Death After Death-Chapter 214 - Ambushed
He wasted no time and kicked down the door. It was barred, but even so, the flimsy thing gave without the need for a word of force. That let Simon finally see what was happening. The small dining room contained the ruins of dinner spread across the floor, along with an elderly farmer and his wife and their younger daughters, who both seemed to be women in their twenties.
It wasn’t the young women that the thing was attacking, though. They were just screaming. Instead, the vampire had the man pinned to the wall high enough that his feet weren’t touching the floor.
No one looked at Simon despite his dramatic entrance. He didn’t blame them. The vampire had just torn out the man’s throat and was glorying in a grisly waterfall of blood. Compared to that, it was hard to imagine anything more shocking.
Simon wasn’t sure the vampire would have turned even if he’d uttered some stupid battle cry. He didn’t, though. Instead, he just walked right up behind the vampire and stabbed him with his stake as hard as he could.
All the best deaths are anticlimactic, Simon thought, hoping to drop this prick in a single blow.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to pull it off. Even though the piece of sharpened wood bit deep into his flesh, the thing reacted almost instantly, dropping its victim, and whirling on Simon with a vicious backhand that knocked him backward. It roared in pain, but even before Simon hit the table, he whispered a word of force, and the stake in his left hand shot forward like a bullet, piercing the thing’s chest a second time.
This one went even deeper, and it staggered it. Simon had no idea if that was enough, and immediately pulled out two more weapons, but even as he did so, he decided that it was unnecessary. The thing was dying.
No, scratch that, he clarified as he watched it smolder and decay. It’s dead already. The vampire might not know it yet, but he did. It roared in pain a second time, but as it did so, it started to fall apart into little chunks of ash.
Once Simon decided the thing was toast, he ignored it and dropped the stakes. Part of him told him that was a terrible mistake, but there was a man bleeding out feet away from him, and literally every second mattered. So, instead of watching the vampire’s death throes for the next minute. Simon moved to heal the other man.
It was a rough time. “Hyakk,” he muttered, using a word of healing to repair just the jugular and refill as much of the lost blood as he could. Then, as he tried to understand what parts of the muscle and the trachea were damaged, the farmer’s hysterical wife tried to pull him off of the man.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Get off him! Leave the man his dignity at least!”
Simon didn’t bother to respond to her charges. Her fists were tiny, and her blows lacked strength. She was barely a distraction.
“Mama! Leave him, mama! He’s trying to help!” one of the young woman said as both of them pulled her bodily off of him. Simon ignored them, other than a quick check back at the ashes to make sure the vampire really was staying dead.
The maimed farmer was still choking, which meant that he was trying to breathe, but he wouldn't keep doing so for long without a little help. Simon tackled that next, using several words of lesser healing to pin the mangled flesh back into place a little at a time, followed by a full word of healing to try to put it back together. He had no idea how to make a larynx or an epiglottis, but he was pretty sure if he put it all back together, the body would do most of the heavy lifting for him.
Slowly, the man’s breathing improved, and even though he was unconscious and flayed open, Simon thought he would probably make it. He used one more word of healing to put the muscle, fat, and skin back together, then followed that up with a word of greater cure in case the man had been infected with vampirism. He had no idea how that would work, but if it was anything like it did with zombies, it was better to be safe than sorry.
It was only when all of that was done, and the man seemed likely to make it, that he turned to the women and said, “Please, could I have some water to wash my hands and his wound.”
One girl moved to comply while the other asked, “Was that magic… are you a warlock?”
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Simon nodded because no other explanation was likely to work. “I am,” he agreed. “I was hunting this vampire, and I got here too late.”
“Too late?” the mother gasped. “In disbelief. How could you have been too late? Do you know what that animal would have done to us if you hadn’t…”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Shhhh, Mama, be still,” the second daughter said as she handed Simon a pitcher of water. “It's all going to be okay. Isn’t it, stranger.”
“I think it might be,” Simon agreed as he used the pitcher to rinse away the blood from the wound to make sure it was healed shut before he rinsed off his hands.
After that, he lifted the deathly pale farmer and carried him to his room. He’d been planning to leave him there and introduce himself more properly to the other women in the cottage, as well as see what he might do to fix the splinted door.
However, as soon as Simon set the man down, he stirred and grasped Simon’s sleeve. Simon paused, and the farmer tried to speak more than once but was having real difficulty with it. That was only to be expected since he’d only just had his throat ripped out.
