Death After Death

Simon peered around his tree looking for anyone else that might be trying to murder him. Over the sounds of screaming and burning it was hard to make much out, but after half a minute he decided the coast was clear. That decision almost cost him a death as an arrow embedded in the tree trunk inches from his eye.

Though he couldn’t see who it was that tried to shoot him, he ran in the direction that the arrow came from which was the next best thing. He groped for his shield, trying to get it up in case there was another arrow, but continuing to charge heedlessly, he body checked his would be assassin in the underbrush, sending them both sprawling.

The bandit was on his feet before Simon, and pulled a dagger from a boot, but he held back, and Simon really understood why after he rose to his feet, towering over him. His attacker was little more than a malnourished child. The feral little thing practically snarled at him as it slashed the air with the dagger to keep him back.

“Why don’t you just run for your life you little bastard,” Simon growled, pretending to swing his sword hard enough to make his opponent flinch and jump back. “The last thing I want is to add killing kids to my list of achievements.” The bandit listened to him suspiciously, like a trick was being played on him, and then, after a couple of cautious steps backwards he turned and ran off into the forest, leaving Simon to walk back to the road without so much as the need to look over his shoulder.

Why should he after all. He’d won, big time. However hard some of the monsters Helades had him face, underfed country bandits were no match for a high end, top 1% adventurer like him. “Well Luken,” Simon asked, nudging the prone man with his boot. Rather than lash out at him as Simon had expected, the bandit instead cringed fearfully and shrank from his touch.

“I’m sorry, master mage sir, I didn’t realize… we didn’t realize that you could—” the man babbled before Simon interrupted him.

“That I could kick your ass up and down the street?” Simon gloated, still holding his sword in a threatening way that didn’t quite promise the other man death.

The bandit’s eyes had a hard time leaving it though, and he swallowed hard before he managed to say, “quite right my lord, quite right. If you could see it in your heart to—”

“Go on, get out of here,” Simon said waving the man away dismissively as he sheathed his sword. “If I ever see you again I’ll gut you.”

“Yes my lord, sir, thank you sir!” Luken said scampering backwards and only rising once he was a safe distance away. He took off running the same way Simon was planning on going, which was awkward because he might actually see him again, but that was a problem he could deal with later if he had to.

With the immediate danger gone, Simon walked over to the smoldering corpses and after a moment of thought he put each of the ones that was still moving out of their misery with a single thrust of his sword. He didn’t enjoy killing people that weren’t trying to kill part of him of course, but after everything he’d been through he knew that he would much rather hit the reset button than continue to lie there suffering. Once that was done he briefly considered searching their corpses for anything useful, but that was too disgusting, so he left them to rot and started walking down the road in search of civilization.

A day and a night later he finally found the small village he was searching for. Except for the smell, and how dirty the people were it was pretty much exactly what he’d been expecting. He thought about asking the first person he could find where there was an inn, but feeling shy, he just kept walking until he saw a sign in the shape of a mug of beer above the door of a large building. Obviously there wasn’t a lot of writing happening in this place, so it could hardly be that complicated, he told himself as he walked inside.

Of course things quickly got complicated when he walked inside and the bar keep asked him “Well, what can I get you?” She looked at him like he had shit on his shoes and had tracked it inside her establishment, but once he started to explain the sob story he’d rehearsed on the way here, she quickly relented.

The bandits had attacked him as soon as they thought he was rich after all, so since he hadn’t brought any coins that weren’t gold, when he presented it to her he made a big deal about how it was his only coin left. “I kept it in my boot you see - just in case, but the bandits to the east robbed me blind and took damn near everything else I had.”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

The look she gave him wasn’t exactly sympathetic, but when he was finally done, she said “Well, you can stay here for a night or two until you continue on to Liepzen or Hurag or wherever you’re going, but this ain't no charity operation. It’s still going to cost, you understand?”

He smiled at that, and quickly listed all the things he wanted: a room for three nights to recover from his harrowing ordeal, meals for the days he was here, and a drink to soften the harsh blow that left had dealt him. She nodded, and then looking at his coin muttered, “damn foreign money,” before biting it to make sure it was real. In the end she gave him a handful of coppers and silvers and had the cute bar maid direct him to his room after telling him what time they started serving dinner.

