Unchosen Champion-Chapter 335: Human Resilience
Coop flickered through the darkness for hours, letting the moments blend together as he was absorbed by the grind. Physically, the demand was much more conventional than it had been on the algae bog, so he was well-prepared for the exertion. He was able to push himself to establish a proper extended hunt, but the environment itself was still somewhat of a hindrance that stifled the absolute top speed he had been able to demonstrate with his ability to take down the Primal Constructs on the surface.
He incorporated short-ranged mistjumps to speed up his rotations through the narrow corridors, but because of the enclosed, twisting environment, every move was unique. The difference was in where his focus lay. He couldn’t ‘solve’ the location and concentrate entirely on combat because the minutiae of every decision demanded reconsideration every time.
Instead of being entirely immersed in his attacks, matching his exhalations with physical exertions, he was racing through a dynamic maze-like habitat that required constant adjustment. Rather than speeding through a closed course circuit with enough consistency to move to the back of his attention, he was constantly engaged with solving the puzzle of reducing travel times. He leaned into corners, flashed across gaps, ran along walls, dodged unanticipated obstructions, defeated ambushes, and let his fog choose the next corridor. There was no calm zen in this grind. It was more like chasing the Elite Primal Insurgents through the Appalachian forests than racing around Ghost Reef’s fort.
However, despite all of the small challenges he had to overcome within the fourth level of the mana well, each marginally slowing him down, the fact that he wasn’t having any particular weaknesses exposed meant that he was moving at a consistent speed. The rate that he was actually defeating monsters was slightly slower than when he was on the woven algae fields, but unlike on the third level, the interruptions to his momentum were minor rather than forcing him to completely stop and restart. It was to the point that random adjustments were a part of the pattern. He was able to keep it going indefinitely.
When Coop was on the hunt, routine was everything. The repetitive behavior of a grind and his willingness to sink his thoughts into nothing but his actions were what allowed him to optimize his motions. The more he kept at any particular task, the more it was refined. It was a theme that had bled from his personality into his build, with skills designed to be augmented with practice, whether it was through his Haunted title or Practical Application.
Coop, despite his designation as Icon of Humanity, still firmly believed that there was nothing in particular that made him special. But if there was one thing, it was the zombie-like devotion he applied to grinding. Rather than become frustrated with the process, he embraced it, and more specifically, enjoyed it. He couldn’t help but giggle to himself as he perfectly cut a corner, incorporating the momentum into his next attack, or bypassed a ramp with a premature shield toss as he cleaved an enemy, shaving a millisecond from his intercombat movement. He was like a very deadly child playing hide and seek with thousands of unsuspecting partners.
From the perspective of a Chomper, he was quite terrifying. Delicate fingers of fog would tentatively explore their burrows, silently scouting ahead while a giddy madman cackled in the darkness, disturbing the air currents some distance away. They would have a few seconds with the curious spectral mana before what they thought was prey would encroach the aperture of the crevice.
With their territory invaded, they would strike at the fleshy and seemingly distracted target, undulating their bodies to shoot beyond the threshold of their personal tunnel, mouth agape, only to have their front teeth shattered by a solid ethereal manifestation halting their momentum like an immovable object. In the moments after that, depending on their size, the Revenant would flash through the darkness, inevitably finding a way to behead them with a burst of violence that filled the narrow corridors.
The entire engagement might last one or two seconds, but the time spent engaged in combat was also time for Fog of War to continue flowing. Three additional targets would be acquired even before the first was defeated. Coop was once again in perpetual motion.
He kept up the grind, completely enraptured by the hunt with a passion that was palpable. The darkness, punctuated by flashes of pulsing silver light, insisted that he concentrate on mana and auras rather than his eyes. The stifling of his normal senses had aided him in slipping into the focused meditation that made him seem out of his mind, and almost crazed, to his companions. He was focused on shaving off milliseconds from each engagement, cutting corners in the dark cavities, and otherwise maximizing the efficiency of patrolling the Coral Forest sea sponge.
Coop couldn’t be stopped, but he did eventually escape from his mindless meditation, as he recognized that repeatedly defeating monsters within the same burrows would send him into diminishing returns territory. It was an error that he had already decided he wouldn’t make again after enjoying the Mangrove Forest for half a day too long at the start.
Now that he was fully within phase two of his plan to relevel, he had no intention of wasting time on repeating mistakes, no matter how minor. Phase one was the time for leisurely setting himself up to shoot forward. Phase two was the slingshot. Phase three would be the cleanup, where he put the final touches on his progress and anticipated further challenges within the assimilation.
