Death After Death-Chapter 216: To the Grave

At first, the men came at him one at a time. Simon fought each of them in turn, but none of those fights became grand duels. Some of the men were nearly as good with a sword as he was, but against the blade that he’d chosen for today’s combat, they were helpless. It cleaved right through their weapons and armor without any issues at all.

Weapons like this will make me lazy, he reminded himself as he cut down his fourth opponent.

In some ways, it was fortunate that he couldn’t just do this whenever he wanted. If he used a sword that left such an obvious path of carnage behind most of the time, it would start some very bad rumors and leave some awful legends about Simon the Butcher in his wake. He didn’t want that, but today, he wasn’t going to leave anyone alive, or undead, or whatever. If you were working for a vampire, you would meet the same end they did, as far as he was concerned.

After he cut down some of the best warriors the other side had to offer, the rest started to bunch up. He discouraged that by launching another arrow at the eight men who were forming up with pikes and spears on the steps of the inner keep. Then, when they slammed the front door shut on him while he was walking over those smoking corpses, he leveled it with a word of greater force.

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I've got to pace myself, he reminded himself. He could have easily cut his way through the heavy iron-bound doors, just as he’d done with the castle door, but the time for subtlety was done. He’d taken out all the most ready defenders, and he wanted those that were ahead of him to flee before him, which meant that being a little showy was in his interest, even if he could probably only use another two or three major words today.

“I won’t need nearly that many,” he said aloud as he walked over the shattered doors and the bodies of the men that had been crushed by them. “This place isn’t half the nightmare I thought it would be.”

Really, the castle seemed to be pretty normal compared to what he’d seen. It was a bit undermanned, and it looked a little evil, but even with all of that, he wouldn’t have believed there were vampires hiding out here if he hadn’t killed one of them last night.

He kept expecting one of them to spring out and attack him or unleash some hideous secret weapon. He had to keep reminding himself that’s not the way these things worked. This isn’t Hollywood. In the daylight, these things are helpless. Fortunately, he had almost six more hours of helplessness before things got dicey.

As he went, he found limited pockets of resistance, but after only a couple more fights, the strength of these combatants faded from men at arms, or even half-dressed mercenaries, to cook’s boys with knives and maids armed with broomsticks. Though he’d originally told himself he was going to kill everyone here, he quickly decided that he lacked the resolve to slaughter servants and let those people flee. He was certain that their fellow men would find the right way to deal with the collaborators.

Once he started letting those who were wearing armor or bearing arms flee, the place emptied out in record time, leaving Simon with just enough true believers to be on his guard but no real force left to stop him. “Pity,” he sighed. “I still have one more arrow.”

After Simon had done a quick sweep of the main building and the smaller two- and three-story wood-framed houses on either side, which seemed to be where the servants lived, he finally descended into the cellars. In every horror movie he’d ever seen, this was where the hero ran into the villain. Of course, they made the mistake of doing it at night, which was a lot riskier.

Simon was happy to learn from their mistakes, though, and did it right, going one room at a time in a search for coffins. That turned out to be a bigger undertaking than he would have thought. Though the castle above wasn’t very large, the basements below were fairly extensive. Some of the rooms, such as those that were used to store wine and cheese, were quite clean and almost pleasant, but once he reached the dungeons, the real horror show started.

The first time Simon opened a door that smelled of death, he knew he’d regret calling for more light, but that was exactly what he did. He whispered a small white flame into existence, and it appeared just above his head, almost like an undeserved halo. It was the most convenient place to put a source of illumination since it would stay out of his way. It wasn’t like he was going to be doing any hiding until he was done purging this place anyway.

The glow of a minor light spell was enough to show him every gory inch of the blood-spattered feeding room, or butchery, or whatever it was. There wasn’t enough evidence to say why this abattoir existed, but the unmistakably human bones marked it as one of the more vile places he’d ever been, and he quickly moved past it after poking the most intact corpses to make sure none of them moved.

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While he did that, he noted there was some writing carved or scratched into the walls, but with all the gore, it was impossible to read. He was curious, but curious could wait until he’d completed his purge. He didn’t need to be distracted now.

