Death After Death

Chapter 10: The Key

The rats attacked him seconds after his feet found the dirt floor of the basement.

The heavy smoke in the air and the lack of preparation took their toll on him. Even though he stomped the beasts into a bloody ruin as always, they bit him several times before he managed to completely slaughter them. Once that was over he put on his boots and the armor in the dark, using his socks as makeshift bandages to deal with the bleeding as best he could.

“God damn, that hurts,” he swore, kicking a rat after he’d finished belting everything else on. This run obviously wasn’t starting off right, but at least he didn’t have to worry about infection, because the way things had been going he wasn’t likely to survive another hour.

The second floor was better. By now he was so used to the traps and the minor variations that he could probably walk through this floor in the dark if it weren’t for the bats. Not that he was willing to try of course.

That would be almost as frightening as the skeletons. The goblin cave on the other hand, was something he should honestly be trying to walk through in the dark, but the idea terrified him. Simon knew where to go now, but just thinking about that lone patrol and those awful teeth made him shiver.

He’d never feel comfortable on the third floor of this madhouse without a machine gun or a few spells up his sleeves. As he crept down the dark passage, trying to remember where he saw the lone goblin last time, his mind returned again and again to magic. He’d seen it twice now in the pit. The first time was in the eyes of the skeleton king or whatever that thing was, and the second was the goblin caster that had been outside his cabin.

It was definitely a real force - something that he should be able to use to beat this game eventually, but he didn’t have the slightest idea how he was supposed to learn it. Hesitantly Simon tried to repeat the word he’d heard the goblin utter when the fireworks started a few times, “Ger-vulmenen. Gerulever-min. Garvul-manin.” There was no storm of sparks or sudden fires as he tried to nail down the pronunciation of the unfamiliar word. Instead the only evidence that anything had happened at all was a bad taste in his mouth.

His brow furrowed at that. Why should saying a word make his mouth taste like sulfur? That train of thought was quickly derailed as - he heard a sudden scream of alarm. That damned goblin had found him again while he was distracted.

Simon made quick work of the little ball of rage when it charged him, along with the first one that came after him. Fighting goblins wasn’t the hard part. They were vicious, but not very strong. It was seeing the little bastards before they snuck up on him that was the hard part.

When the third one managed to stab him in the back of his thigh, he cursed, and crushed its head to paste against the wall. Then he charged forward, swinging his sword in one hand and his torch in the other. He wasn’t going to fight these things in the dark. He was going to do it in the light of their bonfire where he could at least see them coming.

As a strategy, it was ugly as hell, but it was effective. The goblins scattered before him as he charged forward, and he mowed them down without issue. It was a glorious feeling to see them fall before him, but when he was finally done and their small corpses lay strewn around him, he sat gasping at the mouth of the cave. Even in as good a shape he was in, he was certain that if there had been more than six, he would have run out of gas before he’d cleared them all out.

Once he caught his breath, Simon appreciated the view. The cave was fairly high up on the side of a mountain, overlooking a subalpine forest. It was a view that would have been on a postcard anywhere on earth. “Come visit Goblinlandia,” he joked to himself while he appreciated it. If there was any sign of a city he’d probably just abandon this stupid trip down into the pit and explore that instead, but there were only trees and rocks as far as the eye could see.

Reluctantly he got up and entered the skeleton cave with a little less effort than it had taken last time. The stairs were just as cold, but as he stood there in the threshold he suddenly lost all appetite for a fight. He tried to tell himself it was because the combination of bite wounds on his feet and the stab wound on his thigh were making it hard to move, and that if his footwork was compromised he didn’t stand a chance against that terrifying knight, but even he knew that wasn’t the whole story. Simon was afraid. He was so afraid he worried he might piss himself if he had to face that thing again, and he was looking for any excuse not to.

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In the end he tried a compromise position. He hobbled through the crypt for the gate. It took these things a little bit of time to get up, aggro on him, and become a real threat. So, even though it was probably hopeless, he went through the room as fast as he could to the gate on the far side. It was only when he got close that he realized that this might not be the exit, but with skeletons returning to life all around him it was too late to change his mind.

