"Poor birdman! Has he strayed away from the refugee camp?" An urchin in grey dirty clothes spotted a poor creature lying lifelessly on the ground and hurried toward it, curious about its fate. Yet when she got closer, she saw that it was not a member of the avian race, but some lunatic with bird wings attached to his arms.

Well, at first the wings looked like they were attached, but now she saw that they were just hanging loosely on the body's clothes, glued to it with dried up blood.

When she saw that the body had no reaction to her voice, she presumed that the man was dead or just too weak to move, which was the same thing in her line of work.

"You won't need it anymore, sir." The urchin quickly jumped closer to the body, when she judged it was defenseless and grabbed a shiny sword that had to be the madman's possession. She did not understand, if she was in possession of such a nice sword she would have sold it and bought a mountain of food, why had the man tried to fly? People were crazier day by day in these mountains.

She quickly went trough the person's pockets and made sure his possessions would not go to waste here in a bleak ruin, but would be put to good use in the city.

"Thank you, sir. Have a nice day." She whispered in a tiny voice. Considering the situation, it might have looked like a sarcastic remark, but the little girl meant it. Mother had always said that a good girl had to be polite and thank people when they gave her something.

"Cursed." She made just a single step, when she heard a faint voice coming from somewhere close.

"Ha-have you. . .?" She turned back to look at the man, but he was obviously a corpse with the level of injuries she had noticed when she had been searching the man for valuables. She determined that it must have been her imagination and turned away, but the voice sounded once more even before she made two steps forward.

"Cursed." The voice originated from her vicinity and sounded incredibly spooky.

"Stop! I do not like this game! Who are you?" She began to panic, turning her head in all directions, but there was no one around here except for the corpse. However, she could swear that the voice had not come from its direction.

"Cursed!"

"AAAAAHHH!" She finally realized that the dreadful whisper was coming from the sword and hurriedly threw the weapon away.

"Stay away!" She shouted and began to run with all her might down the slope of the mountain, tripping from time to time, but not decreasing her speed one bit. Her face turned white with horror, she had heard terrible stories about this place, why had she ignored all of them just for profit?

She continued to run while cursing in a way unexpected of such a little girl, her silhouette soon not visible anymore, as she had disappeared in the distance.

* * * *

"I have to express my concerns Frei, you are awfully comfortable with lying in graves. I know that you are a vampire, but isn't it too much to constantly return under the ground?" Crow grumbled, his glass body next to his vampire master's face.

"Just be silent, it is coming again. This time it will surely notice." Frei watched a giant bird of prey that flew in the sky above them through the bottle that was pressed against his right eye, its top barely sticking out of the sand that served as a lid of their earthly coffin.

The bird suddenly moved its head and noticed a small piece of bleeding meat on the ground, something an ordinary eye would have surely missed and prepared to descent.

"Damn, why it hurts so much. That stupid lizard simply had to eat everything." The object that the predator was accelerating towards was nothing else than Frei's bleeding finger that was sticking out of sand.

"It seems that you are still juicy enough to attract predators!" Crow complimented him in a whisper.

"Of course, it is a bird. It can't smell me from that distance. Not that an animal of its level would find out easily about my origin before taking a bite." The bird was only a few hundred meters away and the saliva inside Frei's mouth dried completely.

The bird was bigger than he had expected, but he would not chicken out after all the waiting.

"Crow get ready, we will strike in the last second." Frei whispered hastily, feeling tense.

The bird's speed was impressive, forcing them to ambush it with swiftness Frei was not used to, given his limited experience with battles. At one point, he decided that the distance was optimal and jumped out of his hiding place beneath the sand, he already felt phantom pain in his exposed wounded finger. He hoped that he was not too rash, but it was too late to back down anyway.

"Whip!" Frei roared and swung vigorously in the direction of the bird with the glass bottle he held in his hand, praying that the distance was not too great and Crow would be able to catch the bird that was just about to crash into them, its last minute effort to decrease its momentum futile.

"Wh-what?!" Crow blurted out in confusion when Frei decapitated the bird with an overly long katana. The animal immediately dropped dead on top of the pile of sand, a lot of blood pouring out of its headless body.

Frei could only stare in shock at what he held in his hand, alternating between the sharp weapon and the dead birds body.

