Death After Death-Chapter 342 - Regeneration

After a short lifetime of training, Simon still didn’t feel ready, but he still opened up the trapdoor and threw himself into the fray anyway. That wasn’t because he was sure he’d be successful, but because he knew he had to sink or swim. Waiting forever, until he was good enough, was a dangerous game, and neither his doppelganger’s magic nor his own training could mend his broken confidence.

You’ve killed the troll before, he told himself. Psyching himself up for what came next. You’ve killed lots of things; wyverns, goblins, and even ogres. All of that was true, but most of that involved magic these days, or at least magic weapons. Right now he had neither, but he’d promised himself that if the village’s smithy was still standing when the troll was dead, he’d at least craft something to help him deal with the orcs.

Right now he didn’t worry about that, though. He just jumped through the trapdoor and into the level beyond. Crossing the boundary from a vertical entrance to a horizontal exit was difficult, so he left his sword sheathed so he could focus on the lit torches in his other hand.

Simon succeeded in his attempt to avoid burning himself, but he failed in his effort to do so gracefully, and ended his summersault sprawled out just inside the covered bridge he remembered so well. He was only feet from the troll, and just managed to get to his feet as the thing leveled his angry red gaze in Simon’s direction and growled.

Simon’s triple torch was nothing like the spray of a greater word of fire, but it was enough to make the thing hesitate, and rather than pounce, it took a nervous half step back as its bulging muscles tensed, letting Simon get a good look at the ugly thing for the first time in a very long time.

The troll was nearly nine feet tall, with green skin, yellow teeth, and black wiry hair that fell in a greasy mane past its shoulders. No part of it was beautiful. The word he would have used was cancerous, actually, because even the warts that the thing had looked more like malformed tumors to his fairly extensive medical experience now. The monster might regenerate fast enough to live forever, but that growth came at a cost, and that cost was its misshapen anatomy.

At a glance, Simon could see a lot of anatomical errors. Some of the ribs were crooked, and one of the legs was slightly longer than the other. He didn’t have time to give the troll a thorough examination, though, so he saw nothing that would work to his advantage; he had to act, now before this thing ripped his face off.

So as Simon drew his faithful sword, he thrust the bundle of torches toward the thing, making it take two steps back so quickly that it almost tripped over its own floppy feet. That worked great, but the second he lashed out to strike the thing’s knee ligament to try to fell the bastard, it all went to shit.

Simon knew he didn’t connect with the delicate joint the way he intended when the blow against bone made his whole arm shake. He didn’t know he’d screwed up, though, until the thing bellowed louder than a church bell and dove at him.

Note to self, it hates pain more than fire, he thought as he tried to get clear of its rage. Had the blow landed as intended, the troll would have crumpled, giving Simon all the time in the world to get around behind it and find some more fatal spot. Instead, all he had done was turn himself from the hunter to the hunted.

Simon darted between the giant’s legs, noting that the crippling wound he’d tried to give the thing was all but healed. He didn’t get away clean, though, and the troll kicked him with its heel, sending him sprawling toward the town.

Simon ran toward the well, desperate for anything he could put between him and the long loping stride of the troll. He didn’t make it before he felt the monster’s large hands close around his abdomen. Simon sliced down, shearing off a few rubbery fingers, but that didn’t stop it from hoisting him into the air and toward its mouth.

As the thing thrust Simon into its slavering maw, the most he could do was jam his bundle of torches into the creature’s left eye. That reflexive scream of pain was followed by a bite that acted as an ugly yellow guillotine, ending his suffering almost before it started.

The darkness passed by almost too quickly for him to register it, but the death he felt. It echoed through him, and when he woke up in bed, with his eyes wide, he could still feel the tingling. Is this some byproduct of my soul still not fitting quite right? He asked himself as he quickly tried to move all of his fingers and toes. When that went well, he sat up and decided that the violent death had probably helped him settle back into his flesh a little better.

“Well, that didn’t go nearly as well as I would have hoped,” he said to himself as he reached for the bottle of red wine. “I thought I’d at least get a few licks in.”

Some part of him was frustrated that he couldn’t just smite the thing and be done with it. He could, of course. He could destroy it utterly with a few words, but that wouldn’t help his long-term goal, and while he’d tricked the Magi into thinking he had the sight, he doubted he could get away with that in a group of witchhunters. If some of the older members had a finely honed sense of clarity, they’d be able to see the magic in Simon’s every action, so it was best to push that away as quickly as he could.

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Simon’s training went better the second time around. That wasn’t because his hands shook less, or because he remembered what it was like to die at the hands of a monster either. It was because he could fight goblins.

