Death After Death PLUS 232-234

*Note, Patreon is stripping out all my formatting when I post now. I have no idea why. I have added the italics to all of the internal thoughts again manually. At least I think I did. I apologize if I missed any.

Ch. 232 - Living as a Beast

Traveling, as the thing he was, was a slow, halting process that was far more precarious than his time traveling as a mortal. That was counterintuitive since he could now transform into a flock of ravens and soar dozens of miles in an hour, but such occurrences were rare because of circumstances well beyond his control. 

After all, how could someone soar without making sure he had a safe place to land. As a result, even though Simon the man was much slower, he moved much further every day. 

Such travels were simpler, too. Then, he could simply buy a new donkey, name her Daisy, and set off down a trail, finding food and hospitality along the way. It didn’t matter where he stopped. Some nights, he would sleep under an open sky, and others, he would curl miserably under a canvas tent or warm himself by the fire in an inn’s common room. 

As a vampire, though, he needed a place free from the light each night. Then, once he found it, he had to secure it and make sure that he would not be disturbed while he was crushed by the sun. Both of those steps were time-consuming. That was tough as he moved from one mountain to the next, but it was especially bad once he left the mountains behind. 

There, in the flat lands, he might be forced to stay in the same lair for a week running before we found a new one and moved further west if locations were bad or hunting was scarce. If he had been willing to massacre a family farm every now and then, he could have made record time, but that was a shortcut he couldn’t conscience. These people’s lives were already hard enough. Goblins might be rare, but Murani patrols and armies were getting to be fairly common. 

Despite the chaos, the broad cultivated lands were much less monster-infested. Although he would occasionally find a bridge troll or a small goblin pack, he was increasingly forced to feed off of animals as he made his way toward Brin. As bad as that was, though, at least that let him practice his gaze. 

When you fought goblins, they ran toward you at least, which made them easy to catch. Bears and wolves did too, for the most part, but goats and deer, they just tried to escape, and as fast as he was now, trying to run down a deer was miserable. 

So, he got good at holding the skittish creatures in his gaze as soon as he found them. That didn’t make them taste any better, but it did make them stand there and wait to die. By the time he got to Slany, he could make it work on people, too. 

The small mining town was all but dead by the time he reached it, and there were no clues around the burned ruins of Corwin Manor to say for sure what had happened to Gregor’s heirs. That was unfortunate, and it gave Simon one more reason to hate the Murani. Still, he lingered for a better part of a week as he explored the familiar area and purged the silver mines of goblins in an effort to reconnect with the person he’d been a dozen lifetimes ago when he called this place home. 

Sometimes, as he crossed wide valleys, he eventually found no easy place further to the west where he could rest, and he had to backtrack before moving further south. Each time he got stuck like that, he told himself that he should just commit suicide and start over, but he couldn’t.

It was impossible for him now that he could see the bigger picture. He was no longer a wounded beast but a monster on a mission. He had no way of knowing exactly how far in the future level 99 was in the Pit. In the grand scheme of things, it was probably 150 or even 200 years from where he’d started, but that wasn’t so far from where he stood right now. 

However unwillingly he’d gotten here, this moment offered a valuable peek into Helades’ end game as far as he was concerned. It would be a lot easier to solve levels if he understood what it was he was aiming for. 

He was 120 or so years in the future relative to where he started, and the fact that there was a giant war going on for the continent that he spent most of his time on seemed rather relevant to that. “War can’t be what I’m meant to stop,” he told himself at first, as he watched another army marching or another legion building a fortification. 

It seemed too mundane. All of this time, Simon had thought that what he was doing was building up to something huge and epic. Sometimes, he thought it might be the devils rising from the Pit or some out-of-control necromancer lord, but as he watched a legion of men with spears and shields marching south one evening on one of the trade roads, he became less convinced. 

By all accounts, this war had been going on for the better part of a decade, and if he had included the two wars that were precursors to it, then the thing would have been closer to half a century. It was happening all around him right now in a hundred battles and guerilla actions. Sometimes, he interceded, and sometimes, he didn’t as he tried to decide what he was going to do about it. “Wars happen all the time; this one can’t be worse than any of the others I’ve seen in my other lives.”

