Surviving The Game As A Barbarian Novel 2025 - Chapter 673
Chapter 673: Tomb of Stars (4)
How long had it been since my last Hans?
It just had been that long since I had last encountered a…
A Hans.
The last one was K…
Hans Caesar. While I was active as Riehen Schuitz, he was the one I ended up meeting by chance within the Dark Continent.
Not even two hours after I met him, we were ambushed by the Noarkans.
We overcame them without any major casualties, but things could very well have gone terribly for us. If Raven hadn’t changed her mind in the middle of it all, that day could have come to an end with us just being trapped in the Cage of Silence.
Anyway, that wasn’t what was important.
Hans L.
That was the Hans code of today’s encounter.
Well, hard to say whether the guy who turned into a monster before dying was also categorized as a Hans or not. Still, caution was always good.
Ba-dump!
I decided to follow my racing heart and shouted at the rest, “We’re moving!”
Of course, the others couldn’t understand my reaction.
“Hmm? So suddenly?”
“I don’t sense the presence of any other monsters…”
Baekho and the archer seemed confused. However, they still noticed how panicked I looked and still took up their stance to move away from here as fast as possible.
“This is an emergency,” I rushed to explain. “We need to get away from this place as fast as possible.”
“No, so I’m asking why—”
During an emergency, actions were more important than words.
I ignored their questions and just began running, and the others just ran after me, even while not knowing why. Rather than mob mentality, I believed that the reason they followed me was because they trusted I had a reason for my actions.
“Let’s move first! There must be a reason Baron Yandel is reacting like this!”
With that, our sudden charge began. However, even while following after me, the group continued to pepper me with questions.
“No, Baron! Just what is it? You should at least tell us. What are we running from?!”
Although it may be obvious, I had nothing I could say to answer that question. I didn’t know “what” we would have needed to run away from either.
“…You’ll soon understand.” Since there was nothing else I could tell them, I tried to pass the question with that.
“Argh, you’re really good at making people frustrated, Baron!” Baekho looked like he would die from frustration, but he didn’t stop moving or do anything like that.
Eventually, we came across another humanoid shape at the edge of our vision.
“…A person?”
“It’s not a person. It’s a Bayon.”
The monster had dark skin, and a black spider was over its face. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just one this time.
“…There are quite a lot of them.”
Beyond the one we saw at the front, five more Bayons appeared from behind the fog of war as we approached.
“Hey, Baron! What are you going to do now?”
“We’ll eliminate them as quickly as possible and keep moving.”
“Alright. You all hear that?”
As soon as I gave that order, our group switched over from movement mode to battle mode and faced the Bayons.
The battle itself wasn’t that difficult. Since there were more enemies this time, Baekho didn’t charge them recklessly like he did before. Although it was a little on the hasty side, he thoroughly investigated the Bayons as he fought them.
“What’s with this bastard?! Why is he using all these skills?”
“…It’s a Guardian essence!”
“What? Why the hell does this random mob have the essence of Fianil?”
Due to the Bayons we encountered having much higher quality essences, the battle actually took quite some time.
Fifteen minutes…
To be honest, it was pretty swift for defeating six rank 3 monsters. But even that amount of time felt too long with the uneasiness now settled in my heart because of Hans L.
Anyway, I guess it’s fine since nobody got hurt…
I wanted to resume moving as soon as we were done with the battle, but unfortunately, I wasn’t persuasive enough for that.
“Huh, and leave all this behind? Please wait a moment. Let’s at least loot this before leaving.”
Baekho completely ignored my comment about moving and began to loot the monsters. Even when I told him we didn’t have the time, the only answer I received was him asking me why we needed to be so hasty.
I sighed. I was getting frustrated myself too. It wasn’t as if I could tell him the truth.
If I tell him it’s because of the name Hans… He’ll only snort and make fun of me.
Maybe it would’ve been different if he’d been by my side and experienced the previous Hanses with me. However, if I just told him the story from my perspective, he would just wave it off as a superstition, and then he wouldn’t follow me, no matter what I did or said.
For those reasons, I just stood back and watched him loot the monsters.
“Six Bayons… This is quite peculiar.”
“It is. Maybe it would make sense if we were in the Land of Immortality, but these monsters aren’t that common around here.”
The two wizards shared their opinions with each other. Just as they said, it was odd to see so many Bayons roaming around here.
There’s no way this is the end, though.
It was difficult for me to believe that this incident would be the end of the Hans effect. It wasn’t just once or twice that I had been done in by a Hans, after all.
“Alright, that’s looting done!”
In any case, Baekho quickly finished looting, and we were ready to move on once more. However, another person stopped me this time.
“Wait! Please wait a moment, everyone!” shouted the tank of Baekho’s team, Lek Arues, as if he found something.
I was ready to ignore him if he said something nonsensical again.
“These guys! I recognize their faces too!”
But then, I heard something I couldn’t ignore.
“Bryat! Come over here and look at them! These guys… Aren’t they adventurers from our side?”
“…What do you mean?”
At Aures’s request, the archer walked up to the corpses of the Bayons who had the spiders ripped off of their faces.
“It’s true,” he agreed. “Although not all of them, there are a few faces here I am familiar with.”
GM carefully put forward his hypothesis. “Maybe…these were the companions of that man named Hans Dalan?”
“…Hmm?”
“I mean, you know. From what we heard from him, he walked around the outside world with a group of over a hundred people initially… Perhaps these people are from that group…”
“Huh? But didn’t he say that they were separated in the middle of it all?” Aures asked.
