Death After Death-Chapter 343 - A Ways to Go

The little town’s name turned out to be Olven’s Bridge, or more simply, Olvens, though Simon didn’t learn that for two days. He spent those first few hours after the troll's death trying to keep the fire from spreading any more than it needed to. After that, he borrowed some food, and then he got to work.

Despite the fact that the troll had maimed and shredded him a number of times, on the life he’d finally killed the thing, he’d come away almost completely unscathed, and needed little more than a bandage to partially immobilize a slightly sprained ankle. Once he’d taken care of that, though, he got to work. Whoever lived here would be back eventually, and he didn’t want to have to explain too much about why he was carving runes into metal.

No, this isn’t witchcraft, he told himself as he got to work. Honest, now please put down the pitchforks and torches, and we can discuss this like civilized people.

The imaginary mob in his head wasn’t very impressed by that, but then he didn’t expect them to be, and after he’d had his soul shredded so recently by a witch or a demon, he really didn’t blame them. Some menaces deserved to be put down like rabid animals.

Simon chose some very simple designs for this life. Using magic, he could combine many effects into one. He could create a sword that could be strong or sharp, and he could make a dagger that could alternate between life draining and healing, but doing such things manually, well, that would take a long time; simple, single-purpose objects were far easier. They were just a single rune, with one or two interface points depending on the magic involved.

Of course, even that simplicity required exacting care; the clumsier the rune, the less effective it would be. Something that was noticeably imperfect would only be half as effective, and noticeably imperfect was about as well as he could do right now, without the acids and clays he needed to make something great.

“Less effective matters less when it’s powered by the life force of the people you’re killing,” he reminded himself as he hammered. Although Simon had quite the wishlist of things he wanted to make, for now, he needed a good sword that could help him slice and dice threats like trolls without resorting to spells, and a weapon he could use to heal.

Once he had a better situation, he could see about making fancier things like a new divining rod or an amulet that would hide him from other divinatory efforts. He was even considering making himself something that cut him off from magic entirely. It would interfere with his ability to use the very weapons he was making now, but in certain circumstances, it was better to be safe than sorry.

It was his insistent hammering that finally brought the locals to return, at least that's what they told him when they finally made their appearance. At first, it was one family, then two.

“I thought if the smith had returned, it must have meant… well, who are you?” the first woman asked.

“I’m no one important,” Simon insisted, “Just passing through.”

No one bought that. Certainly not once he admitted that he’d killed the troll. He’d tried to avoid that. He still had work to do to get himself where he wanted to be for the next level, but as long as they feared that the monster would come back at nightfall, they wouldn’t get out of his hair and insisted that he needed to flee while he could.

“There wasn’t much fighting,” Simon told them, seeking to downplay his heroic status this time. “I just lured it into a bad spot and then burned it alive. It’s the only way to deal with trolls.”

That news caused a flood of people to reappear. By the fourth day, half of the town’s population had returned, and by the fifth, the smith had come back as well. By then, at least Simon had finished everything he needed to do at the forge, at least for the moment.

He still had a long way to go with files and polishing cloths to get the marks where he wanted. Then he’d need to conceal them with some molten silver, but that could wait until later. Unfortunately, the longer he stayed, the less time he had. After a certain critical mass, he’d become a fixture at the local tavern and was forced to tell his story every night as new arrivals returned.

Simon took this last bit as a challenge, and rather than letting the story grow in incredulity as these things usually did, he tried to make himself sound more and more irrelevant. By the end of the second week, the troll basically killed itself in his tale, but no one believed him, and Simon became known for his modesty as much as his bravery.

When the owner of the lumberyard finally realized that his place of business had been the sole casualty amongst the town, besides the people it had killed on its rampage, he was understandably upset. That attitude was almost enough to put Simon off helping him, but he wanted to be in better shape before he faced off against the orcs on the next level, and helping to rebuild the place he’d burned to the ground was as good a reason as any to stick around for a while.

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It was already autumn here, and would start to get cold soon, but even the depths of winter wouldn’t be as cold as his time in Charia had been, so Simon wasn’t worried, and felling thick trees with an axe and dragging them to the mill with a draft horse was as close to zen as he’d had in a lifetime or two, so he enjoyed that even after it got cold enough that he could see his breath every morning.