It certainly seemed to be, though. Everywhere he went over those next few months, as he slowly made his way across Brin toward Ionia, he found either men fighting or evidence of fighting. He didn’t think that Brin had seen so much combat, even at the height of their civil war, that he’d participated in so many lives before. 

Though Simon didn’t always join in the fight, he usually did when he saw a particularly tempting target of opportunity. Mostly, that meant warlocks. There was usually at least one in any given detachment, and Simon would swim through campsites he found as a mist, looking for those men to rip to pieces as a warning to the rest. 

He had to. Given the way they stayed young but kept casting spells, it was clear to him that they were burning the lives of others instead of their own, which was nearly as bad as his own existence. That meant they had to die as surely as he did one day. 

The warlocks weren’t usually the leaders of a given formation. They seemed to have a different command structure, but they were invariably crafty. Sometimes, he narrowly avoided clever traps that were meant to keep them safe, and other times, he was burned by their suicide amulets or stabbed by their guards. None of that stopped him from doing damage to them whenever he could, not after he found evidence of blood magic rituals in several villages. 

Though finding villages entirely devoid of people wasn’t uncommon at this point, Simon didn’t think that they were killing everyone for dark magics. He knew for a fact that many of the survivors were being sent north as slaves. That was one of the reasons the people of Brin still fought. This was not a war of conquest but a total war. If the Murani had simply come down, conquered the capital, replaced the King with a vassal, and left everyone else alone, the war probably would have been over decades before. 

This wasn’t that, though. This was a total replacement, which drove Simon ever faster in an effort to find out if Ionia still stood. Eventually, on the way there, he grew curious enough to start questioning survivors. They wouldn’t survive for long, of course, but if he ripped three members of a patrol to pieces, he would let the fourth one live long enough to answer questions with the force of Simon’s dread gaze. 

This was good practice for him since months of silent predation had left him with few people to talk to. When he started, he found that he snarled more than he spoke, but in time, more civilized ways returned to him. He learned many things. He learned that the Kingdom of Montain to the south had fallen, and even the city-state of Abresse had surrendered, while the Murani continued to move south in an effort to surround and absorb both of the hold-out Kingdoms he was traveling between. 

That was when he knew this was more than a war. It was an invasion. Apparently, it wasn’t the first one, though. One of the mages explained that his own land of Murani had been conquered by people from across the sea two and three generations back and that this was the result of that. That forced Simon to adjust his timeline a bit more. 

He’d thought that this war extended for half a century, but it increasingly looked like it was the better part of an entire century once he learned more. If that’s the case, then why do none of the early quests deal with this threat? He wondered. He’d had two levels take him to a place he couldn't even find on a map with ziggurats and carnivorous plants, but no quest had ever been urgent enough to take him to the Murani so he could investigate them further.

The most obvious answer was that it was either what Helades wanted or it was irrelevant to her plans. The latter case seemed unlikely, but the former was unsettling. He reached no consensus by the time he reached the war-torn borders of Ionia. 

There, he feasted on beastmen in the Raiden Mountains and observed the situation. From that point, he wasn’t in any hurry because beastmen tasted much better than the goblins, trolls, and beasts he’d been devouring in the flat lands of Brin. 

Why should a beast man taste better than a beast? He had no idea, but they did, despite the stink. There were also plenty of enemy soldiers to hunt or question each night as the mood struck him. 

Still, it was only when he moved past the forts and fortresses that held the passes and saw that Ionar still stood there in the moonlight that he relaxed. He slept there in a lava tube for several days, high on the volcano's slopes, before he penetrated the palace as a mist to learn what he could. 

It was there he found that his son Seymon was still alive. He was an old man now. In fact, he was older than Simon had been when he’d taught him, but he still sat on his simple throne and contributed meaningfully to the discussions with his generals. That sight did Simon’s heart more good than any feeding or victory he’d had in this life. It felt almost as good as his escape from Freya’s grip.

Simon lingered longer than he should. He’d seen that the situation was dire the moment he’d rematerialized as a few silent crows loitering in the shadows of the small garden they planned and discussed within. He didn’t decide to help until one of Seyom’s grandchildren came in to wish him goodnight. She was an adorable little girl who bore a strong family resemblance to Elthena, as he remembered her, young and beautiful in their mid-thirties while he lay crippled in bed. When her mother came in to fetch her and apologize for the distraction, the men just laughed. They didn’t seem to mind at all. 

