Unchosen Champion

Hai Yun diligently etched a subtle smile onto her face. She portrayed an unrealistic depiction of grace that embodied her station, but completely failed to capture her true mood. The feigned expression was directed at no one in particular. It was simple discipline that had her maintaining a charming visage for the benefit of everyone else.

The smile did little to hide the hopelessness that defined her continued existence, but it was as much effort as she could currently give. If anyone looked beyond the strained expression on her sunburned skin, and into her weary eyes, it would be obvious that she felt utterly defeated. Rock bottom was when there was nowhere else to go, but the struggle just kept getting worse, and the hole, deeper. She dared not claim to have actually found rock bottom, cynical enough to avoid tempting fate into escalating her tribulations.

She wasn’t alone in her misery. Of her original mountaintop procession, maybe a quarter of the total number remained. Loyal warriors had lost their families and family members had become fighters in place of lost warriors. New people had joined her entourage, and been lost in the short time they spent together, but only after inspiring even more to follow. They had all been through many trials, and not all had made it. Her feelings were transparently reflected throughout her remaining attendants and the followers that had joined them along the way, but she did her best to seem calm and confident, as was appropriate for her symbolic role.

If not for the honor of her attendants, she would have already been satisfied with the effort she gave. She wasn’t born to be a leader. Without their support, she would never have stepped up to fill the void that her grandfather left behind. Perhaps she wouldn’t have left her burning city in the first place without their expectancy, content to capitulate to the internal tension of civil unrest and the external pressure of an alien invasion. They propped her up, so it had become her duty to avoid toppling over and wilting under the pressure.

She owed them too much to ever be worthy of their continued devotion, but as long as they kept going, she had to keep trying. The forced smile was a feeble refusal to completely surrender to apathy as her ragged followers shuffled around protectively, their torn clothes and the few dulled ancient weapons mirroring their fatigue-lined faces. The trouble was more for their sake than her own.

The simple monster variant that occupied their current location was no match for their obstinate resistance, but that only demonstrated the wide variety of threats distributed across the planet. Only a handful of guards were necessary for keeping the rest secure, so they were taking the defense in easy shifts. As the current sentries acknowledged her before their hunt, she could barely keep her expression steady.

The fake confidence conveyed by her smile felt like another small betrayal toward her loyal followers. It was a lie to mask the failures that had driven their journey across the hemisphere. Despair gnawed at her insides, but her regrets had at least faded. No matter what choices she made, they had all been doomed the moment mana activated on the planet. That was the nature of their new reality. Her experience had led her to a simple conclusion; the assimilation was never meant to be an orientation for new people to be introduced to a broader community. It was raucous oppression designed to pit them against each other before siphoning off the remnants of their homes to benefit alien tyrants. It was a battle royale with the final prize in the form of eternal serfdom at best and complete extermination equally conceivable.

Hai Yun had already lost any real hope for herself long before. She could only explore the depths of anguish while the others looked to her for traditional symbolic guidance. The assimilation was too demanding, and no one anywhere could spare the resources or risk themselves by extending a helping hand to strangers. The moment she felt any self-assurance in their part in the apocalypse, by claiming the first mana well, they were brought crashing back down by the developments of mana.

She sat on a jutting boulder, back straight, despite the sharp edges uncomfortably pressing against her delicate skin. Her hair was combed, held in place by butterfly hairpins that had been tarnished by the weather, and her posture was as close to perfect as humanly possible. The elegant travel gown that she wore had already been ruined by the elements, so she wasn’t concerned about more damage. The rest of the collection was lost forever.

She alone occupied the limited shade at their current location, provided by a mound of similarly eroded volcanic rock adjacent to her seat, poking through the limited gathered sand on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. No matter her preference, her attendants granted her as much luxury as possible, as if her station was important for their own sense of equilibrium.

A ring of rocky coral islands encircled an insignificant lagoon in front of her. There were only a handful of stunted palms growing on their own in the entire tropical formation. The trees weren’t nearly enough to provide shade for more than just the faces of one or two people, making her protection from the sun an exclusive amenity.

