Unchosen Champion

The Champion of Ghost Reef would be the first on Earth to step foot in the Underlayer. He had demanded the maiden voyage for himself in a rare demonstration of his authority. Coop was leading the way, not out of a sense of pride, but because he wanted to make sure it was safe before all of his friends arrived. The position was less of a privilege and more of a nuclear first strike. Any ambushes or other deceptions would be met with overwhelming force on his part. Something inside him almost wished they would try something so he would have an excuse to vent.

He had a few moments with his thoughts while the transportation took effect, experiencing an out-of-body feeling similar to his long distance mistjumps from before he became a Mistwalker. Instead of being pulled through a world of familiar mists, passing through the gateway presented his consciousness with simple empty blackness.

There was no light able to reach his nonexistent eyes while he was in between places. Perhaps he just lacked the mana sense to detect his surroundings, or maybe the lack of scenery was entirely due to his own perception. It was possible that time wasn’t flowing at all, and he was simply imagining things while he instantaneously moved to the destination. Either way he was alone with his contemplations.

Strangely, while Coop experienced no sensations for himself, he could feel the desire of Sethrak the Deep Dweller as it lingered far in the background of his existence. Coop had practically forgotten about it, but his Dedication remained. It was only when everything else was silenced that his abyssal benefactor’s cravings to consume barely brushed against Coop’s awareness, and even then, it was like the subtle memory of a forgotten dream.

As Coop touched upon the alien feeling without his own distractions, he had what felt like a small epiphany. The voracity of Sethrak wasn’t an external influence at all. There was nothing alien about the desires that he sensed. He recognized them like the familiarity of his own bed. Sethrak’s hunger was a clear reflection of his own vast appetite for progression. Coop was yearning for the defeat of his enemies. It was like his constant drive for more experience, even if it was always just a little bit at a time, had manifested into an unfillable abyss within himself.

If he could have blown air out of his nose, he would have. He wasn’t sure if he should feel offended that the system was personifying his own fundamental traits by revealing them as inhuman eldritch horrors, but he put the introspection aside, remembering his first priority was to Ghost Reef.

Once the transportation into the Underlayer was complete, there would be two more minutes before the most eager of his allies joined him. He would need to act relatively quickly, but when it came to combat, two minutes was plenty. In the meantime, within the complete nothingness, his thoughts wandered as he tried to be patient and think about anything except his yearning to grind and whether it was healthy or not.

The gateway to the Underlayer may have felt slow, but the distance was incomparable to anything he had previously experienced through mistjumping. Other than his single use of the Champion Projection settlement skill, he had never teleported such a distance. He supposed he had a good idea of how it would go, thanks to his test flight to Empress City, though he hadn’t expected to equate the two. The comparison made him wonder how integrated individuals like Balor were able to accomplish such an incredible feat. They would usually be reserved to the domain of the system.

Balor had actually established a configuration that enabled teleportation. Coop reiterated the thought to himself. The simple stonemason had built a teleporter inside of their settlement. It was genuinely amazing, but given the layout of the galactic community, it was also something that the system had evidently monopolized. It seemed as though the stonemason’s design only worked because of the specific connection between the departure point and destination. The surface and the Underlayer were joined by the little-understood and often theoretical ley lines, apparently flowing through the chasm, but it was still an astonishing achievement.

However, as Coop experienced what he imagined was the equivalent of a coma, he wondered if he should wait to sing the praises of his friend until after his journey was confirmed. For all he knew, he would open his eyes and find himself at the other end of a single blink, standing beneath the tower in the northern courtyard of Ghost Reef’s fort after the transportation failed and nothing happened.

Ideally, the teleport was working perfectly. Coop was hoping that with enough time, humans could harness that power for a wider variety of uses. He imagined Champion Projection without the mana cost and operable for any of their residents rather than the ability being exclusive to just himself.

The grandmaster stonemason had carved several clearly designated areas into the northern courtyard, decorating them with runes of similar intricacy to what Madison had designed in her ritual chamber to remove the Endless Empire’s blood curse. Balor’s project had required the contributions of half a dozen other artisans, but they had finished well in advance of the event, working with the mission to simply establish Ghost Reef’s connection to the Underlayer as soon as they discovered the convenience of their entrance.

