Surviving The Game As A Barbarian Novel - Chapter 603
Chapter 603: Third Record (6)
After defeating a Guardian, the rift would be cleared and a portal would open. Taking the portal would then return you to where you were before you entered the rift.
Hmm, at least, that was what generally happened.
“Two portals…”
The portals had two different colors, red and blue. They weren’t even pills.
“Maybe we’ll go somewhere weird if we choose the wrong one…?”
Thoughts buzzed around my mind like a swarm of bees. How was everything that happened on Basement Floor One so wholly different from everywhere else? It was like everything was covered in a mysterious veil or something.
This essence too… Since a portal that opens after a rift is cleared doesn’t disappear over time…
Well, I wasn’t sure if that common sense applied here or not. Whatever the case, I looked away from the portal and checked the essence.
“It’s quite the mysterious color…”
The village chief still seemed to be filled with curiosity. I mean, I supposed he was a person from a time before Lords of the Floor existed, so this was probably the first time he saw a rainbow essence as well.
“Lord Baron, can you explain to me what this essence is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah, so is this a monster you saw for the first time here?”
“No, that’s not it…” Despite my frustration, I let out a deep sigh and tried to explain, “Soul Eaters usually don’t drop an essence.”
It wasn’t just that I hadn’t eaten one of them before. Soul Eaters were monsters who gave you a lot of experience. Even if I skipped all other monsters at least once or twice, I always sought this one to hunt whenever I made a new character. However, it had never dropped an essence, not even when I used all the things that increased the drop rate of essences, like Beginner’s Luck and Melten’s Soul Clover. It was why I thought this monster simply didn’t drop an essence.
I didn’t realize you could get one like this.
So, what was the effect of a Soul Eater’s essence? I could at least predict that one of its active skills would be summoning a Soul Cavalry, but I would only know its true details after it was eaten and tested.
Oh, and I wasn’t planning on eating it myself, of course.
“Gahuin! Wake up!”
After hauling Gahuin down from my shoulders, I tapped him on his cheek multiple times. Since an essence had dropped, we didn’t have time to spare. We needed to put this essence into a magic vial within thirty minutes of its appearance.
“Gahuin! Gahuin! Gahuin!”
I increased the power of the slaps a little. I didn’t feel good doing this to someone who had collapsed due to pain. But then again, essences were of higher priority than humanity.
Thankfully, Gahuin woke up around the time his cheeks had ballooned from the abuse.
“Ugh…Lord…Baron? Wh-where…?”
It seemed his shock from the fall still hadn’t left his head yet as he found it difficult to speak.
I only gave him a quick rundown of what happened. The way to deal with wizards was pretty much the same across the board.
“While you were unconscious, a Soul Eater appeared as a Guardian, and it dropped a Guardian essence after being defeated.”
“Wh-What…?!”
As expected, Gahuin’s eyes flashed open with recognition and he immediately came to his senses. Yeah, how could a wizard hold back in front of a new Guardian essence?
“Ugh… I-I can’t get up.’
“That’s natural. Your two legs are bent backward like that. Not even a barbarian would be able to move with—’
“Hueeeik!”
Only then did Gahuin notice the state of his legs and let out a peculiar scream. However, it seemed that he considered the essence more important than his broken legs.
“Move… Move me in front of the essence. I can’t walk.”
As per his request, I moved Gahuin in front of the essence, and I looked for the magic vial in his belongings and handed it to him.
Minutes later, he sighed. “It’s done.” As the essence was sucked into the magic vial, Gahuin carefully took that vial into his magic vial storage box. “So…what are these portals…? Why are there two of them…?”
“Ah, that? We’ll need to think about it now. We don’t know yet.”
“I-I see…”
“So, what do you think?”
“If you’re asking what they are—”
“Anything is fine, so just tell me what comes to your mind.”
“Hmm…”
As requested, Gahuin went on to give me his opinion without thinking too hard about it. “It seems that one of them will definitely connect to where we were…” His words trailed off as a dazed look shadowed his expression, until suddenly, he shouted with certainty, “The blue portal…! We can return to where we were if we take the blue portal!”
It seemed that his Sixth Sense, which had been sealed after we came into the Great Demon Realm, was active again.
“Then what about the red portal? Do you know where this goes?” I prompted.
“That…I don’t know. It is odd. I do get the sense that it is dangerous…but I don’t feel that it will be a bad choice either.”
