Death After Death

Chapter 21: Just a Barmaid

When Simon woke up in the fresh air and the empty bed of his cabin, a small part of him had died. He felt more hurt by Freya’s death than he had been by any of his deaths. The pain he felt as he thought of her was worse than the first time the skeleton knight had killed him or the time the slime had suffocated him to death. His disused emotions had stayed in their lockbox where they belonged for so long, that feeling this sense of loss for a sweet young woman was devastating.

Freya had actually liked him. She thought he was funny, and cute, and now she was dead. He would have happily died a dozen times to prevent that, but now he would never get the chance.

Or would he?

It was only after he’d spent several minutes just laying there and feeling sorry for himself that he realized she was still down there on the sixth floor. Maybe not the version of her that remembered him, but she was still the girl he’d been close to falling in love with. Surely if he saved her again, and they spent a few days together it would be just like it was before, wouldn’t it?

With that thought in mind, Simon quickly started to get ready. He’d promised himself he would take the levels he had on lock nice and slow to use them for practice, but he threw all that out the window, charging into the depths as soon as he was geared up. He didn’t even bother to bring food - just his weapons, his armor, and a single lit torch. It was all he needed. This wasn’t about learning or even progressing. This was about Freya and filling the hole in his heart that should never have been there in the first place.

He rushed heedlessly through level after level, killing what he needed to and no more to get past the next challenge. Being apart from his girl when he knew exactly where to find her was a special kind of torment. The only thing that even slowed him down was the slime, but as soon as he forced it from the water, he burned it to ashes with two simple words. He was a little surprised at how much more effective his fire spell was than it had been last time, but he didn’t have time to try to understand why.

He just rushed on to the door that led to his favorite besieged inn. In the backroom where he always appeared, he found the same zombie that always tried to eat him, and Simon dispatched it with a single wet crunch of his mace. Then, he turned, ready to go find Freya, when suddenly the door burst open, and the blond girl with the pitchfork that had killed him not so long ago was standing there.

“Who are you,” she demanded. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” She jabbed the air a couple of times just as she did before, but this time Simon was actually still capable of speech as he had nothing but a scratchy throat. The woman was the same busty blond wearing the same dirty blue dress as last time. Her eyes were hard, and she had a bloody bandage covering a wound on one arm. Even if he didn’t have first-hand experience that she was the killing type, he would have believed it just from her appearance.

“Woah, easy there!” he said, backing away. “I’m a friend of Freya’s. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Her pitchfork lowered almost immediately, and a sad look crossed her face. “A friend… of Freya’s?” She opened her mouth and was about to say something else, but the sound of breaking wood ripped through the room, and they both turned to face it.

The boards on one of the windows had failed, almost identically to the last time he was here. That made sense. The levels were always very similar, but never quite exactly the same.

“Hold on,” Simon said, pushing past her. “Let’s take care of this, and then we can find her." It was only after he said he was a friend that he realized that might cause him problems later when he was talking to her, so he was happy for the interruption.

This time, one of the zombies made it all the way in before he brained it, and he had to kill three more to block the hole before he went for the trestle table like he did last time. “A little help here?” he asked. This time there was no help coming, and he had to push it all the way to the window by himself. When he looked around, he saw the blond girl was still here, but she’d sat down at one of the clean tables and was drinking some kind of liquor straight from the bottle. She might be feistier, but she wasn’t in a much better place than his Freya had been. That made sense. He wouldn’t want to know anyone that could live through a situation so awful and come out the other side unaffected by it.

“So, where’s Freya at?” Simon asked, as he walked back to the table and tried not to show how out of breath he was. Her only answer was a distant look in her eyes, and another swig from the bottle.

Simon sat down and tried again. “Is everything okay? Look, if more try to get in I promise I’ll protect you, but first I want to make sure that—”

“She didn’t make it,” the woman said, looking at the floor instead of at him. “Okay? She didn’t make it, and there was nothing I could do. She’s gone.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Gone? That’s not possible.” Simon retorted. “She has to be here. There’s no way out of this place. I’ve looked.”

“I’m telling you, she’s—” the woman tried to reply.

“Freya!” Simon shouted. “Freya, where are you!” The other woman shook her head as he got up and started looking for her. The longer Simon looked, the louder he shouted until eventually, on the edge of hysteria, he found her in one of the guest rooms of the second floor. At some point in the last few days she’d been turned into a zombie, and after that someone had mercifully put her down. It was a horrendous, gut-wrenching moment for Simon.

