With a heavy sigh, Nico peeled off his outer layer and shoved it into his inventory. The air thickened in that instant, welcoming him into a wet blanket of humidity. Within minutes his tail, usually a soft blend of sandy fur, felt ratty as it hung limp with defeat. On better days his fox-tipped ears stood tall and sleek; now they drooped under the weight of sweat.
It was offensive, the swamp’s personal agenda to kill him with moisture.
He ran a hand through his ashen-blonde hair, unsticking his bangs from his forehead, and—feeling spiteful—sighed again for good measure. His gaze fixed onto Kai’s back. Maybe, if he tried hard enough, he could glare a hole through its perfect dryness.
Kai walked ahead, unbothered and untouched by the humidity, with a bomber jacket resting neatly on his shoulders. The guild emblem on it gleamed, proud to be worn by someone who’d never heard of sweat. His upright wolf ears turned attentively at every slight sound, yet they held perfectly still through both of the fox’s sighs—to make sure Nico knew he was being flagrantly ignored.
Kai made a point of sniffing the air loudly enough to be heard. “You smell that?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Yeah,” Kai replied too quickly, “but there’s something else.”
Of course he smelled the swamp. To Lycanfolk, humans whose manaprints were entwined with that of canines, scent was how they read the world. Still, Nico humored his guildmate with a few sniffs, sorting through layers of algae and rot until a sharp chemical sting cut through.
A blob of that smell latched onto Kai’s boot.
It twitched in a way that tried to suggest ‘frog’, if frogs came faceless and wrapped in an ominous black haze. Kai glanced down, unimpressed, and snapped his fingers. A blue spark flared from the friction and jumped to the thing. On contact, steam rose from the not-frog’s surface and it bubbled into a grotesque swell. With one final croak, it burst into a puff of distorted light.
Nico watched it pop. “That’s gruesome.”
“Riftborn aren’t real,” Kai said, scraping his boot clean with the heel of the other. “They’re just masses of unstable mana trying to imitate a form.”
“Right,” Nico replied flatly. “Like how watching someone get boiled alive in a movie isn’t disturbing. Because it’s not real.”
Kai rolled his eyes just as something rippled nearby. A serpent-like Riftborn dragged itself forward, moving awkwardly, as if it hadn’t realized it could slither. Nico gathered gold mana in his palm and flicked his wrist.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED ||
[ ??? Shock Pulse (C)| 25% chance stun | "it shocks" ]
A spark of electricity drifted from his fingers and landed on the creature with a delicate kiss. A shriek of static tore through the air. The Riftborn convulsed, smoked, and collapsed before flickering apart like a broken pixel.
“Wow, that was so much more palatable,” Kai said, blocking his nose against the acrid metallic smell.
“It’s humane.”
“They discontinued the electric chair for being inhumane.”
“I’m actually sure boiling someone alive has always been considered torture.”
Kai didn’t dignify that with a response. He strode ahead with his usual crisp posture. Even in this heat he made it look as though the swamp itself parted to keep his fur pristine. As a Lycan from the lush forests of Lumere, his tail’s dense black fur had long adapted to let drizzle roll cleanly off it. Though in this case, it was probably owed more to alchemy than fur.
Kai’s discipline centered on phase-state manipulation: how water shifted between solid, liquid, gas, and the gradients between. Where Kai reached notoriety was his ability to manipulate those transitions sans-inscription, relying only on his fire-water elemental affinity—which was clearly active now. The air around him looked noticeably cooler.
And yet, he hadn’t offered.
Resentment surfaced in Nico, even as he acknowledged that only his imagination could visibly register the air’s vapor content. He wasn’t jealous, exactly. Just damp… and annoyed.
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“Hot?” Kai finally asked, glancing back with one ear tilted in facetious concern.
“You’re regulating the humidity just for yourself, aren’t you,” the fox replied, damply. Kai lifted his hand in a limp gesture. Blue mana shimmered across his fingertips, drifting outward in a meandering veil.
|| STATUS UPDATE ||
[ Effect: ?68% humidity (50 min) | "here u go loser" ]
The air around Nico thinned as heat and moisture lifted from his uniform in a slow exhale of steam.
“Why did you wait until now?”
“I’m generous like that.”
“…Anyways.” Refusing to humor the provocation, Nico turned his gaze toward the warped horizon of trees and mist. “I think we’re in.”
“What gave it away?” Kai asked as he swatted a Riftborn aside with his tail. “The sudden biome shift? The light refracting incorrectly? Or the system message telling us to unravel the rift?”
“The GPS said we arrived.”
“It said that a while ago.”