Simon was very distracted, though. Seyom’s daughter, who would have been Simon’s granddaughter, was in her thirties, and she looked so much like her grandmother that it made her heart ache. That was when he decided he had to help them, at least a little. The only question that remained was how he could best do that.

Ch. 233 - A Demon in the Dark

No one was ready for him, not once he got serious about killing people again for the first time in months. The attackers perished under violent and mysterious conditions, and the defenders who found the pieces of those bodies were often sickened at the sight. Their disgust did not stop Simon from doing what needed to be done, though. 

He’d grown stronger, not just physically but in his abilities, and no one without magic could do much to him. How could you fight a seven-foot tall beast with the strength of ten men that could freeze you with a look and vanish into smoke?

They all grew to fear him, and it was well that they should. Simon feared what he was capable of as well. In an effort to spare Ionar the worst of his deprivations, he traveled north after only a few nights of slaughter. It was there they were most besieged and needed a miracle most. 

Some part of him wanted to talk to the King before he left. He wanted to speak to Seyom one more time, but he knew that would be an act that was as selfish as it was horrific, so he only allowed himself one last look at his great-grandchildren playing in the palace garden from a distance before he soared north toward Coramin. 

He skipped the Oracle for the same reason. While he checked to make sure that the caldera city was still there, he made no effort to visit it. As much as he wanted her insight, or perhaps the insight of her replacement at this point, for Simon wasn’t sure if she was immortal, he stayed away. 

The only indulgence he offered himself was to stop by the mosaic that he had made with Bertrand half a century ago. It was still there, but it was no longer a lonely slab of rock in an out-of-the-way place. Instead, there was a marble pavilion surrounding it now, with an altar dedicated to “The Greatest of Teachers.”

That touched Simon enough to make his eyes water as he was moved to tears for the first time in his entire beastly life. Even though he was hungry enough that he should have spent the evening hunting, he spent most of the night just gazing at that silent moonlight temple and appreciating the works of great beauty that he’d helped make so long ago. 

Well, he spent half the night looking at the well-preserved mosaic. He spent the other half looking at his hands and wondering how he’d gone from that to this. 

Not even those hours of self-pity could stand between him and more bloodshed, though. “I’ll make art when this is done,” he told himself before he returned to his current lair to recuperate and bask in the tragedy that was his current life. 

On the following night, he did not visit again. Instead, he devoured a pack of beastmen before continuing north. 

It took him two weeks to reach the border fortress and find a place to shelter from daylight. By then, its defenses had all but collapsed. It wasn’t hard to see why. They had too few men, and those who died or were wounded were replaced by beardless boys who were as green as they came. 

Simon had no idea how they would last the winter or really how they’d managed to hold the sea this long. Fortunately, he was in the miracle business, and it wasn’t hard to see how to take apart the enemy’s assault, a piece at a time. 

Ionia had never been a populous nation. It was the mountains and the seas that protected them from the deprivations of their neighbors. The mountains couldn’t do their jobs, to stop the invaders this time. Not even in these narrow passes. How could they when the enemy built bridges and reinforced paths so that siege engines and barricades could be brought to bear.

Their camps were large and lay well out of reach of the defenders' few catapults, but the fortifications themselves were not that impressive. It was probably only the mage’s unwillingness to risk their own lives that had preserved the small fortress this long. Without his magic, Simon could do nothing to reinforce it. What he could do, however, even without magic, he could make the approach that much harder. 

Under the cover of darkness, it would have been the simplest thing in the world to tear apart the supports of those hasty structures and send them all tumbling down the slope. Still, even that wasn’t enough. It would have been too sloppy. 

Stop Simon, think he chastised himself. If you destroy a bridge, they’ll just stop using it or build a new one, but if you sabotage a bridge, then who knows how many people will fall to their deaths. 

The beast within him had been thinking about the sprawling battlefield only in terms of vulnerabilities and body count, because that was what it craved. Even if it couldn’t taste the carnage, it wanted more of it, but there was much more to it than that. The pass was narrow, and there were so many ways to reach it from the valley below where they waited in safety, but mountains were dangerous places, and he’d grown much stronger than he’d been the night he killed dozens with his first rock slide, and this time he could kill far more with a little effort. 