Simon tried to tell him to save his strength, but he seemed insistent. So, instead, Simon got him a glass of water, and after choking and sputtering on that for a few seconds, Simon was surprised to find that it helped remarkably.
Once he’d finished the glass, the farmer began to speak again, and this time, Simon could finally understand what he was saying if he leaned in close.
“I should be dead,” the man whispered, “But I ain’t. Still, you should kill me just to be sure. I don’t want none of that curse near my daughters, you understand? They’re old enough to start families of their own, not to start killing them!”
“You won’t have to worry about that,” Simon assured him, hoping it was true. “I healed your body and purged your blood of the curse. You won’t be having any troubles there.”
“Well, if that’s the case, it will be a miracle,” the man sighed. “But you should be saving those fer yerself. You killed the dog that did that, but the witch that he serves will take that personally.”
“He had a master?” Simon asked. Simon seemed to recall him mentioning something about that just before this asshole had killed him the last time, but that was a long time ago, and he would have to consult the mirror for those details.
The farmer nodded. “The dark lady.” he rasped with his raw throat. “While I thank you for your help, she’ll know what you did. She’ll come for you. You should flee while you can.”
“Maybe I’ll pay her a visit too,” Simon said, not put off by this. He’d been planning to look for the next level and leave right away, but dawn was only a few hours away, and vampires were kind of helpless when the sun was out, so putting down a few more might be fun. “Do you know where their lair is?”
“Everyone knows,” the man whispered, pointing at the wall across from him. “Castle Gravenstone. It is a cursed place that was empty for decades, but a few years ago, she returned and brought all manner of wickedness with her.”
Simon shook his head at that. Evil was like a fire, and no matter how many times and places he put it out, it always sprang up somewhere else. This one he probably didn’t even need to pin on his doppelgänger. There was a lot of evil here in the east that he’d barely touched on. He’d found one werewolf, along with rebels and cultists. That probably meant there were a lot more of each, just waiting to unleash their evil on the world.
“If it was morning, you could see it from here,” the farmer continued. “It’s not even half a day's ride, and it lords over the whole valley, but I wouldn’t go there. It is a fearsome fortress and the living that follow her as well as the dead. The region prospers under her peace, but even so… the beasts must feed, and sometimes a family just… they just vanish, but we all know what happens.”
Maybe the Unspoken aren’t so bad after all, he reflected.
“I’m pretty fearsome myself,” Simon said, “But what I want to know is if it’s so terrible here, why not simply pack up and go somewhere else?”
“Where would we go?” the farmer asked. “I don’t speak the westerling languages as you clearly do, and the south and eastern lands are much more dangerous. They’re full of monsters. As to the north, well, we both know that’s impossible with the war.”
“What war?” Simon asked as he wondered about the monsters the man mentioned. He was getting the sneaking suspicion that with all the problems he’d had in Brin and Ionia, they were the easiest zones that he was likely to encounter. Chiara was shaping up to be much uglier, and then, of course, there was Murani to deal with and—
“The one that the Mountain Lords are losing, with the Murani,” the farmer interrupted Simon’s thoughts by reading his mind.
“Here, too?” Simon asked. “You’ll forgive me. I come from the west, as you’ve guessed, but I thought that war was done.”
“Aye, in the west, it has been for a time, as I understand it,” the man nodded, “But that doesn’t mean they’ve given up. They’ve simply turned their sights elsewhere.”
“So, you’d rather live beneath the threat of vampires than die from one of these other dangers?” Simon asked sourly.
The man went to answer but instead suffered a coughing fit, and all he could do was nod until it finished. “It’s a bargain with the devils, I grant you, but it’s worked out pretty well until tonight.”
That answer annoyed Simon, but before he could press the man any further, he was shooed away by his wife, who insisted that he needed his rest. He did. The farmer’s life had been spared, but he was probably still looking at pneumonia or something, in the best case. Simon could stay and tend to him for a few days. Even without magic, a few herbs he knew would go a long way. However, if what he’d said about vengeance was true, all of that would probably have to wait until tomorrow at least.
Simon asked the daughters a few more questions, and though they were obviously afraid of him, they answered his questions quickly and as honestly as he could. They didn’t know a lot, but they shared what they did.
It’s probably because they’re afraid of me, not in spite of it, he realized as he finally decided to get a few hours of sleep before daylight.
Staying up all night would be the smart thing, but whatever vengeance awaited him wasn’t going to happen instantaneously in a world without cell phones. If he wanted to purge the castle of whatever creatures lay within it, he was definitely going to need to rest. He’d used a lot of magic in a short time, and he felt drained.
