They walked into the rift and immediately sank to their knees. They were in a swamp. It rained although the canopies of trees soaked most of the rainwater.

The water they stood in was dark and murky with drifting pieces of wood and plants in it. The ground beneath their feet felt solid enough.

In all directions stood moss-covered trees, many of them had the lowest parts of their canopies submerged in the water, a few had fallen to some past disaster or time itself.

Around some trees, thick weeds emerged from the water, creating good hiding spots for the monsters.

The air was humid but didn’t smell of decay as Keynes expected. There was a freshness to it that felt at odds with the nature of the swamp.

Despite the heavy rain, there was plenty of light.

Bill was the first to comment on the rift.

“I don’t like it.”

Haruka nodded, presumably scouting the area with his spiritual companion. Keynes decided to do the same.

It is a nice-looking place, Alice said as she floated away. She was crazy.

“Keynes,” Vivena whispered as if afraid that monsters would hear her. “If things go south…”

She didn’t finish the sentence but Keynes understood the meaning perfectly.

“Just wait for the rift monsters to show up first. There is no overcharge effect, so fewer monsters and no boss.”

“I am not sure about fighting in the knee-deep water though.”

She was right. They couldn’t see the bottom. There was no telling how deep the entire swamp was. The Level 3 rift was larger than the Level 2 and if they followed the same formula then it should be around two kilometres square in size.

“Keynes, is this me or does this rift seem very different from the previous one?”

“You mean the armour?” Keynes half-asked as he noticed the same thing. At the face value, this rift looked like Level 1 or 2 rifts. There had to be more to this.

“I do.”

“So, what is it, Har?” Bill asked. “Are we doing it?”

“Vivena, Keynes?” Haruka turned to Keynes and Vivena.

“What is your spiritual companion telling you?” Keynes asked.

“He’s not yet back. Did you send yours?”

Keynes nodded. He considered unfolding his aura but he couldn’t do so without revealing his presence from the monsters.

Master, there are monsters ahead. They are submerged.

Size? Skills?

I think they are large but I cannot say for sure. The water is obscuring my senses. Is it yours?

Keynes shrugged her question away and turned to the others.

“The monsters are underwater and they seem to be large.”

Haruka got the same message from his spiritual companion.

After a short debate, they decided to go ahead. They could always back off out of the rift if the monsters turned out too strong. And there was always Vivena with her absurd Talent.

They slowly waded through the water until they encountered the spot. It was twenty metres wide, without a single tree or weed. Their spiritual companions confirmed that the monsters were hiding there.

“Wait here,” Keynes said and lifted himself into the air. He moved above the spot with the monsters, the rain hit him hard as there were no canopies to shelter him. With a shock, he realised that even the rain was Level 3. That was scary.

He stopped three metres above the surface, then unfolded his aura just enough to touch the monsters beneath him. He wished for a better technique, it’d let him scout the area without the monsters knowing about his presence.

The water exploded as two lizards covered with colourful fish scales jumped out of it. They were the size of a grown crocodile but there were many differences: a shorter head with sharper teeth, a red dorsal fin and a longer tail ended with a sting.

Keynes had to go higher to avoid their attack as both monsters jumped over three metres into the air. A few seconds after the monsters dropped back into the water, Keynes repeated his aura probing, only this time, the monsters met his shortswords.

Despite all strength behind the attack, the blades didn’t manage more than inch deep cuts. Not enough to deal lethal damage.

“Damn it.”

Roused and angered by the wounds, the monsters swam out of their hiding spot. It was a submerged depression. Easy to miss if one didn’t pay attention.

There were five swamp lizards. Bill and Haruka readied their rungus while Vivena decided to use the unidentified mace. It meant that the mace’s properties wouldn’t be active but it didn’t matter. It was a Level 3 weapon. Just this made it very powerful. And there was a strong possibility she wouldn’t be able to wield it if it was identified anyway.

The mace turned out to be their saviour.

Rungus did very little damage, especially because they were crafted out of Level 1 wood. It pushed Bill and Haruka into defence while Vivena kept her ground.

