Death After Death

Before this trip, Simon had considered the jungle level a pleasant place. Compared to some of the levels around it, it was a real garden spot, literally and figuratively. That was especially true by the water or at the top of the pyramid, farthest from where the plants grew thickest; it was a paradise. Not only was it beautiful and warm, but he hadn’t seen a single monster that didn’t have roots on any of his visits here.

He could see setting up a luxury resort right there on the river so that all the other adventurers could come here for the mandatory beach episodes that had been in basically every anime he used to enjoy. After spending a week here, though, all of that changed. Now, after trying to clear out a megalithic stone city or temple complex or whatever this was supposed to be while dealing with plants that just wanted him dead, he was completely sick of this place.

It was awful.

What had been pleasant warmth had become sweltering heat, and now, away from the breeze that dominated the open spaces by the river, the insects were a constant nuisance. If you added that to swinging his sword arm over and over until he thought it would fall off, it had become worse than almost any battlefield he’d been on so far. Even fighting the damn orcs, he’d never quite been this tired.

He’d tried using the frost sword to freeze the largest clusters, and that worked okay, but it took forever. After a little trial and error, he’d come down to using fire magic and a machete, which was really just his long sword with the blade broken off so that he could swing it easier. Even though these things wouldn’t burn properly, once he’d gotten that rhythm down, he could clear a whole street in a few hours. However, the hard work and punishing heat took a real toll, and he was forced to take breaks constantly.

Really, he felt like he was taking breaks more than he was working at this point, but it could hardly be helped. He had to spend more time by the river because he was almost out of potatoes. So, it was fish or starve, but as relaxing as it was, it really slowed down progress. Especially since the plants seemed to be regrowing almost as fast as he was killing them.

Purging a building or two of an overgrown rose bush felt great and all, but what was the point when the thing was already resprouting when you went back the next day? Even the ones he’d burned to a crisp were starting to sprout again after a week. What was the point? It’s not like he could keep mowing this city down every week for the rest of his life.

“I have to be missing something here,” Simon sighed as he walked back to his favorite stone, pulled off his boots, and slipped his feet into the cool water. “I don’t think that Helades brought me here because this place needed a gardener. Even a gardener with a sword.”

He smirked at that. He wasn’t even afraid of the biggest plants anymore. They burned best of all, and as strong as their vine-like tendrils were, they moved so slowly that they were really only useful on targets that were sleeping like he’d been the first time he’d come here.

And he definitely wasn’t about to let that happen again. These days, he stayed at the top of one of the lesser pyramids. It was only four stories tall, but even though that was a real hike, it was worth it for a good night’s sleep. None of the vines seemed to grow that high, and he had no interest in finding out what death by slow digestion felt like.

Awake or asleep, he no longer really felt like he was in danger. The moment he started using fire or ice, the biggest plants that had actually spouted those giant carnivorous blossoms would just close up to shield themselves from the worst of it and quietly die. They wouldn’t even give him the excuse that it was too hard to justify leaving.

The only things that were even a threat anymore were those annoying needle-spitting blossoms. They’d gotten him a few times now, and their numbing poison spread pretty rapidly, but it wasn’t anything that lesser cure couldn’t fix. Anyone without that little power would be completely screwed, of course, but he wasn’t concerned. He just took out the most likely clumps with lesser fire or distant fire first and then hacked away at the roots of the rest.

The job had gotten so mundane that he wasn’t even wearing his armor anymore. He couldn’t, not in this heat. Heat stroke was both a constant threat and a bigger danger than feeling his foot or arm start to go numb before he muttered a few magic words. Passing out because he overdid it could very well be a death sentence in this place.

Still, he wished he knew what he was supposed to be doing here. “This is pretty much the opposite of killing zombies or goblins,” he complained, not sure what else he should be doing. “Why do you kill zombies and goblins? So you don’t get more zombies and goblins. But plants in a jungle? There aren’t even any people around.”

That had been his secret theory at the start of this. That he’d find some tribal remnant he’d have to help. Helping people seemed to be an increasingly important theme in The Pit. After all, he’d helped those kids, he’d helped that doctor, and of course, he’d helped the people of Schwarzenbruck, but here there was no one to help, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with that information. He supposed that the task could have just as easily been to knock over the giant pyramid that dominated this place. Honestly, that might have been easier than trying to kill all the carnivorous plants that swarmed it.

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Simon kept searching, though, certain that eventually, he’d find some dark secret they had to be protecting. He wasn’t sure if that was the right move, but it was the only one he had. If he didn’t find something in another week, he promised himself that he’d move on and give one of the later levels a try.