For the time being, Balor’s Tower was the focal point of their teleportation network. From the elaborate access points carved into the surface, anyone with sufficient permissions from the settlement could utilize the teleportation features of the tower. A simple menu to select a destination was accessible through the tower’s connection with mana. The tower itself was more of a conduit at the top of an exhaust vent for the ley lines than an actual building.

They wouldn’t need to take turns using the single magical elevator Coop used, and instead had access to 22 total points beneath the tower alone, arranged in an expanding circular pattern from the largest in the center. There were also smaller locations containing their own handful of rune-decorated access points on either side of both ends of the canal and at several points along the perimeter road within the fort. An additional 12 gateways, subdivided into 11 access points each followed the inner wall of the fort. In total, more than 150 gateways were already prepared.

The gateways were like train stations in a miniaturized public transportation network, appropriately spread for the size of their city. Each spot could be used to access the transportation ability of the tower, giving the entire fort the ability to easily come and go to any of the layers along the chasm, as they were established, and they would provide equal access to anyone on the future lower levels. Coop loved that they had established their transportation infrastructure first, before demand for it became an issue.

At first he was concerned with them being extremely limiting, like single-person elevators in an extremely tall tower, but each gateway was designed for groups to use at once, so long as they shared a destination. Coop had taken the main one by himself simply due to his insistence on going down first.

While Coop led the way down for all of the human residents, the aliens and phantoms would be a steady presence up top. They continued to engage in intergalactic battlefields while making some time for their other duties to the fort. The Lighthouse still had a significant backlog of war declarations, with armies patiently waiting to be defeated, so even though the two groups couldn’t participate in the settlement event while it occurred beyond their territory, they weren’t without their own tasks.

Beyond the walls of Ghost Reef, the Empress City soldiers staged themselves just outside the main gate, awaiting their turn on the teleporters. The groups that had come with Coop on the short trip over from the mainland were geared up for combat, led by the Flame Knight, Captain Javier, who had organized the cruise ship evacuation months before.

The event’s participation had already been carefully organized by the time Coop came back, and he just needed to touch base with everyone that was remaining on the surface. Garod and a few other crafters were temporarily off battle duty, instead tasked with crafting another group of Legendary items, utilizing Coop’s growing collection of materials. Other than them, only Balor was overseeing the transport of human residents of the island, just in case any issues with his construction arose. Coop had successfully avoided thinking about what could go wrong with teleportation, and he had no inclination to learn more before he activated the portal.

Unfortunately, now that he was mid-teleport, he was having second thoughts. He didn’t think anything had gone wrong, but he had been left alone with his thoughts for a bit too long already. Hopefully, he’d be reconstituted soon enough. He’d have to ask his friends what the trip was like for them and compare notes.

Charlie and Camila had successfully delved far into the caverns beneath the fort, preparing a dozen levels for future construction in their preliminary outings, all of which were already accessible by the Tower. At the moment, they were empty pearlescent chambers, but Charlie had high hopes for them. The girls had an easy time for the most part in the underground, thanks to the monster variant hiding in the darkness already being a clear target for some mysterious grinders. They strongly suspected that Jett had been taking care of the underground beyond what the Adventurer’s Guild and Gibson’s party had done. While they were down there, they only had minimally leveled regular monsters to contend with, but they also reconnected with some lost residents in the darkness.

They encountered the colony of bats that had been missing from the island for so long, ever since the end of the Siege Event. Apparently, Charlie had successfully negotiated their return to the surface, introducing them to the enormous bat house that had been installed in the northern wall of the fort. Coop was proud of Ghost Reef’s relationship with the animal powerhouses that lived among them and especially Charlie for taking up the mantle of recruitment on his behalf.

The bats would be joining the other animals in remaining outside of the Underlayer, protecting the fort from encroaching Primal Constructs. Between the animals, the phantoms, and the settlement’s extensive spread of territory, he sincerely doubted there would be any problems up top. Only the regular maintenance of suppressed invader variants would be necessary.

Coop had nothing to worry about when it came to the settlement. He could put 100% of his focus on the Pirmal Constructs and the Underlayer. Of course, he was assuming he actually made it. He mentally crossed his fingers, hoping that Balor hadn’t steered them wrong.

Once his vision finally returned, Coop was deeply relieved. He confirmed that everything was where it should be after it was immediately clear that there was no threat, according to Presence of Mind. He was doubly soothed.

