Arden ran his hands through his hair, careful not to cut any hair or skin with the claws equipped.

  ‘What else can I do?’

  Arden took the time to pose dramatically in several different poses. Each one more dramatic than the last.

  “I haven't even used them how they're meant to be used, but I already love them.”

  Vera and Sya watched him from the side, his enthusiasm infecting them. Sya’s jealousy had subsided somewhat after thinking about it. He needed them more because he was on the front lines. Plus, it wasn't like she would be able to use them easily as a Blight Walker. Between her low stamina and inability to store them, she knew that he would get far more mileage out of them than she would.

  But still…

  ‘Damn I wish had those.’

  Vera for her part smiled and played along with Arden's childish antics. It was his first time, after all. She remembered how she had acted after earning her first Satellite. And hers wasn't even a cool set of bone claws.

  Arden, decidedly done with playing the fool for now, calmed down and turned to his companions.

  “So this room is special, right?”

  Vera nodded her head.

  “It has to be. The tree and the amount of skeletons can attest to that.”

  They walked around the tree, finally being able to see what was behind it. Between the many undead thralls and the tree's sheer size, they hadn't seen what lay behind it. And now that they had seen it, they were left disappointed. There was nothing special about the other side. It was just a replica of the front side, with the exception that there was no hall to enter.

  No matter how they looked at it, the dead tree was the fulcrum of the mausoleum.

  “I volunteer to touch the tree.” Arden said with a raised claw hand.

  “Go for it,” Vera said.

  Arden approached the great tree. Like the first time they saw it, he looked up the entirety of the tree. Now that they weren't being besieged by the undead, he could take the time to fully appreciate it.

  The whitened bark was cracked and splintered in many places. It looked like it would crumble at a touch to reveal a younger tree hidden within the shell. Arden was amazed it was still standing.

  He tentatively placed his hand on the trunk of the tree and waited for a change to come to it. Nothing happened to the tree.

  The circular plot of land holding the tree changed though. A pale blue light shone from the border of dirt and stone. Then, the two dungeon divers with Status access received a long message. Arden showed it to Sya so she could read it as well.

  The Great Grave Archwood, for a time, was the Sovereign of Death. It guided the souls of the dead and gave them solace, as per its role.

  Those who lived among the many branches of the Great Grave Archwood acted as the Archwood's paladins. When those paladins would meet their ends, they were buried with honor among the roots of their respective branch of the Great Grave Archwood, allowing them to stay with the Archwood in death, helping to guide the spirits along with their god.

  When the Great Grave Archwood was succeeded as the Sovereign of Death, there were those who defied the new Sovereign.

  They rejected death.

  The contradiction of life and death led to undeath thriving among the former branches of the Great Grave Archwood. The spirits of the adherents wander in death, while the paladins’ spirits became Mavericks.

  The residents of this branch are corrupted, and were roused from rest.

  Until you arrived, and the spirits were returned to the roots.

  Now, only the Maverick remains.

  1/3 on branch plate.

  Arden ignored the revelation that this monstrous tree was apparently but a mere branch of a much greater tree. He focused instead on the message as a whole.

  ‘Why does that worry me?’ Arden thought. There was something there that he couldn’t quite make out, and it unnerved him.

  “Well,” Arden said after a lengthy silence. “That's a lot to take in. Do we normally get a story for free with a stargate?”

  “Sometimes,” Vera responded. “Most stargates are simple, but this isn't unheard of. When you think about it, even the simple ones have a story. ‘Here are some monsters’ pretty much sums it up.”

  “What's different between the stargates with backstories?” Sya asked.

  “Better loot for one ,” Vera said. “The boss is guaranteed to drop something good. Unfortunately, the boss is going to be harder.”

  “No point worrying about it,” Sya said as she stepped onto the branch plate to join Arden. “We're already here, we might as well finish it.”

  2/3 on branch plate.

  “Might as well,” Vera said, joining them.

  3/3 on branch plate.

  When Vera joined them, a deep rumbling sound came from beneath them. The blue light from the plate burned brightly before dying off, leaving a pale blue glowing brand on the center of the plate. Before they could react, the branch plate started to slowly descend into the ground with them on it.

