Death After Death

Chapter 74: Horrible Timing

“Damn it!” Simon cursed as soon as he felt himself lying comfortably back in his own lumpy bed once more. It was a cheap fucking death, and he pounded his fist against the straw mattress in frustration. Just like that, less than a week into that run, it was over, and he was back where he started.

He’d been prepared to fight more zombies or maybe a necromancer. He’d been banking on some new twist he could sink his teeth into, and with any luck, a tome with a few new words of power, but a trap? Right now, he wanted to vent his frustrations on the bottle of wine or even the mirror, but he forced himself to calm down and lay there with his eyes closed. While everything was still fresh, he took in every last detail and tried to make sense of a trap that felt like it had been laid especially for him, even though that should be impossible.

“No one even knows I exist anymore besides Helades,” he whispered to himself. “That’s half the problem of this damn place.”

Instead, he focused on the dead body and the magic at play. Obviously, his decision to kill the zombie in the coffin had triggered the whole thing, but was the result of the people who’d originally buried the man, or had that spell been cast by whoever laid the trap? That was unknown and more than likely unknowable.

When Simon went back, he could always check the inscriptions he’d seen here and there on the stones, but those seemed more like prayers or little summaries about the deeds of the men that had been entombed in the barrow than anything that was actually useful.

Had the paper crown replaced a real one? Is that what the author had meant? How could he have known that whoever found it would have a next life? He sighed, slowly sitting up before he reached for the bottle.

“Mirror - does anyone in the pit know that I’m not a part of their world? Like - that I’m an outsider and doing this over and over again?” he asked, expecting another complicated version of I-don’t-know.

Instead, he was pleasantly surprised to read, ‘Some supernatural entities that dwell within the Pit have realized that there is something unnatural occurring on their world, though they are rare.’

“Interesting,” he answered, leaning forward. “Can you give me examples or tell me if…”

“Of course not,” Simon shook his head. “I thought you were going to be useful, but instead, you go right back to being annoying like this. What can you tell me about those entities?”

‘I do not understand the question. Please clarify.’ it typed out.

That was almost enough for Simon to break the damn thing, but instead, he turned his attention back to more productive things and started laying out the gear he planned on taking with him.

Did he hope that he’d cleared the zombie level so he wouldn’t have to go back again and could finally consider Freya laid to rest, or did this new wrinkle make him hope it was still an option to go back to and explore? Simon wasn’t totally sure, but he leaned to the former and not the latter.

On his way out, he thought about asking the mirror if he’d actually cleared but decided he’d rather be surprised. At this point, good surprises were rare in the pit, but he needed something to take his mind off the monotonous task that rat and goblin slaying was quickly becoming. Nothing on the upper levels was really hard anymore, and he both looked forward to and feared the challenges that inevitably awaited him when he got deeper into the pit.

Of course, as soon as he entered the basement and shut the door behind him, he remembered what it was he’d been forgetting. He meant to bring the hatchet and try to force open the door above him. He could use magic of course, he realized, but he shrugged it off.

“Next time,” he said as he continued deeper. He had more important things to do than look at someone else’s cabin.

He cleared those first few levels quickly this time, not bothering to search them for any longer than it took to grab a few potatoes for the road and a sack of gold and silver in case he got to a level where funds actually mattered. Nothing he’d done on the goblin level had changed anything, but after he killed the skeleton knight and took its sword, he discovered two surprises.

The first was that the door no longer led to the familiar crater of the slime. It had vanished. The second was that it didn’t lead straight to the inn either. Instead, the Skeleton’s tomb led to the sewers directly now. He understood the switch, but he found it disorienting just how easily the connection between levels could be reshuffled. Just seeing it like this gave him a strange sense of vertigo, like something was wrong, but he forced it down.

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This might well be the end of an era, and he felt a little saddened that he’d never see Freya again, but he’d already made the decision that he’d known that he’d never see his Freya again when he’d buried her in the graveyard. Finding some new copy just to try again and again with struck him as sad.

Wrenching his mind away from that, he forced himself to turn to the question at hand. Would the pit really be this easy? Had it always been this easy? He had at least four levels beaten now. It might even be more than that. If he knocked out two per run going forward, that wouldn’t even be fifty more deaths. He might even be able to knock all of those out in a few weeks or months of hard work.