“You know, you don’t have to help Mister Barnet just because he blames you for burning down his yard,” the waitress told him now and then when Simon came back in the evenings to eat. “You could have burned down half of Olvens, and it still would have been worth it to get rid of that troll.”

Simon agreed, but rarely said so. Whenever he did, Hattie would start talking about how he should be rewarded, and she seemed more than happy to be the one who would do the honors if he ever got drunk enough to. As a woman in her thirties she was certainly pretty enough that most men would be honored; she struck him as an older, calmer version of Brenna, but Simon didn’t give in to that temptation, or any of the other temptations that came with being a local hero, especially not once he started really losing weight and looked a bit more like his heroic reputation would suggest.

Maybe next time I die, I’ll try using a nature-powered spell with a circle, Simon told himself as he watched the pounds melt off slowly, day by day, and resisted the urge to try it right now.

As he understood it, as long as the magic took place outside of himself, it did very little to affect his clarity, and while the last couple lives had been a useful reminder at how much he hated being like this, he wasn’t sure he had the patience to lose this weight the old fashioned way, ever again. Still, he was committed; he’d never find this Sybil woman without the sight, not when she could hide behind the same sorts of wards that he could.

Body issues aside, Simon enjoyed his stay in the small town. As long as he spent his days swinging an axe, he could still eat and drink pretty well most nights, so that part was hardly a hardship. He almost enjoyed watching the waterwheel-powered lumbermill, and it gave him several ideas for how he might improve his own future endeavors the next time he needed to make paper or some other industrial commodity.

Simon ended up staying until the midwinter feast, but that was only because rumors that there might be another troll lurking upstream kept him there. He was ready to leave after his first month, but instead, he stayed long enough to make a divining rod and go on the hunt. It turned out there wasn’t one more troll in the region; there were three.

One was small enough that it did its best to avoid fighting altogether, and Simon had to smoke it out of the small forest crag that was its lair to hack it to pieces. The other two were harder. One made its home in an old coal mine that had been long since abandoned, two days to the southeast. The third lived under a bridge a day’s ride to the north. It hadn’t been safe to cross for years at night, or sometimes even during the day when it was overcast.

It was the third one that was hardest, because it was by far the biggest of the three. It was a corpulent thing that had grown so large that it couldn’t even find a cave wide enough for its bulk.

Simon handled that one last. He fed the second troll a wagon full of dummies that had been made out of burlap sacks filled with slaughterhouse leavings soaked in lamp oil. It wasn’t smart enough to discover the trap, and when Simon set it on fire with a burning arrow, the hardest part of the whole trap was keeping it from running back into the mine. There was no point in burning down a whole coal mine just to kill one lousy troll.

Compared to those two, the last one was a canny bastard. It had a nose for treachery, and it left Simon’s decoys to rot. He had to try several times to bring it down from where it hid in the murky waters between the stone bridge supports on the far bank.

Eventually, he was forced to use a mirror to drive it out. He waited until the waters of the River Kojin had frozen completely so it could not easily hide beneath the waters, and then, when the sun was as high in the sky as it would get at noon, he used a pair of large, borrowed mirrors that had been mounted in a small cart and tormented the thing.

At nearly twelve feet tall, Simon didn’t stand a chance, even now that he was in much better shape. The thing's arms were simply too long. Fortunately, the sunlight did a much better job than even his magical sword ever would. Those sunbeams that probed the shadows made the ugly green monster smoke and sizzle even from a hundred yards away. Each time it would adjust itself, in an attempt to hide, but all Simon needed to do was move his little wagon, and then he was back at it.

These beams of light weren’t enough to kill it, but there were enough to turn vast stretches of its exposed flesh to stone, and by the time night fell, it was a sclerotic beast that moved with all the grace of a hermit crab.

Not even that was enough to stop it from emerging from its lair to hunt for Simon when the hated sun finally set, though. Against anyone else, those patches of stony flesh might have served as a sort of platemail, but Simon’s blade sheared right through it like it was hard cheese, and he made quick work of the thing now that it had been weakened. He was only struck hard once, when he tried to get greedy and go in for the kill before removing the troll’s last limb.

That leg had given it just enough leverage to send Simon a dozen feet through the air into a nearby elm tree. While it did not survive long to appreciate its minor victory, Simon did let it suffer for longer than it needed to, as he used his dagger to do the Lion’s share of the healing.