by Logan Jacobs
Of course, it wasn’t humanly possible to be killed and come back to life in the first place.
I couldn’t even say how many times I died in those catacombs. Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? It felt like forever. But with each respawn I got just a little bit closer to the doorway leading to what I hoped was an exit. I never actually made it out of the room, even when I managed to kill two of the minions with their own daggers.
“I see you have finally risen, O Great One.”
“Yeah, I know!” I snapped. “You’re Raijin the Sorcerer, greatest in all the land, reliant on your minions to keep me from escaping because you’re too much of a little bitch to just kill me right now!”
“Uhhh, The Great One knows my name?” he gasped as his dark eyes widened.
“Yeah, you pasty little bitch,” I groaned. “You gonna use that dagger, or what?”
Raijin the Sorcerer lunged for me, and I dodged to the left once more. The first two minions were easily dodged, since I’d now memorized exactly how they moved, and when the third one came in to wound me with his dagger, I met his face with my elbow. His nose broke now, instead of my hand, and he yowled in pain as he dropped the weapon.
Right into my hot little hands.
Just like a hundred times before.
Before he could recover, I drove the dagger up and under his ribcage. Blood soaked my arms as his dead weight tried to unbalance me, but I had already killed him once before, and I was ready for it. I braced my knees against his weight, pivoted to face the next set of minions, and pushed out with my legs like I’d done a few dozen times in my other lives. The body launched out from me like a bowling ball, and the other two assholes fell like pins when the corpse plowed into them.
The other two men I had dodged a few moments earlier came up behind me, but now that I was free of the dead man, I could give them all of my attention. Neither one of them had a weapon drawn and that would lead to their quick deaths.
I slashed one across the face and he split the air with his shrieks of pain as blood sprayed across the catacomb walls. The other rushed in to cover him, but I sliced off two of his fingers like hotdogs. While he looked at the little red fountains, I slashed the dagger across his throat, and his body fell sideways onto the face-slash guy as blood sprayed across the floor like a spilled wine glass. I wasn’t about to leave him alive to crawl out from under his companion, so I reached over, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged the dagger across his throat.
He gurgled and choked on his own blood for a few seconds before he went still. He’d stabbed me like a few hundred times in my previous lives, so honestly, fuck that guy.
The pin-minions had managed to get their dead friend off of them and darted forward as a group. I let the one grab hold of me and used him as a counterbalance as I jumped and kicked the second one in the chest. All three of us fell to the ground, and I was able to flip the dagger in my hand and use my falling momentum to drive it into the man beneath me. He let out a screech as I twisted on top of him, dragging the blade straight across his midsection. Blood and worse flowed from the gaping wound, and he was dead in seconds.
The guy I had kicked was too busy staring wide-eyed at his fallen comrade to even try to defend himself as I grabbed his head, pushed it against his shoulder, and thrust my blade into his jugular. He croaked out a dying breath as his life drained from his eyes faster than the blood from his carotid artery.
The dagger’s handle was now slick with the blood of several men, and both of my arms were soaked in the warm liquid. I would probably cause a mass panic if I suddenly returned to my office looking like that.
Some of the remaining minions hesitated as I turned to face them. The dagger had felt very awkward in my hand when I had first gotten it many deaths ago, but after so many attempts at this battle, it almost felt like an extension of my arm. I wasn’t about to drop it because I knew which ones would aim for that hand and how to slip past their attacks. I was invincible because I knew exactly what these mother fuckers were about to do, and this time, I was going to come out on top.
As I expected, one brave man with a sword came charging forward with a battle cry. He swung the weapon like it had been given to him just before I had been summoned. More bravery than sense, the poor guy.
I stepped aside as he swung down, and then I hooked my foot around his ankle as I’d done a few hundred times. His momentum carried him further along until he lost his balance entirely and smashed his face into the wall of the room. Bones crunched, blood splashed, and once he hit the floor, he didn’t get back up again.
It had taken me a few dozen tries to figure out I could just kill that one by tripping him cartoon style.
I turned to the nearest minion. “May I have this dance?”
His face went straight past red and turned purple before he drew his own dagger and sprang forward.
I easily parried his first slash since I’d seen it hundreds of times before, and then I grabbed his wrist when he brought it back around. With a twist, his wrist snapped, and the dagger dropped into my waiting hand.
He screamed in pain as I retrieved the fallen weapon. Then I kicked the back of his knees. They buckled beneath him and brought him down to a better level where I could plunge the daggers into both sides of his neck between the collarbones and the shoulderblades. Blood spurted out from both sides before oozing down his body and soaking into his leather armor.
Halfway there, but I’d been “halfway there” like twenty times, and this next part was a bit more difficult.
If they had been hesitating before, the remaining minions looked almost too terrified to try to take me down. They even had the advantage with their numbers: seven to one. But the blood of seven of their allies now pooled on the floor around us. They were either afraid to slip and fall or didn’t want to become victim number eight.
Their cowardice gave me all the strength I needed. I rushed into their midst and slashed at the first guy who tried to retreat, but he fell to the ground and was immediately stomped on by another sword-wielding minion.
