Death After Death

Chapter 109: Step by Step

Simon woke up once during the night, dreaming that the goblins had tried the shutters, but when he went outside, there were no fresh tracks, so he lay back down until sleep took him. He didn’t fear goblins anymore, but bravery wouldn’t be enough to stop them driving a spear through his guts or ripping out his throat. They were like raccoons but more murdery.

Both creatures could open doors and latches, of course, but one of them only wanted to knock over your garbage cans and feast on your trash. The other wanted to feast on you. Well, goblins probably would be perfectly happy to feast on whatever was in my trash can if I had one, Simon mused as he lay there, falling back to sleep.

In the morning he took his time getting ready, and prepared as well as he’d ever done. He didn’t even forget the axe, though he did desperately regret that he would have to cary a sack for of junk around rather than a real backpack. He’d have to get one of those made at the first opportunity.

In the root cellar Simon killed every last rat without difficulties, and it was only when that was done that he slammed the trapdoor shut and then started to hack it to pieces with the axe. It was awkward work because he was swigging a hatchet against thick wood above his head, and it took several minutes to make an real progress as wood chips rained down on him from above.

Part of him worried that someone would investigate because he was being so loud, but the rest of him kinda hoped that they did. Chopping away at the boards from such an awkward position was a pain. Finally, after a couple minutes of creating a slowly deepening series of overlapping cuts, he threw the axe down and picked up his mace, shattering the weakened board.

Simon reached up and tried to move the bar that was holding it closed, but he found no such object. Instead there was something heavy resting on it.

He fished around a little and was gradually able to push whatever it was out of the way, but the whole time he did so he worried something would chop his arm clean off. They didn’t though, and when he finally freed up the trapdoor and pushed it open he found a dark room.

When he finally figured out where he was, though, he had trouble believing it. The furniture had been knocked over and smashed, and everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and grime, but he would have bet his life that this was his cabin. Just dirtier, and maybe older.

Simon crawled up out of his hole, and with a word, he ignited a torch so he could get a better look. It didn’t answer any questions, though. He could see signs of goblin damage, but there were human tracks in the dirt, too. There wasn’t even enough left of the mirror to ask it a question. He tried, but its words were scattered across the slivers and shards of glass so thinly that they were little more than a blue shimmer.

Simon went outside next, and looked around, but the nighttime view didn’t look too much different than what he was used to. He walked to the temple, and found it slightly more overgrown than before, but otherwise unchanged, and he saw a bonfire in the woods that hinted at goblins, but opted not to investigate that further because he didn’t want to be distracted from the question at hand with a pitched battle.

“Why would a portal take me forward in time but nowhere in space?” he wondered. He didn’t have an answer, though he was sure that there was one he was missing. Simon eventually strolled over to the river, using that as his mirror, and asked, “Mirror, can you tell me how far I’ve traveled into the feature?”

‘The future?’ the mirror asked. ‘I don’t understand. This is the present.’

“Yes,” Simon agreed. “It’s my present, but it's the future of the last level. Can you tell me how much time has passed between where I was and where I am?”

‘I cannot,’ the mirror answered. ‘Time has passed, but it does not flow for me the same as it does for you.’

“What does that even mean?” Simon asked in frustration.

‘I cannot say,’ the mirror typed in glowing blue letters that wavered on the ever-moving surface of the water.

Simon sighed and snuffed his torch before he walked back toward the bonfire he’d spotted earlier. He hadn’t planned to fight, but after the mirror pissed him off, he was looking for something to take it out on. He would have, too, except that when he got there, he didn’t find the few goblins he expected. He saw dozens cavorting in the flickering firelight and froze.

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How’d there get to be so many? He wondered. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing here?

Honestly, he doubted it. He wasn’t really feeling up to fighting so many. Even with magic, it would be damn hard to keep from getting stabbed, but when he heard the sound of a branch snapping nearby him, Simon didn’t hesitate.