He watched the young woman’s ass as he walked up the stairs, but the unavoidable comparison to Freya’s kept him from ogling it, and as soon as he reached the small room, she was gone with little more than a quick curtsy.

The room itself was underwhelming, but no matter how dingy or claustrophobic it was, it was somewhere new and safe, and in his life those were the only two things that really mattered to him anymore. Maybe once he got used to walking and talking and eating, he could worry about finding somewhere nicer to stay. For now, he was just content to lay on his lumpy mattress, stare up at the ceiling, and listen to the noises coming from the common room below. Simon was sure that the novelty would wear off eventually of course, but that was tomorrow or the next day.

When he finally started to get bored, he examined the coins she’d given him. Counting the silver coins, he thought that the woman might have given him too much change, but when he counted the copper he realized the problem. She’d given him 11 small copper coins and 9 slightly larger silver ones, which was evidence that she couldn’t count, or that base-10 wasn’t exactly something they valued in their monetary system. Simon had played games like that before, and he hated them. It was so much more difficult to do the math in his head if it was twenty coppers to the silver, but a platinum coin was only worth five gold ones. He didn’t see why everyone couldn’t just standardize that sort of thing, but games had to have their little quirks, right?

As Simon put away the coins he reminded himself “This isn’t a game - this is some history garbage which honestly makes the whole thing worse, but you don’t need to worry about that right now.” It made the whole thing even dumber, of course, since there was no way he was going to be able to figure out the logic behind that one, but he wasn’t about to ask Heledes to help him with history lessons the same way she’d helped him with language. He shuddered at the thought, and then. Shaking his head, he got up and hid his real wealth under the bed, before spreading the rest of his belongings around to distract any would be thief. Then he went downstairs to get a bite before it got too late.

He smelled the scent of roasting meat and savory spices as soon as he left his room. They only intensified, along with the noise as he made he way down to the common room where he was served boiled potatoes, some sort of minced bread dumplings, and a thick cut of pork loin drenched in a brown gravy. Compared to what Simon had subsisted on up until now in The Pit, this was a feast, and even if it wasn’t something he would have usually ordered, he ate it with gusto. The proprietor gave him evil looks from time to time, like he was about to dine and dash at any moment, but everyone else was amiable enough.

After his second pint of dark brown ale Simon regaled his fellow drinkers with a story about how he had once very bravely run from wyvern after accidentally stumbling across her nest, and was met with gales of laughter. During those stories, and later attempts to guess where Simon was from, he learned much about the world, but other than the fact that the nearest large city was Liepzen, he forgot almost all of it, because he was working on his fourth pint.

By then he wasn’t good for much besides laughing at bad jokes and losing money at dice as he got to know the locals. It was a new sensation for him since he almost always won at games, of course, but he didn’t mind too much since it mostly seemed to come down to luck and bluffing. If it were mostly based on skill he had no doubt he would have won. Not that he needed to. Simon didn’t need the money, so there was no need to clean out peasants for coppers. After all, Thomen was just a bargeman, and Yars was a woodsman, and the sovereign that he’d spent earlier was as much as both of them made in a year. Combined.

By the end of the night it was just him and five or six other drunks singing songs. He didn’t know most of their names, and he had no idea what the words of the songs were, but he did his best. No one seemed to mind since he’d bought the last round of the night, spending the last of his copper pence. He figured he’d probably do pretty much the same thing tomorrow night before he got on the road the following day to go somewhere bigger and better than this little berg. He had the money after all, and he was sure he could find something nicer there.

That was Simon’s last thought as he went to sleep with a drunken smile on his face. His sleep was restful and uneventful, and in the morning he stretched when the first rays of the sun shot through the shutters and forced him from his slumber. He turned and covered his head with the pillow, trying to sleep a little longer to avoid the hangover he was sure he’d have after last night. But curiously, as his brain began to wake up more and more he realized that there was no hangover.

Simon opened his eyes and sat up, tying to figure out what was wrong, because something was definitely off. It took a second, but when his gaze finally met his own eyes in the mirror across from him, he finally realized the truth.

“Mother fucker,” he exclaimed in disappointed frustration. Sometime last night while he’d been asleep he’d died and had restarted back in the damn cabin.