He let himself wind down, but it had been his longest individual grind since restarting in Ghost Reef, and he was still feeling good. The sea sponge was basically the equivalent of the coral colony inhabited by the Ones That Hunt. It was an enormous monument within the mana well, encompassing thousands upon thousands of hideyholes for the local monsters. Coop was sure that, if he had given the Chompers more time, he would have uncovered a boss equivalent near the center, but because the mana well had been reset with the settlement upgrade, the Chompers were still jockeying for position, just like the mutated species on the upper levels.
Unlike the Hunters, the eel-like Chompers didn’t duel for position. They were much more civilized in that they grew as large as possible and simply consumed their opponents. The sea sponge was almost completely devoid of actual combat as the superior Chomper was decided in one bite.
Even the Gulpers had engaged in their own ranged battles where they lobbed spitballs at each other as a way to spread their own territory into wider and wider circles, but the Chompers barely fought at all. It was Coop that had brought the fight to the vast majority of the sponge, and once he decided it was nearly time to move on, the darkness settled back into near silence, with a calm ambience of air flowing through the wider corridors, pulled by the deliberate shape of the sponge to let mana spread throughout.
While the Chompers sought the best possible crevices, the real winner of the whole territory was clearly the sponge itself. This wasn’t so much a territory filled with individual hotbeds of mana, but one gigantic mana bath for the sea sponge. Like the corals that dominated to the point that they became structural for other smaller habitats, the sponge was closer to their equivalent than to the other creatures inhabiting the well. Coop supposed that in a way, so were the algaes of the third level, though for some reason he considered them different, despite the same alien influence. Both corals and sponges were marine invertebrates, but the complex marine algae present on the third level was basically seaweed, more like the diatoms and phytoplankton that flowed with the currents of mana and provided bioluminescent ambience than animals being integrated into the system by the assimilation.
Coop wasn’t sure where mana drew the line, but to him it seemed like vegetation and geological formations, as they knew them on Earth, were incapable of joining the galactic community as assimilated Chosen, but most of their animals were another matter. Even creatures as simple as barnacles had been sponsored. Coop thought the line must have been drawn somewhere between animals and plants, and he personally saw algae as something firmly on the plant side of things. The fact that people like Balor, Caisalya, and Sojjah were included in the galactic community made him wonder if it was a sliding scale based on individual planets, but who could know? He wasn’t the one playing at god. That was the system. Either way, he didn’t think any less of his stone, plant, and slime friends, but he didn’t think Earth would spawn their distant cousins.
Clearly, with his grind winding down, the distracted thoughts had returned. He made his way back to the main chamber, near the top of the sponge where they had entered, and where his companions were keeping a base, so that he could take his personally mandated break.
Coop took a seat among Hai Yun’s resting bodyguards, noting a few new faces had joined them. Runners from the Adventurer Guild were there to relay some messages. Apparently the new phantoms were settling in with the guidance of the previous generations and adventurers were returning to the Coral Forest. Coop gave them a simple response to take back, simply stating that they were all good and would be on their way further down soon.
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Hai Yun had led a party through a tunnel known to wrap back on the main chamber that they were using as a camp, so she would be back shortly. The guards shared some field rations while Coop relaxed on the firm spongy surface, laying on his back with his hands folded behind his head so that he could watch the mana flowing across the ceiling from the clouds beyond. It was surprisingly nice. He enjoyed the moment of peace.
The tunnel they expected Hai Yun to arrive from periodically burst with a fiery illumination, sending embers all the way back to where the rest of the company was waiting. No one flinched as the powerful sorceress demonstrated her own capacity for destruction in the narrow corridors. That the fire dragon had been summoned to clean up their quarry was expected. Its absence would have been more notable than the explosions of violence.
Coop shook his head, still impressed with her abilities. He had previously believed that the flexibility of the Revenant was one of the foremost advantages he had claimed during the assimilation. There were hardly any situations that truly negated his capabilities, whether it was due to the abilities of opponents or features of the arenas. He really thought he could always find an answer within his first set of skills, no matter the challenge.
Seeing Hai Yun and her entourage engage with such a variety of challenges had him rethinking how he defined his flexibility. The truth seemed to be that humans themselves were resilient, adapting to the assimilation with such equanimity they had actually ruined what was supposed to be the apocalypse. Hai Yun and her bodyguards were a perfect example, having addressed the foremost challenge of their starting point, tackling a mana well while Coop and Jones were poking at Ancient Defenders with machetes and rakes.
The poise that humans demonstrated in the face of change was shocking to the broader universe. It seemed like the primary reason they would ultimately face exile from the galactic community was their adaptability more than anything else. The factors that would trigger the Eradication Protocol were merely evidence of their inclination to flourish regardless of imperfect conditions. For whatever reason, that was a problem for the system.
Coop acknowledged that it wasn’t so much that his Revenant build was flexible, it was that it was generic. He was flexible. His humanity really was the advantage he had been leveraging the whole time, same as everyone else.