“Gervuul Oonbetit,” he declared, sending an invisible guillotine of force expanding out in front of him like a ripple on a pond.

At head level, it took out whatever it was that had attempted to sneak up on him, along when more than a few on this side of the fire, but it also sliced cleanly through several trees which crashed down on the gathering sending screaming goblins scattering in every direction.

Simon had hoped to snuff the flames of violence with a clean strike, but instead, he’d sent the scurrying every which way, spreading embers in all directions. He took that as his cue to leave, and he ran for his life back to the cabin. Realistically, he could probably take out four or five at once, but once they found him, it would get ugly, and he’d probably be swarmed by double that. He had no interest in losing a life so quickly, so he just left.

It was a sidequest anyway, he reasoned as he shot back down the stairs and headed for the dungeon.

There, he took a break to calm himself before he did anything stupid as far as the traps were concerned. “Maybe this level is about taking all the cash out of here,” he wondered aloud as he began to ease his way forward. “Maybe someday some adventurers will find it, and it will cause problems down the line?”

It was the best thesis he had so far, and he dug into it as he slaughtered the bats that attacked him. He couldn’t take the treasure with him, but he could very easily use a word of earth to seal that passage shut so no one else could get it either… but then he’d no longer have a comfortable place to stock up on gold with each trip. That made the question a dicier one. He had a theoretical solution, but should he use it?

Simon debated that long and hard once he’d finished off the bats and made his way to the secret passage that opened to reveal the treasure vault. There, he reluctantly sealed the gold into a wall after he’d taken a pouch of gold and silver for his own use.

“From now on, shit gets harder,” he sighed before saying, “Vosden,” and sealing the treasure away behind a thin wall of stone. He’d imagined it to look as close as possible to the rest of the wall, but it came out a little discolored. He wasn’t sure that was going to matter.

After that came the skeleton crypt, but they were as easy to defeat as ever. There, Simon did a little experiment and used the minor word of earth to turn a silver piece into a palm-sized mirror rather than pour his water out on the floor. That worked pretty well, though he had to use the word twice to beat it fully down to the size he wanted.

Even that wasn’t a waste, though. He learned that a word of earth could affect metal and that it didn’t work as well as it did for stone. He didn’t need to ask the mirror any questions this time, though. He just wanted to record the sigils on the sword because, this time, he wasn’t planning to take it with him.

Simon briefly considered destroying it to see if that would complete the level, but he didn’t for a couple reasons. The first was that he was pretty sure he was going to need the thing the next time he decided to try taking out the fire level, and the other reason was that the idea of fucking with the runes without completely understanding them gave him serious flashbacks to the frost orb.

“Don’t try to disarm a bomb until you know whether you need to cut the red wire,” he muttered to himself as he finished with the sword.

After that, he made some notes about some of the other heraldry just in case he wanted to try to figure out why this place mattered one day. Once that was done he sorted out his bag, and it was only when he was halfway through with that, that he e realized he was dragging his feet about the next level. The tavern had become a scarier place to him that a dragon's lair, and he would have laughed if it wasn’t so sad.

“I won’t stay,” he told himself as he gripped the skeleton knight’s key a little tighter. “Whether she’s there or not, I’ll skip it and just keep going.”

Simon waited until he believed the words he’d just spoken. Only then did he get up and walk toward the gate. He opened it cautiously in case the next level had revered itself to zombies, but it hadn’t. Instead, it was the same bustling inn he’d seen the last few times.

Simon shut the door behind him and walked into the common room. He saw Freya sitting there with the same adventurers he’d seen the time before last, but that just made him walk faster. True to his word he left without a backward glance, and when he slammed the door in the sewer he finally slumped against it and allowed himself a moment for the regret to wash over himself before he pushed on.

Hopefully he’d solved one level already, but he had a lot more to do between now and whenever it was that he died, and he wasn’t going to let her distract him.