For those first few nights, Simon only made the watchmen who might catch him disappear. Instead of murdering people directly, he severed ropes, clawed at critical supports, and studied rock formations. Though he didn’t do anything with the latter immediately, he noted the places where the stones might be used to the most devastating effect if and when the Murani tried a night attack. 

The worst part of Simon’s subtle plan was he didn’t get to see when his sabotage took effect. For a few nights, he might weaken a bridge, only to wake up and find it in ruins. That was satisfying, but it was more satisfying to linger at the edges of campfires while skittish soldiers retold the horrible events. 

Their version of events was no doubt exaggerated, but even so, he’d seen dozens of bodies in the gorges and bloodstains that indicated that some had already been carried away, alive or dead. 

“We’re cursed, I tell you,” one young man said, “Cursed! The Ionians have some evil sorcery, and the mountains themselves are turning against us.”

“We have plenty of sorcerers as well,” another man said with a shrug. “If there’s evil magic, they will counteract it somehow.” 

Simon had been planning to kill the small group to start the panic that nowhere was safe, but that insight made him hold off. The mages at the heart of the army were a sort of security blanket for everyone else, which meant that real fear would probably require their elimination. 

Last time, he’d started with the general, but this time, he started with the warlocks. He didn’t kill them in their tents. Not at first. He was too wary of their trinkets and traps. They existed in a compound within a compound at the center of the army. They were practically untouchable there, to a normal foe. Simon could have snuck in and touched them all he wanted, but even he stayed away. He knew the place was riddled with tapestries and rugs marked with binding and force runes, making it dangerous to explore too deeply. Instead, each night after he fed, he watched and waited, waiting for them to leave. 

They had to leave eventually. They couldn’t fight a war from within that crude camp. They couldn’t plan to rebuild or attack while they cowered behind their walls. The warlocks had no reason to cower, though, not at first. 

Those first few nights when Simon hunted them, they had no idea they were being hunted. They went about their business. They drank with friends and visited the outskirts of the camp to make love to their favorite whores. They just never returned home. All anyone found of them were charred and mutilated corpses. 

Things didn’t stay that easy for long. The guards they were escorted by didn’t do much to deter Simon. His ugly yellow claws couldn’t quite rip through steel plate mail, but such armor made a convenient handhold to slam the unfortunate wearer into the ground hard enough to crush their ribs. The mages fought with force and fire. Sometimes, they even landed a blow on Simon, which made him appreciate how much it hurt to be on the receiving end of magic. Not that it was enough to save them. 

Those attacks did more to stall the overall battle than anything else. Afraid for their own safety, the mages stopped leaving their compound. Not just during the night, either. They stopped leaving it at all, at least according to rumors. 

Those went wild after so many deaths. They called Simon a demon and gave him a number of creative names. Some, like the Bloodthirster, were appropriate, given that he was a vampire. Others gave him even stranger names, like Night Creeper or the Breaker of Ways. It took a few nights for the Murani to settle on the idea that he was a Fury. 

That was a mythical creature unique to Ionar that dealt out righteous and deserved vengeance to the wicked. Simon had done a number of paintings on the subject, so he didn’t mind the comparison, though he was far uglier than any fury he’d ever illustrated. A Fury was an old woman with claws for nails. She often had wild dark hair that would strangle cheaters and a tongue that was nearly as sharp as her fangs that she would use to drive liars to suicide. Ugly as those withered spinsters were, they were still human. 

Strangely, though, by the time they’d decided what he was, the average soldier no longer seemed nearly as afraid of him as he once had. It turned out there was an answer for that, too, after he lingered long enough to listen to the watchmen speak about it. 

It turned out that their confidence was once again the Warlocks’s work. “They will definitely use magic to banish the Fury,” one man explained. “Old gods have no power over new ones. There’s no way such a relic can defeat us.”

“I thought they were summoning a demon from the pits below to do battle with it?” another one asked. “Haven’t they done that before?”

“They have,” another agreed. “I heard about it from a friend who fought at Darndelle. They don’t like to do it much because of how many slaves they have to sacrifice, but Demons can certainly be made to fight if the price is right.”

Simon was skeptical of the latter, but he was positively incredulous about the former. Banishing him with a spell would be impossible because he wasn’t a summoned creature. As to summoning a demon to fight on their behalf, that was more believable, but Simon had only read about such instances rarely, even in the heart of the Unspoken’s black library. 