Coop grunted as his perspective changed a bit, gaining an appreciation for not just humanity but all the species that had evolved to survive on planet Earth. Apparently conditions here had been relatively rough compared to the galactic standard, but they had thrived, and that gave them a bit too much power for the system to stay comfortable. He couldn’t help but wonder how many other planets had been denied integration for similar reasons. At the absolute minimum, there were two others, representing Lyriel and Palsteron’s home planets.
Shaking his head to himself and putting the more esoteric thoughts aside, he checked his status while Hai Yun did her last rotation before he had her lead him deeper into the mana well.
[Status]
HP - 42770/42770
MP - 163080/163080
Class - Revenant (Level 267)
Profession - Scavenging (Level 418)
Affinity - Spectral, Abyssal
Race - Human (Icon)
Faction - The Lighthouse
Strength - 200 (+8154)
Agility - 200 (+4077)
Body - 200 (+4077)
Mind - 6040 (+2114)
Intelligence - 200 (+8154)
Acumen - 200 (+4077)
Unallocated - 0
Titles - Champion V, Haunted, Ethereal, Reaper II, Slayer XI, Dauntless, Defiant, Stalwart, Reckless, Stacked, Valor XXIV, Siegebreaker, Underking, Mindbender, Insane
Skills (Active) - Mistwalking
Skills (Passive) - Depths of Madness
Quests - Fortune Seeker (25/50), Upgrade Metropolis to Global Capital
Basic Credits - 80,736,990
“Seems about right.” He muttered to himself.
He was roughly 70 levels ahead of the newly returned Chompers. Though the window of efficient experience gains widened as his actual levels increased, it didn’t completely disappear. 70 levels was a pretty big gap, roughly double what he had allowed while farming the Ruin Excavators in the underground beneath Ghost Reef, so it made sense that he had started to feel some diminishing returns. Then again, it was unlikely that someone less in tune with the marginal nuances in a proper extended grind would notice the initial tentative change in gains.
It wasn’t like he couldn’t get any experience from underleveled opponents, but it made no sense to tolerate the reductions when he could almost as easily get an equivalent portion of experience from overleveled enemies. The Chompers would level him with plenty of speed, but once he was in the zone, where he was squeezing milliseconds from each engagement, receiving 90% of the experience he should have was even more of a significant change than an inefficient mistjump or slightly flawed weapon swing.
The question was how strictly he should heed his instincts in this case. At the rate he was going, he might slip out of the efficiency window in the mana well even before he reached level 500. Would he go straight to Slayer titles when the best he could do was 90% in the mana well?
Coop scrunched his face, wordlessly recognizing that even at 90% efficiency, the mana well would be better than just about any normal monster grind. What about 50%? He shook his head and shrugged. He would just have to go with the flow and feel it out. He suspected that the pseudo elite nature of mana well monsters would keep them suitable for much longer than most targets.
Slayer titles were a guaranteed five levels and depending on the environment and monster variant, he expected to be able to complete them in a matter of hours. However, they came with other considerations. Most notable of all was travel times. After he left Ghost Reef, he would need to actively find them, and he was already sure that there would be cases where it would take days, maybe even weeks, to find new variants.
Remaining within the mana well until he was only gaining five levels a day would keep him in the Coral Forest for what could end up as months. It might easily be enough to hit level 500 first, but it was also ignoring the random opportunities that could exist in the untamed wilds of the surface. No matter what Primal Construct he was grinding, he would almost certainly have more gains than just from Slayer quest chains.
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There could be Hives and Infestations, random nests of Elites, Field Bosses, or even more Fallen Zones. He thought it made sense to go off on his own adventure before truly exhausting the Coral Forest, just like it was logical to leave the Mangrove Forest once it started to slow down. And all of that was ignoring the main benefit of receiving Slayer titles: the stat bonuses. Because of that, he concluded that he wouldn’t linger in the mana well too long.
Since the monsters within the mana well really only had a floor when it came to levels, he thought returning later, after sections were left untouched for a period of time made more sense than sticking around permanently. The creatures of the mana well grew at an unnaturally fast rate, so they could represent further opportunities to gain levels when there was nothing left among the Primal Constructs. It was only a matter of time before the different invader variants were just unacceptably slow to grow, so it was nice to know that there would still be pockets of enemies capable of providing more experience.
With his plan coming together, Coop reviewed the leaderboards.
Day 197
Charlie Seraphin (Level 355) Platinum (Level 347) Camila Alvarez (Level 345) Sila Tupua (Level 336) Imara (Level 335) Sefu (Level 326) Layla Itunu (Level 326) Tzultacaj (Level 323) “Super’ Siwarak Supitaya (Level 322) Safiri (Level 322)12,841,718. Coop (Level 267)
“Maybe two more days.” He muttered. That’s what he thought it would take for him to return to the top 1000.
