“There’s no secret.”

She gave him a hard stare.

“You’re lying.”

Confrontations weren’t something Keynes was comfortable with. It didn’t matter that he had an upper hand, he just didn’t like conflicts. So he picked the easiest way out of this by exiting the rift and ignoring the girl.

Outside the rift, workers were standing in a line, awaiting a command to enter. Out of his group only the mousy girl stood and waited. For them? But when he drew closer she didn’t react so he moved past her.

The second rift featured something called a foxcat, resembling a sand cat with a rabbit’s ears. It was small, knee-high but very agile and fast. One hour between the rifts allowed the trainee group to recharge a portion of their stamina so they could move swiftly. The rift was a never-ending prairie without any features on the horizon.

The number of the foxcats made it impossible for Esopp Earl to keep them all away from the trainees and in consequence, Keynes received a chance to fight. The katana felt smooth in his hands. It was incredible how different unidentified and identified items were. His katana increased damage by 1. It wasn’t something he cared about. The foxcats died easily. So easily that the rest of the group squirmed in pain nearby because of the essence.

To Keynes, the flow of essence was like nectar.

Twice Keynes saw Daiyu Fen glaring at him and grinding her teeth. She wanted his secret, huh.

Not a chance.

***

The next two rifts had nothing of interest. More nature-related themes with snakes and birds that were elusive but easy to kill once Keynes’s katana got to them. The essence was abundant as the monsters were quickly converging only to die in a heartbeat.

When no more creatures came he glanced at Sakur—Daiyu Fen! What the hell was that?! Why did I look at her and thought about Sakura? What is wrong with me? There wasn’t anything between me and Sakura in the first place. She was pretty and that was all!

It was confusing. For sixteen years Keynes barely noticed the other sex and since he’d laid his eyes on Vivena Foxglove his body started to misbehave. Frustrating, stupid, reckless.

Then came time for the fifth rift. For the first time, the rift didn’t have a nature affinity.

The High Lord waited until the trainees had arranged themselves before the entrance to the rift.

“This rift is harder than the ones you have been to. The rift monsters in this one have strong physical resistance.”

“Then how do we kill them?” Lazark asked.

“You won’t be killing anything, remember? I will do the killing as always. But you.” He pointed at Keynes. “Won’t make much harm with your katana. It does no magical damage. So don’t play a hero.”

It caused others to chuckle, which he ignored. This bunch was irrelevant to him. He was interested in what lay inside the rift instead. He wondered how did magical damage work and how would the High Lord inflict it if he still used the same sword unless it had magical damage.

The rift had sand and heat affinity, which Keynes correctly predicted would be a desert. Not a single cloud marred the sky.

“Huh, this is hot,” Butchereyev remarked.

“Yeah,” Samuel King admitted. “I don’t even want to imagine how hot it would be without the thermal protection our wetsuits provide. His words pinged in Keynes’s head. It was hot, yes, although the High Lord didn’t wear the same thermal outfit as them. One of the unexplained mysteries was which attribute enhanced body’s vitality, endurance and resistance.

Did these things increase only with levels or were there some other mechanisms of which Keynes had no clue?

He touched the sand with his hand and grimaced. Fifty degrees celsius minimum. But sand usually was hotter than the air. He made his decision then. He took off the top of the wetsuit, letting it hang. He wouldn’t fight anyway so there was no harm.

The heat attacked him mercilessly, he grunted but his conviction was steadfast. If there was a way to figure out how to enhance his body’s resistance and improve Perception at the same time, then he wouldn’t pass on such an idea.

He heard others laugh.

“This isn’t a holiday, Keynes.”

“This guy’s insane.”

Only Tulli and Daiyu Fen were quiet, for two different reasons, most likely. Daiyu Fen’s stared daggers at him and Keynes wondered… shit.

She freaking mimicked him! She wore a grey sports bra at least. Keynes veered away from her.

“What’s going on?” Samuel King asked.

“I was going to ask that,” Lazark chimed in.

