Death After Death

Chapter 34: True Immortality

He wasn’t in the swamp long before they struck. Simon’s only warning that he was under attack was the spear that missed his head by just two feet, embedding firmly in a large mangrove tree at head level not far from him.

A lizardman, he thought excitedly as he raised his shield and unsheathed his sword to charge the creature. This was one of the enemies he’d been waiting for.

He regretted that decision when two more emerged from the stagnant water beside the first, but only a little. After some of the awful floors he’d been through lately, it was nice to see something he could actually fight. What was he supposed to do against cold and disease? He was here to fight, and lizards were something that could fall beneath his blade.

That was the idea, at least. He took the next spear in the shield. Apparently, these walking lizards were freakishly strong, though, because the blow ripped right through the wood in a way the skeleton knight’s blows never had and gouged into the flesh of his arm deeply.

Simon hissed in pain but didn’t stop charging through the shallow water, and he beheaded the first one he reached in a vicious blow that he hoped would scare off its compatriots. It didn’t, though. Instead, as Simon let his back swing carry him around, the one that still had its spear jabbed at him hard enough to pierce his leather armor and embed the tip several inches into his guts before he pulled back.

A dozen deaths ago, that pain might have been enough to make Simon retreat, but now it just pissed him off.

“You think that’s going to stop me?” he growled before he lunged at the thing. Its fellow warrior clawed at Simon, but those claws barely pierced his boiled leather. These things were certainly strong. They might even be dangerous in packs like this, but Simon was over a foot taller than them and had a huge reach advantage. He also had a little thing called steel on his side and quickly cut them to pieces in a series of frenzied strikes that left him winded when he was finally surrounded by the bodies of the dead.

Only once the killing was done did Simon realize why they’d attacked him: he practically stumbled onto their crude encampment without realizing it. As he walked towards it, he quickly noticed that the portal to the next floor was hanging in the doorway of the closest hut, showing him a picturesque view of an endless desert. As he approached it, he realized that this camp was certainly big enough that this wouldn’t be their only hunting party.

That meant that he needed to be fast, Simon decided as he shoved the cloth he used for wrapping his cheese into the wound to slow down the bleeding while he winced in pain. Healing could wait until he was on the next floor. Still, before he left this one, he decided to send them a message of his displeasure and began to wreck everything he could get his hands on between here and there.

Simon didn’t think that toppling the totem was required, but after the way, those scaly bastards had ambushed him, he thought it was the least they deserved. So, instead of going directly to the gate that looked like it led to a desert somewhere, he took the time to kick it over. Then just for good measure, he stomped on both the nests he found, crushing half a dozen eggs.

That wouldn’t stop him from having to fight the things again the next time he came through here, but it would make him feel better about how much those dull spears hurt.

“Seriously, wood? Even if I heal it, I’m never getting all those fucking splinters out, you assholes,” he swore. “Would it kill you to enter the Bronze Age?”

As Simon limped toward the gate, he noticed that his bandage had darkened noticeably from the effort. He definitely needed to heal himself, but he didn’t want to do it here. Just being in the swamp made him feel unclean. The desert might be awful in many ways, but at least it was relatively sterile.

When Simon got through the door, he stopped and looked around. The place had a real Athens vibe to it, he decided. Everywhere he looked, he saw gleaming white pillars and stairs, as well as a few broken classical statues of warriors in various poses slowly being devoured by the desert sands. He had no idea where it was, but it looked like it had probably been a nice place once upon a time.

There wasn’t much here to protect him from the elements, but that was fine. Simon just looked for the most prominent building and started walking. All he needed was a little shade, and then he could cast a few spells and take a nap to take the edge off.

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He was flying through the levels again, and the last thing he was going to do was let some dumb Stone Age lizard man be the death of him. The only lizard he was willing to die to was a dragon, or maybe that Wyvern if he ever decided to try fighting it. It might be fun when he learned how to use the longbow, Simon thought cheerfully, trying to distract him from the pain in his side.

That was when he saw it. Another damn lizard crawling around the ruins not far from him.

“Lizards? Two levels in a row,” he whispered to himself quietly as the creature rounded the corner. “Come on, Helades. Get creative already, is that so much to ask?”

The thing was a squat, ugly thing that had more in common with a Komodo dragon than a crocodile. It was uglier than both of them put together, though. The thing had six short legs connected to its molted beige and gray body. To Simon, the creature didn’t look like a threat. It looked like it was dying.

It hissed at him as he pulled out his sword and advanced.

