a brief trip into the mountains with his reliable mule, Daisy. He told his regular patients that it was to collect some herbs, which he would also do, but really, it was so he could stand in a bonfire where no one could see how crazy he was.

He hiked until he hadn’t seen a living soul for a day, worrying the whole time that the volcano would pick that moment to erupt. It didn’t, though, and once his bonfire was burning brightly, he finally got all dressed up in the armor he’d worked on for so long. 

Even though he was certain it was going to work, it was still with great apprehension. That wasn’t enough to stop him, though. If I fuck this up, all I’ll have to face are burned feet and injured pride, Simon told himself, and I can heal my feet. 

The worst would actually be if the volcano exploded, and after all this, he wasn’t ready to stop the monsters that came out of it. That would be far worse than any injuries he might get from testing. It was that thought that made him close his face mask and step into the raging inferno he’d built.

The result was nothing. He cringed for a moment, waiting to feel the fire’s sting through one of the parts of the armor, but it never happened. Instead, he stood there, dancing around in his armor while the fire burned around him. This time, he didn’t cheer quite so loudly as he had last time, but he was still thrilled, and in the morning, when he started back to town with some slightly charred plate mail, he pronounced it a complete success and had almost 200 experience to show for it. 

That night, when he returned, he treated himself to a small feast and decided on his next goal. He was going to investigate the caldera itself. Why shouldn’t I? He thought as he made his way through some pan-fried calamari. It beats waiting around waiting for this to happen. 

Still, he put it off until his first morning without patients waiting to see him. As much as he wanted to climb the volcano, he had to balance that out with more menial tasks. After all, his travels had largely exhausted his funds. Without paying customers, he would eventually be forced to start fishing again one day, and that was the last thing he wanted. 

The hike to the rim took almost all day. It wasn’t just steep; it was that there was no real path to go that high. There was a shrine halfway up that was decorated with wilted flowers and other trivialities, but there were no inscriptions he could find. Past that, the last three hundred feet of the trip was more rock climbing than hiking, which was not something he had any practice with. 

Ultimately, when he reached the very top anyway, the view was disappointing. Part of him had expected to see bubbling hot lava or something similarly cool. He was disappointed. Instead of bubbling magma, there was only cracked black stone, spotted here and there with small geysers of steam. At least, that’s all he saw at first. 

After a short break and a long drink from his water skin, before he headed back down, he noticed something else: fire elementals. Well, at least something that looked like them. They weren’t blazing with fire, though. Instead, they seemed to be made out of smoke and steam, which made them halfway invisible as they wandered around the floor of the caldera. 

That blew him away, and he stayed up there until an hour before sunset before he hurriedly started climbing back down. Part of him wanted to stay until after dark to see if they lit up, but he knew that was a terrible idea. Even if they did, it wasn’t worth staying up here until sunrise, which was how much longer he’d have to watch them because if he tried to climb down in the dark, he would break his neck for sure.

Ch. 148 - The Waiting Game

Simon hiked to the top of the volcano twice more in the weeks that followed, but neither trip turned up anything new. The most he got out of it was a picture of one of the half-visible elementals that he sketched out as best he could. He was no artist, but he’d been improving slowly. According to his mirror, his art skill had advanced above poor and was now merely below average, and he’d take that as a win considering the crude materials he had to work with. 

Still, as much as the otherworldly creatures might fascinate him, he didn’t learn anything more about them. It is kind of odd that it is one of the few magical creatures I’ve seen so far, he thought to himself one day as he was cleaning his small house. No sooner had the thought formed than he realized how ridiculous that was. 

“You mean besides the dragon, the basilisk, and the ogre?” he laughed at himself after he thought about it for a second. 

He had, in fact, fought a lot of different magical creatures. Hell, goblins, skeletons, and zombies were all definitely magical, too, and he’d fought more of them than anything else. The difference in his mind was that they had been real. 

