Chapter 39: Back

He heard as well as felt the Death Ledger as it began writing.

[Congratulations! You have killed Spartacus, the Chain Breaker! Your reward is ############*!!]

[Congratulations! You have killed Spartacus, the Chain Breaker! Your reward is gaining a permanent evolutionary undead summon, Spartacus, the Chain Breaker!]

[To continue with evolution…]

[To continue with evolution…]

[To continue with evolution…]

And then the book stopped writing. Riven was shocked. Not because he was gaining an undead summon but because the book had canceled out his reward. It was the same thing that happened when the mission first appeared.

It was as if something was rewriting it, forcing him into servitude. Fear and anger mixed inside him.

“What exactly is going on?”

But before he could do anything more, a dark portal appeared behind him and a strong force sucked him in! “Stop! My undeaddddd!”

His vision blurred, and his words were swallowed in a rush of wind and force that followed. He saw twisting shapes and lights. He saw images frozen and moving too fast for him to grasp. His head reeled, and his sense of direction was turned upside down.

But then finally, everything ended, and he felt himself on solid ground.

He took time to stabilize himself because his head was spinning. He groaned and swallowed through a dry throat, then groaned again as he remembered something.

“I’ve died twice… which means I can only die twice again before I die permanently…”

The thought of that just soured his mood even more. He picked himself up from the ground and shivered as goosebumps laced his body. “I really have to do something about coming back naked.”

He was still in the catacomb forest. The tree with the shadow figure was gone, but the forest with a lot of hanging bodies still remained.

Suddenly, Riven frowned. “I’m forgetting something.”

“You sure it’s not me you’re forgetting?” a cold voice said behind him, and Riven jumped.

He turned back and smiled sheepishly. “How can I forget that we came here together, Kivara?”

But she didn’t smile back. Her void sword was out in her hand, and she was obviously keeping her distance from him.

Her dark gold eyes were narrowed as she swept him with a look from head to toe. The look was followed by a touch of her aura. “Good. It’s actually you.”

Riven frowned in confusion. “Why wouldn’t it be me?”

“Because you might have been replaced by something else. That dark shadow that led you into the catacomb. Wandering Death.”

“Does that happen often?”

“More than you expect. Some monsters will even devour you whole and gain your memories that way. Turning into you would be easy. Their aura will even copy yours.”

Riven shuddered when he heard that. He couldn’t imagine monsters devouring him and then replacing him. That was brutal! “How long was I gone?”

She shrugged. “Ten? Fifteen minutes, something like that. So what happened, Dimensional Necromancer?”

“So I spent more time there than it appears here… some kind of time fluctuation… interesting…”

Riven groaned. Then he explained what happened, except he didn’t include that he died—only that his clothes were gone when he arrived there and he had to fight naked.

As he explained the world he was sent into and the target, he also told her about the lore of the world. The history that was provided and how the war started.

As he was explaining, they began to walk out of the forest.

Kivara shook her head after he was done. “I’ve never heard of any of this before. Berserkers? Romans? No, but it sounds interesting.”

Riven shrugged. “It wasn’t bad.”

But his gut tightened. “It was bad! I only completed the mission this time because of luck and the Undying Sigil… won’t the next mission be naturally stronger? I have to build my strength…”

They continued to walk in the forest, but it was less scary this time, as if everything sinister had vanished with the shadowy figure. The bodies hung on the trees looked like decorations as they swayed in the air.

Suddenly, Riven froze, stopped, and turned his gaze upward.

“Why are you stopping?” Kivara asked, her head whipping up to search for danger.

“I suddenly have a thought. Those bodies are wearing clothes, but here I am walking around naked…”

Her eyes widened. “Don’t tell me.”

But Riven was already gone, climbing the tree like a monkey and disappearing between the branches.

In his life, Riven had never gone to a merchant or shop selling clothes to pick out anything. His sister usually made him his clothes by adjusting his dead father’s own.

So this was actually Riven’s first time seeing a lot of clothes gathered together in one place. And he treated it as if he were in a clothing merchant’s shop.

Finally, he settled on a gray robe that fitted his frame. It had no designs, but the quality was the best he’d seen in his short years. He wasn’t disrespectful, though, and hung the body back—just that it was naked now.

“You really did it,” Kivara said. From the tone of her voice, it sounded as if she couldn’t decide whether what he did was impressive or stupid.

But Riven held up a set of black robes to her. “What do you think? The body looks to be your size.”

At first, she flinched, but in the end, the two walked out of the forest in a new set of robes while two naked corpses dangled in the trees.

When they came out of the forest, a portal was waiting for them, and they entered without issues.

“We are back,” Kivara said.

Indeed, when Riven looked around where the portal had dropped them, he realized it was in the middle of the Shadowwood Forest. And it was day. The sun was high up, but its light barely reached where they were. Still, it was a far cry from the night they ran from the necromancers.

The thought of what happened that night and how it led to them falling into a catacomb made Riven look for the tree again. He found the tree, and it was surprisingly recognizable, but when he searched around it, he didn’t find any hole.

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