Keynes dropped, skewering one of the monsters through its neck, killing it. The deed stressed his sword, he grimaced.

With one of theirs dead, the monsters went into a frenzy. It wasn’t their passive skill which was called: the vitality of depths, and increased the swamp lizards’ regeneration the deeper they were. There was no telling what it meant but the two rift monsters that Keynes had wounded didn’t seem to heal.

Their frenzy didn’t last more than ten seconds and everyone was able to disengage but they knew to keep their distance when one of the monsters was killed.

Strangely enough, the monsters didn’t use their stings. Vivena killed another swamp lizard, sending others into yet another frenzy. Keynes took to the air while Bill and Haruka kept close to trees, using them as obstacles.

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With only three monsters left from this particular depression, this should have been an easy fight but it wasn’t the case. The four misjudged the effect of wading in Level 3 water. It was quite an effort to keep moving and they were losing stamina at an alarming pace.

Keynes cursed silently, understanding their unpreparedness. Besides a few rift items, they had nothing.

We need spells, more items, consumables and techniques. If this was a rare or exotic rift we’d be dead by now.

Like with the goblins, the Level 3 rift humbled Keynes, showing him how little he understood the rifts and the System. He wished for Captain Ventura to be here. That man had been crazy but his training was the best thing that happened to Keynes.

I hope we’ll meet again, cap.

As soon as the frenzy passed, Vivena readied another attack only for Haruka to stop her. There was something wrong. The monsters attacked but their attacks were always temperate. Why was that?

“Watch your back!” Haruka shouted. They turned to see the surface of the water ripple.

Keynes immediately reached out with his aura and found the freaking champion in the form of a swamp snake. It was perhaps five metres long.

“They were pushing us back into the champion!”

“Get to the trees,” Vivena shouted.

The swamp snake stayed submerged but was getting closer. The three swamp lizards were circling them. These monsters were cunning.

Keynes landed on a thick branch that arched above where the champion was going to be swimming in a couple of seconds. Others waited tentatively as the monsters’ plan played out.

“When I hit the champion,” Keynes called out. “Engage those damned lizards.”

And then the time came, Keynes collapsed at the snake, driving the shortsword point first into its head, only to find that the monster somehow avoided the lethal hit. Keynes still cut a deep gouge in its head though.

Out of the water, the snake’s tail exploded with a sting, dripping a sickly green venom.

It was a rare swamp snake with a 10% chance to evade an attack and a tail strike. Keynes dodge the sting as it blurred next to his chest, then cut it off. The snake hissed and bit Keynes’s thigh. Pain exploded in Keynes’s leg, for a moment threatening to overwhelm him but he hadn’t trained his Will for nothing.

With the next slash, the shortsword got stuck in the snake’s neck. It didn’t stop its bite but the strength behind the bite was vanishing.

The beast was dying.

Its body started to trash and Keynes used his other shortsword to end its life.

Keynes had to remove the snake’s head himself. He only hoped that the monster’s bite wasn’t venomous. Meanwhile, Vivena killed a swamp lizard and was helping Bill. Haruka was still fighting, his rungu doing minimal damage. The fish scales of the lizards were far stronger than they looked.

This made Keynes think about their value. They looked pretty and they were Level 3.

Wagner is going to freak out when I show all of this to him.

The snake’s skin could be useful too. As Haruka said: all of this was wealth.

Five minutes later, the last lizard was killed by Vivena. Her mace was the only reliable weapon against the scaled lizards.

“Your leg!” Vivena approached Keynes and without hesitation took out the Poison’s Regalia.

It added 10 Vitality, which meant increased regeneration. He needed that. He could still walk but it was painful.

Keynes accepted the cloak, feeling much better when he put it on. Ten points in a single attribute was a large difference.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Fine. The bite didn’t have poison in it.”

Bill dropped on his bottom, clearly tired. Haruka leaned against a tree.

“This is harder than I anticipated,” Haruka said, sounding mindful. “Even being Level 3 and in the Elevated stage still doesn’t give me enough strength to overcome a few Level 3 monsters.”

“It’s this rift,” Vivena said. “Just wading in the water tires me.”

