Death After Death

Chapter 130: Before It’s a Problem

As interesting as it was to see himself in statue form and read the only slightly tarnished plaque about how he defeated Blackheart’s curse, Simon didn’t linger in the city and was quickly on his way. It wasn’t that he was afraid that people might catch him or something. His anonymity felt reasonably secure as long as he wasn’t standing right next to that statue.

Even if that wasn’t the case, though, it had only been a few years. He could always say he’d decided to come back and visit or something. The worst he’d probably face was a series of feasts in his honor. Maybe he’d have to fend off a marriage proposal or two.

He wasn’t really interested in any of that, though. Instead, he briefly toured the hospital and orphanage that had been built with the reward money he’d refused. They weren’t exactly the nicest-looking places, but that was to be expected. They were functional, at least, and they seemed to be doing some good. Really, in this dark world, that was all he could ask for.

He thought about joining up with a caravan, but he was enjoying the road too much to bother with company. So, instead, he restocked his meager supplies with things that did well on the road, like potatoes, coarse bread, and salt pork. The only luxury he spared some of his silver on was a thin folio full of blank paper. He had paper for his maps, of course, but as he’d encountered different vistas on the road north, he’d felt the urge to sketch some of them, and he didn’t want to mar his otherwise meticulous cartography with his childish drawings.

The road north was in better condition than the one he’d used when he’d come in from the east, but Simon didn’t use that to travel any faster. It would have screwed up the scale of his map. He had no idea how professional cartographers did this sort of thing in the days before GPS, but his way was simple. Every day, he tried to go about ten miles at a nice leisurely pace, and every day, he added another millimeter of line to the road on his map. It was tiny, but he had no idea how far apart any of these places were, so he was leaving himself extra room as he documented each village and lake he came across.

By land, no one seemed to know how far apart anything was. Traders that he talked to spoke in terms of weeks rather than miles, and though people expressed a bit more confidence about the sea routes, from what he’d seen, most of those maps varied wildly, too.

He wasn’t sure. Hell, Simon wasn’t even sure he was going to share these with anyone when he was done, but he needed it for his own sanity. He needed as much of the world that he knew to fit together as he could. It would give him the information he needed to make better choices. He couldn’t keep treating every level like it existed in a vacuum.

This point was driven home as he moved north and found the hills he’d been navigating slowly but surely turned into a desert. The Wantari, it was called, according to the traders he dined with one night. He wasn’t exactly equipped for a desert, and he didn’t have the word for water to fall back on, so he paid careful attention to them when they talked about distances and oases.

It turned out he didn’t have too much to worry about. Four days into the desert, he found a suspiciously familiar oasis that was thankfully unpoisoned. There were some horsemen there that seemed more like nomadic tribesmen than raiders, but he left them alone, and they, thankfully, returned the favor.

The starry nights there were beautiful, and he noted down some of the more prominent constellations, unsure of what they were actually supposed to be. Two days later, the desert started to fade away in favor of grasslands, disappointing him.

“If the basilisk city isn’t here, then where the hell is it supposed to be?” he grumbled as he searched the desert horizon behind him for any signs of the pillars he’d been hoping to find. Simon might not be able to explore the whole world, but he’d settle for at least finding most of the levels he’d been to before.

The whole trip was starting to feel self-indulgent to Simon when he finally figured out where he was and what he needed to do. Even though time was meaningless to him, spending weeks slowly traveling to who knew where over the best part of a thousand miles, sketching landscapes as he went, didn’t seem like the best use of his time.

Then he figured out how near he was to Crowvar. That was all the information he needed to decide that it was time to pay Varten a visit. As far as Simon was concerned, he was the Raithewait family curse, and he would gladly kill every single version of that monster that he found. He didn’t care if it hurt his experience totals or his karma or however that worked. He didn’t even care if it screwed with history. Varten was and always would be, a dead man.

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That wasn’t the main reason he was going to go to Crowvar, though. That would have simply been petulant. Simon had a much better reason for going - this was the perfect chance to kill the centaurs before they became a real problem in a few years.