So, that’s just what he did. Over the next four days, he made forays into different parts of the city. Each time he was looking for a secret door or an evil temple that might have spawned this little nightmare so that he could hack at its roots instead of its branches, but he never located one.

Twice, he’d found crypts to descend into. There, the most interesting things he’d discovered were enough legible pictographs to figure out that this place had been the capital of a vast empire before it crumbled away. It was hard to make sense of everything because he lacked the context to understand all the metaphors, but it was plain to see that the brighter the accomplishments, the older the sarcophagus.

He got more of an Incan vibe than an Aztec vibe from them, though. They were war-like, sure, but he hadn’t found any evidence that they conducted ritual sacrifice on an industrial scale or anything. They hadn’t seemed to have discovered words of power either, because he found no new ones in any of his reading sessions.

Even when he pried open the tombs themselves, all he found were jade-decorated corpses that had long since decayed to bone and dust. There was nothing there to take or to threaten him. This struck Simon as strange, because sometimes in the tangles of the plants he’d find scraps of cloth or the bones of their victims, but that meant that people would have been here in the last few months or years, wouldn’t it?

How long did bones even last when they were exposed to the weather? How long did articles of clothing? He didn’t know, but the conflicting evidence meant that the city he was currently hacking his way through had been abandoned for a couple of years or a couple of centuries. He wasn’t sure which was more likely, but none of that stopped him from trying to find out.

Simon was hacking away at the charred remains of the cluster he’d just cleared out when he felt the sting. He barely registered it at first because he was too busy trying to see if he had finally unearthed some secret worth finding. He hadn’t, though. He’d only found another partially collapsed building with a few scattered pictographs that were still legible.

He pulled the needle from his neck and grunted in annoyance at the blood-tipped barb before he cast it aside. Then he opened his mouth to speak the cleansing words that would make this minor problem go away. Only no sounds came out.

‘Aufvarum Delzam,’ he tried to shout. No words were formed, though. Instead, there were only a few squeaking sounds mixed in with the sound of dry heaving as air exited his lungs, but his vocal cords did nothing to shape it.

The plant had paralyzed his larynx, he suddenly realized with horror. By intelligence or chance, it had taken away his most potent weapon, and suddenly he felt helpless.

It’s okay, he tried to tell himself as he slowly backed away. Everything in this area was somewhere between cooked and halfway dead. He just had to go somewhere safe and wait for this to wear off. As he started walking away, though, he dropped his sword and looked down at his slack fingers in horror. He willed himself to clench them back into a fist, but instead, all they did was tremble.

Simon didn’t need to see anything else, he just turned and ran. He’d never been dosed long enough to watch it spread like this, and the speed was truly horrifying. It had only been a couple of minutes, and already it had reached his hands.

He could feel his heart slowing now, too. It didn’t stop it, of course. Stopping it would be a mercy, and the Pit was never that kind. Instead, it forced him to slow as his balance started to fail, and his energy levels declined precipitously.

He reached the pyramid safe haven he’d come to rely on, but he never reached the cubby he’d been sleeping in. He only got five stairs up before his legs gave out. He managed to crawl up another two, but after that, all he could do was lay there and pant.

Simon’s heart pounded in his chest as he watched helplessly while tendrils from a nearby alley he hadn’t completely finished purging slowly crawled toward him over the next fifteen minutes. When they finally reached him, he couldn’t even feel the tentacle wrapping around him so slowly that it took almost an hour before it started dragging him toward the charred maw of the blossom he hadn’t finished eradicating by his feet.

This had the unwelcome benefit of giving him an excellent view of what was about to happen to him. In fact, Simon couldn’t look away. The paralytic was so powerful that he couldn’t blink. All he could do was stare at the giant scorched blossom and the giant teeth-like thorns in the center that were slowly spreading wider and wider to accommodate the large meal.

Simon focused all of his energy on trying to whisper even one of the words of power he knew. Cure. Fire. Ice. Force. Anything.

His mind was clear, but his throat continued to be paralyzed. The only motion he could accomplish was the shallowest of breathing. That was the only thing that kept him from hyperventilating as he watched the plant’s teeth start to shred his boots, pants, and eventually his legs.

He couldn’t look away, but now at least he was grateful that he couldn’t feel any pain, because what was happening to his body looked agonizing. It was like getting your hand caught in the garbage disposal or one of those safety videos where something terrible happens to someone in a factory.

He could only watch as the motion of the thorns drew him in, in abject horror. Fortunately, he passed out from blood loss before the thing had gotten past his knees, and he was finally freed from the horror of that ending.

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