Death After Death-Chapter 341 - A Chance to Heal

It had been hard thinking about much of anything while his double had kept him wired up to his memories for the last couple of weeks. Each night he thought about his situation and his strange caretaker, but the following day those thoughts were swept away by the high-speed replay of the lives he’d lived, and it was no surprise to him that he’d lived a lot of lives.

However, as that came to an end, and Simon did more than lie in bed with overwhelming nostalgia, he forced himself to get up and move around. Just that much was enough to remove the anesthetic fog that had hung around him this whole time. It would have been easy then to fall to despair, but no matter how many moments of vertigo, or crippling panic attacks he felt at random moments of the day, he didn't let himself give in to the doom that haunted him.

She didn't destroy me, he reminded himself on a regular basis. This won't take long to fix. Well, mostly.

He was still fat Simon, which was his least favorite version of himself, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that until he could safely use words of power, and he couldn’t do that until he had full control of his body once more. Before he got to it, though, he took a minute to study his stats and get a feel for things.

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

Deaths: 63

Experience Points: 96,443

Skills: Academics [Above average], Agriculture [Poor], Archery [Poor], Armor (light) [Below Average], Armor (heavy) [Poor], Armor (medium) [Poor], Art [Above Average], Athletics [Poor], Baking [Poor], Cooking [Poor], Craft [Average], Deception [Above Average], Escape [Poor], Fishing [Below Average], Healing [Average], History [Above Average], investigate [Excellent], Maces [Average], Mining [Above Average], Navigation/Mapping [Average], Research [Excellent], Ride [Below Average], Search [Average], Sneak [Average], Spears [Poor], Spell Casting [Excellent], Steal [Below Average], Swimming [Below Average], and Swords [Average] Transformation [Average] Warfare [Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum (air, disperse, minor, slow), Barom (illusion, light, vision), Celdura (plan, shape), Delzam (cure, order, repair), Dnarth (command, connection, distant, hidden), Eszloum (soul), Farzehl (alter, manipulate, twist), Gelthic (ice, death, weakness), Gervuul (greater, power), Hyakk (flesh, healing), Karesh (location, protection, understanding), Meiren (creation, fire, life), Oonbetit (focused, force, motion), Uuvellum (anti-, null, boundary), Vosden (earth, growth, metal, strength), Vrazig (lightning, ruin, quickening, wind), Weylera (because, on condition of), Zyvon (sacrifice, transfer, plants, water)’

“Eighteen deaths, huh?” he said as he did the math in his head. “That’s some ugly shit right there.”

Still, there was hope. Even if he didn’t trust his voice enough to cast a spell, none of his knowledge on the subject seemed to be missing. The mirror still rated him as excellent, and he remembered all of the words it showed. It was simply a matter of saying them. Simon could have checked the list of accessible levels, but instead went for a walk.

“I can do all of that after sunset,” he told himself as he got his fat ass into gear.

Simon spent the rest of that day strolling around the meadows that made up his little valley, and while he did so, he talked to himself. He tried tongue twisters first, but those were too hard for him. Seashores and seashells became mangled stuttering messes and sprays of saliva.

Instead, after a time, he started to tell stories. First, the ones he’d made up more recently for his Charian Opus, and then, later when he was down to only a few where the characters had complicated names, he switched to some of the Ionian ones he used to teach to his class and his son.

He stammered through moralistic tales about sly foxes, cowardly wolves, and know-it-all sheep, and after a few hours of that, his speech only hitched occasionally on certain sounds. It was progress, and while he was annoyed, he didn’t yet trust himself enough to use a word of flesh shaping. Simon did enjoy the day at least, in the broad strokes.

More than anything, as he sat at the ruined temple or drank from the stream, he felt grateful to be alive. Eighteen deaths is ugly, but it could have been eighteen hundred, he reminded himself. It could have been eighteen thousand, or eighteen million. It could have been forever.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

While dying in his bed over and over of dehydration wouldn’t be as bad as going to hell, it would have been close enough, Simon decided. He was just trying to decide what he was supposed to do, to keep that from happening next time, when he reached the place where the goblin lair should have been, only to find that it had been erased. Not massacred, or demolished, but erased.

The rock with the familiar crevice that led down into the earth where the little buggers waited for night simply wasn’t there. In its place was the same dark soil that was spread throughout the forest.

“How in the f-fuck did he do that?” Simon asked himself as he studied the scene and looked for clues about what kind of magic might have been unleashed.

Is this a clue? he wondered. A taunt? Simon couldn’t say, but the fact that his duplicate had mentioned taking care of them was enough to make him certain he was meant to find this spot.

Still, Simon spent another half an hour just wandering in slowly expanding circles, looking to make sure that he hadn’t gotten lost or walked to the wrong place. In the end, he found nothing, though, and returned to the cabin with only questions and doubts as the sun set.

