Death After Death-Chapter 326 - Big Game

With his five-day trek already extended to almost two weeks, Simon wasn’t exactly in any hurry, but when he saw the signs of the devastation that the ogre he was hunting had left in its wake, he slowed down even more out of pure caution. Although there was no damage to any of the buildings, Simon spotted whole trees toppled and animal pens shattered on the way here; something big had done all of that.

The clanhold of Baleger Pass, didn’t seem to mind his intervention in the slightest, though. They seemed grateful that anyone had come. They were the first people since the sickness ended who were honestly grateful to see him, which showed their desperation more than anything. No one was ever glad to see Simon in this part of the world unless things were truly dire.

They even held a feast in his honor, where he learned he was the third would-be hero to take down this monster. He supposed that should have scared him, but it didn’t. Unless it could rip the soul out of his body or condemn him to a miserable, undead existence, he really wasn’t afraid of much anymore.

When he was asked if he really thought he could defeat it, Simon answered honestly, perhaps too honestly, considering how much they’d drunk up until now. “This wouldn’t be the first ogre I’ve slain.”

That brought looks of doubt and whispers, so he quickly added. “Although I should say that I caught the last one coming out of his lair and levered a boulder right onto his thick skull.”

That made everyone laugh. It wasn’t an honorable fight, but it was a believable one.

“Do you intend to do the same thing this time?” a young man asked hopefully.

“Maybe,” Simon answered, holding up his horn for another beer. “We shall see what I find when I get there. Every beast is… well, there’s a lot of factors involved.”

It was a lie, but it sounded good, and when he used it to switch over to talk of smoking out goblins or laying in ambush for centaurs, no one complained. None of his strategies were particularly clever, but all of them were effective. Really, though, he could have just struck the ogre’s head from its shoulders with a word of force. He could have cleaved it in two with a word of greater force. That would certainly have been the safe, sane thing to do.

You’ve never killed an ogre without heavy magic, he reminded himself. While he’d killed two, both had died to words of greater earth, not his blade, and killing one without casting a spell would be challenging, yet he was determined to do it.

If you want to go the Unspoken route, you can just turn a banner into a garrote wire, he reminded himself that night as he lay drunk in bed. If it works on dragons, it will work on ogres. That wasn’t good enough for him, though. While he certainly planned to use his magic sword and shield, he wanted to see what he was capable of and if he was going to die doing something stupid… well, he’d had a pretty good run so far.

Simon stayed in the clanhold the following day to review maps of the area, as well as any other hazards. Then, on his second day there, he awoke at dawn and went into the craggy slopes that held the ogre’s lair. The villagers didn’t know exactly where it was, exactly, but he did. Once he’d gotten all the relevant information and copied as many of their maps as he could into something that was close to accuracy, he’d spent half an hour with a pendulum to find it.

The cave he was looking for was on the lee slope of a granite escarpment almost eight miles from the clanhold. That was the only reason it largely attacked their herds more than the buildings or the people themselves; it was just close enough to be a nuisance but still too far away to be a menace. It was also just far enough away that Simon would have trouble getting back before dark.

“That’s okay,” he grunted as he marched up a scree-covered slope. “If I kill the bastard, then I’ll just crash at his place for the night.”

While the idea of sleeping in a stinking cesspit like an ogre lair was unappealing, at least it would keep all the lesser monsters at bay. They knew better than to become a snack for an eating machine like a twelve-foot-tall ogre.

As he went, the damage became easier to spot. Eventually, he decided that he’d spent too much time preparing to find it. It turned out he didn’t need magic or even maps. “A blind man could follow these tracks,” Simon muttered.

Still, too much preparation was better than not enough, and his caution was rewarded when he crossed paths with the thing hours earlier than he’d expected. He froze then, as still as the scraggly pine trees on either side of him as the thing looked around absent-mindedly before moving on. It wasn’t fear that Simon was filled with, though; it was interest. The thing had just reached into a tall cottonwood, ripped off a branch, and eaten a beehive, bees and all, in a single sloppy motion.

Well, that’s a new one on me, he thought as he watched the lumbering giant move away from him.

Simon didn’t follow it, then. Being out in the open would give it too much of an advantage. Instead, he followed its path back the way it had come and eventually reached its lair.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The first thing he did there was check for any easy way to drop a giant boulder on the thing, but he wasn’t that lucky. There wasn’t even any good place above the cavern entrance for him to hide and ambush the monster, which was a shame. That had been his main plan; leap from somewhere high up onto its skull and give it a heavy-duty lobotomy.

Instead, he pulled out a torch, lit it, and descended into the darkness and the stench of the ogre’s lair. It was spacious, at least, and Simons's light didn’t quite reach both walls at the same time. It was also shallower than he'd been expecting. It was little more than a deep overhang with a slight curve at the end, which wasn’t ideal for his backup plan.

