Death After Death (Roguelike Isekai)

Simon spent more than a day walking around the city smashing statues. He pushed them over wherever he could, and then he shattered their heads with a larger stone. Often, he bashed one head against another just to reduce the number of times he’d have to repeat the task.

The work was exhausting, and even doing only a dozen or so every hour forced him to take frequent breaks. That was exacerbated by the lack of water. He had his skin, of course, and there was a well in the next level that he was pretty sure had water in it, but on this level, there simply wasn’t any that he could find.

While that made sense, given that he was in the middle of the desert, it was also quite troublesome. Still, Simon didn’t let that stop him. He stayed and worked for two full days, nursing his water, until he couldn’t find any more statues worth bashing to pieces.

The effort bordered on obsession. In several cases, he broke apart what turned out to be actual marble statues just to make sure they weren’t people. He didn’t sleep well, either. He kept dreaming that the basilisk had found him, and both nights he woke up several times as a stray rustling made him worry he was about to be ambushed.

During all of that, he saved the lizardmen near the basilisk for last. It was only when his skin was as empty as the city, and his thirst was rising, that he approached the lightning-scarred carcass of the beast. Some part of him worried that the thing had been playing possum and would manage to open its eyes one last time, and make him regret saving the lizardmen, but that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, he took their heads into a patch of shade around the corner before pounding them into dust just to be sure.

“You. Can. Never. Be. Too. Careful,” Simon grunted with each strike.

As he worked, Simon considered doing some kind of autopsy on the slain monster and looking for some biological answer behind the magic it wielded so casually. It’s possible it's some kind of gland, or lens, he told himself. It might be a piece of its brain, or…

Those thoughts continued to loop until he completed his task, but in the end, he decided against it. As cool as the idea of dissecting a mythical creature was, he hadn’t had water in a day, and his hands were shaking. So, if the power really was biological in nature, there was a fair chance he’d cut it wrong and get himself petrified all over again, which he had no interest in enduring.

Instead, he walked by the bloated, leathery carcass and moved toward the temple he’d walked with Helades so long ago. If he’d had the moisture, he would have spit on it, but as it was, he saved that water for climbing the sandy stairs.

Getting close enough to the portal caused it to ripple open invisibly. It was dark on the other side of the portal, too, so there was no visual indication that it was there, but Simon could see the magic, and he paused to study the ripple of magic that emanated from it.

He’d be on the blasted plains around Crowvar soon, but for now, he ignored it and strode past, looking at the well-preserved friezes on the walls. There was nothing here that he hadn’t seen the last time. The place was Ionian, and no ancient secrets were hidden in it. Still, it calmed him to look at it again and rekindle those memories of his first time here.

“Well, first time where I didn’t get turned into a statue,” he corrected himself.

Those memories were old now. They were older than a normal person could hope to live, and at least two centuries in the past, so it did him good to reconnect with them. He studied the delicate decorations and read the inscriptions, looking for evidence to support Helades' claim, but he didn’t find her name anywhere. He didn’t find any goddesses that looked like her either, though he did find a couple that reminded him of Elthena, since they had Ionian features.

Finally, when he could stand his thirst no longer, he walked back outside and through the gate without ceremony. There was no reason to delay. He’d been through this one many times and never seen a threat.

It was only when he’d stepped through the portal and found the smell of mist and wet earth instead of the smell of ash and charred flesh that he realized something was wrong. For just a moment, Simon worried that he’d done something to break the magic or reopen a level.

He had no mirror on him to call up, but as he started counting the levels off on his fingers, he quickly realized what had happened. The heat had gotten to him; it wasn’t Crowvar that came next, but Darndelle. He was in the graveyard!

For just a moment, fear flashed through him as he remembered what the graveyard was like. It was only when he reminded himself that he’d crushed the Blackheart to dust that his eyes stopped darting around looking for ripples in the fog.

“It’s just a stupid mistake,” he told himself. “Happens to the best of us. This is what you get for neglecting the lower levels for so long!”

As Simon berated himself quietly and reminded himself that the centaur level was a daytime level, he suddenly stopped as he heard a noise. For a moment, he feared the demons in the fog were back, but as it repeated again, he identified it as nothing more than a shovel. Someone was digging nearby.

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That calmed him almost as quickly as the realization of where he was, and he set down his sack of supplies very carefully. He was still incredibly thirsty, but that would have to wait another few minutes.

Once Simon’s hands were free, he pulled out his dagger and then rubbed it in the earth to take off the shine a bit. He didn’t know what he was up against, which made the element of surprise key.

Probably just grave robbers, he told himself as he crouched and padded from one gravestone to the next toward the sound.

Just graverobbers might not stay that way, though. Something evil had been buried in this graveyard once before. It might not be the people who were the problem. It could be what they were about to dig up.

