Death After Death

Once Simon was well enough that the village’s matriarch began to find an excuse to ask him when he was going to be leaving almost every day, he rented a cottage outside of town where he wouldn’t have to see her as often. He still needed to visit Rivenwood two or three times a week, though. Not only did he rely on the townspeople for food as always, but no matter how careful he tried to be with his targets, he was always going back to the fletcher for another bundle of arrows.

He had to visit the smith fairly regularly at the beginning, too, of course. However, once Simon had the old man make him the tools he needed, that part at least was done. Though he’d spend most afternoons over the next month scratching the perverse symbols ever deeper into the steel short sword he’d bought for just this purpose, he didn’t need anyone else’s help with that. Light, patience, and his steel scribe were all he required.

It turned out that he’d gotten it backward, though. He’d thought that crafting a magic sword was going to be the hardest thing he was going to have to do, and getting better with his bow was going to be the easiest. In reality, though, it was the opposite.

It took almost two months of careful, painstaking effort to carve all nine runes and glyphs onto the steel, along with the 12 connecting lines, but that had merely been time-consuming. Learning to improve his skill with the long bow, on the other hand, was supposed to be easy, but even after a full moon, he felt like he hadn’t gotten much better at all.

Sure, standing there, he could hit the bull’s eye every time. Even for fairly far-away targets, that wasn’t too hard. But shooting like that would only be enough to get him killed. And that wasn’t enough. He was trying to master shooting and moving the way that they did in the movies, and it seemed to be almost impossible.

He was never going to be a Legolas, but he would have settled for at least a Robin Hood. Apparently, those skills took a lot longer to practice than a few months, though. In the end, he had to settle for learning how to arc his shots over cover and shoot blindly at his targets, but even that was hit or miss, and after spending weeks of time practicing the technique, he could hit a target on the other side of his cottage only one in four times from fifty yards away.

His other experiments went even better, though, especially with Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́ Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼. Though fire and lightning were cool, lesser force quickly became the most useful of all his trump cards. He could apply it to himself, letting himself leap impossibly high and even granting him a double-jump-like effect. Though greater force would likely be enough to turn an enemy into paste, or at least break every bone in their body, lesser force had some real killing power too - as long as he was willing to lose the arrow, he thought with a grin.

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́ Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼” he whispered as he let go of his arrow. The projectile was too fast for him to watch with the naked eye, of course, but he found it just where he knew he would: embedded in a nearby tree all the way up to the feathers.

“Pretty cool,” he said to himself as he examined his handiwork, “But figuring out how to bend the shot would be even cooler…”

That was one trick he hadn’t been able to figure out. Running and jumping while firing his bow wouldn’t become a necessary skill if he could just figure out how to shoot more effectively around corners, but sadly that was harder than it looked because this magic system wasn’t very magical. Sure - it might look that way, but when it came to lesser force, all he was doing was injecting a little velocity into the system, and in this case, that was somehow added by his mind at the moment he spoke the words, but he had no idea how, and making the timing anything close to exact was impossible.

It was really only doable on slower things, like his jumps, but even there, he’d ended up with a few nasty bruises over the last few weeks. He’d never be one of those parkour guys you could see on YouTube, even with magic. That was for sure.

The people of the village didn’t seem to dislike him for any of this, though. Though it was true that they didn’t see any of his magical experiments, he was sure everyone had heard the rumors by now. Still, most mornings, when the weather was nice, he was in town helping someone lift timbers into place to help put all the ruined lives back together, and no one had been anything but kind.

After being in the little village for two months, he knew almost everyone by name, and were it not for a handful of fire-scarred buildings that remained, no one would know that this place had been a war zone recently. There had been rumors that the orcs were returning lately, but Simon had personally gone out to investigate and found nothing to substantiate them.

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Honestly, that was probably the reason that Hybissian hadn’t run him off yet, of course. Still, orcs were unsubtle creatures. He’d found a few goblin tracks once, but a village of this size would not be easy prey for a goblin nest, even without him here. The villagers had thanked him very much for investigating, but he could see they still worried behind their smiles.