I, however, agreed that GM’s theory was definitely plausible. After all, the best place to hide a lie was right next to the truth.
If the truth is that hundreds of people remained outside the city walls…
The lie was that everyone got separated, maybe even swept up in another incident entirely. And we were left now, finding evidence of the aftermath.
“If what I’m thinking is correct, it has been at least a few months since these people turned into monsters.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Although I do not know much about Bayons, do you see this mark that looks like a cut here on the neck? There is a good chance that this person died from that injury and underwent monsterization after they died.”
“…And?”
“And these blood stains around the neck area seemed to have been made at least a few months ago.”
As expected of a wizard who lived off of research, his theory seemed plausible.
The Fallen Gramps also nodded in agreement. “Hmm… Then perhaps that Hans Dalan fellow also died a few months prior to us—”
“Dalan,” I said, cutting him off. His gaze jumped to me in confusion as I clarified, “Don’t use his full name. Just say Dalan.”
Every time I heard the name Hans, my body reflexively flinched.
“You care about such odd things.” Fallen Gramps only took a moment to look at me in bafflement before continuing, “In any case, this Dalan fellow may have died a few months ago, and if he underwent monsterization, things could become tricky.”
“Yes. That would mean that the ‘Dalan’ we met wasn’t ‘Dalan’ at all.”
“Hmm? What are the two of you talking about? I can’t understand a word you’re saying!”
“Aures… To put it simply, someone acted like ‘Dalan’ and lured us into this place.”
Only after Jaina explained it in simple terms did Lek Aures shout in shock, “But then…! Have we fallen into a trap?!”
Since they were used to it at that point, the two wizards didn’t pay his reaction any mind and continued their discussion.
“If our theory is correct, then these Bayons here may not be the end of them.”
“Yes… Although we can’t know how much of it is true or not, if over a hundred people did encounter a problem or incident in this place…”
“That many Bayons could be roaming the area.”
It happened the moment those two came to their conclusion.
“I’ve detected monsters approaching us from nearby!” our scout, archer Bryat, shouted. “Their number is five… No, six… Seven, ten, fifteen…? Their numbers are increasing!”
We were relayed the number of monsters he was detecting in real time. It didn’t take long for the number that began as five to increase to over thirty.
“A monster torrent! Torrent may be too weak of a word to describe the number of them!”
It was adventurer jargon for the phenomenon wherein monsters suddenly appeared in large swarms.
“Wow, a sudden monster wave?”
Players called it a wave of monsters.
“Bryat, where did this torrent begin?”
“There’s no set origin. The monsters are charging us from all around. It’s as if they are aiming for our location!”
It was certainly an abnormal phenomenon. The Bayons, which we hadn’t even seen while walking around the place, were suddenly charging us in the dozens.
…Did killing one of them trigger something?
Although I didn’t know the specifics of the situation, it was time to act rather than waste time thinking.
“Even with the members we have, I don’t think we can handle that many monsters.”
“If another monster appears or a meteor falls on us during the battle, we’ll be in deep trouble.”
“Their numbers are lower in the northeastern direction.”
“Stand at the front. We’ll try to avoid the battle as much as possible.”
“Yes.”
After making our archer, who had the longest detection range, our guide, we quickly followed after him.
“This way!”
With his wide senses, the archer guided us to avoid as many of the Bayons as possible, maybe because he was a top-class scout.
“How’s that? Isn’t our archer pretty good at guiding?”
Hearing Baekho praise him as if to show off his ally, the archer let out a defeated chuckle. “Baekho, this was only possible because there was at least a gap here… If we had continued to stay at that place and noticed it too late, we wouldn’t have been able to avoid combat.”
“Hmm? What does that mean?”
“Although I was unsure of it at the start, I am now certain of it. When we first defeated that Bayon, if we had stayed there, we would’ve already been surrounded by them without any way out when I sensed them.”
Hearing Bryat’s humble words, Aures began to kick up a fuss. “Oh, is that true?! That’s amazing, Lord Baron! So that’s why you suddenly said we needed to run away quickly!”
“I was curious about it as well…” the archer agreed. “Just how did you notice it, Lord Baron?”
Baekho’s eyes narrowed mischievously. “Heh… Looks like our baron had a skill for it? Let’s see, what would it be among the ones a tank would eat… Hmm, I don’t think Supersensitive Muscles’s range is that long, and it’s definitely not Clock Hand of Regret. I don’t think Fate Tracker showed much reaction either… Just what is it?”
He truly believed that I had a sensing-type skill and tried his best to uncover it, rattling off each skill that came to mind and assessing my reaction.
I didn’t say anything in return, though. I mean, what could I say? That it wasn’t a skill, but because it was Hans? Even if I told him, he wouldn’t believe me, and it was more beneficial for me if he believed I had a particular skill for it.
After coming to that conclusion, I kept my mouth shut and continued to focus on escaping the encirclement of the Bayons.
[You have entered a special area.]
With time, we left the Ancient Stone Plains and entered a new area.
[Field Effect—Toxic Lavascape is applied. Your Poison Resistance stat is set to 0. Soul Power recovery speed has decreased by 99%.]
[Warning: Be careful of explosions!]
The green lava bubbled up ominously. Poisonous gasses filled the air like smoke.
“…They don’t seem to be chasing us anymore.”
Our scout declared our situation resolved as we entered the new field.
“We’re alive.”
“Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like they’ll chase after us forever.”
We escaped the Bayon monster wave. However, my rapidly beating warrior’s heart was telling me this.
Ba-dump!
There was no way that was the end of it.