“It’s fine,” he told himself. “Worst comes to worst I’ll just take a quick trip home for lunch. Skeleton swords aren’t nearly as painful as traps or goblin teeth.”

The comfort from that reassurance only lasted as long as it took him to reach the gate and find it locked. “Oh come on!” Simon yelled as he rattled the bars.

The cold metal might be half made of rust by this point, but there was no way he was breaking through this without a cutting torch or a truck with a big bumper. That was when he felt someone walk over his grave, and he knew for certain then that the horrid knight was staring at him. Maybe it was even advancing on him. Even turning around to face it was a test of his will though.

He wondered if this was what it felt like when you failed a saving throw before he chastised himself. He couldn’t afford to be defeatist like that. He needed to turn around and face his fear or he’d never get past this floor! Simon turned around and raised his sword just in time to receive three feet of frigid steel in the gut.

He gasped, in both shock and pain. This was so much worse than the last time. It was indescribably bad, and the pain wasn’t even the worst part. He looked down and saw ice forming on his armor, spreading out slowly from there.

“What the fuck?” he asked in disbelief, surprised to see the breath fog as it came out of his mouth. He wasn’t dying… this thing wasn’t trying to kill him. It was trying to steal his soul, or something worse.

With the rest of the crowd of skeletons bearing down on their intimate embrace, Simon brought his sword down against the unarmored neck of this thing with almost hysterical strength. The first blow did nothing, and the second shattered the blade against the spaulders like the sword was suddenly frigid and brittle leaving Simon with nothing but a few inches above the hilt. For a moment he stared at it in disbelief. Then he plunged it into his own neck and pulled the frigid piece of steel sideways, severing both of his carotid arteries in a single painful motion.

For Simon it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. The last thing he wanted to do was kill himself again, but it felt like his soul was leaking out through that terrible blade, and he didn’t like the idea of spending the rest of his life imprisoned in ice, or whatever this thing planned to do to him. In that strange peaceful moment between life and death he noticed that the skeleton had a key that looked to be about the right size for the gate on a necklace around its neck. As he felt his life splash out in hot gushes across the face of the frigid knight he managed to smile in defiance as everything faded to black.

Moments later he woke up in his bed, but somehow the darkness between his last life and this one seemed longer and more frightening than normal, like his trip through the afterlife to get back to his starting point had been a longer, harder climb than usual. His teeth chattered for a few seconds while he regained his composure before he felt the strength to finally sit up and look around the room that was fast becoming a sort of prison cell.

“What the hell was that thing going to do to me?” he asked himself.

The mirror started to answer his question, but when Simon saw it was just asking him to rephrase his question for the tenth time he ignored it. That gag was definitely getting old. Even if the mirror wasn’t any help, he wasn’t sure that he would have woken up again if he had died to that skeleton’s evil chill.

“Mirror - can I die in the pit?” Simon asked finally. He had to know.

‘Of course you can die in the pit,’ it answered. ‘You have now died seven times.’

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Simon clarified, annoyed that this thing was so dumb he had to spoon feed it everything. “I mean can I die in such a way that makes me stay dead.”

‘That is not possible,’ the mirror typed out in its blue cursive script. ‘All deaths will result in a reset to starting conditions.’

Simon was surprised to get such a definitive answer from the hunk of junk, honestly. It might have been a first, but even if what it said was true, the last thing Simon ever wanted was to die at the hands of that thing. It was a terrifying experience. Last time he had seen it as he bled out on the skeleton’s blades it had been bad enough, but its frigid embrace had been a hundred times worse.

At this moment Simon was sure of only one thing, and that it was that he couldn’t go back down into the pit. He had to find another way out. He didn’t know where he would find one. He didn’t know if one existed, but he had to find one, because the only thing worse than staying here and waiting for the goblins to burn him alive in a night or two was going back down there and trying to get past that nightmare. He got up and started getting ready.

The first thing he needed to do was to cook all his food, because he knew more than anyone that there was no guarantee he’d be able to make fire. After that he was going to fold up his bedding and use it as a crude sack so he could… Simon’s head began to spin with possibilities. If he could just get out of this hell hole then he’d have it all - a fantasy world to explore and a strange sort of immortality.

The life of his dreams was still within his grasp he decided, and he didn’t even have to fight that damn skeleton!