His eyes scanned his surroundings and he found he was completely and utterly alone. He squeezed his eyes and blinked, feeling odd sensations as his senses fully returned. For a moment, it felt like he had to relearn to see, hear, and smell. He tasted the earth and metallic underground in the air, and his skin tingled from head to toe.

His ethereal armor manifested a moment later, adding specks of the abyss to its form while his spear and shield solidified, summoned with barely a thought. Though he was by himself, he was more comfortable when he was fully equipped, so he summoned his gear despite the apparent lack of danger.

The oppressive silence was the most disorienting sensation. It felt like he had stepped into an enormous anechoic chamber. It was absolutely silent. He instinctively flexed his jaw, popping his ears, feeling the heavy quiet pressing down almost like a physical force. In the absence of any noises, he was forced to confront the unnaturally loud sound of his own heartbeat, the whoosh of blood in his veins, and the air being forced into his lungs. All combined, it made him feel unbalanced.

The unmitigated isolation hit him like a wall. The familiar comfort of the world was gone. It was like being the only person on an entire planet, giving him goosebumps, but the Underlayer lacked the sense of wonder he had anticipated before exploring a new region.

Coop breathed a muffled sigh as he confirmed that the system never failed to disappoint. Maybe this time the blameworthy entity was actually mana, but either way, the Underlayer had not lived up to his lofty expectations, though it was sufficiently alien in unforeseen ways.

Coop had imagined a journey toward the center of the Earth to reveal mysterious, untouched environments that were teeming with undiscovered life, flourishing within unique landscapes. He had been mentally prepared to meet hostile mechanical recreations of dinosaurs, thriving in primordial fungal jungles that were tucked within rocky caves, or other scenarios that were equally exotic.

Instead, his watery eyes were greeted with gently rolling, nearly flat plains and a clear sky that stretched all the way to the horizon. He slowly tilted his head up while stepping forward as he tried to find the oppressive feeling that would remind him of his position stifled deep underground. Rather than stalactites, he found loose cloud formations far above his head that formed a softening fog bank high in the sky that calmly flowed like a river of water vapor against what might have been a ceiling if his vision could penetrate the fluff. If there was a ceiling, it was miles and miles high.

“Where is this light coming from?” He suddenly wondered, doing his best to break the silence, spinning around without finding a source. It was the equivalent of broad daylight across the entire landscape, with illumination scattering from everywhere at once.

For a moment, the thought that he was actually dead crossed his mind, and it seemed like he had no way to dispute it. This place seemed like a personal purgatory. He took a deep breath, doing his best to avoid jumping to conclusions, but the sound of his lungs filling and his heart beating were a reminder of his continued mortality. It was like his ears were stuffed with cotton with the way ambient sounds were missing. The whole experience was dizzying.

As he turned around he finally found a landmark to center himself aside from the handful of footprints he had planted in the soft ground. A pillar of solid stone, completely unblemished by any sort of erosion, rose from the top of a barely discernible bank of earth. An extremely slight incline led from his feet to its base that he was pretty sure wasn’t an optical illusion, but would require precise tools to actually measure. His eyes traced the column’s rise, following it straight up until it disappeared among the hazy pillows of vapor at the top of the cavern as they bunched around its edges like it was a cotton candy topped baobab tree.

Coop leaned so far backwards, he nearly stumbled. Calling it a pillar wasn’t doing the enormity of the stone trunk justice. It was as thick as the entirety of Ghost Reef’s fort, and given its assumed position, he could imagine it being a base to a tower that was capped off by their entire city. In a way, it made him feel better about the hollow existing far beneath their foundations. As uncomfortable as the chasm made him, it was a tiny pipe compared to the solid structure that existed far underneath them.

Without the solid stone monument, Coop might have believed something went very wrong with Balor’s teleportation. Instead of sending him into the deep dark abyss, he was standing in a picturesque desktop wallpaper of completely virgin land. The pillar made him feel like an ant at the base of a skyscraper, but it was different enough to confirm in his mind that he was underground.

The only clues that he wasn’t standing in more familiar wilderness on the surface was the hint at a concave sky and lack of a shining sun. If he concentrated on the horizon to his left and right, he thought he could also detect the suggestion of more stone walls, maybe, but he would need binoculars to be sure. The problem with his discernment was caused by the scale of the cavern. The Underlayer should have the expected tubular cave shape, but it was so large it could be confused with the actual outdoors.