“Sorry, buddy, it’s you or me,” Simon said as he advanced.

He needed somewhere to rest and heal some of the wounds the lizardmen had given him. He couldn’t do that with monsters wandering around these mysterious ruins. He never even got close to the thing.

Halfway there, a third eye sprang open. It was deep purple and glowing, which was in stark contrast to the other two that looked so milky that he thought that perhaps it was blind. Simon didn’t like the look of it and charged, but he was too slow. A second later, the glow rippled out, reaching him almost instantaneously. That’s when his body stopped responding, and Simon started to struggle against the paralysis it inflicted on him.

Seconds later, as the lizard got closer and closer, he began to panic. He was going to get eaten alive after all, but it wasn’t the carrion crawler that would do it. It was going to be this fucking lizard! It was only then that he noticed a further problem. His shield arm was still in his line of sight as he stood there transfixed, but his hand looked strange.

As soon as he focused on it, he understood why: the leather armor was still brown, and the shield still looked like it always did, but his hand had turned gray. Not gray like - he had some kind of disease, or he was starving, either. Like concrete gray. Like somehow, the stupid lizard had encased him in a layer of stone.

While Simon struggled to break through this strange effect, the lizard continued to advance. Moments later, its mighty jaws latched onto his leg and chomped down. Simon heard the blow more than he felt it. He could feel a dull ache from whatever the creature had done to it, but he could hear the coating of stone shattering to get to the part that hurt.

At least, that’s what he’d imagined had happened.

Only when he toppled over into the sand did he realize his leg was missing somewhere below the knee. He knew that because he could see the lizard devouring it at leisure not far from him.

That was the least disturbing part of the whole picture, though. That wasn’t what made him scream inside his mind while he lay there in the sand. The leg that the lizard was gnawing on wasn’t just covered in stone. It was stone. The fucking thing had petrified him, and he was still stuck inside his body.

It was the zombie level all fucking over again, and there was literally nothing he could do.

That meant that fucking lizard wasn’t just any lizard, he realized. It was a basilisk. Suddenly everything clicked into place. The statues. The six legs. All of it. A damn mythological monster had just ended him with a glance? How was that fair? Getting killed and sent back to the cabin like that would have been bad enough, but being trapped inside your petrified body until it finished eating you? That was all kinds of screwed up. Could rock even really die, though, Simon wondered. The basilisk might be capable of crushing his body into little pebbles, but even if it did, would that be enough to get him off the hook and back to the cycle of reincarnation he’d been stuck in for so long? Zombies died when they got shot in the head. How did statues die?

For the better part of the next hour, Simon watched the creature gnaw on his limbs as it broke them off one at a time. It hurt, but it was a dull, muted ache. Something that he would have associated with a sprain or anesthesia, not with dismemberment. The real torture was understanding what was happening and knowing how long it might last.

For a while, Simon was hopeful that the thing would rip his head off next and end his suffering, but it didn’t. Eventually, it got bored with him and moved on somewhere out of sight, leaving him lying in the sand at the foot of the temple he’d toppled from. From where Simon lay, he could only stare at the dune-covered horizon.

Soon, boredom was a more irritating companion than the ache of his missing limbs. That gave him plenty of time to remember the other broken statues he’d passed by. At the time, he thought they’d been just another part of the ruined architecture. Only now could he see that they were other warriors just like him who’d been caught unaware by that fucking lizard.

Day turned into night, and still, Simon raged inside his skull. He tried to cast his healing spell on himself, but it did nothing because he couldn’t speak the words. He tried to pray to Helades, but whether it was because she couldn’t hear him or she enjoyed his suffering, she didn’t respond. Nothing happened.

All he could do was shift between rage and panic as he tried to think of some clever way out of this. He couldn’t, though. Once again, he was trapped inside his head. All he could do was watch the sun’s arc as it moved across the sky and the slow march of the dunes as the storms moved them every day while he slowly went mad inside his skull.

At first, Simon tried to keep track of the number of sunrises he was forced to endure, but he lost count before he even reached thirty. Sometime after that, probably weeks later, his left eye became entirely covered by blowing sand that slowly gathered around him.

Until now, he’d been consumed with frustrated rage that he would have to look at such a tedious view for weeks or months. It was only when his right eye became partially obscured by the rising sand did he realize a far worse fate was possible: he could be buried alive so that the basilisk would never finish him. If that happened, he would have to endure an eternity alone in the dark.

It was a chilling thought, but day by day, that seemed to be precisely what would happen…