Surviving The Game As A Barbarian Novel 2025 - Chapter 680
Chapter 680: Dream (7)
The entire world was covered in darkness.
Flash!
Like with the first rays of dawn, the light that appeared over the horizon immediately began to color the world.
The winds were so strong that it felt as if I would be swept away by them. My ears rang with the noise as new information flooded my mind.
Well, I guess it technically wasn’t new information.
“Now I feel alive,” I gasped, slipping into Rafdonian. The doctors asked me to speak in Rafdonian back in my dream, and when I wasn’t able to, I got pretty embarrassed from just sitting there and moving my mouth.
Well, it didn’t matter since I was able to return.
I looked down. Bulky barbarian hands threaded with tough veins, so unlike Hansu Lee’s small hands, greeted me. I repeatedly clenched and opened my fists, checking on the state of my body.
Clack, clack.
It was then that the familiar sound of heels entered my ears. And as I looked in the direction of the sound, sure enough…
Clack.
The girl whom I saw when I was being dragged into the dream world appeared like a ghost and was approaching me.
“Elise Groundia.”
When I quietly mumbled her name, the Earth Witch stopped walking and looked squarely at me.
“I know I told you not to return. Why did you come back?”
For some reason, I could sense a bit of sadness in her voice.
I answered with a smirk. “This is where I need to be.”
However, that answer didn’t seem to satisfy her. If anything, the girl looked enraged as she argued with me, “It was the world where your dreams were reality.”
“But it was fake.”
“You know that it wasn’t fake.”
Hmm, well…
It was true that the more I spent there, the more I noticed that it wasn’t a simple dream world.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said sternly, determined. “That wasn’t the place where I’m meant to be.”
The girl was speechless.
The winds swooshed past, and as time passed, more than half the world was dyed by the white light.
Crunch.
With the sound of something breaking, a boundary of light and darkness was created between me and the Earth Witch.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve made my point known. How about you send me back now?” I asked, putting an end to that long, yet somehow short silence.
The Earth Witch clenched both her hands like a small child. “You will experience much more hardship and sadness there.”
Oh, so she was going with that angle?
“Do you still want to go back?”
It was a childish question befitting of her appearance, but I answered her seriously and truthfully.
“Yes. I still want to.”
I wasn’t going to argue against the fact that this was a cursed world where I always needed to worry about my back and the lives of my allies.
“You will lose something precious to you again. You will experience despair so great that the sadness you have suffered until now will feel like nothing in comparison.”
And just hearing her say that made me choke on a breath.
“So what?”
But wasn’t that what living meant?
The hardship and suffering would make me want to run away from everything. However, Hansu Lee, who always ran away from reality, never knew this: Running away wasn’t the only choice he could make.
My life as a warrior had taught me that.
“No matter how much it hurts, I’ll keep going forward. No matter what nonsense tries to get in my way, I will struggle with all my might to survive until the very end. Because I am a barbarian.”
I stepped over the boundary of darkness the girl was standing on, and she took a step back.
Swoosh!
For some reason, the darkness receded the same amount that I stepped forward.
Oh, this is pretty fun.
I took another large step forward.
The girl didn’t step back this time. She just stood where she was and just spoke to me.
“So you…”
Step.
“…have chosen the life of Bjorn Yandel.”
Step.
The witch who had been looking up at me this entire time suddenly had a defeated smile on her face.
“In the end… You were no different from us.”
…Huh?
“Us?” I asked, halting in my steps. “What are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer me, instead saying, “You act like you aren’t running away, but you are still running in the end.”
“No, so what are you trying to—”
It happened at that moment, when I asked and took another step forward.
“Yeah, as I thought, we were right.”
The girl turned around and walked into the darkness.
Clack, clack.
The sound of heels drifted further and further away. With that, the darkness also began to shrink.
“Hey, wait up!”
I tried to follow her but for some reason, the distance between me and the slowly walking girl never shortened.
Clack.
And as that faint sound of heels disappeared and the entire world was covered in the light…
“Yan… Bar… del… Baron…!”
The voice of a man thrummed through the space like thunder. The voice, strained with static, grew gradually clearer in my ears.
“Ahh! Baron Yandel, you bastard!”
I sighed. That last one was a bit rude.
“Hey, you! Wake up, please!”
“I’m awake, stop shaking me.”
“…Huh?”
I had finally returned to where I needed to be.
***
To be honest, I was a bit worried. After clearing Dungeon and Stone another time, where would I end up?
Maybe I would need to enter the body of a different barbarian and begin again from the coming-of-age ceremony. Or maybe I would wake up in a world decades in the past, or… Maybe decades in the future. Maybe my allies disappeared into the annals of history, and the few alive in the future would greet me in their old bodies.
Well, the result was that those theories just ended as theories.
“Stop shaking me. I’m awake.”
When I opened my eyes, I was on deck. I was spread-eagle and soaking wet while Baekho was above me and shaking me as hard as he could.
“Huh? Br… No, Baron? Uh! He’s awake! Are you alright?”
For some reason, Baekho looked surprised that I opened my eyes as he backed away.
I quickly and concisely checked the most important thing first. “What’s the situation? Are we in danger?”
“N-no. The danger is over.”
Oh, that was good to hear. My final memory was being chased by the Draizen and falling into the water. I was also a bit anxious that I’d woken up to find us in a critical situation because of how desperately he was trying to wake me up.
“How long was I asleep?” I asked.
“It wasn’t that long.”
“The exact time.”
“Uh… Around thirty minutes?”
Thirty minutes…
Although I was relieved, a part of me also felt I wasted something. I had stayed in that world for at least half a year.
