Unchosen Champion

The trek through Central America hadn’t been a complete disappointment. The Jaguar Sun hadn’t been able to liberate as many people as they had hoped, for a variety of reasons, but their unwavering progress through the jungle had enabled many of those who avoided the ire of the Cult on their own to catch up and join the procession. Coop wasn’t able to keep track of the constant flow of newcomers. It seemed like whenever he looked away, the number of warriors would multiply. Still, Juliana in particular was upset by the gap between expectations and reality.

He glanced over at her as she continued to pet Felix. She seemed to struggle with showing her emotions. As much as she believed she maintained a neutral expression, she frequently worked her jaw and the lower lids of her eyes twitched as she fought with her thoughts. As the days went by and they marched through the jungle, Coop thought there was no one that needed a vacation more than she did.

Juliana and Felix were well-known liberators. They had developed their reputation through freeing captives of the Cult. However, as time had gone by, there were less and less captives available for them to save. It was a natural function of the Cult’s activities. Those who could be captured already had been, and those who successfully avoided the Priests were even less likely to be caught later. Where Tzultucaj would just keep stomping forward, she was more conscientious of her limits, and she knew if she continued on the same trajectory, a hurdle she might not be able to get over would inevitably appear.

Earth as a whole had barely scratched the surface of the assimilation. Yet, people like Juliana, who had embraced a particular niche and found early success, were already being forced to adapt as the circumstances changed. The assimilation was an extraordinarily volatile event. Coop wasn’t sure if he was successfully adapting as time went on, or if he had lucked out on his particular path. As many human-made distractions as there were, grinding was a throughline that had consistently been the way forward for him. Even in the Yucatan, grinding had been the alleviation to the disappointment of unusually limited experience provided by the Cultists.

Coop was quite happy to find yet another monster variant as the army made its way through the jungles. Once they reached further into Mexico he was introduced to what was considered the bane of the region. Surprisingly, it wasn’t another High Priest or some other group of lesser members of the Cult. It was just another type of regular monster.

There was a pursuit hunter variant of the Primal Constructs dominating the land, called Ruin Tracers. From what he heard, the monsters were an extraordinary difficulty in the past. They were ultimately the reason the Jaguar Sun hadn’t been able to sustain itself during the siege event. There were many individual Jaguar Warriors who bore the scars, mental and physical, of being chased down by the monsters and forced into desperate battles for survival at earlier points of the assimilation. A large portion of the combat experience among the warriors had come from their battles with Ruin Tracers.

The Ruin Tracers were similar to the Primal Trackers that roamed South Florida, but they weren’t exactly the same. The Trackers around Empress City were wolf-like pack hunters that applied debuffs revealing the location of any prey that fled their groups. The Tracers, in contrast, didn’t rely on debuffs. Instead, the Tracers seemed to be motion-activated solitary hunters. They chased after anything that came within their range, chaining leaps together as they bore down on their prey, before pouncing like tigers through the brush.

Ruin Tracers were what might be created if someone took a large mechanical quadruped, about the size of a pre-mana jaguar, gave it an oversized head, and replaced all four of its limbs with metallic frog legs. They had enormous spiked teeth, shaped like hooked nails, that jutted from their excessive vertical mouths, unable to be contained, and seemed designed to prevent escape more than chewing or tearing.

When the original Jaguar Sun moved through the region, gathering people as it progressed, they inevitably drew the attention of every Ruin Tracer that had spawned during the assimilation. They were wildly pursued by thousands of the monsters while the siege event put everything into a frenzy.

On top of their numbers and their feral behavior, the Tracers were untamed by settlement territory in the first place. They had risen to higher levels during the early stage of the assimilation relative to the humans, and many had begun evolving into elites. The people who had simply followed Tzultacaj in his rampage were not prepared to meet their rampage head-on. They dragged more and more until the entire army was threatened by hordes of agitated monsters.

Coop understood. Even without an event, the way the monsters trailed after the army actually reminded him of the waves of the siege. The Tracers jumped and climbed on top of each other as they jockeyed for position at the front of their assaults, refusing to let whoever they targeted find solace. Coop only needed one look into a Ruin Tracer’s mouth to recognize that it was a monster he would much prefer to fight from the top of the fort’s walls. Coop found himself repelling as many as a hundred at a time at the rear of the march, feeling a bit like he was defending the moat bridge back home.

Unfortunately for the monsters in the jungle, Coop was an even greater monster. At first, he engaged with them directly, swapping between weapons as he tested their abilities and sought the most efficient way to defeat them. There were two different situations in which he spent time experimenting with how to hunt the particular monster variant. The first was when they were already activated with a target acquired. The second was when they were still in their more dormant mode, where they waited to pursue prey.

For the first situation, with already active monsters, his inclination was to aggressively mistjump into the crowds and match their belligerence with his own assertive attacks. He utilized his spear in fierce, forward facing assaults, but much like the very first wave of the siege, many of the monsters simply ignored him. They bypassed his position in order to chase after whichever poor victim they had previously locked onto.