Even Majoria tried to get friendly with him after a few weeks, though this time Simon was careful to maintain more distance from the young girl. The last thing he needed was for her to get the wrong idea again because he still had no interest whatsoever in any woman that wasn’t Freya. He suspected he’d be mourning her for a long time.

In fact, Simon was fairly sure that even if he went to the zombie level tomorrow and that he, by some miracle, found her, he’d still be mourning her even after that. Because it wasn’t just her. It was both of them. It was the crappy little cottage and the boring little life they had together. And, of course, it was their unborn child. That last part he shied away from. He was too raw to think about it. Even now.

As the days passed by, though, he found it increasingly hard to recognize that life though. Or himself, for that matter. One day while he was washing his face in the rain barrel, he caught a look in the mirror for the first time in a long time, and he barely recognized himself.

In real life, Simon had always been a little chubby, with short hair, but now he was gaunt with hair that went almost down to his shoulders. No, gaunt was the wrong word, he realized. Defined was probably what he meant, but he’d never thought that he’d look this way, so it was strange. Between the defined cheekbones and jawline, he definitely looked older than he remembered. That was especially true with the stubble that was threatening to grow into a beard after going for so long without shaving.

His face wasn’t the only part of him with this new-found definition, of course. He’d been working out so much lately that his chest and abdomen were muscled in a way that he was sure required steroids. He hadn’t taken anything like that, though, and he was still practically ripped.

“I don’t know why you linger,” Hybissian said finally to him one beautiful summer day, “but you test my patience, and you must leave soon.”

“Do you really think…” Simon grunted, chopping the wood he’d been breaking into smaller billets so hard that he left the axe embedded in the stump that was his chopping block before he turned to face his unwelcome guest. “That anyone in Rivenwood would be able to stop me if I decided I wanted to settle here for good?”

Simon smiled when he said it, but he was incredibly frustrated by this attitude, and when he spun around, he noticed that two of her most imposing nephews were flanking her on either side with hands on the hilt of their swords.

Even with this little display, he didn’t regret what he said. He was fairly sure he could take Rolf and Vig without breaking anything important, but he was completely certain that unless Hybissian had some secret magic power she’d never shown before now, none of them would have a chance against him.

He let the threat hang between them for several seconds before she spoke next. “We all have to sleep sometime,” she said grudgingly.

Rolf smiled at that, showing off a couple of missing teeth in the process, but Simon shrugged it off. The man had tried to intimidate him before, and he was plenty strong, but he moved like an ox, not a warrior, and Simon had nothing to fear from him as long as he could see him coming.

“You know - I knew another woman that could see my aura like you can,” Simon agreed. “She killed me in my sleep rather than just trust me too. I’m detecting a real pattern here.”

“We’ve been more than fair with you…” Hybissian said slowly. “But you’re coming dangerously close to wearing out your welcome.”

“Well, where I’m going is almost as dangerous as trying to fight me would be,” he said evenly as he looked at the old woman. Even though he was certain he could swat her like a bug, he still had trouble meeting her flinty gaze. She was a harder person than he would ever be, but his preparations would still take a while longer. “All I’ve done is help the people of your community get back on their feet while I get some exercise, and as soon as I’m ready, I’ll be gone. I hope that’s in a week or two, but whether we part as friends or enemies… that’s a choice I leave to you.”

She glared at him for a few more seconds before she finally turned on her heel and departed. Simon breathed a sigh of relief at that. He honestly wasn’t sure two more weeks would be enough, but he hoped it would be because the last thing he wanted to do, despite his bluff, was to fight the people he’d already saved once.

After all, Hybissian wasn’t wrong that he was trouble. Trouble followed him like a loyal pet and hurt everyone he got close to. He needed answers, though, and the only way he was going to get them was to be ready for the challenges that lay ahead. He needed to be ready to fight an unnatural blizzard, a deadly plague, a tribe of lizardmen, and of course, that fucking basilisk.

He’d come too far to cut corners, especially when it came to that last one. When the time came to kill that lizard, he needed to be more ready than he’d ever been for anything in his whole life.

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