Ch. 444 - A Bloody Mess

As the darkness deepened and the night passed, Simon wasn’t even tempted to sleep. Instead, he sat there, holding a sharpened stake in both hands as he looked out across the valley. At first, he’d meditated there just to calm his nerves, but the longer he sat, the more it became about seeing the weave of the world.

Simon hadn’t used a wand in over a week, and while he wasn’t sure that trend would continue with the floors that lay ahead, it was beginning to pay dividends, and he was determined to savor it. He might have to smite some new threat with lightning at any point, which could set him back quite a ways.

So, for now, he was content to enjoy the world like a painting as he kept an eye out for threats. He enjoyed the faint swirls of gray from the animals that populated the natural world, and the brighter whites that leaked through the windows of the family farm below.

How pure would my sight become if I just spent a life in a place like this, raising a family and tending my fields? Would it be enough to finally understand how all the pieces he’d discovered fit together?

Without vampires, this seemed like a good place to live. The air was clean, the farms were fertile, and though he knew there were probably still goblins up in the crags of the mountains where he’d once dwelled, it felt safe.

At least it did until he caught sight of the vampire. It appeared as a single bat cloaked in shadows, flying toward him, and once he realized what it was, that sight was enough to shake him from his vision completely.

When that happened, he lost sight of the spec of evil completely in the dark sky, and it took him several seconds of concentration to get it back as flashbacks of his last time on this level assaulted him. The wall. The woman. The endless hunger for blood.

Simon shook free of that just in time to see the black cloud stop coming toward him and move toward the house instead. To his true sight, the vampire’s aura was so dark that he made the night glow like twilight by comparison. This was an evil man who had done evil deeds and needed to be stopped.

It’s all playing out just like before, Simon thought as he rose to his feet and started to run down the hill toward the farmhouse. But why? Freya can’t be a part of this, can she?

He’d been able to assure himself that it was delusional to think that Vampires would return just because the level was the same, but clearly, he’d been wrong. The vampires were still here, and if Freya was too, he had no idea what he was going to do.

Last time, he hadn’t come until he heard the sounds of struggle. This time, he was already almost there as the vampire used his gaze on the girl at the door and charmed his way inside. Is that Emma or Ara? he wondered as he pushed himself to go that much faster. Last time they’d barred the door behind the monster, and this time Simon had no desire to use a word of force to get inside.

He managed to get in just before the girl shut it completely. She should have looked at him with fear, but instead she offered him only a dazed look as she opened the door wider to allow him in, just like the vampire. Simon ignored that for now and charged the monster.

He’d only finished smashing the man of the house into the table, and hadn’t even yet bitten him, when he turned to face Simon. “Oh, another hero?” the vampire laughed as Simon charged the vampire with his sword held high in his left hand. “Isn’t that just—”

He never finished his taunt. As the vampire grabbed the wrist of Simon’s sword arm, he plunged the wooden stake he’d concealed in the sleeve of his right hand deep into the man’s unarmored chest. He felt the second weapon skitter off the bone and sink into his flesh. It wasn’t a deep wound, but it was enough.

Moments later, before anyone could react or even understand what he’d done, the stake caught fire, and the body burned from the inside out, falling to pieces. In moments, the monster looked more like a pile of cinders than a man.

The whole thing was over in seconds; it was anticlimactic, really. Instead of a knock-down, drag-out brawl, it was like his opponent had just vanished in a burst of smoke. There wasn’t even a struggle, really, just a painful wrenching of his wrist, and a moment of absolute panic as he was assaulted by intense deja vu, and then it was over, and there was nothing but screaming and ashes.

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He’d known what the threat was going to be, and he’d reacted. He’d even glimpsed what the vampire’s next actions were going to be thanks to his midnight aura, but Simon couldn’t say for certain if it had been the same one he’d met here twice before or not.

He was still trying to figure that out when the farmer rose and thanked him profusely. “I don’t know how you knew he’d come for me, but if you hadn’t…” he trailed off, not wanting to further upset the crying women around them. Simon merely nodded, making no move to comfort them either. Their wailing was somehow cathartic. He hadn’t cried in a long time, but right now he wanted to.

