Death After Death

It turned out not to be goblins. The villagers seemed to know that too, of course, but Simon hadn’t bothered to ask them. Instead, after a quiet ride to the source of the problem, he just tried the same trick he’d used last time. Suffocating them in their lair would be a fairly bloodless victory. Unfortunately, he found out the hard way that this wasn’t going to be like last time when half a dozen hobgoblins staggered out of the dank hole in the ground. Other than their dark olive skin, they had little in common with the goblins he’d fought so far, and they were definitely going to be a little tougher than their smaller cousins. They scattered the fire in all directions as they charged through the smoke looking for something to kill.

Simon hadn’t been ready for a counter-attack or the larger-than-expected opponents. None of them were. Still, he charged in before he remembered that this was the very last life he wanted to die in. He was just so used to fighting now that it was his first impulse, and he regretted it as he moved toward the opponents that were almost as large as he was.

They were vicious, too, but his boldness surprised him as much as it did his opponent, and between their coughing from the smoke and their squinting from the sun, he was certain that he and his men could make short work of the bastards. He was mostly right, but partway through the fight, when there were only three of the green skins left, Simon took a club to the back while he was gutting his second opponent that sent him sprawling. It hurt, but he didn’t think that anything was broken. He would have almost certainly been stomped to death if two of his fellow warriors hadn’t shot it with their crossbows, though.

After that, Simon was about to order his men to start rebuilding the fire when he noticed that one of them was hurt pretty bad. “The rest of you start the bonfire back up unless you want to go in and see if there are any of those big bastards left while I tend to Trav,” he said. From the expression of the other men, he realized that they probably thought he meant he was going to end his suffering with the point of his sword, but Simon doubted it would come to that.

The man had been raked across the belly with the foul claws of the hobgoblins, and he was bleeding badly enough that Simon was sure the abdominal wall had been ripped, which meant there might be all sorts of internal damage as well. Simon wasn’t much for science, and he barely remembered his high school biology test book, but still, he struggled to remember those crucial details as he soothed the wounded soldier.

“Easy there, man. The worst is over. You’re going to be okay,” Simon said, struggling to find something to say that wasn’t so generic and coming up empty. He’d shared a campfire with these men for all of two nights, and he knew next to nothing about him.

“I-I’m dying, aren’t I,” the man gasped as he lay there in obvious pain.

“Nah,” Simon lied. “I’ve seen way worse than this. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“A flesh wound?” he moaned in fear. “What is that? Does that mean it’s already diseased? Gods protect me!”

Simon realized the man would have no idea what he’d meant by the phrase flesh wound only after he said it, but he didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he gathered up the image in his mind of the wound knitting shut, the intestines returning to normal, and the blood pooling in the man’s abdominal cavity slowly being reabsorbed by the body before he whispered, “Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́,” under his breath. Simon could see that it wasn’t enough to fully heal such a large wound, but it did help, and he quickly reached for the bandages.

The last thing he wanted to do was reveal his magical powers. He knew exactly what would happen once he’d done that. Instead, he just made Trav comfortable. After all, Simon could always heal him again that night or on the way back home if necessary.

They stayed there the rest of the day, filling the lair with smoke, and when night came, they camped nearby and kept a watch on the entrance until morning. It was only then that Simon was completely satisfied that they’d done their job. They brought one of the heads back to the village on a spear and mounted it in the square to show everyone that they had nothing to worry about, and that night a feast was held in their honor.

The village wasn’t rich, so the food was meager, but Simon still enjoyed the crude folk music and the amusing medieval dances that he had no idea how to perform. Before the end of the night, he was all but propositioned by one of the women there. “Please allow me to show you my gratitude properly,” she’d breathed into his ear when she brought him another beer.

Simon politely declined, but the whole thing just made him miss Freya more, and so the next morning, they made haste back to the Baron to deliver the news of their success. The ride back gave him plenty of time to reflect on his strange little life. The life of a mercenary warrior certainly wasn’t what he would have chosen if he’d gotten a say in it. Being the Baron and actually managing all the details of the kingdom could have been fun. Playing a wizard in a tower studying how to make this magic system slightly less broken could have also been cool too, but even if he could figure out a way to reach that spot in one of his lives, he couldn’t imagine how he’d be able to do it without Freya by his side, and that was more important than anything else.

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The trip back was uneventful, and Simon made his report only very briefly before he went to find his wife. Even that brief stopover was enough to chill him when the Baron’s eldest said, “Hobgoblins, you say? Are you sure? I had no idea. Is it possible fighting goblins might not be as simple as you claim it to be?” He’d actually laughed at that, and it had taken every ounce of Simon’s willpower not to draw his weapon. The man had known that they were being sent out against something a lot tougher, and he’d lied to him.

