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...”

‘Apologies, I cannot,’ the mirror replied.

“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.

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.