Chapter 17: The Boundary

Chapter 17: Chapter 17: The Boundary

Victor scratched the back of his neck, caught completely off guard. "I... no, nothing like that, I just..."

And then it hit him.

Oh. Right.

None of what he’d just done was something a Barbarian in this world would know.

Whether it was using the bug’s gland or about its poison gland, and even the idea of sterilizing the knife before cutting into a person’s flesh. None of it existed in their culture. Of course, it wasn’t a skill nor magic.

But he could not tell them he was a player with knowledge from another world. Besides, people believed what they wanted to at the end of the day.

"Well, you see, it just came to me." He explained, not sure if they were going to buy it.

But then he noticed their eyes get brighter.

Popo wrapped a hand around his neck in laughter. "That’s it. The favor of the ancestors. And the elders said you were a good for nothing. Hahaha... the sword was just not your fate."

The others joined him, giving heavy affectionate pats to his shoulders.

Victor was taken back. They really bought that?

However, he could not help but notice that only Kiki did not look at him with those stars in her eyes.

Like she had more questions but held them back. Victor tried not to look her way for now.

Kiki was insanely attractive to look at, but her gaze made him feel like she was peeling into his real self.

—

Popo called for everyone to sleep, insisting he’d take the first watch himself. Two other barbarians volunteered alongside him, and Victor, half out of guilt, half out of the fact that sleep felt impossible after everything decided to join them, along with Kiki.

None of them wanted a repeat of what had almost happened to the girl. As far as they knew, more bugs could be hiding in the village.

They rotated through the rest of the night in shifts, with their weapons in hand, and eyes on the treeline and the hollow homes.

Until grey light finally began creeping over the horizon.

By morning, Popo begun handing out orders. As survivors of a tribal massacre, the first and most important resources to gather was food, and other essential supplies.

What could still be salvaged had to be salvaged fast, before rot or scavenging wild animals got to it.

A few warriors banded together under Kiki to sweep the rest of the village, checking for more stragglers among the swarm, or, if the ancestors were kind, other survivors who’d hidden well enough to make it through the night.

With daylight properly up, Victor finally saw the full scope of it.

The village wasn’t just damaged. It was gutted through.

Boramo had been very brutal with the extermination of the tribe.

Huts that should have stood in neat clustered rows were now leaning at broken angles.

For some homes, the thatch roofs were torn open in ragged holes where the swarm had punched through from above.

Structure support beams jutted out at odd angles like broken ribs. One structure had collapsed entirely, and had nothing left but a blackened frame and a single wooden door standing upright in the wreckage, leading nowhere.

Bodies were scattered here too. These were the old and sick that never made it to the arena to watch the battle challenge.

An old woman slumped against a doorway, half of her face missing.

A man collapsed halfway out a window, like he’d been trying to escape but ran out of time. Blood still dropped down his fingers.

In one hut, Victor found what had clearly once been a set of little siblings, huddled together in a corner. Their backs had been eaten out.

From the way their fingers dug into each other’s skin, they must have held on tight to one another regardless of the pain.

A sad sight to behold.

Only a day, but the dead had began to rot and the smell.

Off to one side, under a lean-to someone had hastily rebuilt, Jaja lay propped against a support post, color seemed to slowly return to his face.

The young barbarian girl who’d brought Victor beer the night before knelt beside him, pressing damp cloth to his wound, murmuring something low and comforting every time he winced.

Victor watched them for a moment before turning away, making sure no one paid him too much attention as he slipped past the edge of the search parties.

It was good timing that Kiki was busy too.

He had somewhere else to be.

He kept his pace unhurried as he moved. He also nodded at anyone who glanced his way, making himself look like he was helping clear debris, until the huts thinned out behind him and the tree line swallowed the sounds from the village whole.

Victor wasn’t looking for supplies.

He was looking for a place

He lifted his eyes toward the distance. There was a line of green hue hills like light from earth to heaven which rose against the grey morning sky.

This was it. The boundary separating the Southern Bloodline’s territory from what the game had always called the Open World of the First Floor.

It was one of dozens like it scattered across Gavalon, each boundary carving the land into isolated tribal territories and clans of different specie, separating one bloodline’s hunting grounds from another’s.

According to everything Victor remembered from a thousand hours of gameplay, these lines had stood unbroken for hundreds of years. It was older than most empires, and older than any war. It was an ancient division nobody alive understood.

The only way one could cross these boundaries was if they were level 10 and above. Or an animal without sentient intelligence like humans.

Meaning migrating animals could move freely through the boundaries.

Victor always assumed that the boundary was a kind of safe mechanism for the young ones of the different races from invasion and conquest.

Further evidence for this was the fact that once one reached level 10, nothing in this floor remained attractive. They would all seek higher floors with greater growth possibilities.

Then again, Victor was also aware that in about a month’s time from now, this boundary would still fall.

The encroaching darkness would make sure of that.

And when it did, the real game would start. And thousands would die.

He sighed heavily looking at the Boundary. What a beautiful magical sight. Like auroras touching the earth.

But that wasn’t what he was looking for. Not directly.

He kept close to the northern edge of the boundary, eyes tracking the ground, kicking through underbrush and fallen branches as he went.

Sometimes, he would count the paces aloud. Just the way he remembered doing it a hundred times in the game.

Only this time, there was no respawn if he got it wrong.

At least there was no proof of it.

Meaning he had to be careful of traps. Traps that had been set by the barbarians to hunt wild animals.

Up ahead he finally saw it.