Death After Death (Roguelike Isekai)

Simon used the shovel to poke around the hole, probing for what the necromancer might have been looking for. It was then that he got the scare of his life, when the skeleton that had been digging the hole returned to the grave.

He’d assumed that the abomination had died along with its master, but it hadn’t, and it returned, practically diving into the pit to attack Simon. Fortunately, he still had the shovel in hand and swung with all his might, shattering the thing apart in a cloud of bones. That was satisfying. What was less enjoyable was that the pieces continued to tremble where they fell.

At first, Simon thought that was some residual magic dissipating, but it was easy enough for him to see that most of the larger chunks were still connected by a thin black thread of power. Indeed, they were slowly reunifying a piece at a time. As he watched, the phalanges of a hand snapped together one at a time, which was concerning.

“Now how’s it managing that trick?” he wondered as he traced the lines of power from one point to the next, noting how they twined together as they approached the skull.

Simon picked up the tome and dug around until he had the man’s coin purse, since he was broke. Then, he tossed those things along with the shovel out onto the grass. Then, as an afterthought, he cut off one of the necromancer’s fingers and pocketed it as well, in case he needed to have a talk with the man later. Simon disliked the idea of summoning the dead, but he disliked it less when the man was guilty of doing the same thing.

After that, he lifted himself out of the shallow grave with a grunt, picked up the shovel, and smashed the skull with one good whack. The blow rang out into the darkness, but at this point, Simon was less concerned about getting caught than that the magic lines had vanished. That was progress, and as soon as he examined the skull, he found out why. The circle rune that powered it was cracked by his blow, but still largely legible.

He started to study it, but when he saw another lantern approaching, he quickly thought better of it and pocketed the bone fragment. Then he grabbed the book and the pouch and ran back to his own bag. By the time the nightwatchman was blowing his horn in alarm, Simon had already collected everything that connected him to the place and was coming out of the far gate.

He could have gone out through the temple gate, which was the portal to the next level, but he wanted to do some research before he moved on. Well, research, a few drinks, and a nice long nap; he was exhausted.

Simon went into the first inn that was still open, even though a search to find one that hadn’t already shuttered wasn’t an easy thing this time of night. He was pretty sure he’d never slept in the Tarnished Tankard before, but he couldn’t be sure. He ordered two drinks, a warm meal, and a room for a few days, but only got stale bread and cold mutton, which was enough.

Simon ate and drank ravenously, then immediately crashed out without sparing a conscious thought about the necromancer he’d just killed. The closest he came to that was choosing coins that didn’t have blood from the man’s finger on them when he paid for his accommodations from the dead man’s coin purse.

In the morning, he woke with a headache that exceeded even his hunger, but he set aside both of those and leafed through the book he’d obtained for a few minutes before hiding it under the bed and heading back downstairs. At first glance, it looked like another volume of nonsense, but the man who’d owned it had known enough to raise the dead, animate them with a source of power other than his own soul, and make the damned things reassemble themselves. So he clearly knew something.

Simon pondered that riddle while he drowned himself in warm porridge and beer. He didn’t want to get drunk exactly, but the innkeeper refused to serve him water, and he would take any source of hydration at this point.

“You want water, you can go drink it out of the trough out back with the horses,” he laughed.

Simon didn’t find it funny, but he didn’t complain. When he was finished with his meal, he went to check out the graveyard, where he surreptitiously observed the scene of the crime. That part of the graveyard was swarming with men, most of whom were guards. They’d clearly found the person Simon had killed, but rumors about what they’d discovered hadn’t yet percolated into the crowds he walked through.

He didn’t linger there and instead made his way to a public fountain. There, he had his fill of water to drink and shook off the growing buzz breakfast had given him. Then, he used a clear part of the reflection to confirm that the level had indeed been solved.

“Well, there we go,” Simon said with a nod as he swirled the water to make the glowing words fade.

He could leave now in good conscience, but of course, he wasn’t going to. Instead, he went back to the inn and spent the next few hours reading and studying the bone fragment.

Between the two, it was the bones that were the more interesting. While they explained the way he used the souls of the dead to fuel his creations, the book told him little about magic. It did tell him who the man was, though.

After that, it only took a little asking around to find out that Rigel Blackton was a prosperous merchant and a fixture of the southern market. That no one had seen him in days didn’t surprise Simon; what did was why the name hadn’t crossed paths with him in previous lives.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

You couldn’t see his aura, Simon reminded himself. You could have walked right past him in the street and never known it.

That was one option. The other was less charitable. He was currently a little over a decade from the blows he’d dealt to the Unspoken. While there were doubtless witchhunters still walking around the country, it was entirely possible that there would be more witches and warlocks in the future because of his actions.