“A portal that is dangerous, yet still one we can get good rewards from…”
“Uh…I guess you could interpret it that way?”
Yeah, how many years had I played Dungeon and Stone? This was just the way things were.
***
Thanks to Gahuin, our choices were narrowed down to two. Well, we only really ever had two choices to begin with, but anyway. Either we used the blue portal to safely get out of here, or we used the red portal to try for the additional rewards.
Before I made the decision, I received information that would help me make the right one.
Alright, then which of these portals should we take?
Considering how clearing this underground floor is our main objective, I don’t think it’ll be bad to just get out of this place now…
I needed to keep this in mind and not forget it just because I was inside a rift. Our goal was to escape Basement Floor 1. This rift was only a stepping stone needed to proceed to that plan, and we had just cleared it.
Just taking the Soul Eater’s essence and going back feels like a waste of time…
Although I had only been here for a week, the village chief and the other two had been stuck in this rift for over half a year already. That was just how massive in scale this rift was. Yet this was the only reward we could get from it? I didn’t even know what the effect of the Soul Eater’s essence would be, not to mention our archbishop ended up becoming a priest of Karui and going off somewhere.
“Time is the deciding factor. You decide. I will follow whichever one you choose.”
“Me too.”
The village chief and Erwen gave over the right to decide to me, and Gahuin hurriedly tried to persuade me.
“Lord Baron, let go of your greed. We’ve lost our archbishop already, so staying here any longer is unwise. We don’t even know what could be beyond that portal.”
What Gahuin said held some logic as well. However, I wasn’t doing this because of my desire for personal gain. The bonus reward beyond that portal? Sure. Whatever it was, it would be helpful to me. But that wasn’t what mattered.
The reason I wanted to go through the red portal was because of something completely different.
If I walk through there…
I might be able to take one more step into learning the secret of the labyrinth. It might even help us in escaping Basement Floor One. And the most important part of all this…
It’s too easy.
The difficulty of this rift was far too low. Well, we did lose our archbishop in the process, but even then, this was unbelievably easy.
…There’s something off about this.
My experience told me that there was a trap lying in wait. “For now, we’ll postpone making the decision.”
“Postpone…?”
“If we return like this, we won’t know what might happen to the archbishop.”
Gahuin nodded. “That’s true…” Gahuin said, his words trailing away.
Both Gahuin and I already knew it, though. If we left now, that would be the end of all this.
“Even so, it can’t be helped,” he argued. “Everything requires sacrifice. We have already lost a few souls after coming down to this underground floor… If we die here, their sacrifices will be in vain.”
It was a logically sound argument. Still, it wasn’t as if I didn’t detect his crafty mind that wanted to prioritize his safety as he said those words. Honestly, I was pretty crafty as well.
“Unrelated to the survival of the archbishop, I feel that we should take a look around the area and investigate it before we take the portal. There are definitely some things we missed on our way here.”
Four different canyons..
A field debuff that messed with the mind..
The Lord of Silence and the priest of Karui.
A boss battle that ended with no real threat.
In the end, we somehow cleared the rift and opened the portal, yet I missed far too many things. And if we left those things behind here, I might never be able to learn about them again.
“…Do we really need to? I can’t even move properly at the moment.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll carry you on my back and protect you.”
Having heard many kinds of sighs in my life, I could tell that Gahuin’s responding sigh was one of approval. Now that I’d convinced him…
“Alright, let’s get moving.”
After memorizing the portal’s location one more time, I let the village chief walk in front of us as we began to move.
“This place…isn’t this where that monster was before?”
“That’s right.” We were in the place where the Lord of Silence, Siliut, was buried. Before we began properly investigating the area, I wanted to check on it first because I now had Gahuin with me.
“Is that Sixth Sense working properly still?” I asked.
“For now…that seems to be the case.”
“We won’t be able to talk when we get close to it, so try and properly look and investigate it. It can’t move, so don’t get too scared of it either.”
“S-sure…” Gahuin seemed as if he wanted to get up and dive into the blue portal at any moment, but since he couldn’t even walk properly, there was nothing he could do.
Sometime later, we arrived at the monster’s area.
[You have entered the area of Nullification. All essence skills are sealed.]
Given how all sound disappeared, it seemed the monster was still alive.