He was fairly certain that Helades did not mean for him to solve levels like this. In fact, because of the way things worked now, he was pretty sure that the horse lords were supposed to win, at least for a while. Doing things like this might well screw things up as far as she was concerned, but he didn’t care.

All Helades seemed to care about was that he saved that one family he’d found near the exit portal. That wasn’t good enough for Simon, though. He was long past saving one person at a time when the world was falling apart.

“If I go back in time and kill baby Genghis Kahn before he grows up to conquer all the centaur tribes, then I can save thousands. Tens of thousands maybe,” he told himself, and that was exactly what he aimed to do.

The only problem was that he really only had one shot at this. It was actually refreshing to realize that as he slowly made his way to Crowvar. Normally, he had as many chances as he needed to solve a problem, but win or lose, he was pretty sure this level was complete, which meant that when he died and tried to come back, there would be nothing here. In fact, there would be nothing between the cathedral and the centaur levels, and those were probably a couple decades apart.

“Figuring out the dates for every level is probably something I should have done first thing,” he sighed as he realized he needed a calendar every bit as much as he needed a map. A second try at things like this would involve him whiling away a dozen years doing whatever before baby Genghis Kahn was even born again.

Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen, and the last thing he wanted to do was solve this Helades’ way, so he was going to have to make this count. Simon spent the next couple of days trying to decide the best way to take over the town and its military resources in a coup, as well as thinking about how he should kill Varten this time, but all that went out the window when he saw the black plume of a village burning in the distance.

He didn’t have time to play political games at the Raithewait’s expense. There were people to save and hazards to fight.

Simon had to leave the main road to reach the place and was much too late to do much good. At least, that’s what he thought as he watched the fires already guttering in the distance. That changed when the centaur war band that had done the deed spotted him as they were leaving the scene. Apparently, they hadn’t gotten enough murder in for the day and decided he was worth killing, too.

That was fine. If they’d run, he would have had to hunt them down, but this way, it made things easy enough for Simon to kill them all with a single blast of greater forces. He didn’t bother to hold back. There was no one around, and they deserved no mercy.

So, he waited until they were within range, used a world of lesser force protection to keep the arrows that they rained down on him and his donkey from finding their mark, and waited until they got into range. Then he said, “Gervuul Oonbetit.” After that, they never saw what was coming. One second, they were charging him with lances down in a tight group of almost twenty warriors as they jockeyed for position and raced each other to be the one to end Simon, and the next, they were only so much cooling meat.

With a single swipe of his hand, an invisible sword dozens of feet long sliced through the group in a single clean line that left each of the half-men cut in half. Sometimes, their human torsos were cut neatly from their equine bodies, and other times, the line was closer to mid-chest or head. Some of them had time to scream, but most of them simply looked at Simon with uncomprehending eyes as their hearts beat their last.

It was an unsatisfying victory, and Simon spent more time calming his mule as he tried to walk past the bloody sight than he did actually defeating the group. He sighed. Normally, he wouldn’t have acted with such brutality, but just because this evil wore a human face didn’t mean it was remotely close to human, and he reminded himself of that as he made his way to the village.

Simon’s heart fell when he didn’t immediately find any survivors, but once he started to shout that the centaurs were dead and it was safe to come out, a few women and children started to crawl out from beneath burned-out buildings. Many of them were wounded, but all of them were covered in ash and dirt.

The men had died fighting. That much was obvious from the corpses, but they hadn’t done much. For every ten human corpses on the ground, there was only a centaur or two. It was a familiar sight for Simon. He’d seen this kind of carnage before, though not in a long time.

“Are they going to come back?” a little girl asked him as he was bandaging a split around an arm that might have been broken or simply sprained.

“No,” Simon said confidently. “These monsters will never trouble your village again. I won’t let them.”

He wasn’t sure how he would keep that promise yet, but he was sure that he would, and it would take an awful lot more than a few centaurs with bows to change that.