He easily carved a fissure in the center of their waves, lunging forward with his spear and breaking their oddly oriented jaws with his shield whenever they leapt toward his exposed flank. They were merely regular monsters and Coop had grown far beyond the most basic challenges of the assimilation long before he met the bane of Central America. However, he wasn’t content to merely run up his personal score versus the Tracers. He intended to completely prevent them from harassing the Jaguar Warriors as they wove their way through the jungles, so he swapped through his weapons until he settled on his ethereal glaive.

The superior length of his polearm-based weapons comfortably countered the monsters’ leaping attacks and the sweeping strikes of his bladed weapons seemed best for holding wider sections of the forest. The ethereal glaive was the happy marriage of the two advantages he sought. Due to the focused nature of the Tracer’s attacks, where they willingly ignored his presence in favor of consuming the individuals that triggered their hunts, he needed more than the usual amount of lateral mobility. His mere presence wasn’t enough to attract their ire.

The first rounds of battle between Coop and large waves of Ruin Tracers were difficult in that he needed to be thorough. He was far beyond normal monsters limited in their growth by settlement territory, but the aggressive nature of the monsters meant that he was equally chasing them down as he was using himself as bait.

After crushing the first few encounters on his own, he shifted his tactics to incorporate wider areas of Fog of War and groups of phantasms to work together and create bulwarks against the waves of monsters. On the bright side, rather than steady masses of monsters chasing after the war host, like they would have experienced within a siege event, the invaders came in groups of a few hundred that had no follow up. Coop was able to defeat the monsters and take some time to reconsider his tactics and develop more efficient methods of taking care of them.

The greatest beneficiary of his additional considerations was Legacy of the Mists. Coop was finally able to limit-test the ability and he made some valuable discoveries. The primary note that he took away was that even though his weapons were physically stronger, a fresh ethereal weapon maintained a durability of 100/100. If he exceeded the durability by summoning too many phantasms, the weapon dissipated, taking the phantasms with it. He had to be careful with diminishing the durability of his own weapon as he was easily strong enough to destroy them himself, but it was an excellent opportunity to practice.

He envisioned the Battlemaiden instructing him to use his weapons properly, avoiding the extra pressure on the blades with amateur attacks. As long as his strikes were clean, the durability was unaffected. Coop was gradually scratching at another level of expertise. For the first time since he started fighting, he was putting an emphasis on the art portion of the martial arts and his blades positively sang as a result.

But that wasn’t all. Playing with more phantasms had introduced new dynamics between the manifestations as well. As it turned out, they weren’t only limited to coordinating with him as the summoner. They could also harmonize with each other, so long as he summoned them as a team. It was the first time Coop was specifically calling for squads of phantasms to engage in proper skirmishes, rather than multiple individuals to overwhelm a large opponent. Normally, they would have engaged with a single difficult enemy, so the instructions he gave them would be overly simple. He was having to be conscious of formations, arrangements, tactics, and grander schemes so that they could maintain teamwork after their initial target was defeated.

It may not have seemed like it from a numerical standpoint, but defending the Jaguar Sun had been an opportunity to make enormous gains in his own ability. Coop was satisfying his Haunted title with artful poise while Legacy of the Mists proved to have more layers than he initially believed.

In the time between larger batches of monsters that collected on their own, he hunted individual idle Tracers that hid in the brush before they had the chance to assemble together in their pursuits. While the activated monsters had to deal with squads of phantasms fighting alongside Coop, the idle monsters were the ones that experienced a more personal touch. They fell to the oppressive mobility of his Revenant build. The obscuring effect of his Fog of War hid his own movements and gave him an easy way to get the jump on the aggressive monsters. They never had a chance to lock onto a target. Instead, they caught his ethereal spear through the neck and were disassembled after a mistjump and a quickswap carried him and a fresh blade into melee range.

Coop had become a satellite for the Jaguar Sun, orbiting their march while hunting the monsters. Another Slayer title was his ultimate physical reward, but the grind had evolved into a bootcamp where Coop had rare opportunities to truly practice his skills. The real progress wouldn’t be reflected in his status, but he checked it anyway.

[Status]

HP - 18050/18050

MP - 33600/33600

Class - Revenant (Level 197)

Profession - Scavenging (Level 162)

Affinity - Spectral

Race - Human (Rank 1)

Faction - None

Strength - 125 (+3360)

Agility - 125 (+1680)

Body - 125 (+1680)

Mind - 2800 (+560)

Intelligence - 125 (+3360)

Acumen - 125 (+1680)

Unallocated - 0

Titles - Champion IV, Haunted, Ethereal, Reaper, Slayer IX, Dauntless, Stacked, Defiant, Siegebreaker, Mindbender

Skills (Active) - Invocation, Presence of Mind, Fog of War, Vaporform

Skills (Passive) - Mind Over Matter, Adamance, Practical Application, Arcane Comprehension, Clarity of Purpose