They nodded.

“What do we do?” Bill asked and Keynes replied before anyone else voiced their opinion.

“We push forward. We are underprepared for the rift but we have time. We don’t need to clear it in an hour. Besides, with this cloak. The tides will change now.”

***

Keynes wasn’t wrong. The Poison’s Regalia gave him a substantial boost. The poison aura mixed with his spiritual aura was enough to wear down the swamp lizards. The champions were unaffected. It looked like being a champion gave some hidden perks.

They encountered seventeen depressions and repeated the same tactic with Keynes floating above the water, then stirring the monsters from their slumber. He’d attack them as they jump out of the water, and then Vivena would join him and kill as many as possible. Bill and Haruka had to sit out the fights and watch from a distance. Haruka was able to step in and help in the beginning, wielding his Elevated aura to distract or confuse the swamp lizards but his spiritual stamina ran out too quickly.

Additionally, their wooden clubs were at their limits and they decided to not risk destroying them.

The swamp snakes were a sort of wild card as they came in different rarities. After the first rare, the next two were common, and the last one was exotic. The exotic swamp snake took two hours with its two annoying passive skills, it was able to recover from slashing damage as long as it remained close to trees and it moved faster in the water. Its active skill was a rapid constriction. Keynes also discovered that the poisonous attacks from the cloak didn’t seem to work with swords.

Keynes didn’t take chances and stayed in the air during that fight. By the end, Vivena had to step in and give him a hand.

The champions dropped unidentified common seeds in a small glass bottle and exotic boots.

Bill commented that the swamp, with the right items, was actually easy as they only had to repeat the same tactic to clear it.

Vivena disagreed with him.

“In every direction we look, the swamp looks exactly the same and the heavy rain obscures our vision further.”

Bill spun around, taking the view in.

“Damn, I haven’t realised it. You’re right, Vivena.”

“Spiritual companions can lead us out of it,” Haruka interjected.

“I don’t have one yet.”

“I don’t think ascenders without spiritual companions will have much chance here anyway. The way the monsters behave here is not normal. They are passive and attack only when they are very close. It is clear they are waiting for unaware prey.”

After fifteen hours of exhausting fighting with rest in between, they reached the reward chest. Keynes and Haruka immediately checked the area for the hidden door, finding none. Keynes wondered if the Explorer buff increased the chance of the hidden rewards. If that was the case, they’d need to exploit it.

They found a perfectly rectangular piece of white wood and a Scroll of Identification which they badly needed. They had four unidentified Level 3 items, including the wood.

“I don’t understand something,” Keynes said. “Why did the System give this wood a system window but when you take a piece of any tree from the rift, you don’t get the same.”

Bill and Vivena weren’t interested in the topic. Haruka pondered the issue and came up with an easy answer.

“It has to be tied to the fact that it is a rift reward.”

The answer didn’t satisfy Keynes. There had to be more. But this wasn’t time for discussions. The group was beyond tired, wet and hungry. They decided to leave the rift and rest for at least six hours before returning here. They’d already overstayed their welcome.

But Keynes wasn’t so hasty. Their first Level 3 rift had broken armour laying here and there. Why was this rift different?

He asked them to stay a while longer.

“I want to check on something.”

He’d mentioned to Alice that something about these depressions seemed odd. Alice had only encouraged him to check on them, refusing to tell him if he was right or not. Keynes didn’t know if that was the System’s restriction or her twisted way of helping him.

“What is it?” Vivena asked as they trudged back to the nearest depression.

“Just a hunch. I will be back in a minute.” Alice, you will have to help me navigate underwater. Okay?

She mentally nodded and Keynes dived into the water.

The depression was deeper than Keynes anticipated. At least, three metres deep.

At first, Keynes recoiled when his hand touched something resembling a snake, then he realised these were roots. The whole depression was full of them and … there was a pattern. He followed them, regretting he couldn’t see in the dark waters.

They create a circle…

He got to the middle and his hands touched something cold, smooth and round.

Eggs?! What the hell?

When he got back to the surface, he held three book-sized eggs. Now the question was – what were they?