“Even so,” the Baron stepped in to smooth things over. “You managed to deal with the problem and come back unharmed. Excellent work.”

“Well, not unharmed,” Simon corrected him, “but I think that Trav will pull through.”

“Yes, I had heard something about that,” the old man said, “Apparently, in addition to your other talents, you are a gifted healer.”

Simon just shrugged, not sure what to say, and after a little more discussion, he left. His next stop was the inn, but Freya wasn’t there, so he tried their home and was pleased to find her cleaning up their little hovel. When he first saw her, she seemed upset, and he thought he was about to get yelled at, but as soon as the door creaked and she turned, she ran to him and hugged him like she was afraid he was going to vanish at any moment.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I-I heard that someone came back from your little adventure and was hurt pretty bad. I feared the worst, and…” her words dissolved into tears as she beat her hand impotently against his chest. “How could you think any of this is okay? What if you’d died? What if you’d left me in this strange place already a widow!”

“It’s going to be okay,” Simon said, trying to soothe her by stroking her hair. “Everything is going to be just fine. I mean, look at this lovely home. You’ve—”

“The gods can take it for all I care,” she spat. “We could leave tonight. We still have the wagon; we could—”

“What happened here?” Simon asked, noticing the small bandage on her arm. For a moment, he had a flashback of the time Brenna had hidden a wound and then turned into a zombie and bitten him. He felt the sudden impulse to undo the bandage and check to make sure it wasn’t a bite, but he suppressed it.

“Oh, I just cut myself in here while I was… cleaning up.” She looked like she was on the verge of tears again, and Simon didn’t understand, but he did his best to make her feel safe.

Freya clung to him all night, except for when she was cooking over the low fire he’d made with some of the cutlery they’d saved from their trip. “I believe someone called all this junk,” she said, smiling.

Simon didn’t care about the dig. He just cared that it was the first time she’d really looked happy all day. That night he told her about the fight and about the man that had almost died under his command. He blamed the Baron for sending him without the proper information and the people of the region for not warning them, but as he drifted off to sleep, he knew the truth. It had been his fault for not investigating more before he’d sought out the confrontation. They could have watched and waited or done some scouting and asked around to figure out that they needed to prepare more. They didn’t, though, because he’d been so certain it wasn’t going to be a challenge.

He was going to have to work on that.

The rest of the week they spent cleaning and building. Simon used an axe to make some new posts for their fence, and he hired a carpenter to fix their doors and shutters, so the place should be less drafty, but by the time he was called away again almost two weeks later, their house was finally starting to look like a home, and that brought him a measure of joy and peace that was almost indescribable. The last conversation he had with his wife was about what they should plant in their garden in the spring, and then he was off on the road again, dreaming about a herb garden and perhaps a nice spinning wheel for her if he could find one.

This second mission was against the centaurs that had been raiding villages and herds to the east. Centaurs were rare creatures in games, so Simon hadn’t had much experience with them, but the reality was fairly terrifying when he saw one for the first time. The creatures were huge and bestial. They were taller than him at the shoulder, and they had huge sharp teeth and dead eyes that made them look more like animals than men.

It turned out that the creatures favored short bows that they could fire while they ran at speed, which made them almost impossible to fight or capture. Simon was shot twice in their first encounter and was forced to lay there in pain for most of the day until he could get enough privacy to heal himself.

Thereafter, he was more careful. They retreated and spent a day practicing with whatever the men had on them, be it a long bow, a crossbow, or a sling, and after that, they recruited a shepherd in one of the dangerous areas, and used him as bait. Then they waited among the rocks and the sheep for the centaurs to reappear. As the nine of them galloped toward the shepherd kicking up a trail of dust in their wake, the man drove his flock back further into the rough ground, and when the centaurs moved to follow, Simon and the dozen men he’d brought with him sprang from their hiding places and took down several of the monsters before the centaurs even knew they were endangered.

This time Simon was not able to bring his men back unscathed, but after a few minutes of fierce fighting, only three centaurs were left to retreat, and all but two of Simon’s men had survived the encounter.

This time there would be no celebration because their survival had been a near thing. If Simon had met them on an open field of battle to “put the fear of house Raithewait in them,” as the Baron had suggested, Simon was quite sure they’d all be dead by now. No, this time, all he wanted to do was go home and kiss his beautiful wife, and appreciate that he’d survived.