The Shallow Waters

You think heading to the center might be a good start to your search. The chest of riches could be anywhere by now, and it's best to begin in the center, though your boots will certainly get soaked from the muck. A shame, but a sacrifice you are willing to make.

You step into the grimy stagnated water as it rapidly reaches the top of your boots, underestimating the depth of the swamp before it fills them. Uncomfortable, and rather repulsive with mud and debris already building at the souls of your, but you keep moving on anyway, trying to ignore, even as your next step lands your leg in soft mud, and your boot get sucked further off by the swamp floor. With every step of progress, your boots are yanked on by the muddy bottom, making you exerting more and more effort just to continue, and sinking deeper without something to grab onto.

After a few minutes of dragging your now mud caked legs through the swamp, you hear something on the air, a sloshing or splashing noise coming from behind you. You look back after a few seconds to see the culprit of the sound, but see nothing in the spot, nothing but the waves over the eater's surface indicating past motion. You increase your speed as the sloshing continues, this time closer. Again, you soon your neck around and, again, see nothing but the water having been slightly disturbed, only now a few feet from the first instance. Your walk becomes a fast jog as you try to get to any near by patch of land or anything that you can get out of the water onto. The sound of sloshing is getting closer and closer as you sprint, the indication clear as day something is following you, and you don't dare look back at it, in fear of what you'll see.

Your sprinting gets more hectic, having to wrench your boots up after every hard plunge that propels your forward until they get sucked off by the mud, first the left foot, buried half way in the water, and then the right, yanked off and tossed in the water out of your reach as you pulled it up. But this does not stop you to get them, just all the more reason to get out of the water and avoid whatever else is in it. You finally see a patch of land in front of you, within the reach of your right hand. You grasp at the dirt edge to get some leverage, but as you're just about to reach it, something grabs a hold of your left leg from behind, the sloshing now it's loudest.