  “Magic elevator, huh? Nice,” Arden said.

  As the branch plate descended further and further, the light from above became far less effective. It wasn't long until the only light they had was the blue inscription beneath their feet. With the lack of light, they couldn't see anything around them. As far as they could tell, they were entering an eternal abyss. Not the ground nor a wall could be seen.

  “How deep are the roots?” Sya said. “I feel like the Blight’s going to kill me before the Maverick has a chance to.”

  Arden gave her a disappointed look. It was par for the course considering she was both a Blight Walker and a stargate explorer, so the threat of death was very real. Still, he didn’t like her tempting her own mortality like that.

  “What do you think the Maverick even is?” Arden asked, changing the topic of the conversation.

  “If I had to guess,” Vera began. “I think it would be something like a death knight. Death knights are strong for their rank. They have high durability, and cause necrosis when it attacks. I think the Maverick will be a variant of a death knight.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “How strong are we talking about?” Arden asked.

  “It'll be a red tier. A boss always has the same tier as the stargate, so we don’t have to worry about that. Its rank is what we have to worry about. A base death knight is always main sequence. It doesn’t matter what tier it is, it will always have two star cores.”

  Arden realized the implication.

  “But this isn’t a normal death knight. This is a Maverick, a former paladin of a death god.” he said.

  “Right. Hopefully I'm wrong, but if I’m not, we’ll be fighting a red-tier supergiant-ranked Celestial.”

  In the dim glow of the elevator, Vera was barely able to see Arden’s and Sya’s faces. They both looked uncertain. Arden folded his arms and tapped one arm with a clawed finger.

  “How much stronger would a supergiant be than a main sequence and protostar?”

  “A main sequence is twice as strong as a protostar, and a supergiant is twice as strong as a main sequence. As such, you need to absorb twice as much star cores as your previous rank. From protostar to main sequence, you need 1000. 2000 to the next rank, then 4000 after that, and so on and so forth.”

  “Do we have a chance against a supergiant?” Sya asked.

  “It’ll get rough. Very rough, but it is possible. Maybe.”

  In the silence that followed, Arden’s eyes widened. In the darkness, no one could see it. He figured out why the story had worried him.

  “Do the stories in stargates mean anything?” Arden asked.

  Something had been nagging at the back of Arden’s mind since reading the message. Neither Sya nor Vera had noticed it, but they weren’t acquainted with the oddities that he was. Not like he was.

  They didn’t have a doppelganger running around causing mayhem. They would only see the words at face value. Vera would likely think of them as just stargate shenanigans. Who would believe a tree death god existed in the first place? If the Archons existed as deity-like bullshit entities, then what did that make an existence of a Sovereign? Regardless of what a Sovereign supposedly was, the words struck a chord with him.

  Contradiction of life and death.

  To anyone else, contradiction didn’t mean anything. Arden knew better. His Status was still showing him a unique message. If he hadn’t made it so that the message only appeared when he wanted it to, it would be the first thing he’d see anytime he’d open the Status. Now, the message was at the bottom of the short overview.

  Paradox in progress.

  Arden felt that the self-contradictory nature of the Maverick, a dead being refusing death and becoming alive once more, was similar to a paradox. The only thing preventing him from acting on it was the fact that the other’s Status hadn’t informed them of a paradoxical event.

  ‘Would that make every undead a paradoxical being?’

  He didn’t think so. This was likely something special about this Maverick that was waiting for them.

  “To my knowledge, they don’t mean anything,” Vera said, to Arden’s immense relief.

  Even though she said that, he didn’t stop thinking.

  “A contradiction of life and death…”

  “Is something on your mind?”

  Arden thought for a few more seconds before he spoke.

  “The message. Did it seem weird to you? I keep coming back to the contradiction part. I'm worried that this makes the Maverick a type of paradox like the doppelganger. Same goes for every undead.”

  “Because they contain both life and death?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t think it matters,” Vera said after a moment of deliberation. “If undead were paradoxes then someone would have realized it before. It's a unique constitution of undead to have a balance of both life energy and death energy inside of them.”

  “Wouldn’t that make them paradoxes?” Sya butted in, taking an interest in the conversation.