The idea of harvesting the trees to rebuild their destroyed convoy of ships and escape their situation was unfeasible. The few sad shrubs were so small, they might collectively form a single-person raft at best. The result would never be enough to sustain anyone for the necessary distance to escape the surrounding sea.

Before he left with his sisters’ party, Seki Kitawa had coordinated with her navigator and estimated their journey thus far. According to him, she and her attendants had covered approximately 5,000 miles worth of the pre-mana planet, half of which had been on their last leg at sea after being knocked off course. In reality, according to the wise young master, it would have been much more, given the changes to the Earth brought by mana, but Hai Yun knew nothing about those details. All she recognized was that, though she was far from the mountaintop she once considered an eternal home, she hadn’t gone far enough. If this was the limit for Earth’s most powerful collection of fighters, then the apocalypse had truly arrived. The planet stood no chance.

Hai Yun’s weary eyes absently roamed. The sandy shores of the uninhabited atoll gleamed in the insistent sun, alien in their own uniquely picturesque image. Countless bright magenta crystals, as fine as dust, decorated the surface of the beaches, twinkling as the light shifted. The sands were embellished with pink glitter, dancing with the sparkling waves as if competing to see which could reflect the glare the prettiest.

Groups of the shipwrecked were scattered around, sitting idly in the sunshine, poking at the pink sand, or wandering absently along the shores, searching for something they couldn’t consciously identify. Hai Yun suspected it was hope they sought, but they retrieved seashells and the occasional interesting debris in lieu of their hidden aspirations.

The stranded guests had surmised that the beaches were decorated with the remnants of distant civilization shards that had been crushed and washed up on the remote island, the same way they had been. Many of the latecomers had at least seen a shard from a distance, unlike herself. Based on their descriptions, Hai Yun guessed that it would have taken hundreds of shards to spread such a fine scattering of dust across such a vast distance. There may have been a bit less than 250 civilization shards remaining, but it seemed as though Earth had been granted thousands to start with, then proceeded to lose a significant portion of them right away in the initial chaos of their collapsing society.

She supposed that if the valuable objects had landed in the ocean, there was nothing they could have done, but she desperately wished one would have landed in her city instead. Even if they had fought in the civil war between her brothers, at least the survivors might have had a better chance to withstand the external challenges being wrought upon them.

She was sure that she was the last one from her family standing, and her attendants were all that was left of the broader merchant clan. Of their bolstered convoy, only three smaller boats had survived their attempt to travel through the seas south of Japan. Hai Yun hadn’t bothered with a headcount since reaching the atoll, unable to bring herself to acknowledge the losses. All she could do was force her small smile and hope that some resolve would naturally return if she faked it for long enough.

The last defeat had been the worst because it had been the most unreasonable. They had stumbled into hazardous waters late one night on their oceanic journey, weeks prior. Their presence disrespected the titans that competed for dominance in the deep and their ignorance led to a fatal mistake. Her ancient merchant ship was the first to be destroyed, almost as if it was an unintentional warning to the rest.

A school of flying fish had shot across the surface of the ocean like silver-plated bullets, shimmering in the moonlight, fired from rifles somewhere distant in the starry darkness. The high level school of fish smashed through the hull of the antique ship, sending splinters of wood flying in a surprise explosion that barely slowed the animals. The catastrophic damage to the ship left the passengers of the largest vessel scrambling to stay at the surface of the sloshing dark water in a matter of seconds.

Before they could be rescued by the rest of the convoy, the reason the flying fish were fleeing made itself known. Nearby, just ahead of where they had been sailing, a single pointed tooth emerged from the surface of the ocean. At first, it could have been mistaken for an errant unicorn’s horn, but the swirling serrations across its stained ivory surface made it clear it belonged to a predator that relied on harpooning its unsuspecting prey before consuming them, and the way the surface of the ocean bulged indicated that it was connected to something enormous.

The towering off-white structure may have resembled a spiraling horn at first, but it just kept climbing, growing larger and larger, until it might have been better placed as a skyscraper in a megacity than in the mouth of any legitimate animal. What kind of prey could it possibly be used for?

