Surviving The Game As A Barbarian Novel - Chapter 687
Chapter 687: Mystery (1)
Dungeon and Stone was a hardcore game. Even if you never made a single mistake, the characters you created through hard work and effort would die up during normal gameplay.
In that sense, the news wasn’t particularly surprising.
The archer of Team Baekho, Leyton Bryat, had died.
It was something that should’ve been expected. We had fought against the Bone Dragon and then were teleported to random coordinates. Any character would have a hard time surviving the ninth floor by themselves, even more so if they were injured beforehand. If our healer, Jaina Flyer, hadn’t lucked out and landed near me, she most likely would have died there as well.
“…Eh?”
And yet, the surprise upon hearing such news out of the blue couldn’t be helped.
“Wh-what do you mean…? Mr. Bryat is dead…?” GM asked once more, looking shocked.
Fallen Gramps just continued with an emotionless voice, as if he were merely reciting the facts. “I discovered his corpse on my way here. It seemed that he had expended all his strength and trying to survive in this region proved too brutal for him.”
“Th-that’s…”
GM couldn’t say much at the news of his death.
It was pretty ironic as well. Fallen Gramps, who had been allied with him for much longer than we had been, didn’t seem to even care at all.
“In any case, since Bryat is dead, only Baekho could’ve made that note and tied it to the tree.”
“I-I guess…?”
“We can stop talking about Bryat now. So what is the situation? And what is that building?”
“Well… We don’t know much either. It was just here when we came to this place…”
“Hmm, very interesting.” I watched Fallen Gramps walk over to the building with sparkles in his eyes and for a moment, I was stunned. However, I closed my eyes and took a minute of silence.
Leyton Bryat…
Seeing how he acted with Baekho, he wasn’t a good person. But I would at least make a point of mourning for him. It would be too sad for this brutal labyrinth to not even give him that luxury—
“Mr. Bryat always wanted to stop.”
I raised my head at the sudden voice. It was Jaina.
“He got what he wanted. Now, he doesn’t have to do a thing.”
What the hell? Was she a monster as well?
Despite the thought, I ended up smirking after seeing her expression. Even though she was speaking sardonically, I could tell she was mourning him in her own way.
“It must be nice for your allies,” she concluded. “They always have someone to mourn them when they die.”
“Then you should come over as well.”
Jaina hesitated at my joking tone, then gave me a small smile. “That won’t work. I need a lot more offerings.”
“You can get offerings by killing plunderers or people from Noark.”
“…I hope you’re saying that while knowing I’m one of those people from Noark.”
Ah, that was true.
“Thank you for your words, but I’ll decline.”
Well, sure. I wasn’t being serious either.
If I accepted a priest of Karui into my group and got exposed for it, I would end up an enemy of the Three Gods Church. The palace was giving me enough headaches, so another enemy of that scale would be impossible to handle.
Now we just need to wait for Aures and Baekho.
After that, Fallen Gramps and GM began investigating this new phenomenon while the other half of us just sat idly on standby.
One day, two days…
On the third day, Aures appeared. He looked terrible. One might even say he looked like crap.
“Ha, haha… I-I’m alive…”
I could tell how much he had suffered for the past few days just by looking at him. Relief seemed to fill him as soon as he saw us and he fell asleep right then and there. Jaina went over to him to heal and take care of him.
“So you weren’t the one who put up that cloth either…”
“I’m ashamed, but it’s true. I barely ran away from the monsters and entered the Primordial Land, but at that moment—”
“Enough.”
I got the feeling his story would ramble on, so I quickly cut off Aures and turned to look at the rest of the party.
“Isn’t it odd? It’s clear that Baekho was the one who put up that cloth to send the message, but he still hasn’t shown himself.”
“It definitely is odd. At first, I thought he had gone to put up the clothes in the other regions…”
“I think if that were the case, he would’ve come back to check at least once by now.”
Once Aures joined us as well, my questions only grew in number. If he wasn’t the one who put up that cloth, it meant that it had to be Baekho, so where was he?
Fallen Gramps suggested a possibility. “Maybe Baeko Lee went in there first by himself.” He was pointing to the building that had appeared left of the monument.
It was obviously shaped like an entrance. Although we investigated it thoroughly from the outside, we still hadn’t been able to figure out what was inside it. Since we didn’t know what was going to happen, we decided to only go in after everyone was here.
“Truly… If it’s Baekho we’re talking about, it makes sense that he might’ve gone in. Saying something like he’d quickly check inside before we arrived.”
“…It’s an absurd course of action, but I feel like it is something he would do.”
Everyone nodded at Fallen Gramp’s idea.
However, even though he was the one who suggested it, Fallen Gramps actually shook his head at our deductions.
“No, it is certainly odd. I don’t know what Baekho may look like to you lot, but to me, he is more careful than anyone else.”
“…What?”
“Unlike how he acts, Baekho never does anything reckless. He is so afraid that sometimes, I am the one who becomes frustrated when I stand next to him.”
“…Are we talking about the same Baekho?”
“Being confident and being careful are two different matters.”
“But you were the one who suggested that he may have entered that thing first.”
“That’s right. Through the process of elimination, other ideas have been expended. However, if that careful Baekho did go inside there…then I believe there was a clear reason for him to do so.”
Hmm…
“How about it? Bjorn Yandel, what do you think?”
Multiple aspects of this were confusing. If Fallen Gramps’s guess turned out to be true, then that meant it was difficult for someone to exit after entering that place. If Baekho could freely enter and leave that place, he would’ve come out at least once by now.
“One more day. We’ll decide after one more day.”
With that, we gave one more day for any changes to occur, but Baekho didn’t reveal himself.
And so, it was time for me to make a decision.