They’d been walking for thirty minutes past the supposed border, according to the last signal before the GPS glitched into infinite recalibration. Shortly after, a system notification appeared.
|| ! NEW QUEST ! ||
[ Target: Unravel the Rift (｀?ω?′)? ]
[ Reward: Entry to Tellur ?(ˊ?ˋ*)? ]
This kind of territory relied more on instinct and experience than on tech. Probably why Central assigned two Lycan alchemists to the job; scent and sound told them more than any blinking dot on a screen could.
Still, Nico would’ve liked a blinking dot.
The bog around them was shifting in real time. Roots unfurled from thin air, creatures flickered in and out like faulty holograms, shadows stretched in every direction indifferent to light sources, and gravity behaved more like a suggestion. Beneath it all came a low, constant hum that crawled against their senses—the signature of unstable mana. Its pressure alone was enough to tear a rift in reality.
Rifts weren’t rare. In the natural world, colliding mana flows—much like tectonic plates—fractured reality. Once broken, mana seeped through the cracks like water, trying and failing to reconstruct the world as it remembered it. The rift layered over reality as a flawed reconstruction, an alternate dimension that could be stepped into by those unlucky enough. Left to fester, it warped reality beyond repair.
They reached a break in the fog where the swamp widened into a lake. Murky water crashed in small, frantic waves despite the absence of wind. Nico stared at Kai, who himself was busy staring at a Riftborn floating upside down in front of him.
“So,” Nico said. “We’re swimming?”
“If you’d like,” Kai said, stepping around the sleeping Riftborn.
He moved to the lake’s edge and exhaled azure mana, spreading it with a sweep of his hand. Water froze solid in its wake, forming a broad path of ice that crystallized the surface muck. Nico stepped onto it and slid forward in a short drift. He’d picked up the knack for ice-skating entirely from time spent with Kai; there wasn’t much ice in Ruzen, his desert hometown.
As they advanced, a broken landscape unfolded. Ruined pillars jutted from the mud, half-buried among reeds and mangroves. Blackened mana residue webbed across their surface, following wandering currents. Simultaneously, every Riftborn turned toward them: reptiles with too many legs, birds flying with no wings, marsupials stretched too weirdly long. Their luminous eyes blinked in eerie unison, then looked away.
“They’re avoiding us,” Nico murmured.
“I would too.” Kai said curtly.
Nico flicked an ear, not entirely sure why that offended him. Riftborn usually guarded a rift’s core; it was the source of their existence after all. The passivity here was unsettling, especially with the Rift showing signs of long-term mana instability. The biome was wrong, yet consistent in how meticulously wrong it was. At least rifts could keep a theme.
“There wasn’t much about rifts in the Tellur debrief,” Nico said to fill the air.
“Not surprised,” Kai muttered. “Central barely keeps tabs on this place. It’s a diplomatic black hole. Everyone calls it neutral, but no one looks over the records. And now this…”
“I’d like to portal in like the other surveyors.”
“It’s too unstable with an active Rift,” Kai said, still watching ahead.
“Yeah, I know. That’s why we’re walking.”
“Ah!” Kai’s ears perked in mock surprise. “I thought we just liked doing this.”
At the far end of the swamp, the mist parted just enough to reveal twin archways jutting from the muck. The air thickened with the smell of ozone on approach, dense with a deep reverberating hum that made each breath feel deliberate. All indicators of a mass of unstable mana colliding into itself: the rift’s core.
Nico stepped off the ice path and approached the first arch. Kneeling beside a pillar, he brushed moss from the stone and traced the carvings. Though distorted by time and rift, they unmistakably formed glyphs of a mana inscription. A mix of air and fire mana gathered, sparking contained electricity into his palm.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED ||
[ ???? Mana Circuitry (B) | +50% inscription enhancement | "glyph keyboard" ]
Gold mana flared along his wrist, forming a ring of glyphs that rotated around his hand, ready for input. He selected a few and began linking them between the stone pillars.
Kai idly tapped on his phone in full contribution. Nico was vulnerable while he worked, so Kai kept his other senses alert, guarding him. Probably. There was no cell signal in a rift, which meant he was definitely taking notes and not doing mobile dailies. Also probably. Nico folded his ears back to muffle the tapping.
Mana recognized the glyphs, pulsing its light into them the moment he restored the inscription. Satisfied, he stepped equidistant between the two arches and flexed his hands, shaking out the charge in his fingers. Kai caught his glance, slid his phone into his inventory, and flashed a peace sign.
Electricity flared from Nico’s palms as he slammed them into the ground, feeding activation energy into the inscriptions. The current split with a sharp crack, racing along the circuits toward each gate, glyphs blooming in sequence as gold light climbed the pillars.
But the mana didn’t hold.
It blackened under the rift’s pull until the gates glowed with the color of absence.
A window blinked into existence, casting a faint fluorescent glow over them.