“You stepped on your bud,” I snickered as the swordsman stumbled on the man’s body.
“What?” the man gasped as he awkwardly swung the blade to keep me at bay.
“I may have seen this all before.” I knocked the blade aside with a flick of my wrist and shoved my other dagger deep into his inner thigh.
Blood sprayed everywhere and soaked into the genius’ leather-clad legs. He collapsed with a shriek and further trampled his fallen comrade.
I gave those two some alone time and feinted toward another dagger-wielding minion. He darted back like I knew he would, so I turned and swung my own daggers at Raijin the Sorcerer.
There was a reason he had brought fourteen men with him into the catacombs. The sorcerer was not a melee fighter by any stretch of the imagination. He needed their protection, so Raijin let out a pathetic squeal as she dropped his dagger and stumbled away from me.
“Here, hold this,” I slammed the dagger in my right hand into the thigh-minion’s back for safe keeping, and he stopped screaming.
Then I brought the toe of my shoe down on the guard of Raijin’s dagger, and the blade catapulted up into my fingers.
“Upgrade!” I laughed. The sorcerer’s dagger was a bit longer than the others, and the curve made it look like the talon of some giant creature. The blade was perfectly balanced, and in previous attempts where I’d obtained the blade, it parried the other minions’ weapons like they were made of plastic.
I was almost there.
I kicked one of the men into another that was wielding a sword, and he lifted his arms to protect himself from my blade, but this dagger was pretty fucking awesome, and it took his arm off at the shoulder while I shoved my other knife’s tip right into his eye socket.
I guessed the man died instantly, but as his cut-off arm fell toward the ground, I kicked the sword up and out of his dead hands and snatched it with my fingers that used to hold the dagger I’d just p
lanted into his skull. Then I drove this blade into the neck of the fucker I’d kicked him into and spun around to fast the last three dudes.
The remaining three men converged on me as one. The middle man and the one to my left carried swords, while the one to my right carried a dagger. I dodged the thrust from the middle, parried the dagger on my right with Raijin’s curved blade, and used my elbow to try to knock the other sword out of the left man’s hand. He managed to hold onto the blade, so I shifted my dagger to point toward him and drove the blade through his arm. The muscles lost their tension, and the sword fell to the ground with a clatter that was nearly drowned out by the man’s screams.
“That’s gonna leave a mark.” I left the blade in his arm, grabbed the other man’s sword, and ran it through the dagger-man.
The horrified swordsman let go of his blade and got my sorcerer’s dagger through the throat for his effort. The man with my other dagger in his arm yanked it out and came at me. He was clearly not lefthanded, and we’d danced this dance a few dozen times, so I was able to knock his weapon from his grasp and cut him down.
The only living minion at that point was the one coward who hadn’t even bothered to try to wiggle out from underneath his dead comrade. He whimpered at me as I approached, and his blood splashed against my shoes after I used the curve dagger to rip his throat open.
All that remained was Raijin the Sorcerer himself.
“Well, that was fun,” I said as I pulled my left-hand dagger out of the skull of the one-armed dude I’d killed a few seconds ago.
“You are even more powerful than I imagined, O Great One! Fourteen men, gone in the blink of an eye!” The man stood there with a grin on his face, and his eyes were lit up with the kind of delight only an insane person could muster.
“You seem a bit too happy for someone who’s about to die,” I growled, and my blood-soaked socks made a squelching noise as I stepped around the bodies and came to face the sorcerer once more.
“What?” he squeaked and bowed his tattooed head. “Noooo… O Great One. I am your servant! I’ve summoned you to this world to be your minion.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I sighed. “You’ve killed me probably five hundred times.”
“I’m sorry, Great One,” the sorcerer gasped as he bowed lower. “I have not ever killed you. I summoned you because I wanted to see your great power, and I wanted to be your aide as you conquered this world.”
“Yeahhh,” I groaned as I studied the man for a second.
This might be a trap. He might be waiting to use his trump card for the last possible second. Or maybe was a necromancer, and I had just given him all of the manpower he could ever need. Of course, if he was a necromancer, he would have just come in with a horde of zombies instead of bringing in live men. Dead people don’t need to eat as much as the living, and he did seem like a cheapskate.
Then again. It really didn’t matter if he had a trick up his sleeve. If he killed me now, I’d just do the whole sequence over again. I had every step memorized, and all that was left was to kill this motherfucker.
“Let’s hope this ends whatever loop I’m in,” I said as I swung my left dagger at him.
He jerked his staff upward and managed to parry my attack, but the block was lazy, and I had put more effort into my blow than he had in his defense. The staff shifted in his grip, and I brought the other dagger in to completely disarm him. The wood cartwheeled through the air and landed with a clatter somewhere off to my right. Raijin’s gaze followed its trajectory before turning back to me with terror in his eyes.
He knew as well as I did that he was finished.
The sorcerer opened his mouth to speak, but I was sick of listening to his obnoxious voice, so I shoved one of the daggers into the back of his throat and, while he choked on that, I brought his old dagger up and brushed the front of his robe out of the way. I stared into his terror-filled eyes as I carefully thrust the blade up under his ribs. I watched the light of life leave him, and I reveled in his body sliding down onto the stone dais.
