Barbarian in a Failed Game

This wasn’t the first time Khan had experienced viewing someone else’s memories.

After dealing with the Alchemist’s clone, he had used those memories to uncover and keep the secret workshop at Grand Elfelan Citadel and disseminate rumors.

Back then, he had experienced something similar.

When ‘Alpha’, who was only a presence in the memories, suddenly glared at him and engaged in an unblinking staring contest. Attempting to maintain his composure, Khan was startled.

“That’s an unusual outfit, and your face is peculiar too. Are most intelligences from outside Midland similar to your kind?”

“… To some extent, yes.”

Despite merely peeking into Skadi’s memories, Khan suddenly found himself in the middle of the scene. Not as “Gordi Khan”, but dressed as a company employee in a suit and dress shoes. Oddly, he held an axe in his hand.

‘What the hell kind of mash-up is this?’

“A mental entity often manifests in a form most familiar to the individual.”

The traveler, who had opened the void, spoke as if reading Khan’s thoughts.

“It’s proof that you’re starting to accept your form in Midland as well as your form from the other world.”

“That’s… a load of crap.”

While his verbal response was negative, internally, Khan agreed with the traveler’s statement.

His time on Earth was more than twice that of Midland, but in terms of the density of experience, the nearly ten years he spent living like a barbarian were overwhelmingly significant.

Perhaps this meant he had come to identify with the “barbarian” aspect of himself.

“So, what do you mean by saying you summoned me for this moment?”

“I thought you’d start catching on. My identity, I mean.”

“I know.”

Mortalia. Khan spat the detested name from his lips.

“Whether by coincidence or something else, no matter what I do, your traces keep coming up like persistent tendrils. Only an idiot wouldn’t see a connection.”

The traveler — Mortalia — smiled brightly.

“Right, correct. I called you here.”

“Why?”

“You’re not curious about how I did it?”

Khan gazed at her with a look that said he wouldn’t understand even if she explained, but Mortalia shrugged it off.

“It would be a bit disappointing if you didn’t listen. I went through a lot of trouble, you know.”

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

“Oh, just listen.”

Sliiide.

The robe that concealed Mortalia’s body gradually slipped off. It wasn’t as if she had an exhibitionist streak, yet, despite the odd timing, Khan merely squinted in discontent at the sight.

“Disgusting.”

“Straight to the point, aren’t you? From your perspective, I must seem like a kidnapper. Still, it stings a little because I’m a woman after all.”

Khan didn’t initially react, and Mortalia continued to wear her characteristic bright smile, making her appearance even more unsettling.

Her body was ostensibly human, but it was clearly not. Below her neck, her skin was covered in rough, scale-like growths, and her hands and feet ended in cephalopod-like tentacles. Yet her face retained the beauty she had possessed in her human days.

“What do you have to do to end up like that?”

“Finally taking some interest, huh? I guess taking off the robe was worth it. Honestly, it’s nothing spectacular. You saw it yourself, didn’t you? The me in the memory just recklessly opened a void. This is just… a side effect. I underestimated the power of chaos.”

Even as she spoke, Mortalia’s tentacle fingers wriggled. She seemed to find it amusing, waving her hand for Khan to see.

“You know this, don’t you? From the memories passed on through Karyan, that I ascended to godhood by harboring chaos and ignoring the rules. At first, it was fine. The side effects were just occasional lapses in sanity. However, the more chaos I embraced, the more my body changed.”

“… Karyan is fine though.”

“He’s special. You might not fully grasp it, but… Haha, a monster who single-handedly hunted down apostles of the Void even during his mortal days is hardly ordinary.”

‘A real monster’, Khan thought to himself, impressed.

‘A creature that end-tier playable characters and hero-grade NPCs could only hunt down as a group, he managed to take down alone? Even before becoming a God?’

Khan had doubted it ever since Karyan claimed he had wrestled with an ancient dragon, but now…

‘Karyan might have really been the strongest in this universe…?’

“To be precise, his lineage is what’s special. Anyway, as I started facing these side effects, with my mind occasionally drifting and my body mutating, I realized.”

Mortalia smiled and turned her head toward the portal to the void.

“Isn’t it ironic? I became a God to overcome the mortal lifespan, but because of that, my time became even more limited.”

“So, what exactly did you hope to achieve? Transforming into that mess… Why did you summon me of all people?”

“……”

Her expression turned contemplative as she gathered her thoughts under the weight of Khan’s blunt tone.

“I wanted to be free.”

“What?”

“In some form or another, you know this world is fake, don’t you?”

Although he didn’t answer, that silence was the truest form of affirmation. There was a time when the world around him was merely a ‘game’. Monsters, NPCs, even playable characters—everything had been an illusion for Khan.

Before he was possessed by Midland.

“I used to believe I was the greatest sorceress in the world. I thought everything could be achieved at my fingertips, and that wasn’t entirely wrong. Manipulating souls and wielding the power of chaos—it’s almost over the top, even for a story’s protagonist, isn’t it?”