Some part of him had planned to train for another couple months, until he lost weight, but that quickly proved impossible. While the goblins were great for fighting each night, most battles left him with minor wounds, and after only a few nights, he realized that those would quickly become a bigger problem than his flabby ass.

Simon bandaged and disinfected them, of course, but not using magic to simply erase the injury was crippling himself almost as much as not using it to shape his body. Remember the mage hunters, Simon told himself each time he was tempted to use a spell to solve a problem. That helped in the moment, but it did not help him win the fight.

Unfortunately, nothing else did either. Simon’s second time through the gate, he managed to disembowel the troll, but that didn’t keep it from picking him up and slamming him into the covered bridge like a rag doll, hard enough to shatter his spine. His third attempt went better, but only because he threatened it with fire rather than the sword. That got him almost to the first row of houses, which was where he planned to fight it. Unfortunately, a loose cobble ended all of that, and the troll stomped on him, pasting his internal organs.

Simon found the whole thing to be frustrating, but less because of his physical infirmities, which were all but gone now, and more about his reliance on magic. He’d thought about it loads of times in the past, but this brought it all home to him in the worst way. What am I really capable of without spells or items? He asked himself as the first fingers of doubt crept in.

“Anything I damn well want,” he told himself, pushing those doubts away. No matter how many times he died, Simon wasn’t the sort of man to be shaken so easily anymore. Still, as long as he ran from the thing, or fought it, he didn’t have much success. It wasn’t until his sixth death that he combined the two and made real progress.

By that point he’d become quite adept at the flip from horizontal to vertical, and the troll’s shying away from fire. So, he used those moments to cripple it, at least long enough to get away. The first time he’d had a whole damn pike to do this, and though he considered making one, he’d have a terrible time getting it through the trapdoor. Instead, he threw one of his torches in the creature’s face, and then, when it shrieked in panic, he darted between its legs, leaving his sword in the meat of its calf, and making it run with a limp that exaggerated its already unbalanced legs.

Well, dart was probably a little generous. In his hopelessly round body, Simon couldn’t dart; that was half the reason he couldn’t escape the thing. A few days of fighting goblins had donealmost nothing to slim him down, and he jiggled the whole way to the first home. Still, that was enough, and it bought him the time he needed to slam the door shut and dive out the window while the troll was chasing him down.

From there, Simon quickly got rid of his remaining torches, tossing them in the smithy where he could get them later. While he was there, he snagged a mostly finished greataxe that was only sharp on one side to replace his missing sword. Simon wasn’t very skilled with axes, but for a monster like a troll, it might do enough damage to slow it.

For the next few minutes, he laid low, letting the troll tear apart the house that Simon had vanished into, before stalking around fruitlessly in search of its prey. Simon yelled to get the thing’s attention several times before retreating again, into or behind other buildings, and only once did the beast get close enough that he had to use his axe to remove most of its left hand.

Simon had planned to lead it into the same barn where it had burned alive last time, but the creature refused to play along. Instead, after the best part of an hour of hide and seek, he managed to get it to the lumberyard. That would have been an easy place to burn it alive as it stalked him between the slabs of drying wood. Sadly, Simon couldn’t use a word of fire to light them up, and he couldn’t carry a torch while he stayed hidden.

Instead, he had to lure the thing beneath a heavy load of suspended posts that had been abandoned in the chaos, and then cut the rope and drop several hundred pounds of wood on the troll. That wasn’t enough to stop it, but it did stun it long enough that Simon could get close and drive the axe through its throat, all the way to its spine, further taxing its powers of regeneration.

While it flailed, Simon got fire, and then set the wood alight. By then, the thing was half free, so he had to fetch a wood axe and batter it back into submission, at least until the flames were high enough that he was forced to retreat from them with only minor bruises and burns.

As far as his victories went, this one wouldn’t rank, but he was still proud of it. As he watched the thing crisp and writhe, he appreciated that it had all been done without magic, and wondered how much life force one might drain from a troll to power a spell.

My cleverness and its stupidity had more to do with it than anything, he told himself. As much as he would have preferred to meet the thing in a stand-up fight, he wasn’t there yet.

That should have been funny, but instead he decided that it didn’t bode well for the road ahead. He didn’t really like that he basically had to use the same strategy he’d used the first time, too. He’d just done it with regular fire instead of words of power.

“You’re sure you’re going to be able to take out those orcs?” he asked himself. He’d breezed through there one time like Thor and still gotten a skull fracture for his trouble. After this performance, he wasn’t sure he’d have any better luck the second time around.