  “By the old rules of the world, probably. But the rules have changed for earth. We live in a time where people can use superpowers, and monsters come from pocket dimensions.”

  Vera pointed at Arden and Sya.

  “You are both brimming with life energy because you’re alive. If you were filled with death energy, you’d be inflicted with a special condition called death, and the effect of death is that it kills you. The undead have both.”

  “I would have never guessed that death kills you,” Arden said dryly.

  “So if undead have both types of energies, does that mean the reason we were able to kill the skeletons was because we got rid of the life energy inside of them?” Sya asked.

  “Correct. Normally, life and death cannot coexist in the same vessel. But the undead were tailor-made to have that balance. Getting rid of the remaining life energy kills them, but so does getting rid of death energy. It’s all about disrupting the balance. That's why undead are generally weak. As you attack them, you rid them of their life energy while adding on the death energy.”

  Arden was about to ask how you get rid of death energy, but the elevator began to noticeably slow its descent. The elevator came to a stop, and the blue light on the elevator pulsed, releasing a wave of identical blue energy. It washed over the darkened chamber that they found themselves in.

  “We’re here,” Vera announced.

  Once the wave reached the end of the room and stopped, torches along the now-visible wall began to light themselves with blue flames. Two activated on opposite walls at the same time, then another two. They kept lighting themselves in sync on opposite walls until they joined together at the far end of the chamber where a large door sat with the torches forming an arch around it.

  With the room now bright enough to see, the three of them were able to investigate the room. The most noticeable aspect of the chamber were the roots. Roots as thick as people came down above in a tangled mess. They reached through every part of the chamber, splitting the stone walls and floors. There even appeared to be skulls between the knot of roots.

  Arden looked up and noticed that there was no ceiling, just darkness.

  “That’s unsettling.”

  Only the calcified roots of the death tree had dominion here. Actually, it wasn’t the tree that held sway here. It was death itself. That was why the only signs of life were the roots of the dying tree. There were no cobwebs, no rats or rat droppings. Only the tree roots and the skulls. They weren't signs of life, but signs of death.

  The dead returned to the roots.

  Arden, Sya, and Vera slowly stepped off of the elevator, and it began to rise up again. There was no going back from here.

  “How do we get back to Earth if we kill the Maverick?” Sya asked as she watched the elevator disappear into the inky blackness.

  Vera followed her gaze.

  “A stargate will appear in the boss room.” she said.

  “Good thing,” Arden said. “I know Sya is taller than me, but I don’t think she’d be able to reach the platform from down here.”

  Vera turned to the grand door.

  “Let's go kill something.”

  “Fine by me,” Arden said.

  Arden and Vera both placed their hands against the door. They paid no mind to the skull carving on it. Roots held the dead, after all. Straining their muscles, they slowly pushed the door open wide.

  The three of them went through it and torches, this time gray, began to light themselves.

  The room this time was a large circular room, similar to the room where the branch of the Great Grave Archwood had been. This room however, had no furniture. Only a blank area. An arena. The tree roots continued to spread from the darkness above.

  Arden had to admit that this place was worthy of a boss fight.

  All three of them watched as a shadow began to coalesce in the center of the room. The darkness from this seemed deeper than the darkness above them. Sinister, even.

  The shadow morphed into a humanoid shape. When it reached roughly two and a half meters, the shadow stopped growing, and became more defined.

  Shadows melded into an evil looking set of black and gray armor. Spikes of black rotted wood jutted out unevenly through the helmet. The stench of decay which had been thankfully absent from the rest of the mausoleum was now here. All in all, the armor looked like it would belong to someone with the Dark Lord moniker, which was only accented by the spikes coming together to form a crown made out of gnarled roots.

  The Maverick held a great spear the size of itself against the ground. The spear had a lacquered wood shaft, and just before the spear tip was another mess of tangled roots, much like the helmet that the Maverick was wearing.

  The Maverick picked up its spear and held it threateningly towards the group, and began to release a black and red haze from its helmet like it was exhaling a breath.

  “I can only feel two cores. It's a main sequence,” Vera said. “We can take it.”

  The heavy door behind the three humans suddenly shut, sealing any avenue of escape. They would either kill the Maverick and escape, or join it in death beneath the roots of the Great Grave Archwood.