“I’m from San Antonio. I like sunny weather,” Keynes replied offhandedly. It was a lame answer and he hoped they wouldn’t join him and that mad Asian girl.

A hundred metres from them, the High Lord finally turned around and his eyes bulged. He stood there for a moment, mesmerized, surely wondering if his group lost their minds.

“Is this safe?” Butchereyev asked. “The sand is painfully hot.”

“It’s not safe,” Keynes told them. “This is not something you should be doing.”

“Then why are you doing it?” Daiyu Fen snapped.

“Because I am unhinged?” Keynes replied smoothly, hoping that it would deter her from this.

“Lies.”

In the distance, the High Lord shook his head.

A few seconds later, high-pitched wails came from behind a dune. Keynes ran toward the sound, wishing to see the rift monsters before the High Lord charged and slew them. But Level 7 didn’t move from his place. He stood rooted in place then did something that stopped Keynes in his tracks. The High Lord extended his hand, blue light flashed and a shard of ice shot toward a shapeless mound of sand down the slope of the dune.

The moment it hit the monster, it died leaving a pile of sand behind.

Keynes shook himself out of the shock. Was this a Talent or a spell? And those monsters. They were nothing but sand. Suddenly, the katana in his hands felt irrelevant. These things were nothing like the nature-affinity monsters, these were mounds of sand.

More ice shot toward the growing number of mounds. Essence reached Keynes and he smoothly began guiding it all over his body. Maybe the pleasant feeling that banished the scorching heat also dulled his sense of danger because he asked the High Lord, “Is that a skill?”

Without looking at Keynes, Esopp Earl replied.

“Why would I tell you that?”

It took Keynes a little aback. He didn’t think skills were secrets too.

As he considered a reply, the High Lord stopped throwing the ice shots. And a minute later, groans behind them ceased. Keynes turned his head and found the other six trainees on their knees. Only Daiyu Fen kept the top of her wetsuit off, for which she paid with mild burns.

She should have known better— but, wait. Why was that? Then he looked at his body and similar marks were there. Whatever held the pain away started crumbling.

“This place is hot,” he hissed.

Esopp Earl gave him that aristocratic look which his son had worn for most of the time.

“You haven’t answered my question. Why should I tell you if this is a skill or a Talent?” He asked as he narrowed his eyes, staring at the pouch hanging Keynes’s neck. Keynes went cold. He had Contender’s Ring there…

In a state of near-panic Keynes verbalized the first idea that came up to his head.

“We can trade information.”

More high-pitched wails sounded and the High Lord’s attention went elsewhere, while Keynes sighed in relief. But solace didn’t last for long, exposing his body to the sun of this rift was taking its toll.

The remainder of the sand monsters died in the next twenty-five minutes. Against the High Lord’s icy ability, they seemed to have zero chances.

When their group got out of the rift, medics rushed them. This wasn’t anything his body couldn’t regenerate but there were still two rifts to be cleared before they could call it a day. Well, not exactly a day. There was another training scheduled after the rifts.

“Eat and drink before we enter the next rift,” the High Lord said, giving Keynes a long look. What did he think about his proposition? Hopefully, he didn’t take offence. “Return here in forty minutes.”

Some troopers showed up and led them away from the rift and the High Lord. Keynes cursed his stupidity. His idea didn’t work. But why? How could he gain more resistance and vitality?

They had a private canteen at their disposal where they could eat wholesome food. Keynes was impressed. The underground base had an open canteen available to everyone but he’d rarely had time to visit it.

The troopers remained by the door while the trainees attacked a stand with food. Packed salads with grilled chicken and mozzarella. What else was there…

It was easy to forget about eating with essence running throughout your body. It almost seemed nourishing. They ate in silence—

“Hey, what’s the big idea with taking clothes off?” Lazark asked.

“I told you,” Keynes replied. “I’m from San Antonio. I like the sun.”

“You’re also red like a crab. If medics didn’t put the anti-burn ointment on your skin, you’d sustain damage.”