Raijin the Sorcerer was no more.
My heavy breathing seemed to echo around the room and at first I thought I had more enemies to deal with. I spun around and held my daggers at the ready as I watched the flickering shadows bend and crawl along the walls. I held my breath, and the only sound was the faint crackling of the torches and the occasional dripping of water somewhere deep in the catacombs. I listened hard for the footsteps or echoing whispers of approaching enemies. Nothing. I was alone.
“Yessssssss!” Relief swept over me like a bucket of cold water. My hands shook so violently that I dropped both daggers. My legs would no longer support me, and I staggered away from the steps of the dais to slump against the left wall. Fourteen men and a powerful sorcerer. Dead at my hands, and they super deserved it for being complete assholes.
“I won… Finally.”
I sat and stared at my hands for a long time. Once they finally stopped shaking, I tested my legs. The first two steps were more stumble than stable, but at least I could support myself again. Now that the threat had been dealt with, I was able to get a really good look at the room I had been stuck in for the past thousand lifetimes.
It wasn’t a very large room. Each wall seemed to be about the same length, maybe about fifteen feet or so. The stone dais was in the middle of the back wall but away from it toward the center of the room by about four feet. The stones were covered in moss here and there, and the scent of wet earth and blood filled the air. The doorway leading out of the room was along the wall opposite the dais, slightly off-center and more toward the right wall.
That was my way to freedom.
As soon as I crossed the threshold, there was a little gust of wind. It whipped through my hair and fluttered my clothes, and it seemed to be coming out of the floor. I couldn’t see any huge gaps beneath my feet, but the breeze didn’t last long enough for me to drop down and really investigate.
The strangeness of the wind made me do another quick check of the room behind me, but a shimmering light drew my eye to the left wall. Some kind of weird writing had suddenly appeared in neon blue ink on the stone.
“What the fuck?” The text seemed to flow like it was underwater. It wasn’t in any language I had ever seen before, but it had to be important somehow. I walked over to the wall and tried to touch it. If it was carved into the stone itself, maybe I could find a way to copy it onto paper or imprint it onto the leather of the minions’ armor.
The moment my finger passed through the floating text--because it wasn’t carved into the stone--the letters suddenly shifted and morphed until I could actually read it.
You have been called, O Great One, to save this world from its destruction. Heed your power and use it well, for with it you shall defeat every foe that dare stray across your path. For you cannot fail when you can repeat your attempts as often as you need. Go forth, God of Time, and return hope to the heart of this world.
I stood there and stared at the writing for a really long time. What was this power it was referring to? I was gonna have to figure that out pretty quick if I was this God of Time they were talking about.
Chapter 2
As I turned to leave the room, my foot hit the sorcerer’s staff, and it rolled away from me. Every time I had tried using magic with it before, it had been nothing more than a useless piece of wood, so I didn’t even bother picking it up.
The sorcerer’s dagger, on the other hand, was quite awesome, and it had served me well every time I’d used it to murder these fools
“Where did I drop it?” I asked myself as I glanced down amongst the fifteen corpses. The curved blade laid just within the dead sorcerer’s grasp, and I chuckled as I picked the weapon up. “You’ve got a new master now, buddy.”
The steel was still covered in blood, and even a quick swipe on Douchebag Wizard’s robe didn’t really help clean it away. The grip was tough leather and there were grooves where my fingers fit perfectly
, as if the weapon was meant for me. It wasn’t the most perfectly balanced dagger in the world, but it had served me well in the battle, and I felt a thousand times stronger just holding onto it.
“I wonder how sharp this thing actually is,” I asked as I drew my thumb along the sharp edge.
As if my words had been some kind of trigger, a floating text box appeared above the dagger, and I almost dropped the thing. I blinked at the words a few times until I convinced myself that I was actually seeing what I was seeing.
Durability - 84%
Weight - 0.9lbs
Quality - High
Magical Aspect - None
Magical Ability - None
“Uhhh… Am I in a video game?” I asked the cave.
Apparently, weapons had stats, and I was able to see them by touching them. That was a pretty neat trick, but I still didn’t really think I was in a video game because I could feel the pain of being stabbed, and I had died a few hundred times before being able to kill all these assholes.
But if I wasn’t in a video game, why could I see stats of weapons? Why did I keep “reloading” when I died?
Where was I?
The hovering blue text was still on the wall. The middle part struck a chord with me, and it gave me an idea.
What if my power actually had something to do with the whole coming back to life after I died?
I rifled through the sorcerer’s robes until I came across the dagger’s scabbard, and then I attached it to my belt and sheathed the weapon. It was a comforting weight pressed against my side, and I patted the concealed blade like it was an old friend. Then I climbed around the sorcerer’s body and sat down on the stone dais behind him.
But then I ran into the problem of still being alive. If my power was just some kind of immortality, then the only way to respawn was to die. Did that mean I would literally have to repeat the same day over and over again? How was that any kind of amazing power? The words on the wall hadn’t appeared until after I had defeated Raijin and his cronies and tried to leave the room.