Death After Death

Chapter 111: Root Cause

Simon dropped the stone immediately lest it attach to his other hand, too, and he scrambled away to the other side of the fountain. For a moment, it was lost in the murky water, but as soon as the cloud of his blood dissipated, he finally understood what it was.

It wasn’t a stone, he thought plaintively. It was a seed!

Suddenly, a variety of questions were answered. He now knew where the sewers were and why the level with the ruins had been missing. It was because those carnivorous plants weren't there anymore. They were here with him, and they were growing.

Already it had latched the bottom off the fountain, and its roots had begun to fan out, digging into the stone just as easily as they had dug into his hand. As he watched, transfixed, a stalk began to grow out of the top of the thing, and as soon as it was free from the water’s surface, leaves began to unfurl.

Simon flailed back in a panic as that stalk shot upward and began to branch out. It wasn’t that he was concerned that it might hurt him. It was too small for that. The rate that it was growing at was shocking, though, and in another few minutes, it might be able to grow flowers or sprout teeth. He wasn’t sure.

Simon staggered out of the fountain completely naked and ran across the hot stones to where he’d left his sword propped up, and drew it immediately. Once he had it in hand he immediately slashed off the top of the creeping vine, and then reversed his grip and brought it down hard on the nodule of the seed, splitting it in two.

For a moment, that seemed like it would be enough. The thing's insane level of growth stopped, and the debris just floated there. After a few seconds, though, two new shoots started to spring up. One from each side of the seed.

“Mother. Fucker,” Simon cursed.

Fire was the obvious answer, but that was unlikely to be very effective underwater as it was. So, instead, he tried cold. He didn’t know if being frozen solid would be enough to kill something like this, but it should at least give him some breathing room to think.

“Gelthic!” he yelled, instantly turning the fountain’s water to solid ice. It happened so quickly that the arcs of water froze midair, and the stone pool cracked from the force of the expanding ice.

He didn’t care about that. Instead, Simon looked down to tend to his own wound and saw a few tiny leaves sprouting from the wound that had since stopped bleeding.

“What in the actual fuck?!” he hissed as he dropped the sword.

He could see the roots starting to radiate out under the skin. Simon reacted immediately, grabbing the small sprout and pulling it out along with several of the roots before tossing them on the ice.

It hurt, but he’d gotten some of them out. Some wasn’t good enough, not with this thing, though. He could see that. Even a speck would be enough to devour him whole eventually.

So, forcing himself to calm down he studied the wound, he imagined each one of those tiny little roots as they probed and grew, and when he had all of it fixed in his mind he whispered, “Aufvarum Meiren,” sending liquid fire coursing through a small part of his flesh.

Visually, it wasn’t very impressive. He’d expected something like that scene in an action movie where the hero uses gunpowder to cauterize a wound. In this case, it had been the opposite. There had been no flash. Instead, one second, he had a root-shaped tumor, and the next, he had a terrible burn.

Simon followed up on that with a word of cure and a word of healing before he coughed and had to clear his throat from the strain. After all that, though, all that was left to show what had happened was a lichen-shaped scar spreading out from his left palm.

He watched it for a moment, suspicious that it would sprout again, and he’d have to cut his whole hand off to stop it, but instead, it just sat there. That was when he heard the ice crack.

Simon looked up just in time to see a tendril force its way out of the ice, and a thick bulb began opening to reveal a familiar orange blossom. Before it could completely, though, he cut it off. It wasn’t the only one, and Simon spent the next several minutes hacking away at each stalk while the lava closed in.

The version he’d fought amongst the ruins had taken days to regenerate, while this one was happening in seconds? What makes it different? He wondered to himself.

“Because that’s what happens when you open Pandora’s box!” he grumbled.

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Simon put down his sword when he noticed the things were beginning to sprout from the ashen cobblestones where the sliced off stalks were scattered. He didn’t have time for this. The lava was going to reach them in less than five minutes and he was still running around naked. That devil guy was already a prick, and the last thing Simon wanted to do was let the thing see him in such disarray.

So, he used a word of greater fire to burn away all the small bits and sprouts, and then he used another word of ice to stop the big one from growing for a couple minutes so he could put his clothes back on. It was a miserable experience.