I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see, he thought as he soared into the night and observed the mage compound from afar. They were certainly up to something big. He could see the preparations from a ways off, but he did not yet know what it was.

Ch. 234 - A Demon in the Dark (Part 2)

With every night that passed, the preparations in the heart of the Murani camp grew. Each night at midnight, there were bonfires and sacrifices that echoed well beyond the edge of their now well-lit camp, and each day, while Simon slept, the bodies of their victims were removed. Though he couldn’t see where they’d been taken in the darkness, he could smell the series of mass graves that had been dug and filled to hide their crimes.

For five nights, nothing came of these efforts. From where he lingered to watch them after he finished each night, he could see a few of the faces change. That wasn’t definitive, but it indicated to him that their spells were not without risks, and some of their mages died or, at the very least, exhausted themselves in their forbidden rites. 

Simon would take a break from slaughtering guards and other pockets of isolated defenders around midnight to watch the pyrotechnic-laden climaxes to whatever it was they were doing. He was rewarded on the sixth night when a fiery rift not unlike the one he’d seen so often on the chapel level appeared. From this distance, he couldn’t make out all the details, but his memory filled them in reasonably well. 

The runes of the binding ring were painted in blood upon the ground, and it was easy enough to imagine the way that they would stretch and distort as the world beyond tried to violate them and break out of its fragile cage. Then, a man stepped through the flames. From this distance, he was a dark silhouette that looked no different from the demon that had pestered Simon every time he passed through the chapel. That normalcy only lasted for a few minutes, though. 

There was some talking between the newcomer and a group of Murani warlocks, and once some kind of bargain was struck, the creature stepped through the circle, making it flare in protest even as it burned away the devil’s human veneer. On the inside, he had the silhouette of a gentleman, but once he stepped out of the flames and the lies fell away, he changed entirely. 

Simon was too far away to see all the monstrous details, but some of them, like the horns and the wings, were unmistakable. So was the fact that it had practically doubled in size. What was a nearly six-foot man had become nearly ten feet tall, and he stood there, stretching. The words of power flared around him in flaming neon oranges, reds, and greens in quick succession, making Simon do a double take. He’d never seen magic cast in such a way, and he wondered at how it would theoretically work as a flaming sword manifested in the creature’s large hands. 

The demon swept the thing around in a series of swipes that seemed to be nothing more than a warm-up exercise despite the decapitating someone who had been standing too close. The demon laughed at that, in a voice so deep Simon could hear it all the way from his hiding place on a rocky outcropping a quarter mile from the summoning circles at the edge of the nearest mountain.

Despite the casualty, the thing’s sword didn’t stop dancing for a moment, and it occurred to him there was a strange sort of pattern to it. Is this another spell? He wondered. Or is it more like a war dance or something? 

Almost as soon as Simon had that thought, the blade stopped, and the demon leaped into the sky with a powerful flap of its bat wings. It seemed smaller in that moment. It was a mere pinprick of fire rather than a blade. 

It took Simon several seconds to realize that it was because the thing was pointed directly at him. Pointed anywhere else, he would see the blade. Pointed away, he’d see nothing at all, but at him, it would look like the medieval equivalent of a flashlight. Of course, the fact that the demon was flying toward him like a missile was a pretty big hint, too. 

Simon wondered if he should fly away from the thing but decided against it. He was in the mood to kill something that deserved it and roared a challenge to the sky, even as the demon reached the pinnacle of its flight and started down toward Simon like a thunderbolt. 

As the demon fell from the sky with the menace of raptor, Simon considered his opponent. Scale was hard to measure against the glare and the darkness, but he decided that what he’d first taken for horns might be a crown in retrospect. Likewise, the thing was wearing at least some armor, and all of it appeared to be made of burnished gold. 

“No accounting for taste,” Simon thought as he checked his surroundings. 

Even in the dark of night, he could see several places where he’d rigged up several large traps that he could use to easily shift whole mountainsides if the Murani tried to move any large formations of men around. So far they hadn’t yet given him the opportunity to use any of them, which had been unfortunate until now. 