After what seemed like way too long, a second pair of serrated teeth emerged, jutting from the bottom half of a jaw that finally let the bulging ocean collapse into waves. The mouth could have swallowed her entire ship at once, completely by accident, if they had wandered closer.

Whatever this creature had started as, it had long since abandoned its original form. It was something from deep below, a behemoth that should have been far beyond where the light ever penetrated, mutated by mana until it was unrecognizable. It seemed unstoppable, like a whale compared to krill. However, the scaly jaw the teeth were attached to barely had the opportunity to break the surface, only briefly revealing their silvery countenance before shuddering to an abrupt stop.

As Hai Yun struggled to comprehend the monstrosity, gripping flotsam while watching with rapt attention, she eagerly anticipated the rest of the colossal being, imagining a mana-enhanced angler fish, capable of violently conquering all the oceans with a spear in place of a light. Surely, no matter what, she would see a massive sea monster, the likes of which were only told in exaggerated stories or ancient epics. Its sudden halt left her confused.

Then, the sea began bubbling before it had a chance to settle, as if it was being brought to boil, though the temperature had gone unchanged. The water seethed all around while the unlucky humans struggled to keep their heads above water among the increasingly violent waves, absently resisting being drowned while unable to tear their focus from the monstrosity that had pierced the heavens with its natural weapons.

The churning of the ocean preceded a series of massive squid-like tentacles that erupted into the sky before folding back down, wrapping the set of spiraling teeth, and falling across the toothed monster’s still submerged head, preventing the rest of the creature from breaching into the night air. The incomprehensible momentum that had brought the creature to the surface was nothing against the constriction of the gigantic flexible limbs that had been grasping at it from below.

The tentacles raked the solid surfaces with spaded suckers, leaving injured tracks that oozed with blood and painted the dark frothing sea a deep red even in the night. The shouts of terror from her followers were drowned out by the splashing agitation of the environment. It only took seconds before innumerable tentacles smothered the toothed monster, and a second leviathan wrestled the first back into the depths, revealing why a monster of the deep had approached the surface in the first place: it was fleeing an even greater predator.

The resulting tidal waves swamped the rest of the ships that remained on the sidelines, tossing them around like corks in a wave pool, and sending the vast majority of the passengers into the sea. They could only grasp at the overturned hulls and hang on to each other, wide-eyed with fear of what was hidden within Earth’s most remote areas. Mana had unrecognizably transformed their planet, bringing to life what was meant to stay in their nightmares. They who had believed they were at the current pinnacle learned that they were but toddlers, stumbling around as they produced their first steps.

Hai Yun’s people spent over a week drifting at sea, hardly willing to speak of the horrors they saw, before they washed up on their current abode. Having solid ground beneath their feet had done wonders for their sense of security, but the monsters they had seen wouldn’t be held back by a few yards of lonely beach. It had become a habit to keep an eye on the horizon, more so out of fear of ruin than anticipation of rescue.

She took a small bit of solace in the fact that they weren’t threatened by overly developed Primal Constructs. The alien invaders that ventured into the shallow waters of the coasts couldn’t be making much progress. Beyond the physical challenges presented by the depths, they would also find themselves at the bottom of an extensive food chain.

The obvious problem was that she and her people were equally low on the totem pole when it came to the deep seas. Though they had a few small boats that weren’t completely inoperable, they lacked the will to return to the ocean after the close call that destroyed their original prospects. The time spent drifting in the sea, waiting to be consumed from below had done more damage than any of the previous atrocities any of them had experienced.

Hai Yun’s eyes fell upon the three overturned boats, now beached with barely a dozen people using them as backrests. While they could make the necessary repairs for a small number of them to take the surviving boats and seek help for the rest, none of them volunteered for either the role of staying or going. For now, they waited, biding time until something changed.

There was no need to rush to a decision, at least not until Reina Kitawa and the rest of her party returned from exploring the single landmark on the atoll. It may have already been over a week, but the entire party was still on the leaderboards, so they weren’t dead yet.

Hai Yun maintained her position, like a sentinel in the shade next to the rocky mound. She waited for the Kitawa siblings to return with more bad news. What else could they bring?