“What about the others?”
“The wizards are tired, so they’re in meditation, and the others—as you can see—are fine.”
Alright, it seemed that nothing big happened while I was asleep. I relaxed a little.
“Tell me what happened after I fell overboard. Don’t leave a single thing out.”
Baekho also seemed to understand the importance of information transfer as he immediately gave me a report. In summary…
“As soon as I saw you fall into the water, I dove in after you.”
Baekho had jumped into the water to save me. In the process, he got ganged up on by the monsters that had woken up and seriously almost died…
I’ll just ignore the unnecessary asides about himself.
After taking different tactics and maneuvers, Baekho succeeded in bringing me out of the water before I sank all the way down.
He said something about how it was a blessing that the barbarian skeleton itself was heavy and that I had worn my armor because if I hadn’t, I would’ve been swept up in the currents and under the waterfall. Then, it would have been impossible to save me at that point.
“After that, we barely got onto the boat, and quickly escaped.”
“That easily…?”
The explanation wasn’t enough for me to accept it. No matter how much mana the wizards used to activate the defensive magic circle around the boat, I found it hard to believe that they defended against the rank 1 special boss Draizen until I could successfully be saved. And it just ended with, “And then, we all escaped swiftly and safely”?
“To be honest, I don’t get it either. But I swear, that’s all that happened. We got away as fast as we could, and the monsters just let us go. And when we were defending on the boat, they just tapped us a few times and nothing else.”
Baekho’s description of the Draizen’s behavior raised a lot of questions. I mean, it just wasn’t a monster that was that docile.
But since he said that was what happened, I just carried on with the next point.
“Then why were you trying to wake me up so desperately? From what I could see, there wasn’t any reason for you to panic like that.”
Baekho’s expression twisted. “Are you asking that because you don’t know? No… Ah, I guess you wouldn’t.”
“What are you trying to pull here?” I question, a little offended.
He let out a dry cough before answering me as if it was nothing. “Ahem! It was urgent, of course! Your heart had stopped by then!”
“…What?”
“I was so surprised because I thought you were really going to die!”
I finally took a good look at Baekho. It didn’t seem like he was exaggerating when he told me he nearly died after diving into the water. There was the fact that he was drenched head to toe, not to mention his equipment was busted in some places. I could even see a few open wounds on him.
Did he really cry that hard just because my heart stopped?
For a second, I was ashamed of having seriously considered throwing Baekho off the boat when the opportunity had presented itself.
Still, he saved me because he needs me for his own goal. It’s not like he did it just because he seriously cares about me, right?
From that angle, Baekho had done everything he could to save me because it was what he needed for his plan. So I settled on not being too thankful.
Yeah. This was the nonsensical logic that matched Rafdonia.
“Baekho Lee. I have a question.”
“What is it?”
“No, it’s fine. It’s nothing.”
“What the— Bro. Did you just want to piss me off?”
I flinched at his sudden use of “bro” when talking to me, but thankfully it didn’t seem like the others were paying us any attention. I mean, Baekho was the type to just say whatever in the first place.
“What is it? What is it? What is it? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”
“I said it’s nothing!”
“Argh! That’s pissing me off even more!”
As I watched Baekho throw even more of a tantrum than usual, I thought about just telling him to shut up, but I coldly stopped there.
Why didn’t you just leave me to die?
That was the question I wanted to ask him originally. This was the guy who had planned on letting me die and reviving me with the Stone of Revival, after all. If I had died today, he could use it to revive me. After that, since my memory would be erased, he could just marinate me from the side and control me as he wished.
Then he probably didn’t know.
Thinking about it, there was no way he could be sure I had the Stone of Revival on me. Missha could still be holding onto it, and if not, there was the possibility that I could’ve handed it to someone I trusted for them to store it.
Well, since he was smart, he probably knew the chances of me having the Stone of Revival on me would be the highest.
He can’t open my sub-space unless he kills me. That’s just a gamble at that point.
I stopped my question before I could voice it. The moment I said it, he would gain the information that I had the Stone of Revival on me. It could become a variable he could use against me later.
I finally feel like I’m back.
I smirked at the thought, causing Baekho to look at me with an expression that said he remembered something.
“Ah, right! I don’t care about your question anymore, so could I ask you something?”
“Go on.”
“While you were asleep, you were smiling pretty frequently…”
“So?”
“Just what dream did you have?”
I took a moment to think.
What I dreamed of…
If I were honest with him about what I experienced over there, he would just think I had something wrong with my head.
Just like how the people in that world thought about me.
Even if I told him about the Earth Witch or the parallel world, he would just dismiss it and say that I saw a hallucination due to the field effect.
It’s pretty funny in hindsight.
But the funniest thing was that even I didn’t know for sure.
Was everything I experienced a dream or did I really return to the real world? Was the Witch I met in between real or an illusion?
Ba-dump.
I was still a little confused. And for some reason, the memories of that place began to fade away the moment I woke up. It was like waking from a dream when you could only remember a few key impactful scenes from within it.
“Huh? Why aren’t you saying anything? Did you have a lewd dream maybe? I’m telling you now, but if you couldn’t wake up because you got stuck in an orgy illusion…”
“It’s not that, so cut it out.”
“Then what was it? Can’t you at least tell me that? Considering our relationship.”
What was our relationship?
I wanted to ask that in response and cut him off, but I thought it would only prolong the conversation, so I gave a summary.
Something one didn’t need. Something that one would experience at least once in their life.
“It was just a meaningless dream.”
Something that I didn’t need to regret.