That night, while he chewed on his simple meal, he chewed on the large questions of what he was going to do next. While he did so, he studied the mirror, which had pulled up all the levels that came next.

“Why is it everyone seems to know more about how this thing works than me?” he asked himself between bites of dry fish.

‘Level 12 - A bridge troll and an abandoned village.

Level 16 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.

Level 19 - Lizard men in a swamp.

Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.

Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.

Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.

Level 34 - ?????’

“So nothing changed there,” he nodded. “What about the rest? Are you really always watching me?”

‘Only when conditions allow and you are able to be located,’ the mirror answered.

“What about the other version of me?” he continued. “Are you always watching him? Can you show me his stats or tell me what level he’s on?”

‘While there are other versions of you present during certain levels and events, there are other versions of me that exist to watch them,’ the mirror answered, which was a reasonably straightforward answer for it. ‘Trying to interfere with myself during those times would greatly complicate things.’

“That’s not a yes or a no,” Simon answered.

‘Complicating things more than they already are could cause the failure of the Reality knot that powers both of our existence,’ the mirror explained.

Simon shook his head, making a note to file that information away for later. He definitely wasn’t in the right headspace to complicate things further, but it seemed like there might be some opportunities there in the future when he was once again whole in mind and body.

While his ordeal had granted him new insights into what the spirit that powered the thing was really capable of, right now he was more concerned with the words that were typed into neat lines on the glass. The biggest change was that the masquerade had been solved. Simon was of two minds on that.

On one hand, he was glad he’d changed the future of the realms sufficiently that such a terrible night would never take place, but on the other hand it denied him a real reason to return that didn’t involve revenge, and as much as he wanted to take revenge on the woman who’d almost annihilated him, whether she be witch or demon, he wasn’t ready for that. His doppelganger had been right on that much at least. He needed contingencies for how to deal with such opponents, because he never wanted to deal with this again.

“Would fighting a troll count as physical therapy?” he asked himself as he ate.

While the right path to learn more about fighting mages was obviously to join the Unseen, he would need to increase his fighting skills and abstain from magic for years in order to get his sight back. That probably meant fighting and killing again. Can I really take the basilisk, though, without magic? He thought, before quickly deciding that even if he could, it didn’t mean he should try. The risks of failure were much too high.

“Perhaps just another level or two, then, and then maybe I can find somewhere quiet to settle d-down,” he told himself as he finished his meal. While he had no idea where the swamp where the lizardmen dwelled was, he knew exactly where Rivenwood was, and if he showed up there without a toxic black aura, he was sure he’d be allowed to stay as long as he wanted. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

“I might not be able to take out all those orcs without magic either,” he reminded himself. Strangely, though, that didn’t bother him. After what he’d been through, the idea that an orc might behead him or a troll might rip him in two wasn’t frightening, even if it should have been.

Probably the first sign of madness, he told himself as he went to bed that night.

On one hand, as long as he wasn’t doing anything important with a particular life, it wasn’t really very valuable. How could it be valuable? He’d lost almost twenty in a row to dehydration, and the sky hadn’t fallen.

Maybe that would be a good excuse not to use magic, he decided, unless it’s to save someone else.

Simon thought about it for a couple more days, but the longer he did, the more his plan came together. The biggest flaw, of course, would be that he couldn’t use a word of flesh to transform himself into the strong, healthy Simon he knew that he would eventually become. He also couldn’t use words of metal shaping to give himself a vorpal sword.

He needed to learn more about fighting mages, which meant this time he would have to join the Unspoken as a full fledged acolyte rather than a silent brother, and to pass whatever tests awaited him for that, he needed to be able to see auras again, at least a little bit, which meant no magic for the foreseeable future.

It’s going to be a pain in the ass to fight that thing with no magical advantages at all. Are you sure you’re up for it? He asked himself. He honestly wasn’t sure that he was.

“Did I use magic every time I fought that monster?” he wondered. He was pretty sure he had. Though his recent walk down memory lane was a little rushed, Simon was pretty sure every time he’d killed it, words of greater fire had played a big part, but that was just lazy. There were other ways he could bring fire to bear, and a torch would light the barn up as easily as a flamethrower.

Naively, Simon had thought that the decision would be the thing that held him here the longest, but it wasn’t. Even when he could walk around and mostly speak well, he wasn’t a hundred percent, especially when it came to swordplay. Until now, the lack of goblins had been a blessing, but once he came to the realization that he was only getting so good by dueling with the shadows and attacking trees.

Still, at least he lost weight. His reflexes might have been all screwed up, and his reaction time could be hit or miss, but spending all day running around showed some results, and between his bedrest and his limited diet, he went from obese to merely doughy over the month he spent recovering.

Then, on a day that was no different from any other, he belted on his armor and his sword, lit the few torches he had together, and decided to pay the next level a little visit.