“Havellion, can you get a sense as to what is down there?” I asked while looking at the staircase that led down into utter darkness.
GM shook his head. “I’ve never heard of anything like this existing in the Primordial Land.”
“Yeah, so you say…”
I hadn’t heard of it either.
It wasn’t just the Primordial Land either. I had never seen an entrance like this anywhere in the Tomb of Stars. Also, it was very suspicious how it had suddenly appeared even though we hadn’t seen anything when we were here before.
“Alright, I’ve decided.”
“We’re going to enter it, are we not?”
“That’s right.”
I was planning on entering it from the beginning. The reason we even went around the entire Tomb of Stars was to look for something suspicious and one such thing just happened to appear before us. There was no way I was going to pass this up.
“I tried to wait for Baekho a little longer…but it can’t be helped. There’s a possibility that he might be inside, so we’ll be entering.”
It was time to go in.
***
I thought it was a dungeon at first. There was probably a gimmick that I had no idea about, and there were probably countless traps that would kill me that we were unaware of.
We carefully descended the stairs despite those thoughts.
Step, step.
Naturally, I was at the very front, and Aures was at the very back. The ranged characters were sandwiched between us.
Step, step.
I took each step with caution.
It was just what needed to be done in a “dungeon” when there was no information on it. Within the game, I needed to be satisfied with just gathering information on my first try. That was just how dangerous unknown areas were in this game.
Step, step.
In the same vein, we tied a rope to the hips of all five of us, linking us in a chain. The rope was additionally attached to a stake at the entrance like we were rock climbing.
“Uwah! Bad news! Bad news!”
Before we could get anything close to deep inside in terms of steps, the rope broke from the back.
“The rope snapped!” Aures shouted, panicked.
I paused. “What?”
“It’s not my fault! I didn’t do anything! I was only following—!”
“I don’t think he is lying. Seeing the face of the rope here, it seemed to have been cut by something sharp…”
“Everyone, stick to the wall.”
I went back up the narrow stairway and checked the end of the rope myself. I didn’t see anything that would suggest the rope snapped because of any mistake on Aures’s part, and there was no way a rope magically engineered to stretch for hundreds of yards would snap because of an accident.
“Follow me slowly.”
Since I needed to confirm what happened, we stopped going down the steps and instead began to climb back up again.
“Haven’t we already climbed up more than we came down…?”
“Yes. That is correct. We had gone down to the 213th step, but we’ve already climbed up 240.”
No matter how many steps we went up, we couldn’t see the surface. To put it simply, our road back had disappeared.
“I-isn’t this a big problem? We’re trapped here!”
“Don’t panic,” Jaina snapped at Aures. “Everyone’s been expecting at least that.”
“I-is that so?”
GM stepped up beside me. “Since we’ve confirmed that our way back has been blocked, how about we continue down the steps?”
It was a logical suggestion. However, I felt that something was off.
No, rather than something being off…
If you go down the stairs, the entrance disappears, and if you try to go back up, the stairs repeat infinitely…
It was more like deja vu. After all, a rift like this did already exist.
Golden Ruins.
The entrance to that fourth-floor rift had something similar to this.
Now that I look at it, I think the walls are pretty similar too…
If this place was built with the Golden Ruins as a reference, then just going down wasn’t the right way. There had to be a hidden secret here. If we continued to go up the stairs with the entrance barred from us, we would encounter a special event.
Since we might not know what will happen later, let’s do the event first.
Not to say there was any guarantee that we would get that event here. However, a little bit of time would be the only thing we would lose in testing it.
“We’ll keep going back up, so take care to follow after me so that no one is left behind.”
“Pardon? But…”
“I’ll be going first.”
I quickly climbed the steps.
“How much longer are we going to go? No matter how much we walk, we’re only seeing more stairs.”
“Getting back down will be a chore as well.”
It happened around the time I thought we were halfway there.
Step, step.
The sound of unfamiliar steps entered my ears, and I quickly halted our procession.
“Stop.”
“Ah, are we turning back—”
“Quiet. Someone’s coming down from in front of us.”
I had no idea who it could be. The special event wasn’t anything like this.
Just…who is it?
Although I couldn’t know, since there was a possibility this led to a battle, I gave a signal to raise their guards.
But then, the footsteps approaching us stopped.
Did they notice us as well?
The tension in the air went taut like a bowstring.
I ended up gulping, gripping my shield even harder.
At that moment, I heard the other party dashing at us at incredible speeds.
“Ready for battle!”
I broke the short silence with that shout, and I saw something charge at us from the darkness. As I reflexively raised my shield to block, I ended up freezing in that position when the rushing feet lept before playfully stopping right in front of my shield with a tap.
“Surprise! How’s that, were you surprised?”
Seeing him speak so casually and simple-mindedly, I let out a long sigh.
Is this guy actually nuts?
It was Baekho.
I was really considering just hitting over the head this once, but Baekho just giggled while poking me in my side.
“Bahaha! You got really surprised, right? Right? You looked surprised. Are you alright? You looked pretty scared.”
“…You should be mindful of the situation when you make those jokes.”
“Nah, how could I not? I’ve finally reunited with my precious allies! No, but I never expected you would be down here. How could you go in without waiting for me?”
…What?
“Baron, you can’t really tell me off for joking when you—”
“What did you just say?” I demanded in a low voice.
Baekho seemed to notice that something was off and mirrored my confusion back at me.
I quickly checked one thing. “It’s an important question, so answer me seriously. No joking around. Are you the one who put up that cloth on the tree…?”
I had been sure of it until now. However, Baekho only scrunched his face a little at the question with a tilt of his head.
“What are you talking about? That cloth… Wasn’t it you who put that up…?”
A chill went down my spine.
If it wasn’t Baekho who put it there…
Then who the hell called us here?
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