Second Chance Swordsman 3 (A LitRPG Adventure), page 1
SECOND CHANCE SWORDSMAN 3
JAKOB TANNER
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
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PROLOGUE
The birds were the first to flee the forest. They shot off from their branches, creating such a sudden loud spasm of movement, it felt like the very trees were gasping in the night.
The other animals were quick to follow the departing birds. Squirrels, foxes, and deer all scurried from their woodland home, fleeing some unknown danger.
Even mighty predators of the forest—such as wolves and bears—were quickly rushing to escape the forest, ignoring the easy prey nearby.
Nothing could be seen.
Nothing could be pointed at.
But the animals sensed it.
They knew to move far away from it, running from some unknown, invisible danger.
For in the beating heart of that forest on the western edge of Volsungar in the world known as Westria, the tiniest, infinitesimally small wisp of mana had formed in the air.
It was the tiniest subatomic seed of a dungeon gate.
It was smaller than a piece of dust drifting in the air.
It was invisible to the naked eye and yet even now its power rippled outward causing fear and terror in all who could sense it.
Even in this small barely feasible existence, the tiny nucleus of the dungeon gate was growing and even though it was incredibly small on the outside, it was much larger on the inside.
Inside was a growing underground cavern filled with labyrinthine chasms.
At the center of which lay a large throbbing larva.
The larva was white in shape with a large throbbing abdomen.
Its mouth lay latched to the ground sucking in the life from the dungeon world and from the outside world as well.
The larva had been feeding for a long time now in this nether space between the dungeon world and Westria.
For years it had been feeding, just as a tiny dot when the dungeon world had hardly existed at all, when it was imperceptible even to the animals of the forest.
But the larva had grown along with the dungeon world.
After years of feeding, it was finally ready to shed its exoskeleton, and let its true form roam free.
The skin hardened and shed.
The larva’s stomach cracked open, revealing inside a gray-skinned girl with glowing neon green eyes. The girl didn’t have hair, but rather black scaly tendrils that could be compared to dreadlocks if they weren’t so alien and otherworldly.
No one would be able to guess that this creature would ultimately lead to the annihilation of the entire elven race in Westria.
No one except for one black-haired swordsman with crimson red eyes.
And even he, at that moment, couldn’t stop this girl from growing and getting stronger.
The world would come to know this green-eyed girl as Lilith.
The first Traveler to ever be born from inside a dungeon.
1
Sam jolted awake.
He lifted himself upright and reached out into the darkness of the night, hand clasping at an incoming attacker.
He clenched his fist, crushing a mosquito in his palm.
That’s enough buzzing and biting for you, Sam thought mercilessly.
After traveling for weeks through humid forests and swamps, Sam had only fiery hatred for the mosquitoes and gnats that flew around him. Their presence constantly threatened the possibility of devastatingly itchy bites.
Even the mere mental resistance to scratching them was a tortuous endeavor.
Sam shuddered just thinking about the idea of developing more bites on his legs, or, goddess forbid, somewhere worse.
The young man’s thoughts were cut off by the sounds of his companion’s snores right next to him.
It was so humid and hot, Sam couldn’t see himself falling back asleep, so he got up and quietly stepped out of his tent to get some fresh air—or, at the very least, some mildly less stuffy but still fairly hot air.
It was a quiet and calm night.
The fire around the campsite had dwindled down to embers, now emitting a soft orange glow across the small collection of tents and the dark forest that surrounded them.
Sam looked up to the sky hoping to see some flicker of starlight, but instead he only saw the murky brown blackness of a cloudy evening.
Nothing has changed tonight then, Sam thought despondently.
It had been like this every night since they had entered this forest.
The Misty Woods.
It had been deemed a safe and appropriate shortcut on their way back to their home city of Resfall, after their many months away dealing with the Dwarven Cataclysm in the Snowpeak Mountains.
Except their plan to cut their journey home by a couple of days had backfired.
Due to heavy rains and winds, an unexpected deviation in this particular region of Westria’s weather patterns had occurred. And so, Sam and his group of friends had found themselves caught in the Mist Belt.
Typically occurring in autumn time, the Mist Belt was a powerful and deadly fog that surrounded the Misty Woods. Entering the Mist Belt meant an excruciating death, leaving Sam and his companions no choice but to wait in the forest for the Mist Belt to clear.
And so their shortcut had turned into an unexpected detour.
A week had since passed since they first became aware of the Mist Belt and their inability to continue their journey forward.
Sam sighed.
He did not like to waste time.
Almost two years had now passed since Sam had travelled back in time after seeing his world destroyed by the hands of the demon king.
He had accomplished a lot in those two years—saving major historical figures while removing evil men and women before they could inflict harm on millions of innocent people.
But even with everything Sam had done so far, there was still so much to do if he hoped to give Westria a fighting chance against the demon king and his horde.
It was now the summer month of Joyly in the year 1768.
The arrival of the demon king and the black gates was only three years or so away now.
Sam knew that to change the far-off future, he needed to keep altering the future that was soon to occupy his present.
He considered the next year or so ahead of him.
There was the Gray Gate Catastrophe, and then the big one. The historical event that—if Sam could stop—would more than anything truly alter and tip the fight against the demon king in Westria’s favor.
It was the tragic event known as the Elven Genocide.
Sam shivered just thinking about all the millions of lives that were at stake.
The goddess had entrusted Sam with a gargantuan task and he planned on seeing it through. He carried the burden of the entire world on his shoulders.
It was because of this that Sam knew he could never stop training, never stop preparing for the major historical events coming his way.
He picked up some twigs and little sticks on the ground and tossed them into the dwindling campfire.
A little flame began to pick up.
The fire had grown to a healthy blaze by the time Sam had wandered over to the camp’s pile of chopped wood and returned with a large log.