While he stood there contemplating all of this, he opted to take both swords with him this time. The frost sword wouldn’t be useful in all cases, as he’d learned with the adventurers, and this time, he really wanted to hack the carrion crawler into pieces but didn’t see ice helping with that job. He could think of a level coming up he’d absolutely need it for, though.

“I never have actually killed this thing, have I?” he asked himself as he strode into the sewer. Truthfully, he didn’t think that he did. That made him smile. If all it took to never have to walk in this disgusting sewer again, he’d gladly kill fifty of the little bastards. In fact, maybe that’s what he was supposed to do, he realized. Maybe the giant pile of bodies it retreated to each time he wounded it was a nest of some kind.

It was with that thought in mind he entered the foul place with his torch and his sword at the ready before he whispered, “Aufvarum Barom.” He wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from minor light. But a gentle glow filled the surrounding tunnel. It wasn’t enough to let him see all the way to the far end.

That was fine, even if it made hiding impossible, he thought with a nod. He sheathed his sword so that he could free his hands to pull out his short bow and knock an arrow to the string. Now, he could experiment with how this spell was supposed to work and hopefully make sure he never had to come back.

Simon found the creepy crawler a few minutes later. This time, it wasn’t perched on its favorite corpse. Instead, the soft blue light seemed to have alerted it, and it was waiting on the ceiling just past the first bend, waiting to surprise whatever came around the corner.

Unfortunately for it, Simon knew that it was coming, and he released an arrow into its soft, fleshy body before it could react. Then, as it screeched in pain and tried to run away, he hit it again. On the third shot, it lost its grip on the ceiling and splashed into the foul water.

He waited there for almost five minutes for it to surface or strike him again, but other than a few weak motions that might have been its tentacles in the first few seconds, it never reappeared. Once he was sure that there wasn’t a horror movie ambush just waiting to grab him as the monster suddenly returned to life just long enough to drag him into the sewage, he continued on to the mound of bodies jammed against the grate at the end of the T-junction.

He’d planned on burning the whole thing down but realized now that he was standing here that it was a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Greater fire might still do the job, even though they were completely sodden by the vile wastewater. Burning them would definitely fill the small tunnel with the most disgusting smoke he could imagine, and if he used too much, he might cause the pile of bodies to explode.

Even after the plague city and Schwarzenbruck, bodies still weren’t something he wanted to touch if he didn’t have to. So, instead, he decided he was going to flush them.

“Oonbetit,” he said seriously, visualizing ripping the heavy metal grating off the wall.

Adding minor seemed like it would be too little, and Major always felt like overkill. Just plain force would be sufficient, he decided. Strangely, though, nothing happened. He felt the magic course through him, and he heard the rusting bars creak under the invisible strength his will imposed on it, but it wasn’t enough to actually do the job.

“Huh…” he said in bafflement. “Who would have thought.”

Simon refocused and tried again, adding a bit more oomph to the spell. “GervuulOonbetit,”

This time, the metal gave with a terrible shriek as he ripped it into two pieces and sent the debris flying in opposite directions, opening up the hole into a dark abyss that might well be the only waterfall in the pit worse than the one that had killed him on the goblin level. One minute, the flow of sewage had dammed the water completely, and the next, with nothing to hold them back any further, they started toppling one after the other into the void, and the water level quickly retreated from the very edge of the ledge he’d been walking on to almost a foot lower, so it no longer felt like he was in constant danger of falling into the channel.

For the briefest instant, he saw something glittering amongst the refuse, but before he could see any more than that, it was gone, toppling into the abyss.

“Oh well,” he said with a shrug, “If it was important, it will be here next time, I guess. Because I sure as hell ain’t going in after it.”

Honestly, he hoped he was done with the place forever, and it was only when he was climbing toward the ladder that would take him to the surface that he wondered, “Wait, if these sewers are under ancient ruins, then why are the corpses so fresh?”

The answer was obvious. The sewers and the jungle ruins above had no more to do with each other than the sewers and the front door of the inn had. He wondered why it had taken him so long to put that together, but since it didn’t really matter, he set that aside and continued on. He had some plants to kill.