Keynes shrugged Lazark’s comment but it encouraged, somehow, Daiyu Fen to sit down next to him. The ointment the medics gave them outside the rift was, indeed, a life-saver. It reduced pain to a bare minimum.

“So, what’s your secret?” she whispered.

He gave her a sideways glance. She wouldn’t let him be, would she? The truth be told, he was tired, physically and mentally. The constant stream of revelations and the murder of Murphy Polloc had shaken him. A thought that the future of the world resided on his shoulders gnawed at him. But it wasn’t like he wished to hand it away. There were many factors converging on this one. Keynes had always hated the spotlight because it’d always painted him in a negative light and bullies exploited that. But the current spotlight was different. Yes, it put a target on his back but at the same time, it made him important—very important—and that was something he came to… like.

“Train hard,” he replied and focused on the food.

***

They were back to the rift hall. In front of them was the entrance to the sixth rift. This one was uncommon. Keynes had never seen an uncommon rift and didn’t know what was different about this one.

“An uncommon rift spawns uncommon monsters. Not all of them are uncommon but enough to make a dangerous difference. The monsters in this rift are the reason why we chose this place to set up our Special ops academy. There are rift clusters out there with many more rifts and a few even include rare rifts. And that’s where the issues begin to take shape. Most of the uncommon and rare rifts are perilous. The uncommon monsters have one passive skill while rare monsters have one passive and one active. This one has uncommon monsters with a passive skill that offers them some magical resistance and we can work around that.” He gave them one last look and entered the rift.

Monsters with skills… that sounded bad.

Rift (Uncommon)

Level

1

Status

Open (Ruptured)

Requirements

-

Modifiers

-

Details

This rift contains common and uncommon rift monsters and a small chance to encounter a boss.

Affinity

Nature

Special Status

-

Keynes had to admit that the rifts spiritual interface was quite poor in terms of providing information. Ignoring his mild disappointment, he followed the High Lord inside.

A pleasant breeze and an expansive grassland welcomed him on the other side. Mountains were in the distance. But he knew by now that inside the rift space behaved strangely. He’d gotten wind of a test where troopers tried to walk in different directions. Despite them walking for hours, when they finally turned around, they found the distance to be about five hundred metres from the rift entrance and over a kilometre if in a straight line, making a rift a rectangular cuboid. So if someone decided to go toward the mountains, they would never get there no matter how long they walked.

Because it was mostly flat grassland, the monsters were easy to spot. They were large and bulky too.

“Dinosaurs?” Butchereyev spoke up.

“Yeah, I was going to ask the same question,” Lazark added. “What kind of dinosaurs are they?”

“How can there be dinosaurs here?” Daiyu Fen asked and then her eyes snapped to Keynes as if expecting him to know it.

He shrugged.

“They look pretty much like diplodocus. But I cannot say what they are without inspecting them.”

The High Lord peeled his eyes from the monsters in the distance.

“The uncommon monsters have twice as much essence as the common ones. Also, there are far fewer monsters in this rift making the amount of essence per monster way higher.”

They groaned while Keynes got excited.

“Can you kill them like… slower, High Lord?” Samuel King asked.

“No.”

He exploded toward with a ten metre jump up and shouted, drawing the attention of the large beasts.

“Weren’t diplodocus herbivores?” Lazark asked. They were but Keynes stifled the urge to reply. The teenager with glasses irritated him and he knew why. Not long ago he’d been like Lazark and he just now realized how annoying to others it’d had to be. It wasn’t only that he asked questions, there were many little things that bothered him.

Keynes rushed after Esopp Earl but it was like chasing a sportscar on foot. He heard the anger of dying rift monsters a hundred metres ahead. He wanted to fight too. He tightened his grip on the pommel of the katana and sped up. As he ran, he briefly turned back his head checking on the rest. Daiyu Fen, as expected, was sprinting after him.

Then came the essence in a powerful wave, no, a flood of the essence. Each of the monsters had to have an impressive amount of it. Actually, Keynes was forced to slow down by the sheer pressure of the essence. He had to divide a lot of his attention into guiding the essence throughout his body.

