Death After Death (Roguelike Isekai)

For the first few minutes, Simon just enjoyed the change of scenery. As the distant rumble of the volcano faded along with the portal, he listened to the sound of rain softly pelting the leafy canopy above him. It both felt and smelled like peace, and he decided right away, as he pulled his cloak up over his head, that he needed more days like this one.

While anywhere felt better than being in Ionar, this place felt special to him. He reflected on that as he started walking and decided that was because it had been one of his first real successes, and he was looking forward to seeing the children again. He'd always felt a little bad he hadn't done more for them. Hell, I'll escort them the whole way this time, he told himself.

He was uncertain if he'd stay there for years and years to see what future troubles assailed them, but he certainly might. It had been a long time since he'd set Crowvar to rights, and he might enjoy a life of doing that with a larger city.

Plus, I can see what else there is to Charia beyond vampires and zombies that way, he thought cheerfully.

Just putting the volcano in the rearview was enough to improve his mood immensely. He'd have to deal with it again, of course, but that was a problem for him to deal with in another life.

Simon didn't allow himself to lose his focus completely in such thoughts, but he'd grown so powerful that he no longer felt the need to jump at shadows, even though he walked with his sword in his right hand and his runed walking stick in his left as he walked calmly through the forest, toward the road. However, after only five or six minutes, he knew that he was completely lost.

That was annoying since he had no magical location spell to help him find his way. Fortunately, he could see the stars through the trees above him well enough to mark north, which meant that, at the very least, he wasn't going in circles.

"I didn't even think that I could miss the road," he complained to himself as he looked around for anything that might be familiar. He didn't have any luck with that, though, and might have wandered around all night if not for the scream that rang out distantly.

Simon cursed and, turning ninety degrees, ran toward it as he charged through the underbrush. It was the scream of a woman, which almost certainly meant Kaylee. While her death now would be enough to end her part in the massacre that lay a decade in their future, that still wasn't enough of a reason to see a sweet young girl like her dead.

The forest seemed interminable, but the screaming didn't stop, and as he got a little closer, he could hear the irregular screeches of the beast, too. It was definitely the same monster as always, and that thought spurred him on all the harder.

Fortunately, Simon arrived in time. He burst out of the foliage onto the road fifty yards from the site of the massacre. Instead of devouring children, the big, ugly bird was clawing desperately at the overturned wagon while the screaming continued inside it. The hole the eight-foot-tall super predator had made was big enough for it to get its whole beak in there now, and any second, it would tear the whole thing asunder and devour its quarry.

He didn't hesitate. "Hey, ugly!" Simon called, leveling his sword at the thing.

That didn't get its attention, but the word of distant fire he launched next did. That splashed against the side of the thing's face, setting its feathers and fur alight. The monster roared with agony and then, half-blind, turned to charge Simon, trailing oily black smoke.

For just a moment, he was tempted to take it with his sword, but he was too out of practice for that. It was definitely doable. He could feign an attack, pivot around to its blind side, and then hack its spine. If he'd made his sword a vorpal weapon rather than a vampiric one, he probably would have tried it, but he didn't want the kids he was about to rescue to be devoured when he fucked it up, so instead he used a word of force to behead it before it was halfway to him.

Then, once it stopped twitching, he carefully stepped around it and made his way to the wagon. He didn't remember exactly how it looked the last time he was here, but he was pretty sure it wasn't this rough. The thing looked ready to come apart, and he peeked through one of the holes that the beast had gouged with claws and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the boy and his maid were safe.

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"It's okay," he told them both, forcing himself to smile as he remembered how much he'd scared them on at least one of his previous visits. He wasn't sure which one. "You can come out now. No one's going to hurt you."

Both of them looked at him with fear in their eyes, but Simon could hardly blame them for that. They'd been slow to trust him last time, too. At least this time, they didn't actually see me use any magic, so I don't have to explain that part, he thought with a measure of relief. Eventually, they crawled out and joined him. Simon tried to stand between the children and the worst of the carnage, but the night did the heavy lifting there.

"What are we going to do!" Eddek wailed, trying not to cry. "Everyone is dead! How will we live to see the sunrise!"

Simon felt bad for the kid and assured him it was going to be okay. "It's a terrible thing," he agreed, "but there's a miller's family not far from here. We'll stay the night there, and then in the morning, we'll continue on. Charia is not so far away. It's a lot of walking, but we'll manage."

"I'm not sure that we should go off with you," Kayla said. "Eddek's father will hear of this, and when he does, he'll send for someone and—"

"I get it," Simon agreed. "You don't have to trust me. Maybe just accept that I'm not quite as bad as the owlbear, and we can work on the rest later."

Their conversation continued, and slowly, after a few minutes, after he'd built up some trust, Eddek started to tell him about where he was going and why he was going. It was a festival in Adonan, the capital of Charia. Simon had long since forgotten the particulars of this conversation, but as it slowly came back to him, it all sounded right.

The only anomalous thing was that he was pretty sure that Kayla had only been the young lord's surviving servant on most of the occasions. There'd been another girl, at least once, but he'd seen such strange behavior in the loops between Freya and Breena as well, and it wasn't like he could ask the girl about it. She was a little more withdrawn than her master, but Simon suspected that had been the case before, too.

"You're never alone," Simon said, trying to reassure them when Eddek sounded like he might be about to start whining again. "You just need to…"

Simon whirled at the sound of rustling in the bushes, drawing his sword on instinct. He'd killed the owlbear already, so there shouldn't be anything dangerous around here. But he was wrong. Even as he watched, a second owlbear stepped out of the woods. The thing was huge and at least a foot taller than the one he'd just killed, but it still managed to move with a predatory grace that he found unsettling.

The thing's giant golden eyes took in the scene, and as soon as it saw the burned carcass of the other one, it let loose a terrible screech and then charged Simon.

Did that make this one the male or the female of the species? He wondered as he opened his mouth to shout a word of power. He supposed it didn't matter. He'd killed one-half of a mated pair already from the looks of things, and neither the size of these beasties nor the prospect that he was about to orphan a nest of things somewhere stopped him from doing what needed to be done.

"Oonbetit!" he yelled, sending out a line of pure, sharpened force into the thing.

It was too late to use something blunt or even add a greater word. He had enough time to speak two syllables before the thing reached him, not four. That should have been enough. It would have been enough if he could have stepped back a few steps, but that's where the children were, huddling safely under their wrecked wagon.

So even though he sliced the predator neatly in two, from crotch to groin, the left half of the thing still managed to crash into him, slamming him against the wagon. It was like he'd been kicked by a mule, and though the wooden wall of the wagon broke beneath their weight, Simon tried to push the weight off of him. It was only a few hundred pounds of bloody bird. He should have been able to do that much.

Unfortunately, one of the shattered planks had been transformed by their crash into a wooden spear, and it stabbed through both Simon and the carcass, deflating one of his lungs and pinning them together. Even that was fixable with magic. He'd been hurt worse and thought it likely that he could make a full recovery, even from such an ugly wound. The real problem was that he couldn't breathe. He wasn't sure if his ribs were cracked or broken, but with this thing on top of him, the real problem was that he'd had the wind knocked out of him and no way to fix it.

"Sir Simon!" Eddek shouted, immediately running to his aid.

Isn't that ironic, he thought, struggling weakly as he watched the boy try and fail to pull several hundred pounds of owlbear off him without success. I would have killed for this scenario only a life or two ago.

Simon's last thought before the darkness took him was hoping that the kids would be okay. He wouldn't be there to save them, but with any luck, they'd make it to the miller he'd mentioned.