Surviving The Game As A Barbarian Novel 2025 - Chapter 717
Chapter 717: Prison (4)
There was a saying in this world: When prisoners live as prisoners for long enough, they begin to boast about their shackles.
About who had the bigger, heavier, and tougher chains.
About who had to endure the most to carry those chains.
Some might challenge it, might question if it even made sense, but the man believed it to be true.
After all, it wasn’t that different for him either.
Good equipment.
Status.
Money.
Skills, experiences, and so on…
There was a certain pride in the results obtained through blood, sweat, and tears. And even though he sometimes desired the recognition of others for his efforts, the man often felt a sense of emptiness too.
What did it matter how much money, fame, or authority he obtained? The moment he returned to his original world, it would all have been for nothing.
And so, the man thought.
Good equipment.
Status.
Money.
Skills, experiences, among others…
No matter how much he talked about it, from others’ point of view, it must surely seem like he was boasting about his shackles.
“Hah, I want to eat a Jumbo Mac.”
Because this world was a prison.
***
There was a man who silently looked into a mirror.
Ba-dump.
A face that was considered quite handsome was accompanied by white armor that covered his entire body.
Ba-dump.
After looking at himself through the mirror for a while, the man felt uneasy for some reason.
Well, in truth, he knew what the reason was.
The man brushed his hand against the upper-left part of his breastplate. Where his index finger touched was completely empty, with only a slight mark left behind on it. It was something similar to the mark left behind after removing a sticker that had been on a surface for a long time.
The man moved his hand away from the mark.
He was no longer the paladin of that church.
Officially, he had left the church and had become an outsider, and was no longer allowed to use the title of Paladin. The insignia on his armor was taken as proof of that.
He no longer had the obligation to attend the morning prayers or conduct mealtime prayers, nor the group nightly prayers before going to sleep.
However…
Ba-dump.
The man reflected in the mirror still kneeled on the carpet and closed his eyes to pray, if only informally.
It was something he had done every morning, even after leaving the church.
“May the blessing of the twilight star be with us…”
In truth, the man hated praying. Even when he was still a part of the church, he always complained in his heart about the frequency of the act and had sometimes even made excuses to avoid attending them.
However, there was a reason he continued with the morning prayers, at least. In a sense, it was the same reason that any human prayed to a god.
“Your servant desperately calls upon you. Please do not take away your authority from me. Please show thy mercy. Save me from threat.”
He was afraid.
He had created a tank character that used divine power as the main resource, and if that divine power had just disappeared one day, he would become useless. And there were quite a few examples of people losing all their divine power after leaving the church.
Well, honestly speaking, praying also helped him calm down a little. Even a stone on the side of the road wished to lean on something.
Ba-dump.
And so, after kneeling for a while in an almost meditative state, the man stood. He then looked to the ceiling.
“Please, I beg you… From what I saw, it seems that you treat the baron well, Goddess. I will keep supporting him from his side, so please?”
The way he was speaking to the goddess was beyond frivolous, but it wasn’t a rare occurrence for him at all. Even while he was in the church, he would use polite words aloud and these words were in his heart, and his divine power continued to increase despite that.
In a sense, the goddess also wanted a more familiar relationship with him.
…Or not.
Knock, knock.
As he was about to leave, a knock came at his door.
“Mr. Parav, are you there?”
On the other side, the face of a familiar woman was waiting for him.
A small build. Big round eyes. An overall gentle appearance.
However, the woman seemed like her stubbornness would match her righteousness.
“Ms. Marrone?” he asked in surprise. “What is it? There should be some time before the gathering…”
“Just because. I heard that putting on a large armor set by yourself is difficult… I came by to see if there was anything I could help with. But, well, it does seem that you’ve finished with it all!”
“Ahaha… It was difficult doing it by myself at the start, but I’ve gotten the hang of it after all this time. Thank you for thinking of me.”
“If you’re done, do you want to head over with me? It won’t be too long before the gathering.”
“Ah, okay.”
With that, the two of them left the lodging and headed toward the meeting spot.
Many people had already arrived, and they could also see the vice-captain standing there with a stern expression.
Versyl Gowland.
Someone who possessed great shackles comparable to his own. Another prisoner in this vast prison.
And someone who had obtained a new set of shackles not long ago.
“I didn’t notice it at first, but these days, I’ve been feeling the weight of Mr. Yandel’s absence. Ms. Gowland must be having a hard time…”
“Ahaha… That’s probably the case. Probably…”
Parav gave an awkward smile as he slowed his breathing.
Ba-dump!
Even though he hadn’t done any strenuous exercise, his heart had been beating wildly from the moment he woke up this morning.
It was a condition that befell him on the day he returned to the city and that had never left him since. Even though a few days had passed already, even though he should’ve gotten used to it at this point, he got the feeling that he would never grow accustomed to it.
Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump!
He still felt like he was going to burst with anxiety, and sheer emptiness sometimes visited him, making it hard to breathe.
It was all due to this intuition of his. He couldn’t tell whether it was a blessing or a curse.
Please, let me survive today without any danger.
When his condition suddenly worsened, he closed his eyes and prayed to the goddess of this other world one more time.
Pshwoong!
A sound, similar to the one of a fighter jet taking off, assaulted his ears.
At that, all the clan members looked up at the sky where the sound came from, and they all went silent.
“Huh?”