“What I wouldn’t give for an amplify light spell,” he muttered as he looked around the room for a better plan. The spells were only a word or two away, but he refused to use them. Instead, he happened upon a new plan. “Time to go goblin mode, I guess.”

Simon spent the next half gathering firewood and building a small fire in the heart of the ogre’s cave. The smoke covered up the worst of the stench and made it a little difficult to breathe, but he lingered just inside the mouth behind some rocks and waited for the beast to return. All this time, his plans had revolved around the idea of getting above it and attacking the brain or the spine; it was ironic that he was going to have to do the opposite.

Simon had to stoke the fire of his bait twice because the ogre didn’t return until close to sunset, dragging a half-eaten elk in one hand. When it arrived, though, and saw fire in its cave, it abandoned its dinner and charged forward, which is exactly what Simon had hoped for.

The thing had only just lumbered past the rock he was hiding behind when Simon sprung out with his sword. He’d planned on hamstringing the monster, but with the razor edge of his magical sword, he cut almost halfway through the ankle without much effort.

He’d planned on taking out the thing’s second ankle, too, but it reacted too fast and spun around, swinging a head-sized fist at his skull as it roared in pain. I thought I’d have a few seconds, at least! Simon’s mind protested as he moved to get distance.

He lurched away at the move, but even so, he only barely avoided being decapitated, and when the thing’s leg went out from under it after three steps, he came within feet of being crushed to death by the ogre’s treetrunk-sized arm. When that happened, he paused right there in front of the thing’s three-foot-high skull and whirled around, impaling it through the left eye and lodging several feet of fine steel in the ogre’s brain.

That should have killed it. That should have been enough to kill any opponent with a pulse, but the way it was moving its arms, it was clear it was about to squash him like an insect. So, Simon grabbed the thing’s lank, greasy hair and climbed over the top of its skull in a desperate bid to escape.

I clearly did not think this through, he chastised himself as he moved as quickly as possible. He tried to think of what else he might do now that he was down a sword, but he needn’t have bothered. Before he got halfway down its back and ran for safety, it was over. The clumsy monsters had struck his sword hilt, thoroughly scrambling its brains.

It shuddered and shook for several minutes, and even after it stopped moving, Simon waited for several more before he retrieved his gore-streaked blade. He’d brought down the thing, and the last thing he wanted to do was die because of a post-mortem muscle spasm.

The night, the worst part of the ordeal turned out to be the filth-strewn lair. Simon kept a fire burning near the mouth of the cave to ward off anything dangerous, but he still felt disgusting.

“The first thing I’m doing when I get back to Baleger Pass is taking a hot bath,” he told himself as he curled up in his bedroll.

He went to bed that night feeling apathy, or perhaps even disappointment, instead of pride. I won, but I very nearly didn’t, twice, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep. When did I start relying so much on magic to win my fights for me?

In the morning, he left the cave behind, sure that his sense of smell would never recover. He noted that the carcass was where he’d left it in the entrance and that it already bore the marks of many types of scavengers. Right now, it's the better part of a ton of meat, but in a couple of weeks nothing but bones will remain.

To provide evidence that the deed was done, he hacked off one of the creature’s giant sausage-sized fingers and brought it back to the clanhold. There, he presented it to a cheering crowd that became excited as soon as they saw he was returning alive.

Simon spent the next three days more or less drunk, as he was shown not just hospitality but gratitude for the first time on this level. He was forced to retell the battle at every meal, and he turned down several marriage proposals, as well as an offer to stay and help them slay other troublesome beasts in the area.

“There’s a griffon that comes down from the peaks almost every month to take another cow!” the headman complained.

Simon politely declined. Though he did consider staying, any help he gave this small clanhold would only help this community. He needed to think bigger.

On the way back to the city, Simon took it easy and pondered the difficulties of this region. It was clearer to him than ever that the problem was the monsters as much as clan rivalries, but while they could eventually learn to get along, there was no easy way for the Charians to deal with the latter problem. They would really need guns, or the magical equivalent, to take out the bigger creatures like ogres and trolls.

“I could make them something, but they’d only burn me at the stake for it,” he said to himself with a heavy sigh as he wondered what the answer was.

He pondered that all the way back, stopping at clanholds every night, but all along the way, he used his divining rod, taking little detours to confirm the locations of various ore veins. Some were obvious and had probably been seen before, but others were more subtle. In one stream, three days outside of Adonan, he found a knuckle-sized gold nugget panning in one of the streams. He pocketed that but added it to his list.

By the time he reached the city, he had the locations of a dozen rich, exploitable veins ready to be mined; the only problem was that they were on the territories of half a dozen different clans. “Anywhere else, I could just go to a king or a duke, but what do I do here?” he asked himself. “Do I invite them all at once for a sit-down, or do I approach them individually?”