Quests - Fortune Seeker (20/50), Upgrade City to Metropolis

Basic Credits - 7,228,402

Coop forgot his horror at the howler monkeys as he gazed upon his progress. No, he sighed to himself, it hadn’t recovered to a rate that he felt proud of, but gains were gains. Six levels in almost twice as many days was not great at all, but he had to temper his expectations with the fact that he had completed his grind in less than half the time, then continued defeating the lower level regular monsters for the benefit of the Jaguar Sun. Really, he had enjoyed the steady progress at the start, returning to form, then delayed moving on by becoming responsible for an entire army’s security. It hadn’t been for nothing. His martial techniques were advancing and his phantasms were more potent than ever. He just wanted a gold star too.

A few million basic credits and a few thousand materials were the additional rewards he collected for his continued diligence beyond less defined personal growth. The system had granted him another point in Fortune Seeker for defeating the first Ruin Tracer, but he was on the verge of abandoning any expectation of completing the profession quest. By the time he finished finding 50 different variants of normal monsters he doubted whatever it rewarded him would be of any use. Half of his current completions had come from the Siege Event alone, so he was on pace for completing the quest in a period best measured in years.

His Slayer title had also ticked up from eight to nine, and Coop wondered how high he could force it to grow. Most of the world clearly lacked the monster diversity of Ghost Reef, so it would certainly be difficult to progress the title and aforementioned quest to their limits. The incremental progress made it seem like he had only grown by a small amount.

However, his stats told the real story: he had made massive gains. They were just hidden in his profession level rather than class level. Compared to the usual, where he gained two or three here and there, depending on how many boss monsters he defeated, gaining almost a full 12 levels in Scavenging was astronomical.

Before he first entered the Coral Forest Mana Well, his profession and class levels had been approaching equilibrium, but since then, his class level was running away with the lead. When his class level hit 100, his profession level was 95. Since then, his class level made twice as much progress. It was nice whenever his profession made up some ground, and this was one of those occasions. Repeatedly defeating regular monsters was the most consistent method of grinding his profession. If he parked himself in a specifically dense location and focused on maximizing his Scavenging, he thought it would even be possible to rival the speed that the profession masters of Corozal demonstrated.

He had gained more than 200 Mind, including the bonus, and that naturally meant huge gains spread throughout his attributes. It may have seemed insignificant, but the knockdown effects were impressive. Even when his health total was so large, gaining more than a thousand points was a welcome prize. Furthermore, he could literally never have enough mana. Having over 33,000 was actually ridiculous when considering the pools of resources other people had, but he had skills that could actually spend it all. More was certainly better.

The most exciting development was that Practical Application had reduced the cost of Legacy of the Mists into double digits. Summoning a phantasm now came at the price of 98 mana. Coop was nearing the point where he could ignore their mana cost completely. As it stood, he could comfortably reach the limit of his weapon’s durability while leaving enough for some truly massive Fog of War channels. 10,000 mana for the ghosts and another 10,000 mana for the mists wouldn’t be out of the question while leaving enough for Mind Over Matter to protect his health from the most devastating attacks.

Coop chuckled to himself, causing Felix’s ears to swivel toward the sound. Coop was remembering how there was a time when Ghost Reef’s civilization shard was threatened by Kevin the Hammer and a handful of the Chosen from the Endless Empire. There had been serious questions regarding whether Coop was strong enough to defend his claim on the world, doubts that it would be possible for his limited skirmisher class to withstand the inevitable threats to his territory, and mocking disrespect toward his potential. He’d wonder what those who dismissed the Revenant as too simple to build up into something that could compete thought now, but they were gone, dead and forgotten, while he lived on.

The Cult of Chakyum may have more respect for him as an enemy than any other he had faced, but he seriously doubted they would be prepared for what he had in store for them.

He checked the leaderboards to see if anything had changed in the last few days.

Day 112

Coop (Level 197)

Vul-Hau (Level 160)

Xba-Hau (Level 159)

Itz-Hau (Level 159)

Un-Hau (Level 158)

Ah-Hau (Level 157)

Xul-Hau (Level 157)

Zin-Hau (Level 157)

Xov-Hau (Level 156)

Puch-Hau (Level 156)

He blew air out of his nose and kept scrolling.

Cab-Hau (Level 156)

Ek-Hau (Level 155)

Can-Hau (Level 155)

Bac-Hau (Level 155)

Cat-Hau (Level 155)

Muz-Hau (Level 155)

Lom-Hau (Level 155)

Wil-Hau (Level 154)

Sip-Hau (Level 154)

Bol-Hau (Level 154)

The list of Priests continued until he found more familiar names in the late hundreds. Coop shook his head. The Jaguar Sun continued to rise despite the obvious demonstration of power by the Cult of Chakyum. Coop felt like he was watching two trains travel toward each other on the same track. The crash was unavoidable. And he wasn’t just watching. He was conducting one of the trains.