Chapter 299: Man Vs. Bear

“That’s not normal, right?” He heard Reinera whisper to Professor Rowe.

“No, it is not,” the man replied with a confused look on his face.

“What should I do? Should I kill it?”

The man thought for a moment before shaking his head. “No, it might be a good chance to get a closer look at what is going on. Can you try to capture it with your chains?”

Reinera shrugged her shoulders. “I can try, but I think this fella might be a little harder to capture than the wolves. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s pretty fast.”

The man was about to say something, but was rudely interrupted when the monster flickered with a flash of silver and dashed toward Reinera.

He saw that Professor Rowe was about to intervene, but the man held back when he saw that Reniera wasn’t caught off guard.

She created a dome of chains surrounding the creature and collapsed onto it.

This seemed to work and the chains grappled the squirrel as it struggled against the bonds.

For a moment, Julius thought it was already finished, but then he sensed a powerful surge of mana coming from the creature. An explosion of silver light blasted from its body, fractured the chains enough to break through.

He didn’t know if the squirrel realized that it had picked on something bigger than expected, but instead of rushing toward Reinera again, this time it ran away in the opposite direction.

Julius couldn’t help but chuckle to himself.

At least the little bugger is smart enough to know when to run, he thought with an amused grin.

Reinera tried to run after it, but the thing was really quick. It split through the trees and off into the forest before she could catch it.

“Well that was weird,” he finally said as they all stared at where the monster had run off to.

“I agree, we should head back,” Professor Rowe said to them.

“What? Why would we do that? We are already pretty deep,” Reinera said to him.

“I don’t feel comfortable with two delving this rift when you recently advanced to Tier 3. There is no doubt that this rift is undergoing some kind of transformation at the moment and I would rather we didn’t take any risks,” Professor Rowe explained.

“I thought that was why you wanted to bring us in here? You know, to test us?”

The man frowned and looked at the trees around them. “I wanted to test you guys in a more controlled environment. This is far from controlled. I have no idea what would force the rift to undergo such drastic changes, but the fact that a squirrel has managed to transform into a Tier 3 monster is indicative of the severity of the issue.”

Julius understood where the man was coming from. At the end of the day, Professor Rowe was a teacher and had to prioritize students’ safety before anything else. So the decision to fall back would be considered the safest option.

With that being said, Julius had no real desire to leave, not when it was finally getting a little interesting. He knew that Reinera was feeling the exact same way, if the excited smile on her face was anything to go on.

So when Professor Rowe had already started to head back toward the rift entrance, he had to stop to look back at where Julius and Reinera were both still standing.

“Come on, let’s head on back. I will get a group of other organized to come investigate.”

“Give us a shot! We can protect ourselves, we promise,” Reinera pleaded.

“I can’t take that chance. Remember the last time something weird happened in a rift? You two were transported to a random rift and almost died,” the man reminded them.

Oh yeah, he kind of forgot that Professor Rowe had been the one with them when it happened.

“And because of that, we got a lot stronger. Plus, this will be a great experience for us if we ever encounter something similar. But next time we won’t have a Tier 4 looking out for us,” Reinera said so convincingly that even Julius didn’t notice that he was nodding along right beside her.

Professor Rowe looked at her with a serious gaze. “Are you sure?” He asked.

“Absolutely.”

Their teacher sighed and deflated a little. “Okay, but when I say we leave, we leave. No arguing about, okay?”

“Understood!” Reinera said with a beaming smile.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author’s consent. Report any sightings.

***

They didn’t come across any more Tier 3s, but the deeper they walked into the rift, the more they spotted signs of this silverish corruption.

The feeling of this metallic-like mana got even stronger, which made them all wonder what could have caused this.

A few monsters decided to attack them, but weirdly, they didn’t come across that many of them.

Eventually, they came close to the center of the rift, and Julius spotted a huge lake just up ahead. But what he saw made him pause in interest because the water was almost like diluted mercury instead of a crystal blue lake he had been expecting.