Something shot into the sky like a rocket before drawing a parabola back down to the center of the city. Because it was so high up, it looked slow, but it was obviously moving at an incredible speed. It drew a clear arc across the sky before raining down bright lights.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
The alarm bells that lined the city walls began to ring.
Boom!
And not long after, the entire city shook with an impact.
***
Rumble!
The tremors could be felt faintly on the sixth underground floor.
There, I collected my thoughts while looking at Raven.
“A portal…”
When a barbarian heard something nonsensical, they never said it was impossible or limited their imaginations. The wizard who’d spoken the ridiculous idea, however, seemed to be in doubt of her senses.
“Well… It might not be! It’s just that I think I can feel the mana waves specific to portals come from inside the box…”
Although she wasn’t a Guide who could sense the presence of portals from a distance, she was still a wizard who was more sensitive to mana than anyone else.
That was why there probably was a portal in there.
Plus, I had heard of something like this in passing in the past.
Tap, tap…
The Round Table, twenty years ago.
Well, since a lot of time had passed since then, I guess it was the Round Table of twenty-something years, but nevertheless.
An evil spirit from another world, Kagureas, had said this:
“There is a portal in the palace basement.”
There was a portal somewhere under the palace, a place other than the dimensional squares. This could be that portal.
“It’s probably not a portal connected to the labyrinth, right…?”
Well, we’d only know after testing it out, but the probability that it connected to the labyrinth was not that high. Kagureas had also said as much.
“I learned it by chance so I can’t be sure, but I do not think the portal is connected to the labyrinth.”
It was closer to “hearsay” than factual evidence, to be fair. However, since it was said by the first person to discover it, I could attribute some credibility.
“Is there anything other than the portal?” I asked.
“I’ll need to take a closer look at it…”
“Go on. This might be some grand discovery.”
Raven seemed to like my wording, as she took off to passionately look at this “box” that she guessed contained a portal. She took a lap to look at its exterior before taking another lap around it to check if there were any indents, before using float magic to see if there was anything above it.
Boom!
I used my iron mace to hit the walls, followed Raven’s command to use a shovel to dig into the ground, and so on.
After doing all we could do, there was one thing we became sure of: There was nothing else we could figure out other than whether or not the portal existed in the box.
Well, and maybe was one more thing, though it wasn’t something we learned during our investigation.
“Huh? Mr. Yandel, look over here! The ceiling we fell through reformed itself!”
The floor of the fifth underground floor that we had fallen through was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t feel the slight tremors from above either.
Suddenly, I felt pressed for time. I got the feeling I was in a place that was completely separated from the outside world.
“What about teleport?” I demanded. “You can still use teleport, right?”
“Pardon?” Then, the realization and fear that she might be stuck here forever dawned on her face. “Ahh… G-give me a second!”
She quickly drew a magic circle on the ground and did some tests.
“Um, Mr. Yandel?”
“Speak.”
“Well… I have good news and bad news—”
“Bad news.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to use mass teleport here… My mana keeps dispersing…”
What the hell? Then were we really stuck in here?
I wondered if that even made sense or not, but I tried to remain as calm as possible and keep the conversation flowing.
“Then what’s the good news?”
“I can’t see it with my eyes, but there is a teleportation-type magic circle engraved into the floor here. I think that’s why my mana is being dispersed… But if we can activate it—”
“The point.”
“We should be able to get out, but we won’t know where we’ll land.”
So we didn’t need to worry about being stuck here forever. That was a small comfort, at least.
“Since you’ve used military magic circles, you might know this. It’s similar in principle to those. A magic circle created at a set coordinate, and you can move to and from it using mana, but—”
“The point.”
“This magic circle only has one circuit. It’s only possible to move back and forth from one other point. So what do you want to do?”
I didn’t even need to think about the answer. “Are you sure you can’t figure out anything else from here?”
“Yes. I might be able to figure something out if I had some research equipment, but this is the most I can do here with just myself.”
“Got it. Then activate the magic circle immediately.”
“All right.”
Having seemed to have already known what my decision would be, Raven didn’t say another word and immediately began activating the magic circle.
“This might take some time. I’m going to conduct some verification tests just in case there is something dangerous about it,” she explained. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready, so please rest for now.”
After hearing that it would take some time, I walked up and approached the structure in the middle of the room. It wasn’t black, but not white either—a gray cube. When I touched its exterior, its surface was soft enough to be left with an indent, but it was durable enough that multiple hits from my iron mace didn’t even produce a single crack.
If it’s really a portal on the inside, there should be a way to enter it…
Hmm, was it the sort of thing where I needed magic or a card key to open up an entrance? But if it could be opened with magic, Raven should’ve been able to do something about it.
The weight of time felt heavy on my shoulders. I decided to think about something else.
Noark. Who are they working with, and what are they trying to accomplish?
That was probably a more important question to answer than whatever this mysterious box was. There were a few suspicious things that I couldn’t overlook if they were simply just trying to destroy the royal house.
District 7…
And was District 7 okay?
From what I could tell, it seemed that Thunder exploded one more time before the total collapse. I truly hoped that they were safe—
“Huh?”
Suddenly, I flinched involuntarily and stepped back from the box.
It really couldn’t be helped.
Below the part of the surface I had touched before was the outline of a person’s hand.
When I slowly reached toward the handprint, the hand that seemed to have been pushed out from the other side wriggled again.
Then, I heard a faint voice.
“Let me out.”
I felt chills go down my back at this completely unexpected situation, but it allowed me to realize what this box’s purpose was.
“Please.”
This box was a prison.