“ARGH!”

He spun and found Daiyu Fen squirming on the ground. Yeah, I went through that shit too. He couldn’t even imagine what this place was like during the boss spawn.

Seeing her on the ground almost moved him enough to tell her his secret. Almost. In the end, he couldn’t do it, he realized. These people were his enemies and at some point in the future, they might meet on opposite sides of a barricade. Making them stronger now would only work against him in the long run. It did very little to console him as he stared at the six forms on the ground writhing in agony.

That made him miss a tail. A beast appeared out of nowhere and lashed it at him. Keynes yelped out of shock and pain as he was shoved forward.

Grassneck (Uncommon)

Level

1

Abilities

Has enhanced magical resistance

Details

Uncommon dweller of rifts

Keynes groaned, his body could be broken for all he knew. But the damage quickly became a lesser concern as he sensed the ground shake. The grassneck was coming.

This uncommon variety had silvery skin resembling the skin of tuna. Keynes noticed his katana between him and the monster. He needed to get to it if he wished to fight this monster.

He started raising and instantly regretted it. The pain almost overwhelmed him but he had to move. If the High Lord came and helped him (which he could do any second), all his big talk would become a laughing stock and they might forbid him fighting the monsters.

When he got to his feet, the monster had already passed the katana by and was slowly changing its course, most likely to gain the best angle at striking him with its tail.

He readied himself, waiting for the tail.

It came in a blur and Keynes threw himself to the ground but he didn’t take into account a second of hesitation that stemmed out of piercing pain in his side. The tail got him in the face, which he managed to cover with his arms.

As the result, Keynes was thrown back, brutally hitting the ground. A beady eye glanced at him from above. The monster opened its jaws filled with sharp teeth. How the hell is this thing Level 1? And where is that blasted Earl?!

The monster’s head dived down, Keynes pushed his Will, ignored the pain and his protesting body and rolled to the side. A loud snap told him that this thing went for a kill. Holly shit, this monster was dangerous.

He spied his katana and used every ounce of his Will to get up.

“Do you need my help, boy?” came a question from behind.

“I’m fine,” Keynes replied defiantly. Or I will never be able to look into the mirror again.

He trudged toward the katana. His feet were fine, only his side and forearms took damage, which worried him. The grassneck slowly turned his way and rumbled lowly.

Just wait, I will turn you into sushi.

Why was this katana so low? Keynes dropped to one knee to grab the sword. He hissed as the pain stopped him from getting a good grip. He pulled at his Will again but even this became harder, way harder.

With trembling hands, Keynes turned.

Grassneck was close enough to attack him. Its long neck gave it a massive advantage. Except— it didn’t, Keynes realized. If it attacked him just at the edge of its range he could cut its head off.

So as the beast trudged toward him, he stepped back.

“Come on! Attack me!” he shouted.

The beast narrowed its eyes. Surely it couldn’t be intelligent enough to see through his ruse, right? But eventually, it prepared its body to attack. Keynes readied himself to take a swing at its neck. He had only one chance to do it. After this, he would collapse.

It—what the HELL?!

The monster roared as Daiyu Fen cut off a part of its tail.

How stupid is she?

The monster turned its attention to her as she hacked at its massive bulk. Her katana scored a wound, it didn’t seem to hamper the grassneck.

The High Lord stepped next to Keynes.

“Fine. I will make the trade. The thing I used was [Ice Shot]. A spell. Now your turn.”

Keynes looked at the man with a mixture of confusion and relief.

“If you use an orb on a rift and clear it within thirty minutes, you can unlock a challenge mode.”

“And what is the challenge mode?”

Keynes crunched his nose, unsatisfied.

“I don’t know. We were forbidden from activating it. Even Captain Ventura didn’t argue with that decision.”

“Wise,” he said and shot forward to kill the grassneck that was overwhelming Daiyu Fen.

That stupid girl!