He hadn’t exactly gotten a chance to study a dragon up close or anything, but the wyvern he’d blasted out of the sky was something he could have dissected if he’d wanted to. He could have preserved it and mounted it like a dinosaur in a museum, but the fire elementals, or whatever it was they were, that was something else entirely. It was entirely outside his experience, and other than a few run-ins with ghosts, they were unique. 

That made the whole thing pretty damn magical to him. In the days that followed, even after he stopped going up the volcano, the image lingered with him, though he wasn’t completely sure why. After all, he had a sword that radiated cold and a suit of plate mail that was immune to fire that he’d built himself. That was magical, too, but again, it was something he could put his hands on and understand.

Every day, he waited for the volcano to erupt, and every day it did nothing. So Simon waited, and he prepared. He started going to the gym, which was a little too naked and Greco-Roman for his tastes. He never oiled himself up in olive oil and wrestled with grown men, but he did enjoy the natural hot springs that fed the bathes of the complex, and in time, he found a couple of guys to practice his sword fighting with so he didn’t get too rusty.

Some of his sparring partners found it strange that a doctor knew how to wield a blade so well, but Simon let the mystery linger. When the rumor started to spread that he’d been a field healer for the army in the Kingdom of Brin, he didn’t do anything to stop it. He didn’t care what people believed, as long as it wasn’t that he was a warlock.  

Indeed, rumors aside, life became pretty mundane after that. Things became routine. He hid his weapons and armor in a magic-carved hollow beneath the trunk he used to store rarely used medicines, and he waited for the day to be a hero. 

The only problem with that was that it never came. Day after day, he kept one eye on the horizon as he treated small wounds and persistent fevers, but the volcano never erupted, and the ground beneath his feet never shook. 

Well, never was a strong word. The volcano had regular minor tremors every few days, and perhaps once a month, it would rumble slightly more ominously, but it didn’t amount to anything. Each time it happened, Simon held his breath, and each time, silence returned, and the world continued to turn. 

At first, it was frustrating, but after a while, he was okay with it. It wasn’t like he was living a bad life right now. He couldn’t even blame anyone else for this waiting game. He was the one who thought it would be cool to stop it before Helades’ portal even opened up, and he knew that might take a year or more.

So, he made the best of it and slowly shifted from counting the weeks to counting the months. It had taken almost three months to walk here and two more before he’d gotten the suit completed and tested. It had been six months since then, though, and he’d settled back into the life of a doctor rather than the life of a traveler or an adventurer or a hero. That meant he’d been on this level for almost a year now. Once upon a time, that would have been a rarity, but these days, that was becoming almost par for the course.  

Other than the weapons and armor that he’d secreted away and the donkey he was still paying a few coppers a week to keep well-fed in the stables, there really wasn’t anything left to point to him as adventurer anymore. He kept a knife on his belt when he went out, but he hadn’t worn his leather armor in months. 

In fact, recently, Simon had broken down and bought one of the togas that the locals wore rather than the worn-out tunic and breeches he’d worn for so long. It felt weird to him, but it made those around him treat him with slightly less suspicion and a touch more warmth than they had up to now. 

No matter what he wore, though, he never got quite used to the food choices here. Beef was imported, which meant it was of poor quality and pointlessly expensive. Potatoes were likewise rare enough to be noticeable when they appeared in the market. 

This limited his diet to seafood, goat, and lamb, which seemed to only ever be flavored with wine sauces. Simon refused to suffer with the dull palate of the locals. He eventually made his own wood-fired oven in his garden just to make better bread than he was used to here. He would have killed for some tomatoes to try making a pizza with, but no one had heard of such a fruit, and pepperoni had yet to be invented, so he was forced to go without. 

Food, much like magic, was still in a remarkably primitive state in this world, and once Simon had that thought in mind, he couldn’t let it go. He had little in the way of cooking knowledge from his time before he died. His skills had largely been limited to boiling water for ramen and choosing the perfect number of seconds for each meal he stuck into the microwave. 

In time, he did figure out how to make flat bread, and with enough lard, he even figured out how to pan-fry fish with a thin flour coating until it was extra crispy and somewhat palatable again. Those two things didn’t quite add up to a fish taco, but it wasn’t bad, and Simon considered it one of the many successes he had in the months that followed. 