That thought summoned a whole swirling nebula of recursive thoughts. How many levels had he solved only for them to come unsolved again with a similar problem? What were the odds that a single graveyard would get multiple evil artifacts? Was the universe self-correcting? Was it—

He banished those thoughts and instead forced himself to focus on what his eyes and ears were telling him. There was a light ahead that was probably a lantern, but the fog made it hard to see who was there and what they were up to. There was no talking, either, which meant there might just be one person. Did that make it just the town gravedigger then?

That made things easier in a way. If it were just someone doing their job, then surely he could stop them before they opened the gate to hell or some other terrible fate.

It wasn’t a grave digger, though. That bit of wishful thinking vanished as soon as Simon got close enough to see the aura of the man doing the digging. It was so dark that at first he mistook it for a shadow. The only problem was that the light wasn’t bright enough to cast a shadow that dark.

Simon paused to study that. The shadow was actually darker than the night around it, and it was attached to a person. A wicked, wicked person, which was clearly the reason he was here. He tried to peer into the shadow, to get some idea of what he was dealing with, but the colors were washed out by the darkness and his still-blurry vision.

That was only half of the confusing part, though. The man wasn’t actually in the grave. He wasn’t doing the digging, yet the shovel still moved. Simon studied the scene, trying to parse it out since he didn’t see the aura of any apprentices or other underlings.

That was how he found out that skeletons reanimated by dark magic didn’t have an aura. Well, no aura wasn’t quite true. Living beings had a cloud of energy around them that he could read like a scroll or a tavern sign, but the animating magic that flowed through the creature was visible enough if he stared. It was more of an outline than a cloud, but it flashed with dark menace.

Simon wished his vision was clear enough that he could study it in greater detail, but that was beyond him. All he could see was that the magic was in some way linked to the graveyard itself.

That’s why it was so hard to notice, he realized with a sinking feeling. It has no power source. There’s no crystal or tether to its master. The land itself is fueling it, but how?

Suddenly, Simon wondered if the dark magics of this necromancer might be fueled by the souls of the graves that they stood atop. That horrified him, and he quickly retreated. It wasn’t because he was afraid to act, though; it was because he needed his bow.

Simon had it, and at one time he was pretty good with it, but he’d grown rusty with lifetimes of disuse. Rust didn’t matter, though. There was no way he was closing this much open ground with someone who could tap into the souls of others to fuel his creations.

I could use my wand, he reflected, but he decided against it. Magic needed to stop being his first resort and start being his last resort. Still, when he retrieved his bow, he moved the wand to his quiver just in case he needed it. Then he withdrew an arrow, nocked it, and moved back to his opponent. He didn’t know what the man was up to, but he knew that the necromancer needed to be stopped as quickly as possible.

Simon crept up on him one grave at a time, from the rear. He stopped every few graves and waited for the mage to look around. Even alone at night in a fog-shrouded graveyard, he was paranoid, but not paranoid enough to notice that his doom was upon him.

Normally, Simon would have felt comfortable making the shot from fifty feet, but at night, when it was this desperate, he creeped all the way to thirty feet before he pulled back, aimed carefully for the necromancer’s throat, and loosed.

He missed by inches, and the arrow soared off into the night before ricocheting noisily off a mausoleum somewhere not far away. That was enough to make the necromancer take notice, and with a clipped command, he ordered his skeleton out of the grave to investigate. Even as he was doing so, though, Simon lined up his second shot for several extra heartbeats to be sure it would find its mark.

The mage never saw it coming. His skeleton had barely escaped the man’s lantern light when the arrow stabbed right through his throat and came out the other side in a spray of blood.

Choking on his own blood made speaking a word of power impossible; still, Simon was wary and did not reveal himself immediately lest the man have a wand or other types of magic at his disposal. That was good, because he made a series of gestures, and a ripple of force left him and traveled outward, shattering several gravestones to Simon’s right like an invisible wave.

Simon didn’t have to fire a second shot. He just had to wait a little longer. Less than a minute later, unable to breathe, the necromancer fell back into the grave his minion had been digging up.

The death looked genuine, but it was only when the dark aura coming from the hole faded that Simon got up to investigate. You could pretend not to breathe, but you couldn’t fake your soul leaving your body.

“Let’s see what you were up to,” Simon said as he approached the pit and looked down. He was much more interested in finding a fountain or a tavern that was still open to slake his thirst, but investigating this wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that could wait until later.

As it turned out, there was nothing special in the hole. There was no coffin, and the only corpse was still warm. Simon regretted that asking him what he was up to was impossible, but he didn’t feel like taking any chances tonight. Still, the mage died clutching a thick tome, and Simon was definitely going to take that with him, so he hopped down there to get it.

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