He threw the log on the fire. The impact of the large piece of wood caused a cascade of little orange ashes and sparks to burst out into the air before sizzling away into nothingness in the night.
Standing over the fire, Sam held out his hand. Appearing out of nowhere, a large unlit wooden torch emerged, gripped within the young man’s palm and fingers.
Sam had materialized the item from his inventory—an interdimensional storage realm, personalized to him and all the items and loot he wished to hold onto.
It was just one of the many perks of being a Traveler—an adventurer who had survived the trials of the White Gate tutorial dungeon gate and returned with awe-inspiring powers and abilities.
He dipped the front-end of the torch into the fire and watched as the tip ignited into a burst of flame.
Sam held up the torch in front of him and began to walk into the darkness of the forest, leaving his campsite behind.
Sam’s boots crunched on twigs and dewy grass as he strode forward into the woods. The flame of his torch crackled as it broke through the veil of blackness that encompassed the lonely forest.
Sam didn’t have an exact direction he was heading in, a precise coordinate that was driving him forward, but he did have a feeling.
The Mist Belt in Joyly was more than a historical anomaly.
It hadn’t happened in Sam’s previous timeline.
He knew because he had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the different dungeon gates that appeared across Westria during his original timeline. On the days that he hadn’t spent training and diving into dungeon gates, he had spent in the library, poring over every document and book he could find, tracing the history and records of the many dungeon gates and their appearances across his world.
That was why he could just follow his intuitive sense that there was a dungeon gate going to appear here in the Misty Woods, hidden and protected by the Mist Belt.
In some ways, it was good that Sam and his companions had gotten trapped within the Mist Belt—otherwise any dungeon gate that formed would be impossible for Travelers to access, which would inevitably mean there would be a dungeon break.
A dungeon break made the boundaries between the gate and Westria much more porous and all the monsters inside the dungeon could then enter Westria and wreak destruction.
Dungeon breaks were the cause of thousands of innocent people’s deaths.
The only way they could be stopped was to defeat the dungeon boss within seven days of the dungeon gate’s materialization.
Sam ventured further into the dark forest, the flickering torchlight casting dancing shadows upon gnarled trees and the dewy leaf-strewn path.
Just ahead of him in the velvety veil of darkness, a flickering splash of light emerged.
The glow grew larger and larger until suddenly Sam no longer needed his torch to light the forest anymore.
A giant yellow portal glowed out in front of him.
It was a yellow dungeon gate.
Sam stepped closer to the gate, eyes widening at the sheer enormity of the magical portal in front of him.
It was a whole tier-level above him.
For a Traveler, he was currently at the apprentice-tier level, and glowing in front of him was a journeyman-tier level dungeon gate.
Sam stared at the gate with conflicted feelings.
On the one hand, he was frustrated that he and his companions had gotten stuck within the Mist Belt, but on the other hand, he was grateful that he was here to clear this dungeon gate and stop a dungeon break from happening.
He looked over his shoulder and considered going back to the campsite.
He considered waking up the others.
Sam had been doing extra training the whole trip since they left the Snowpeak Mountains.
At first, the others were happy to join him, but as his diligence never stopped, they eventually told him they needed to save their strength to focus on getting back to Resfall.
Fair enough, Sam thought, as he considered taking on the dungeon gate alone. I don’t mind a challenge.
With that, he stepped into the glowing powerful dungeon gate, and disappeared from the Misty Woods entirely.
2
Moving between worlds was always a disarmingly anticlimactic process.
It happened in a blip.
Less than a second.
One moment Sam was in the Misty Woods and in the next he was somewhere else.
And one never truly knew where the dungeon gate was going to take you. A Traveler could step through a dungeon gate and arrive in an underground cave; or a swamp filled with treacherous octopi; or even the middle of a volcano that was about to explode with some very angry fire goblins rushing at you with so much passion to kill you because they knew the only thing left in their soon-to-be-over life was the possible satisfaction of stabbing your face and puncturing your brain with their knife before the explosive volcano took everyone out.
Sam shuddered just thinking about it.
Avoid fire goblins if you can, Sam thought to himself. Always a good piece of advice.
But, as good as such advice was, the world of the dungeon gate was primarily out of the Traveler’s control.
Entering a dungeon gate was like gambling at a casino—you never knew what you were gonna get.
That was, of course, if you weren’t a time traveler from the future.
Emerging in the new dungeon world, Sam recognized it from his research in his previous lifetime straightaway.
He was standing in a cool cavernous chamber deep underground, but this was far from the bog-standard caves he experienced early on as a Traveler in multiple typical blue dungeon gates. No, this cave was different. Jutting out from the grey rocks of the cavern were shards of growing crystals in a kaleidoscope of colors.
According to the historical records in Sam’s previous lifetime, this dungeon world had been dubbed, The Crystal Caverns.
The entire place was airier and brighter than any other cave complex Sam had explored. The pulsating luminescent crystals appeared to reflect and refract off one another, creating an ethereal and glimmering ambience to the entire area.
The cave system was also quite unique outside of the glowing crystals. The cave system had incredible amounts of verticality with upper and lower layers that needed to be climbed up or down to be explored. This change to a more challenging topography was an indication of the more difficult nature of this journeyman-tier dungeon gate.
Sam didn’t have much time to indulge in his sense of wonder, though.
Seconds after stepping into the new dungeon world, an arrow came shooting straight towards the middle of his forehead.
Sam knew he had less than a millisecond to react appropriately. A single flinch or hesitation could mean his brain fluid splattering all across the ground of crystalline cavern.
Luckily, Sam's reflexes and muscle memory were top-notch. His years of training as a Traveler, swordsman, mercenary, and fighter in his previous timeline meant he entered every difficult situation with a lot more years of experience than his appearance might have led on.