He thought that was about the worst he’d see, but then he found the cages. The owners of this castle had turned what might have once been a small dungeon into an overcrowded pantry that was every bit as vile as the abattoir he’d just left. Some of the prisoners were too weak to move, and a few looked dead, but all of them had bites on them. Most had half a dozen, at least.

“They’re keeping these people alive so that they can feed off them over and over again,” Simon murmured to himself in horror. He hadn’t checked the servants or the guards, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d been drained once or twice as well.

That tugged at Simon’s heartstrings, and even before the strongest of them were up and begging at the bars, he was already cutting the locks off the cells. It was only when he started to open them that he realized they were begging him to kill them, not free them.

“Go!” Simon commanded, “You’re free. Get out of here!”

Some did, but most simply sobbed, and Simon left them to their fate as he moved on deeper into this house of horrors. There were some things he couldn’t heal with magic. He knew that. He’d died in some pretty rough ways, but those people had lived some pretty awful lives, and there was little he could do to help them. He just hoped that their next lives were better than this one.

After that was when he finally found the first coffins. They weren't particularly fancy or well hidden and were only guarded by a door that had been barred from the inside. Simon cleaved through it without issue, and inside, he found three coffins in an otherwise empty room.

Simon spent a moment looking around for any possible traps. It seemed unlikely, given that these people had to walk through here every day, but perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they just turned into bats and flew over cursed runes or some bottomless pit trap.

Still, he found none, and when he opened the first coffin, nothing stopped him.

In the thing, he found a man who was both handsome and pallid, and Simon staked him without a second glance, using the pommel of his sword to hammer it in. The vampire opened his mouth in a silent scream but wasn’t even able to lift a finger in his own defense as he crumbled into ash.

The second coffin was empty, which was worrisome until he realized it probably belonged to the asshole he’d killed the night before. “Maybe they keep spares around,” he said to himself as he opened the third.

There, he found another man who looked like he might have once been a warrior before someone dressed him up in noble’s clothing instead of armor. He was a bit rough around the edges and probably Murani. Unlike the one he’d just killed, this one managed to struggle weakly and raise a hand to try to ward off Simon, but there was nothing he could do.

His behavior and appearance were enough to make Simon a little curious as to what this guy’s story was, but he wasn’t about to let him keep breathing until nightfall, and he quickly drove a stake through his heart as well, transforming him into dust and ashes in seconds.

When both of them were done burning, and nothing remained behind but a foul odor, Simon shrugged and said, “Three down, one to go. Hopefully.”

Truthfully, he had no way of knowing how many there were in total, but he knew there was at least one more. Three coffins were empty, and three vampires were dead, if he included the one he’d killed last night, but none of them had been women, which meant that she was still out there.

Still, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t find her. He scoured the dungeons twice before he switched to the other outbuildings as the hours ticked by.

“Think, man, think,” he told himself. “There’s only so many places. Where could she be?”

He’d already searched basements and the bottom floors of every room that didn’t seem to have a basement. He’d also searched the area where the throne room might be in a real castle in case the previous occupants were human and had included human details like a second way out. Such secrets could easily have been repurposed into an extra hidden lair.

“But if there’s another better hiding place than the nest in the basement, then why weren’t all the coffins there?” he asked himself. “Well, it's either because those were a decoy or because the better spot is too small. That probably rules out a cavern or secret passage, which means it's got to be something stupid. Like, something practically in plain sight.”

Simon looked around again, trying to filter his perceptions through that premise. He considered the well but instantly dismissed it. Instead, after a moment’s thought, he decided it was probably somewhere incredibly unlikely, like one of the towers.

“Who would look for something that hates sunlight in the place that gets the most sun?” he asked himself.

That clinched it, and after a brief debate about which one he should check, he decided that considering the ego on these sorts of villains, the highest tower of the keep was the best bet, even if he wasn’t looking forward to running up those stairs. “There’s still time to run and live to fight another day,” he told himself as he eyed the horizon. He had maybe half an hour left until this was over, one way or the other.

Finding the door that led to the stairs was easy enough, and even the lock only stopped him for a few seconds. Halfway up the tower, he found a new problem. The thing had been physically walled off with bricks. Judging from the work, it had been done rather recently.

While that was bad, in a way, it was a good sign. If someone was taking the time to brick up stairwells, then there was something worth hiding, and he could only think of one thing that might be: the leader of this whole nightmare.