This isn’t like the basilisk, he acknowledged. When I killed it, it was over, but now? There are more of them. That castle is almost certainly crawling with the bastards, just like before.

Simon wanted to do anything but go to that castle. In fact, if he’d known where the portal to the next level was, he would have taken it, regardless of whether or not this level was complete.

“How can you be sure he didn’t bring this evil upon us, huh?” the farmer’s wife countered, practically daring him to defend himself, even though he did nothing of the sort. “Maybe he’s the one that the monster was looking for!”

“Hush, woman,” the farmer answered. He was still wincing when he moved and probably had at least a cracked rib, but if his pride was more important than his health, Simon wasn’t going to fix the problem. At least not right now.

Maybe I’ll use the wand on him when he goes to sleep, Simon told himself. Regardless, the last time the man had been nearly bled dry in under a minute. So he was in much better shape than he’d been before.

It was only as the chaos of the home calmed down that he did. Once the farmer’s wife stopped blaming Simon for what had happened, and the girls picked up the remains of dinner, they made tea, and Simon sat there, drinking and talking. He wasn’t even trying to understand the situation, though he should have been. He was too distracted for that, and for a bit, all he did was nod and listen to their tale of woe.

That much was easy, since it sounded a great deal like the last time he’d been here. Only one major difference stood out: he eventually realized that no one was talking about a dark lady. Instead, from time to time, they said, ‘our lord,’ and once the farmer said, ‘Lord Souzirin,’ though he crossed himself and his wife chastised him for saying the evil name aloud.

That snapped him out of his trance. “A lord, you said? No dark lady?”

“I believe he keeps a… harem of sorts in his walls,” the farmer answered, trying to keep his indelicate point vague in the presence of his girls. “That’s what the rumors say, at least, but there isn’t a Lady Sou— He rules alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“And the mountain clans? Are they too busy fighting the Murani to come to your aid?” Simon continued?

“The Murani haven’t threatened this region since the time of my father’s father,” the farmer answered, looking at Simon more strangely. “Why would the Charian lords help with a problem that the Brinnish lords have been unable to dislodge?”

“The Brinnish lords?” Simon asked, dumbly repeating.

“Since I was a boy,” the farmer grumbled. “I don’t much care for it, but I suppose I’d have to pay taxes either way, and it doesn’t matter much who I pay them to.”

That gave Simon another wave of vertigo. He’d walked into fields of battle, but never into the aftermath where a whole territory had been conquered by someone else. And by me, likely, as he considered the timeline and thought of his short time with the false duke. But why? Why would I conquer the Charian lowlands? Did I stop there? Did I conquer other adjoining lands, too?

If this farmer’s timeline was right, and he had no reason to doubt it, then this would have been a little over a decade after some version of himself had seized the throne of Brin. The idea boggled his mind. His enemy was to the north, not the south-east. He should be forging tighter alliances with the other nations and trying to build something bigger, not conquering them.

For now, he set that aside and focused on the conversation. Then, when he got all of the answers he could, he stepped outside for some fresh air to try to understand how history might have played out his way. He was nearly 70 years beyond level zero at this moment, but unlike his last runs, the Murani didn’t seem to be a problem anymore, or at least not locally. It could be that they’d just shifted their attacks west to Schwarzenbruck or nations he wasn’t even aware of on other borders.

As Simon pondered, he paced the bounds of the farmhouse perimeter. He’d told the family he was looking for any signs of further attacks, but mostly he was just thinking things through. It occurred to him only when he was about to go back inside that what he’d really been doing was looking for the portal to the next level. As much as he wanted to understand this one and what was happening in the wider world, he wanted desperately to get away from this place.

Unfortunately, he never found it. It wasn’t in the house, the shed, or the barn, nor was it in any of the fence gates. That meant that he was going to have to go to the castle. That was the most logical place for it to be, after all.

“I should just skip it,” he told himself. “I should go west, find a nice town somewhere near the capital to settle down and learn what I can, and then I can come here on level zero and level that fucking place with an earthquake and pretend this floor never happened.”