But Mortalia had realized that her belief was mistaken. If she had been merely exceptional, she might have lived her life intoxicated by her greatness. However, her overwhelming brilliance led her to uncover hidden truths, and the consequences were, as evident, devastating.

“A person who lived for their own greatness suddenly realized all this was fake. Naturally, the next steps followed. At first, I denied it… but gradually, I began searching for a way. A way to escape this fake world. And the result was…”

“Failure?”

“Half, maybe.”

Khan displayed a hint of surprise at the ambiguous response. Half a failure? Did that mean there was half a success—

“Don’t misunderstand. It was impossible to move to another world. If that had happened, you wouldn’t have ended up here.”

“Then what do you mean by half-success?”

“You.”

Her tentacle-like finger pointed at the man in a suit holding an axe.

“An intellect observing this world from beyond the void. Drawing you into this world—that was the half-success and the best I could do.”

***

“…What do you mean by that?”

The long-suppressed emotions threatened to burst free.

Success? Dragging an innocent person into this wretched world? Was she joking?

If they had met in the physical world, without gazing at her beautiful face juxtaposed with cephalopod tentacles—

He might have genuinely tried to beat her up.

“Are you saying that dragging me into this damned world was your way to be free? You must be confused. I was just a normal human. I lived a life entirely removed from fighting, as far from it as possible! And now? You dumped me into a world filled with monsters for your sake? You must be joking—!”

The dam of repressed emotions broke, and his words spilled out. When he first fell into this world, there were dozens of moments each day when a small mistake could have led to his death.

Of course, that made sense.

Despite his body becoming that of a barbarian, his mind remained that of a corporate drone, worn down by repeated routines.

“Sorceress, your choice was the worst. If you were going to summon someone, you should have brought a human from the battlefield over there, not a pot-bellied office worker like me…!”

“But you survived, didn’t you?”

“That’s because─!”

“And it might sound like an excuse, but summoning you among all the entities from other dimensions wasn’t my doing. Think about it. Leaping past the void surrounding Midland to possess an intelligent being from another dimension? Even in my final years, that was impossible. And… if I can’t do it, it means no one in Midland can either.”

Mortalia added with an awkward smile.

“It’s true that I caused you to fall into this world, but the process involved the power of something entirely different. And that ‘something’ chose you, interloper.”

“Something? Are you talking about the creator of this world or a force like fate or destiny?”

“That, I don’t know.”

Mortalia shrugged, deflecting Khan’s sharp question. Khan was about to vent more anger at her irresponsible attitude but stopped, struck by a sudden question that made his face harden.

‘Something’s off.’

What was it that felt off? Khan meticulously reviewed their conversation, and Mortalia remained silent, seemingly willing to wait until he voiced his thoughts.

And it wasn’t long before Khan figured it out.

“The sequence of events—what’s the timeline here?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“According to what you said, your actions don’t make sense.”

Mortalia merely laughed. Seeing her reaction, Khan knew that his suspicion was the correct answer to her riddle.

“You discovered the truth of this world, began wielding chaos, experienced its side effects, struggled for freedom, summoned me, left traces to guide me here… It doesn’t add up, does it?”

“What exactly doesn’t add up?”

Mortalia had left traces of herself throughout Midland. This guided an interloper like Khan to a frozen valley, led him to encounter Karyan, and passed on her thoughts. These encounters provided Khan with reasons to head to Paradise and ultimately led him to the Tree of Memories to uncover these memories.

“So, when did you summon me? Was it before you met Karyan?”

“…….”

“When did you realize the truth of this world? When did you embrace the power of chaos and experience its side effects? Then who is the you that I saw in these memories? From what I gather, you hadn’t fully comprehended the world’s secrets when you first left your thoughts with Karyan. You only realized the truth later on, likely after opening the void portal atop the Tree of Memories.”

This presented a significant contradiction.

“According to your remnants, you only decided to summon a void entity after opening the void portal. Isn’t that interesting? Yet, you left traces for an interloper even before your contact with Karyan.”

A relic in the sorceress’s ruins, an ancient map, guided him to the Hoarfrost Gorge. However, at the time of leaving that map, the sorceress had no intention of summoning an entity from another dimension. Yet, she left behind a trail for such a being.

“Who are you, really? Are you the sorceress who discovered the truth of the world and despaired, or are you something entirely different?”

At this question, Mortalia smiled the same unsettling smile as before.

“Do you know? This world has been endlessly repeating.”

And she spoke a shocking truth, perhaps the true crux of their long conversation.

“And that chain has already been broken once. It was I who broke it… and the heavens punished the creation that dared defy it. Haven’t you ever felt something was odd? The powerful ancient civilization fell, leading to the present era. Didn’t you find the time in between strangely empty?”

That was the punishment from the heavens. Ending an era filled with beings defying the heavens, and beginning a new one.

“My actions were simple. I broke the cycle of repetition and led the ‘me’ of the final history to leave trails for you, who would be summoned in the distant future. The result of that is the me standing before you now.”

“An Apostle of the Void…!”

“Correct.”