Still, all of that preparation gave him options tonight that he might well need. Simon spent the last several seconds of time he had before his enemy was upon him considering which of those titanic dead falls and other geologic features might be most useful. Then, he was out of time, and the demon struck. 

Well, the demon tried to strike him. It arced down with grace and power, using the momentum of its descent in an attempt to cleave Simon’s head off. Evading the blow was impossible at these speeds, but a moment before the demon could impact him, Simon’s body dissolved into mist, making contact impossible. The demon’s eyes widened just enough for Simon to see that he’d noticed the trick. Here, though, its speed worked against him. There was nothing that the demon could do to alter the attack without throwing himself entirely out of balance. 

Not that such restraint would save him. Simon reformed almost as soon as the blade was clear, and even as the demon soared past, he grasped its ankle with his monstrous, malformed hand. He felt the scalding heat of demon’s greaves and its terrible momentum, but he ignored the force straining his tendons and the way that the searing metal melted his flesh. Instead, he whirled around like a shotputter, spinning 270 degrees on his heel and redirecting the demon's momentum straight into a cliff a hundred yards away. 

The monster flipped and rolled in the air chaotically as it tried unfurl its giant bat wings and right itself, but it was useless. It had only just begun to get control of its twisted flight path in the seconds before it hit the stone with a terrific crack that echoed out throughout the valley. Even before the demon hit the stone, Simon was charging toward it. 

If that wouldn’t be enough to finish me off, then it definitely isn’t enough to handle a demon, he told himself. He wasn’t in the habit of underestimating his opponents these days. Still, in terms of people he wasn’t likely to take it easy on, Demons were pretty much at the top of the list. 

The demon had only barely gotten to his feet and was still leaning heavily against the wall when Simon approached like a wrecking ball. He expected treachery and wasn’t disappointed when the flaming blade on the thing’s sword suddenly reversed. The hilt stayed right where it was while the shimmering blade burst from the rear. 

It was a neat trick, and it scored a shallow but painful blow along Simon’s side before he body-checked the demon hard enough to break his spine. This time, the thing didn’t even try to get up. He just rasped, “Gervuul—” before Simon ripped his head clean off and tossed it far enough that it started to roll wetly down the mountain.

Simon considered ripping off all of its limbs as well, but the headless corpse didn’t put up a fight after he yanked off the first one, so he picked up the blade as the corpse’s open wounds started to smolder and sizzle.

The thing was just a handle now, and he was studying the markings on it when he heard the words behind him. “Gervuul Uuvellum Vrazig!”

He only just had time to whirl around before black lightning rippled out from the unseen caster. It blew holes right through his flesh, and his wounds were slower to regrow than usual, even as the arcing ebon streamers carved into the rock behind him. Simon slumped against the stone and struggled to rise, but the demon hit him for the second time with the same spell, bringing him to one knee as he took stock of the situation. 

At least he’d turned all the way around by the second blow, and he could see what he was facing. The demon had started to regrow from his head, and though he looked like a naked dwarf right now, barely four feet tall, he was getting larger even as Simon watched. There was nothing that would stop the thing from blasting him over and over again. This time, though, Simon had his sword.  

It’s been a long time since anyone hit me that hard, Simon reflected as he tried to figure out how badly he was hurt. 

The sheer fact that he hadn’t already healed told him how bad it was, but Simon refused to accept that. Most of his guts and chest had been blasted away, along with half of his face, but his charred skeleton was still complete, and his limbs were largely complete. The demon had gone for center mass, which was a smart move most of the time but a terrible mistake in this instance. 

A moment later, he made a second mistake when he took Simon’s moment of hesitation for defeat when he started to speak. “They told me you would be tough,” the demon said almost boisterously, “and for a second, I almost believed them. Still, for a God, you are not much of a—  Oonbetit!”

The demon rightly judged that he didn’t have time for a greater word. Not at this range. A simple word of force wasn’t going to cut it, though. He’d applied it broadly in an attempt to shove Simon back, but after three steps, even in his weakened state, he was strong enough to shatter that invisible wall of force and keep right on going. This time, Simon slammed him into the ground by his throat, pasting him. Whatever words of power he’d been about to speak next were lost in the short, sharp scream that followed. 

Simon only had a moment to enjoy that, though, before he whirled around as he realized something. If this asshole can regrow from his head, then he can probably regrow from other parts of his body, too, can’t he?