Death After Death

Simon wasn’t even mad that he’d died this time. It hadn’t hurt too bad in comparison to all the other ways the pit had made him suffer so far. The worst it had done was ruin his streak, he thought as he sat up, but he could always get that back another time.

“Mirror - show me my character sheet,” Simon said while he reached for the wine. Getting a new streak started would be even easier now that he knew what was on all the early levels.

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 14

Deaths: 29

Experience Points: -136900

Skills: Archery [Below Average], Armor (light) [Average], Athletics [Below Average], Cook [Very Poor], Craft [Very Poor], Deception [Poor], Escape [Very Poor], Investigate [Below Average], Maces [Average], Ride [Very Poor], Search [Poor], Sneak [Below Average], Spears [Very Poor], Spell Casting [Poor], Steal [Very Poor], Swimming [Very Poor], and Swords [Above Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum Hjakk Gervuul Meiren’

He noted with approval that he’d only gotten to level 14, and that was practically level 20. He’d only been at this for like a week, and he was already basically halfway to the halfway point.

When Simon noticed the experience line, though, he spat the mouthful of alcohol back out.

“What the hell! Why is the experience line like a hundred thousand lower than before,” he demanded. “It was almost back to zero the last time I checked.”

‘The experience category takes into account all of the actions you have undertaken since your Entry into The Pit. It—’ the mirror typed.

“Hey. Stop telling me things I already know. I know how it works, I want to know what I did to cause it to drop like that? Is this place bugging out even more than usual?” Simon asked.

‘I am not aware of the specifics that drive the total higher or lower. I only display the number. Perhaps you did something terrible, or were very upset by something your actions caused,’ the mirror suggested.

That shut Simon right up.

The mirror's words reminded him of the glimpse at that book that summarized his life in Helades’ temple. It dinged him five experience for every wasted day, and there had been a lot of those. How much had a few weeks as a zombie cost him? How much had murdering those poor people while he was an undead monster? The world might have reset so that it never happened, but his soul certainly remembered.

If that was indeed the case, then it would take a long time to dig himself back out of that hole. That was fine. It really didn’t seem to have any mechanical effect. It was just one more way to measure progress.

Simon looked over the rest of his sheet, noting with approval that several of his skills had actually improved, including spell casting. It was now listed as only ‘poor’. That might help explain why his fire spell had been nuking everything lately. Simon just wished he had some way to turn that dial down a bit. He’d love to have the spell for just burning instead of mega burning.

He cracked his knuckles and rose to his feet. He needed to head back down. Not to beat this place, or do anything stupid like that. The only thing he was in a hurry for was to see Freya again, and if it really was a 50-50 shot between her and Brenna then she was due to be there, and he didn’t want to keep her waiting.

Simon geared up in the way he’d gotten used to, and headed down into the first level. Except for the slime and the skeleton knight, nothing was really a challenge here anymore. Now that he’d learned how to make the sword do what he wanted, and he held his shield up when the goblins tried to shoot him, everything was pretty easy.

This time, his duel with the skeletons cost him a cut on his forearm that was deep enough to bleed like crazy. When the knight was laying in pieces on the floor, Simon removed the bracer and cast his healing spell.

“Aufvarum Hjakk,” he intoned, visualizing his arm without the wound, like it had never been. The words were mostly successful, but even after the skin closed up and he wiped away the blood the wound still ached, and there was still some weakness.

At least there wasn’t an ugly black scar like the zombie bites had left behind, though.

While he sat there and tried to get his armor back on, he talked to himself about his options. “The way I see it,” he opined, “either my healing spell is too low of a level to restore all my hitpoints, or it’s so complicated that it’s basically broken.”

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“Well what do you mean by that Simon?” he said, using a slightly different voice.

“I’m glad you asked, Simon,” he continued, laughing at his joke. He hoped that that omnipotent bitch was enjoying how quickly he’d figured out another flaw in her little game. “When I cast the spell, I only imagined the skin closing up, so that was the only part that healed. Since the pit is so pointlessly complicated, it's possible that the damaged tissue beneath the skin didn’t actually get healed at the same time.

“Well, that sounds fucking stupid,” Simon told himself, continuing to play devil's advocate.

“I agree,” Simon nodded. “That’s completely dumb, and whoever designed this system should have their godhood license revoked. If the problem is just a level issue then I can fix that, but if it's the latter… well, I’d have to spend months studying the anatomy of cadavers and practicing improving, and that sounds pretty disgusting to me.”

Once his armor had been put back into place, and he’d finished his criticism of Helades, Simon stood up and stretched, eyeing the frost sword not far from him. It was just one more game breaking bug as far as he was concerned. If he could wield that sword, then he wouldn’t have any problem facing whoever was supposed to be the boss of the Pompeii level. Sadly, it was one more casualty of bad design, he thought with a shrug as he walked to the slime’s cave.