“It could be that the blackheart killed him when it was still here,” Simon mused aloud in his room, but of course, he’d never be sure. An ancient necromancer certainly would have tried to figure out how that curse worked, and probably paid for it with his life.

Simon didn’t break into the man’s home until his fourth day in Darndelle. That wasn’t because he wasn’t interested in the necromancer’s secrets, though. It was because it had been swarming with guards and agents of the crown on the second and third nights he checked. Obviously, they found the body, so they’d gotten there first, but he doubted that they’d found all that there was to find.

For better or worse, Simon was used to the way that men like this hid their secrets, and as he crept toward an easy place to climb for a second-floor window, he made a note to add that to the book he’d been writing on witch-hunting. Secrets Don’t Stay Buried. He quite liked the sound of that.

The first window he tried was locked, but the second had been left open a crack, and Simon crept in after ensuring there were no servants about. The house wasn’t guaranteed to be empty, after all. He went from room to room on the second floor looking for auras, but all he found were occasional signs of violence; the king’s men had not been gentle when they’d come for the servants of the necromancer, and Simon didn’t blame them for that one bit.

While he poked around the man’s bedroom, all he found there were ledgers that had already been rifled through. Simon didn’t bother to look for secret passages because the layouts of the surrounding rooms made sense. Instead, he went downstairs and repeated the process, looking for a void where there shouldn’t have been any. In the end, he didn’t find much to go on there and was about to go down into the basement when he realized there was a window missing.

The downstairs study took up one corner of the house, next to the dining room. It was well-appointed and symmetrical, with bookshelves on two walls and windows on two walls. The only thing that would have made it perfect would have been one more window. If he’d lived here, he would have certainly had it constructed that way. So, he looked around there and quickly found evidence that the nearest bookshelf was a secret door.

Finding it was easy, but finding how to open it was somewhat harder. Simon pulled on mundane books in vain for several minutes before he found that one of the intricate carvings in the wood was actually a switch. Pressing hard on that released a hidden latch, allowing the expensive furniture to swing a little to one side, revealing a narrow staircase.

“Not so different from how I would have done it.” Simon thought back to his time in Ordanvale. In fact, for a moment, the deja vu was so strong he had to assure himself that he didn’t kill some version of dark Simon.

“There’s just only so many ways to hide secrets in simple structures,” he told himself as he scrounged a candle and breathed life into an ember to light it. Then, he descended into the darkness, sure that whatever he found wouldn’t be pleasant.

While Simon wasn’t disappointed in his eternal quest to find more books, there were fewer than he would have hoped. Instead, this seemed to be a place for experimentation. There was a body on a sturdy table that had been embalmed, but not yet completed, and several skeletons that had been taken completely apart and were in the process of being put back together.

At least, that’s what Simon thought was the case. As he took the whole situation in, he quickly discovered they’d probably been working away until recently and then collapsed in a pile of bones.

The room was much larger than he would have given it credit for at first, which was an easy mistake to make considering that he only had a few candles lit. The place wasn’t a piece of an existing basement; it had been dug out by the man’s undead laborers. It actually burrowed out under the street, and then down it for a ways like tunnels, or catacombs.

Simon got flashbacks of the last necromancer he’d killed, who’d turned merchants and their guards into zombies to mine gold. This was similar, but apparently much more stealthy. “Where does he put all the earth?” Simon wondered aloud as he wandered around. “What is the point of all of this?”

While he found many tunnels, including some with strange markings and even words of power, he found few answers. It wasn’t until the third passage that he tried dead-ended at the external wall of someone else's basement that he found his first major clue. There, affixed to the wall, was a bronze plaque with a complex word cast in it.

It took Simon a few minutes to parse it. When he was done, though, he was sure that unless the mage who had made it was very long-lived, it was certain that he'd borrowed the idea from somewhere else. In a sense, he’d enslaved everyone who lived in the dwelling to which it was attached to a minor degree.

How did that even work? Simon hoped that Mr. Blackton had written that part down, because Simon desperately wanted to know that. One thing was for sure, though: he was glad that the Murani had never thought to use DnarthEszloum in such a way. He could almost imagine them attaching these to the walls of the city, and forcing everyone in it to obey the will of the Godking.

“He reinvented witchcraft from first principles,” Simon realized as he read the glyphs. “Only instead of marking the people individually, he’s marking their homes.”

Simon almost touched it, but thought better of it. It didn’t seem to be powered, but he didn’t want to change that or be affected by it. If it touched his soul, his other mark would trigger, and his run would be over.

That put some things into perspective and helped him understand the graveyard a bit more. One of these tunnels undoubtedly led to the graveyard, and whatever mechanism powered the dead, another one probably led to wherever they were dumping the earth, but the rest… it was a maze down here, and Simon quickly realized he could spend months trying to figure out what the warlock he’d shot in the back had been up to.

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