From the soaking clothes and waterlogged armor to the choking air and the sense that, at any moment, more leaves were going to burst out of his skin, everything was just as awful as it could be. It also made everything take twice as long as it should have.

By the time the thing was growing again, Simon still didn’t have his armor or his boots on, so he shoved them in his sack and slowly backed away. The lava was almost here anyway, and it would finish this.

Simon used a word of force to bound to a nearby rooftop, where he watched the mutant plant grow and flourish over the next ten minutes, becoming even taller than Simon as it grew. It climbed all the way to the top of the fountain, and had extended tendrils toward the nearby buildings, but none of those was going to be fast enough to escape the tide of lava.

He sat there on the roof for several minutes, even after he’d gotten fully dressed, watching the whole thing burn, and he didn’t leave until the water and ice of the fountain had been buried under a slow tide of lava and stopped steaming entirely. That was enough for him to believe that this was finally put to bed.

So, with one last look at the scar on his palm to make sure it wasn’t sprouting, he started to make his way uphill toward the palace. The way there was trickier than usual because he had lingered so long, but he made it work. He walked on rooftops where he could and used words of lesser force and force where he had to. There was only one spot where he needed to freeze the lava to have a place to land, but that was enough to get him on the stairs and head up to the rise the palace was seated on.

By the end of all that, he was so hoarse that he could barely talk. Both the words of power and the worsening air quality had done a number on his throat. By the time Simon entered the throne room, he could see the portal to the demon-infested church floating there, but part of him was afraid to enter it.

What if I wake up in the morning and that fucking thing is growing out of my hand again, he thought to himself.

It didn’t seem likely, but it did seem possible. He’d gotten really lucky that he’d opened that container right next to a volcano where his mistake could be incinerated, but if he was already contaminated like the victim of a zombie movie, then couldn’t he start the whole thing all over again?

Simon imagined one of the cities that he actually liked gripped in those awful vines. It was a terrible thought that kept him paralyzed as the eruption continued to worsen. It was only when he’d waited the better part of an hour, and a serious earthquake sheared part of the roof off, that he finally went through.

It had been hours. That was enough time to be sure, right? He reassured himself.

The beautiful stone church hadn’t changed at all. This time, the demon was sitting at a desk writing away. As if he didn’t notice his guest.

Simon was happy to play along with that, of course, and he sat down on one of the pews at the back of the church to center himself. He looked like shit, he felt like shit, and unless something changed, the next level was that damn cemetery that had almost killed him last time. He wouldn’t survive that in his current state. He needed a plan.

So, still wary that the devil’s slackening bonds might let him free at any point, he crossed his arms on the pew in front of him and lay his head down at least until he caught his breath. That moment of rest became something much longer as his exhaustion caught up with him, and he took an accidental nap.

Simon slept peacefully, and it was only after he realized he slipped off that he bolted upright in the pew he sat on.

“You’re a bold man,” the demon chuckled. “Not many dare sleep while a rift to hell churns only a few feet away.”

Simon shrugged as he got up and approached the thing. “What are you going to do to me when you’re trapped in there and I’m out here?”

The demon smiled, but said nothing, so Simon looked past him, to the portal, and the broken floor. It didn’t seem any bigger than any of the other times, and he was fairly certain that the monster was bluffing. That’s what they did in the stories, anyway.

“Have you tired of the eternal torment yet?” the demon asked, finally. “There is a way out if you would like to make a—”

“Pass,” Simon said. He considered examining the runes again, but he already had a copy, and he was in no state to try to finish this level. “Anything that you’re going to offer me is on the other side of that line, which is exactly the opposite of where any sane person should be, right?”

“Well, Sanity only lasts so long here,” the demon agreed. “You’ll change your mind eventually. They all do.”

Simon rolled his eyes and pulled out his small silver mirror, then he spent the next few minutes going through the fracturing circle of protection line by line and symbol by symbol. It was only when he was satisfied that nothing had changed since his last visit that he turned to the demon and said, “My sanity probably won’t last forever, but sooner or later, I’m going to figure out how to close this rift, and then you’ll have to go find someone else to tempt.”

“We shall see,” the red-skinned devil said as he sat back down at his desk, opened his book, and started writing again. Simon thought it was interesting that the demon left tiny scorch marks on the page instead of ink, but wasn't so interested that he stuck around for very long before he looked around to see what he could do to prepare for the next level.