The only problem with the slime was that Simon’s fire spell was still a bit much. It wasn’t quite the blast it had been last time he fought it, but it was still more than the tight ray of fire he tried to visualize as he cast the spell. He didn’t even wait for the thing to completely stop moving. Once it was burning, Simon was already walking past its corpse to the inn, hoping against hope that his Freya would be there this time.

The first person he saw in the inn was the same zombie that always seemed to attack him from the right. This time, Simon brained him before he even got close, and the corpse fell on the ground in a heap. The second person he saw was unfortunately Brenna, but this time she wasn’t wielding a pitchfork, she just barged through the door and lunged for him.

She was already a zombie, he realized slowly as he pushed her away. He could easily kill her, of course, and put her out of her misery. It was without a doubt the right thing to do, but for some reason he had trouble raising his flanged mace against her. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d been trained his whole life not to hit a girl, either, he realized. It was that he might have to do the same thing to Freya in a couple of minutes when he explored the inn more completely.

It was only the idea that if she bit him again, he would have to live as a monster like her for who knew how long all over again. The fear that he would ever have to spend another minute as an undead monstrosity is what finally brought his arm to life, and it only took one good blow to the side of her beautiful face to make her crumple like a marionette that had suddenly had her strings cut.

His chest heaving from the emotional effort more than the physical one, Simon stopped and studied her body after that, because the first thing he noticed was that she didn’t have a bandage on her arm where he presumed she’d been bitten before.

He eventually found an infected looking wound on her shoulder that was almost certainly the cause, but he still had no idea why such details would change. Why would one girl be alive or both of them end up dead before he got here. Why was the bartender never the survivor, but the same zombie always attacked him first on arrival.

He had no answers, but for once he was pretty sure it was more than just Helades screwing with him. If he knew what kind of RNG was behind how these levels were generated, then it would give him some kind of edge.

He didn’t have that, though, so instead he searched the bar for Freya. He found her with her skull crushed on the second floor, and almost let the zombies overrun the place while he was busy sobbing over her covered corpse.

Simon spent the next twenty minutes killing the eight zombies that had managed to get into through the window before he could move the table into place. Then, once he barred the back door just in case, he spent the rest of the day in the basement getting rip roaringly drunk.

Simon normally didn’t care for too much drinking, but right now he cared even less for thinking, and he happened to have the spell of ‘cure light hangover’, so why the hell wouldn’t he get blasted.

One day turned into three, though, as he wallowed in self-pity and mourned the loss of a romance that had never really been. He drank the tapped barrel dry, and made quite a mess trying to open the untapped ones, and he spent the whole time castigating the stupid goddess who caused this whole mess.

“None of us would be in this mess if you tried to make your precious hero a bear,” he yelled out of the third story window one night. “Not me, not Freya, and not any of the other poor saps you tricked into getting on this ride, you bitch!”

The zombies didn’t seem to mind his antics, but three days seemed like he was pushing his luck, so on the fourth day after he made his hangover disappear with two little magic words, he finally opened up the front door to face the carrion crawler.

It turned out that the slimy little bastard was a lot less interested in him when he shot first with the crossbow. Once it had a bolt buried in its wiggly torso, it disappeared into its pile of corpses, never to be seen again.

Likewise, the plants didn’t try to do anything with him as long he stayed away from the largest blossoms, that were easy to spot by daylight. This time he was able to stroll right to the pyramid, and then take his time climbing the thing. He reached the top well before sunset and took his time to enjoy the view. The jungle continued as far as he could see in all directions, and the canopy was only broken in two places: a river, and another distant pyramid. He was unable to tell if the city on the horizon was also merely ruins, or if people still lived there, but it didn’t matter. With man eating plants on the loose, the last thing he was doing was spending a few days traipsing through the jungle to find out.

The wyvern level was as anticlimactic as anything he’d ever experienced. Since he didn’t try to wander over to its nest this time, no angry mother tried to devour him. Indeed, nothing tried to attack him. Simon walked to the ruins of the castle completely unmolested, and even poked around a bit before he made his way up to the shattered tower.

It wasn’t a very interesting place though. Anything worth taking had long been stolen from the empty rooms, and the weather had rotted away the rest. Now the only thing of value it had was the commanding view. Well, that and the portal he corrected himself.

The city on fire in the wannabe Vesuvius level definitely seemed a little further along than last time, but not four days further along. Simon had wondered about that on his way here. Theoretically, if he’d wasted days in the zombie floor, he should have arrived to find a wall of cooling lava blocking his way, but instead it seemed about the same before as he slowly walked to the palace.

In the end, the only real difference was that the goddess wasn’t waiting for him on the throne this time. He’d expected that, though. She only did that last time to tease him with hope.

The joke was on her. He’d left his hope back on level six with Freya’s corpse. Everything he did from now on was just spite.