Even his pickiness had his plus side, though. Thanks to his proximity to the market, he eventually learned to like both olives and dates, which were things he would never have touched on Earth. Early on, he’d tolerated them just for something to snack on as he hiked up the volcano to inspect the caldera, but in time, he grew to like their flavor, and he almost wished that someone would invent pasta or something so he could try more complicated flavor combinations. 

Sometime after Simon had been in Ionar for almost two years, he had enough friends to start hosting dinner parties. These started quite by accident when he was explaining to one of his sparring partners what the strange meal he’d brought with him for lunch was. It was just a wrap filled with a few of the ingredients that had been available in the market that week. There were some onions, some cabbage, and some slow-roasted pork. It was nothing special, but soon, he was inviting his friends over on a weekly basis for his new creations.

“You should shut down your apothecary and open a restaurant,” Aikolas exclaimed one night after several bottles of wine. 

“I would,” Simon agreed. “But where would I get the herbs to flavor all of these sauces without an apothecary?”

Everyone laughed at that, and all agreed he’d be a wonderful host. In time, he became truly accepted by these people despite his foreign background. That was nice. He'd been here for almost two years after all, but it was also when the marriage proposals started coming in. First, they were just the men of Simon’s circle casually mentioning he was getting a little old not to have a family or bringing up the fact that their sister or cousin was single out of nowhere. 

For a while, he missed these social cues completely. Those were easy enough to rebuff, but when drunk men and former customers started to brag to him about the size of their herds or the generosity of their dowry, it became impossible to miss. Now that I’m part of the community, they want me to become part of the community, he thought, realizing the inevitability of the thing. 

He held fewer parties after that because he wasn't sure what to do, but even so, the offers kept coming. While he wasn’t opposed to finding a beautiful olive-skinned Ionarian woman to marry, of course, it was pretty far down his list of things to do. Instead, he focused on healing by day and half-heartedly studying art and magic at night when the mood struck. 

Things became pretty routine after almost three years of waiting for an eruption that never came. So, one day, Aikolas stopped him one afternoon on the narrow street not far from his home to say, “Ah, I thought you were dressed a little strangely. Is your other outfit for a costume party you’re planning, or were you having a liaison with someone, you sly dog?” Simon was greatly confused. 

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Simon said, looking down at his toga. It was one of three he owned now and looking a little dingy, but it was still good enough to wear in public. He certainly didn’t have a nicer one that he’d been wearing in its place. “I’ve been in my practice all morning, tending to children and—”

“Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t you in the market just a few minutes ago?” his friend asked incredulously. “With the leather armor and the strange crown? I would swear that—”

“Crown?” Simon asked, his interest suddenly piqued. “And armor, you say? Which way did I… err, did he go?”

“He?” Aikolas laughed. “Very droll. Last I saw you, you were heading up the main road toward the high city. I thought perhaps you’d finally gone to make a proposal of your own in your fanciest foreign clothes to make an impression with some noble’s daughter.”

The high city, Simon thought, forcing himself to smile even though he wanted to scowl. Or the volcano?

“Thank you for telling me; I’ll get to the bottom of this right now!” Simon shouted, already running off with nothing but a dagger. Part of him said that he should fetch his armor and that this was it, but the rest of him… practically every fiber of his being screamed that he didn’t have time for any of that. 

“Let us know when you want to introduce her then!” his friend laughed, thinking nothing of the encounter. 

Simon’s mind was racing, though, as he ran down to the first main street, he came across and then cut over to start making his way to the north-east, up to the high city. Just mentioning he had a doppelgänger would have been enough to set Simon’s teeth on edge, but the mention of a crown? That set off all the alarm bells. 

All this time, he’d been waiting for the volcano to erupt on its own, and now, just like that, he was certain that wasn’t how all this had gone down. Someone had done something magical to make this crisis happen, and strangely, almost impossibly, he began to worry that someone might be him.