The sprawling land gave him the slight inkling of unplanted tracts of farmland, as if it had been prepared for sowing upon its creation. Maybe his lofty expectations for more complex ecology were misplaced, considering the Underlayer had only existed for a few months. It hadn’t had time to establish any sort of ecosystem and instead appeared to be a sterile region of mana, untouched by life from elsewhere on Earth.

The teleportation was also probably sterile, but the region was now contaminated with at least one human.

Coop stepped forward, turning away from the column, feeling like the outstretched dark plains were free real estate. Beneath his ethereal gladiator sandals, the ground was firm with a light cushion of nearly black top soil. It compressed like what he imagined stepping on a fresh powder of snow would feel like. There were no rocks or even pebbles in sight. Other than the pillar that marked Ghost Reef for him, the land was featureless. Before he grew more discombobulated, he glanced back at the solid rock column, glad for the anchoring landmark.

There were no Primal Constructs either. This was essentially the preseason, so that much was meeting expectations. They had an entire day to dig in before the event really started. If not for their knowledge of the existence of the Underlayer ahead of time, he imagined a long journey down the chasm.

Coop took his time orienting himself, but after less than a minute he was more or less at a loss. Without the actual sky and the everpresent sun or stars, he felt like he would sincerely struggle with even general directions. The place had a strange way of befuddling his internal compass with its generic blankness.

After his two minutes were up, the first of his allies phased into existence around where he had begun. Camila and Charlie were earliest, followed by Shane’s entire party, then Gibson’s, the Cleary Brothers, and more. A few hundred people had entered the gateways spaced around Ghost Reef right away, stepping into the unknown without any confirmation of what they would find, but not hesitating out of fear or doubt.

He watched with amusement as they experienced the same process he did, wide-eyed and ready for threats before experiencing the strange return of their senses, then confusion as they glanced around at an endless empty expanse of untouched land. Thankfully, they provided the sound that was missing, though the Underlayer was still unnaturally quiet.

Camila frowned before she grunted with disappointment, though the exact source of her consternation was unclear. She probably wanted to demonstrate what she and Charlie had prepared. As they collected themselves, other groups phased in as well.

Charlie glanced up toward the sky and was the first to speak. “Where’s that light coming from?” She questioned, causing Coop to nod as his first question was echoed.

“That’s mana for sure.” Buck Cleary declared. “The pure kind.” He added while his brothers nodded, all watching the clouds flow.

“Feels like we should be planting instead of fighting, Boss.” Tiny added, directing his statement toward Coop.

“Right?” Coop responded, glad he wasn’t completely off base with his own initial impressions of the landscape. “How was the ride?”

“Uneventful.” Camila declared while Tomb Blade from Shane’s party added “Dark,” and the others agreed.

“Did it take long?” He followed up, but it seemed like no one was exactly sure, giving contradictory answers.

“C’mon people! Make way for everyone else!” Madison shouted, disregarding the muted atmosphere by clapping her hands, reminding everyone that this wasn’t a vacation outing before Coop could get them all off track.

Coop watched as the residents diligently marked off their arrival points, cordoning them off so that they wouldn’t be overlooked later. There was no chance of the crazy teleportation accidents that might result in two people existing in the same place at once, but the activation of the gateway might be delayed if there was insufficient space on the other end.

Jones was already drawing complicated runes into the ground at the gateways, using his skills to make permanent glowing stamps when he was done, while everyone else worked the tingling sensations from their limbs. Coop watched from over the old caretaker’s shoulder, out of curiosity.

“We need to establish our connection to the Tower in order to use it from this end.” Jones answered Coop’s question before it was asked. “We’d have to wait for the event to end so that Balor could come down, unless you wanted to climb back out.” He chuckled, knowing that’s exactly what Coop would have tried first.

It only took another 15 minutes before all of Ghost Reef’s human residents were in the Underlayer. None of them left the immediate proximity of the column, subconsciously clinging to its reassuring solidity in a sea of vacuity. They would have a few hours before the Empress City soldiers started their own trips down.

In the meantime, Shane took over as had been planned. He was ordering those with the right skills or simple Strength to start digging out a trench and mound around a wide area that would protect their preliminary staging area. Coop rolled his metaphorical sleeves up, ready to help with the excavation.

Amanda and Mikey B began a single lap around the pillar with Cap, Grizz, and a clearly dazed Dan in tow. Coop wished them luck on what seemed like the impossible task of making sense of their location before he got to work.