"I said a whip for fuck's sake! What are we going to do with a dead bird?!" Frei kept staring at the large feathered body that was lying motionless in front of them.

"Have you ever heard of planning? You have to tell me sooner moron!" Crow did not let him put all the blame on the edge of his immaculately sharp blade.

* * * *

"That was a nice one, sir cursed sword." Frei mumbled, his face still pressed into the ground.

"Can you pick yourself up already, or are you out of juice?" The sword vibrated on the ground, his tone gaining a strange rocky echo.

"Shit." Frei found out that his body was more damaged than he had expected when he tried to move his torso.

"I have not come with the bright idea of tying the wings to your arms with a whip and simply jump down. Nonetheless, we have arrived at our destination I must admit." Crow was following Frei's attempts to stand up.

"You should have cut her, I could use some blood." He fell back to the ground after he had only managed to lift himself onto his hands and feet.

"Sucking little girls? You have just hit a new all time low Frei." Crow seemed to be amused by his failed attempt.

"Just do a walking stick and we can go, It will be better to look harmless." After a few minutes, Frei finally managed to stand on his two feet and stretched his limbs.

"To lure children closer?" The sword snorted, but obediently turned into a walking stick.

Frei slowly made a first step and leaned on Crow while he looked around.

They were in some kind of an ancient ruined city, all around them were remains of buildings of gargantuan scale and pieces of statues that were heavily damaged. Despite the damage, Frei guessed that the complete statues used to be dragons before time did a number on them and left only pieces of claws, legs, tails and gaping maws. Occasionally there were glowing runes inscribed on the statues and buildings, giving the ruin an eerie feeling. Frei walked slowly along a giant temple on their right, his intent to climb down the mountain along a narrow path carved into the face of the cliff in front of them.

Naturally, compared to the huge arena behind them where they had fought the dragon, the temple was but a speck of dust.

When they walked past the big temple, a group of skeletons suddenly emerged from behind it. For a moment, all of them froze in place with Frei unable to move a muscle, stunned by the presence of undead, because he had not expected them to be even a part of the game considering they were not among the options when he had been selecting a race.

"Hey, he is not afraid, is he an undead too? A vampire!?"

"An undead quest giving NPC, finally!"

"Are you sure? He looks immune to light!"

"Absolutely, he has dried blood on his mouth!"

"Heck, he has to be special, prepare for some juicy power ups!"

A barrage of whispers slammed into Frei's ears like a wall, but one voice quickly spoke up, silencing all the murmur.

"Our esteemed kin, what should we do to prove ourselves in the eyes of death?" One of the skeletons spoke, one of its legs was slightly longer causing it to stand with its pelvis tilted to the side.

Frei stared at the group of skeletons in a daze, he had not expected to meet a bunch of mmorpg roleplay freaks. Had they been able to resurrect? That fact alone immediately improved his mood by a lot. Should he act as an NPC or not? Probably not, he knew nothing about the game and his act would be seen through quickly.

"Why are you undead? It was not among the available races." He folded his arms on his chest, feeling a bit insecure in the midst of the skeletons.

"Oh! You are not an NPC?! We could not choose anything!"

"We evacuated the planet through a portal and were killed by some freaking pandas. Fucking government scammed us good!"

"Yeah, we respawned at this filthy ruin as skeletons after that." Multiple of them began to speak, clearly happy to encounter something else than a monster that usually attacked them on the first sight.

After a prolonged explanation, Frei found out that the welcome screen he had experienced had probably disappeared after a few portions of reality and the group had simply walked out into this world as humans, the race being the closest to their original constitutions. After they were killed by the almost omnipresent monsters, they appeared as skeletons at the nearest mass grave, which was the standard mechanic of the original game. The nonstandard part was that they were unable to find their indestructible corpse and reappear as humans, because the realistic part of this plane clearly did not like indestructible things and giant carnivorous pandas in turn liked meat. Their only choice was to continue their existence as skeletons that every humanoid would become by dying a violent death.

"So you are stuck as skeletons? What will happen if you die again?" Frei's eyes focused on the one leading skeleton with skewed posture.

"Man, you are clueless!" The leading skeleton stomped its foot and continued his explanation. "Dying once will respawn you as a skeleton, dying as a skeleton will respawn you as a ghost, if you are purified as a ghost it is over. Ghosts can become skeletons by possessing corpses or bones and skeletons can become the living when they recover their own body, but recovering the original body is nigh impossible here."