Not long after, we saw the figure of the Lord of Silence buried under the rubble. It still only looked at me with its tired eye, and I strode closer to it before lowering my body so that Gahuin could look at it properly. His hands shivered at first, but Gahuin began to touch its skin after he realized it wasn’t dangerous.
Tap, tap.
Gahuin eventually tapped on my shoulder and signaled me to leave the area.
“How about it?” I prompted.
What he told me after we quickly left the area was quite simple.
“First, it does seem to be a friendly entity to us. When I met its eyes, signals blared in my head that we must never kill it.”
Hmm.
“This is just my hypothesis…but perhaps the reason the Guardian was weak was because of what you did.”
“What I did?”
“You told me that you could’ve killed it, but you just walked past it. That may have been the cause.”
To put it simply, if I had killed this guy, the boss battle would’ve been much more difficult.
If that’s true, I guess it does explain how easy the boss battle was…
Then what about the archbishop? He suddenly lost it and advanced to a priest of Karui. Was this an event that was supposed to happen? Or was this something we could have avoided if we’d prepared properly for it? I got a feeling that it was the latter. It would be too absurd if it was—
Boom!
At that moment, an explosion shook the land. It came from the direction of the Lord of Silence.
[Siliut the Sealer has died.]
What happened?
The answer to my question came from Gahuin on my back. “Th-the Lord of Silence has died…”
“We need to quickly run away!” he shouted. “Now’s not the time to look around for things we missed during the expedition!”
“Calm down and explain to me properly—”
“The portal will soon close!”
“What?” I didn’t need to ask him how he knew this. It was probably another activation of that Sixth Sense of his.
“Run!”
I could think on my way over there. For now, I ran as fast as I could towards the portal.
“Mister! Behind us! The archbishop is chasing us!”
As expected, it seemed that the archbishop was the one who killed the Lord of Silence.
“How fast is he?”
“It’s similar to… B-be careful!”
Be careful of what?
Confused, I twisted my body a little, only to feel something sharp immediately stab into my left shoulder. The wound wasn’t that deep. Whatever attacked me had pierced through Gahuin first. Gahuin coughed up blood, drenching my upper body.
He hacked in aching gasps, seeming to struggle for breath like he would die at any moment, but it wasn’t a big problem.
The portal was right in front of us. If we could just get out of here, many priests could concentrate on healing him, and he would survive. As soon as I arrived directly in front of the portal, I shoved Gahuin’s body through it.
Vwoong!
It had become about half the size it had been, but the portal worked as it should.
Erwen, go through as well.”
“Mister! But you—!”
I threw Erwen into the portal before it could become any smaller.
A voice behind me asked, “What about you? Why aren’t you going through?”
“No matter how I think about it, I think this is the answer.”
I turned around to see the frown on the village chief’s face and the archbishop approaching us from behind him. Tentacles were twisted in horrifying ways, and the archbishop was floating in the air thanks to them.
He was a terrifying sight to behold.
“You,” the village chief accused, “are you thinking of going through the other portal?”
“Before that, I want to check one thing.”
“You are quite calm even in this situation. What is it?”
“Earlier…you said that you could kill the archbishop if you used your full power, Is that still possible?”
The village chief paused before saying, “Maybe…” Despite the admission, the look in his eyes suggested that this wasn’t a difficult question for him. “You’re the only one here to see this. And even if my body is destroyed, I’ll be fine after I die once…”
“Get to the point.”
“Well, sure. No reason not to.” The village chief shrugged before asking, “But why did you suddenly think of that? Everything will be fine if we leave this place anyway.”
“I told you. I just needed to check it. So will you do it?”
“…Keep your promise.”
With those as his final words, aura began to erupt over the village chief’s sword.
Vwoong!
The pure white aura that used to be the trademark of Count Saintred. However, the aura of the village chief was a little different from the original owner of that body.
What the hell is that?
The aura that surrounded his sword continued to grow bigger and bigger. It was as if there was no limit to it.
Fwoong!
Noticing this mountain of power emitted from his aura, even the archbishop who had been charging at us mindlessly flinched and stopped for a second.
“What did he do…? Can he really use the power you had when you were alive?” I ended up saying my thoughts out loud.
“Well, you could call this the power I had while I was alive,” the village chief said with a smirk. “The knights of this era are a sorry sight. Aura isn’t used like that.”
There was a flash of light.
[Special Condition—Third Record has been met.]
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