He just stood there, crying like a baby, for several minutes, and it was only after he pulled himself together that he slowly came downstairs and returned to the table with the woman that was apparently the sole survivor in this version of the level. Was there a fifty-fifty chance that he would get either one, he wondered? Could he just kill himself and try again in the hopes of being reunited with Freya? Well he could of course, the question was should he. While he rummaged through his thoughts and tried what to do next, the two of them just sat in near silence while the zombies moaned and shuffled outside.

“Did you know her well?” The other woman asked finally.

“I would have liked to know her better,” Simon said, not looking up.

“I hear you,” she agreed, sounding slightly drunk as she passed Simon the bottle. He took a long swig of something that burned as it went down. It was too raw and fiery to be called whiskey, but it was probably its distant cousin somehow. “I wanted to know a lot of things. What the sea smelled like. If a girl from Schwarzenbruck could ever amount to anything. How Helfun Orgson kissed. But then the world ended, and I never got the chance. It’s a tough break for both of us.”

“She was just such a sweet girl.” Simon whined. “I don’t know how this could happen to her.”

“Look out on those streets," she said, pointing with her bottle. "Every monster there was a good guy or a sweet girl only a day or two ago. It ain’t her fault any more than it was theirs.”

Simon shrugged. She wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t want to agree to anything that would make her death or the way it affected him feel less special. The two sat there for a while, slowly getting drunker and more philosophical, but neither of those things helped Simon to climb out of the morass of hopelessness and self-pity that he was slowly sinking into.

Eventually, the barmaid said, “Let’s have a tumble. Maybe the last one before the world ends. What do you say?”

Simon looked over at her like he’d misheard the woman, but between the way she was smiling at him and the fact that she’d let the left strap of her dress slide off her shoulder in a way that practically let her tits spill out left no room for doubt.

“We can’t,” Simon said, ignoring the way his body responded to the beauty. “I don’t even know your name, and you're drunk. That’s not exactly the way these things are supposed to work.”

“Well I’m Brenna, and the dead aren’t exactly supposed to be rising from the grave neither, but here they are,” she said, standing up and walking over to him. She grabbed the other strap and let the dress fall, pooling at her feet. “Come on. One last fling before we all go off to meet our maker. There’s no harm in it.”

For Simon, this was a surreal situation. Not only was he actively grieving the loss of someone, which he swore he’d never do, because it was stupid, but he was being hit on by a woman who was way hotter than he’d ever been with in his whole life… and he was turning her down.

She’d stripped down to her slippers, her small clothes, and the bandage on her arm while he protested; she was a wet dream if he’d ever seen one, and he turned away respectfully from her near nudity to look at the floor once more. Even with that quick glimpse it had been impossible not to notice how flushed with drink and desire she was. Back home she would have been a bikini model or a starlet, but here she was just the second serving girl in a backwater town.

She walked around him, slowly admiring him and complimenting him, and in a way that was almost more attractive to Simon than the amount of skin she’d put on display. When she started to undo his shoulder straps, he didn’t fight back as much as he should. This wasn’t really wrong after all. It only felt wrong.

By the time he saw Freya again, he would already be at least one life removed from whatever he did with Brenna today. It would be like it never even happened. Part of Simon recognized that he’d already given up trying to fight what was going to happen next, but he was too numb to care as they walked up the stairs. Now he was just looking to justify why it was okay to himself, but he knew that was just the alcohol talking, and that he’d regret it tomorrow.

Somehow he still couldn’t make himself stop though as she started to kiss his neck, and grope him under his breastplate. “Please,” she pleaded. “Just one more time… I need it so badly. I…”

Her words trailed off as she moaned in his ear, and while she gasped and trembled, his second thoughts grew to a crescendo. As much as he would love to spend the night with her, he knew that his heart wasn’t in it. “Brenna, you’re a beautiful woman, but we can’t do this. My heart belongs to— Ah what the fuck!” He suddenly pulled away as he felt her bite him. Simon whipped around to see that all the panting and the moaning she’d been doing for the last few seconds hadn’t been some kind of foreplay; she’d become something less than human.

And she’d just bitten him.

That thought barely had time to sink in as he fumbled for a weapon. The only thing in reach was the bottle they’d been drinking from, but that shattered when he struck her and left her largely unfazed. She snapped at him again, and he fended her off as best he could, but without his bracers on she managed to bite him one more time before he put her down by smashing her head into the counter several times. She was strong, but she didn’t weigh much, and a broken neck put zombies out of action as easily as breaking their skull.

After that, all that Simon could do was stare in horror at his wound. This was not good, not fucking good at all.