"So the number of skeletons increase every time a humanoid is killed. That is one crazy mechanic!" Frei shook his head in disbelief. "Wait, won't the number of skeletons increase indefinitely that way?"

"That is kind of the point, this shit had been introduced in the Righteous Fury expansion along with angels who are supposed to purify skeletons and ghosts. This way the playable race undead had been introduced and everyone could try it by simply dying. If they did not like it, they could simply revive near their corpse." The leader gesticulated wildly by his bony hands, clearly not happy with the fact that he would have to continue his existence as this unorthodox race.

"Are supposed to? Are they not doing it?" Frei's eyebrows rose.

"No, I do not know what the fuck are they doing, but as a skeleton, I won't complain." The skeleton's jaw cluttered and Frei could see that there was another mob of skeletons in the distance and another one at the slope of the opposite mountain.

"Heck! I can build an undead kingdom and become its king, right?" Frei thought, but his enthusiasm lessened when his eyes wandered in the direction of the city of angels.

"On second thought, getting out of here might be a better idea." He suddenly remembered how he and Nitarja got themselves involved with warring corporations in the Arcane Universe.

* * * *

The central temple of Tyr'Adriael could be described as nothing but opulent. Its ground level looked like a snowflake with its center dominated by a spiral stairway lavishly decorated with gold that symbolized ascendance to heaven. Contrary to an ordinary cathedral where the main event consisted of a sermon directed by a priest at an altar, here the main dish of the ceremony was ascending to the upper floor and a tall tower that climbed to the sky from the center of the temple. From outside, the temple looked very similar to an ordinary cathedral, but every outer edge of the snowflake looked that way. All in all, the appearance was that of a huge circular cathedral with a tower at its center.

The proverbial stairway to heaven had been constructed at the outer edge of the tower, to make all those who would climb to the tower's top visible from the outside. To the stairs led a way lined with white columns and angel warriors that looked like guarding the ascend of those who were slowly walking towards the stairs.

The line of angels stood upright in their magnificent ceremonial armor, all of them for but a single one that was for some reason sitting on a simple wooden chair, something that was totally not fitting the air of holiness inside of the magnificent Temple of Thousand Vows.

Gabri'El's ass was sore.

He had never imagined an angel could have such a problem.

He looked around, the walls of the Temple of Thousand Vows that he at first considered spectacular and colorful now only seemed boring and dull. How long were they going to sit here?

Well, stand here if he took into account his colleagues around him.

"Have faith young one, many pilgrims will come." An angel next to him said and continued to stand without moving a muscle when he noticed Gabri'El's fidgeting.

"Can we at least play some game arch . . ."

"We do not play games to pass time in this sacred place Gabri'El, you should know better." An angel standing on his other side rebuked him harshly, his smile all but gone since the time Gabri'El had dragged here one of the numerous chairs for pilgrims and sat on it with his legs crossed.

"A bunch of inflexible stooges." Gabri'El mumbled under his breath.

"Were you perhaps praying for the pilgrims to come Gabri'El" The angel whispered in his direction.

"With utmost sincerity." He answered and continued in their boring inactivity.

At the beginning, there was a ceremony for knights that happened without a hitch, but the following call for pilgrims and volunteers to cleanse the mountains in the north was all but unanswered. Some people trickled in, but it was far under the quota the leading archangel had set, prolonging the ceremony for days.

"These angels are so stupid, they had not figured out that people will not do anything unless they motivate them a bit. The most optimal is setting up multiple AIs that will increase the efficiency tremendously and are not burdened with sins that fade away in the light of their greater purpose." Gabri'El shook his head when he saw the actions of these backwards angels.

He should really take matters into his own capable hands, the incompetence of everyone around him was an eyesore, but it would take some effort to replace the inflexible old farts that were leading the angels currently.

"Bah! Planets are nothing to me, to subdue this puny city will be a child's play!" His mumbling became too laud, attracting the gaze of the archangel next to him again.

"Pilgrims come, amen, we need you here, in nomine padre at filial spiritus-san, tea, amen." Gabri'El whispered hastily under his breath, but for some reason the strict gaze had not been deflected by his prayer.

Just what was his problem?!