Chapter 170: Forty Lives
There were some deaths he was frustrated to wake up in his own bed after, but this wasn’t one of them. He had rarely been more relieved to wake up and see the crooked timbers of his roof than he was right now, even if he’d been gone for so long that they now felt unfamiliar.
“A fucking vampire,” he scoffed. “I was killed by a fucking vampire.”
It was almost as an afterthought that he said, “Hell, I almost became a vampire…”
That thought was terrifying. It had been a long time since he’d found a death that really worried him. Even zombies now he was content to just blow his brains out, but would that even work on a vampire? If fire didn’t kill that guy, then who says it would kill me, he wondered.
Simon had vanquished some very hard-to-kill enemies in the past, but none of them had been the sort that he needed to drive through the heart of before. That lay there for some time as he tried to contemplate what his backup plan should be in such a case.
Eventually, he decided that greater light was probably his best option. It’s not sunlight, but if it’s powerful enough, does it even matter?
The idea that he would get to find out didn’t sit well with him. Especially not after he replayed the events of that level over and over again and tried to figure out what he was supposed to do. “That vampire was probably going to gorge himself on that farm or something else close by before he smelled me,” Simon said as he talked himself through it. “On the off chance he didn’t go ahead and do so anyway after he murdered me, the level might already be solved, but I doubt it. I’m not that lucky.”
He sat up, and as he did so, he tried to remember how long it had been since he’d last been here. That, in turn, made him struggle to remember what his last death before this one had even been. “Was it the dragon? Or the spider cave?” he mused aloud. “No, it was those miserable messengers,” he said finally as he started to recount the events of his last few lives on his hands, one finger at a time, until they made sense.
“First, I talked to Helades about Freya, then the dragon burned me alive, then Freya tried to kill me for being a warlock, then I buried myself alive killing a giant spider, then I fought the centaurs until I became a political liability,” he recounted with a sigh. “What a mouthful.”