Unchosen Champion

The sheltered landmark tucked into the Everglades demanded Coop’s attention. Once he spotted the stained concrete and rusted corrugated metal sheets, the entire structure stuck out like a sore thumb. It might as well have been lit up with runway lights with how it lacked camouflage from above.

Coop aimed to make a soft landing, controlling his descent by repeatedly throwing and catching his spear while he was still high in the sky. Instead of one long throw, he made precise adjustments to better regulate his fall, fully utilizing the improvements to his skills to avoid crashing down like a meteor. Over time, he had become an expert in passing the spear to himself, acting like a quarterback throwing over the shoulder of an imagined wide receiver, and setting himself up to always be in comfortable positions as he reappeared at the end of his mistjumps.

Like most things, mistjumping was a learned skill that had benefited from practice. Even being considerate of his destination was somewhat of an art that required many trials before it worked properly without forcing his body into unexpected contortions to right himself before falling. At this point, the precision of his spear throws and the timing of his mistjumps came naturally, decided more by Coop’s instinct than any conscious calculations.

When his feet met the concrete near the center pool of the hidden sanctuary, he barely made a sound. The days when he had to smash into surfaces and make dramatic entrances were gone, at least unless he was looking to make a certain kind of impression. This time, he wasn’t coming in hot, and there didn’t appear to be an audience, so there was no need for any sort of posturing, though it was still an option. The solid, worn patio beneath his soles was quite a contrast after wading through the submerged swamps. It was smooth and weathered from the elements before the assimilation began. Vines weaved across the surface and patches of grass formed their own belts along the edges of concrete.

Rather than being hidden, the structure was merely overgrown. The camouflage was a natural result of the encroachment of the Everglades and all the pioneering flora that thrived with the environment. There didn’t appear to be any deliberate attempt to mask the landmark’s presence.

Coop concentrated on his aura, checking for potential enemies as routinely as glancing around a room upon entering. Presence of Mind filled his senses, revealing his immediate surroundings more clearly than his own sight, though he combined his natural senses to be more thorough. The sections around the large central pool were empty of potential enemies, no matter how hard he looked. Coop recognized the layout now that he viewed it from a more typical angle rather than from a bird’s eye view.

It seemed like Coop had discovered what was once a kind of specialized petting zoo that had somehow avoided being completely subsumed under the gently flowing expansion of the Everglades. The outer paths were elevated boardwalks, protected by rusted and leaf-stained tin roofs, leading to the edges of the swamp, while Coop had landed in the interior in the largest empty paddock for whatever animals were featured inside. It didn’t take a detective to figure out what the main attraction would be. Judging by the layout of the sloped concrete pools, the sanctuary was meant for alligators.

Coop squeezed his spear, holding it upright, but ready to defend himself. He recognized that the only structure he had seen within the Infestation was likely to hold some significance, especially since it was an alligator habitat in a place inundated with alligator minions.

The carved pools were covered in broad floating leaves and thin-petaled white flowers that obscured anything that might be lurking below. Coop kept his eye on the edge of the water, anticipating an ambush that never came. Instead, he spotted a handful of baby alligators hiding among the aquatic vegetation, staying completely still as if they were rubber bath toys. Coop watched, but they didn’t have much of a reaction, seemingly confident that they were hidden by the surface of water, despite his attention.

Eventually, feeling comfortable enough that he wasn’t in danger of a larger creature’s ambush, he turned his attention to the rest of the paddock. What he had assumed were elaborate camouflage patterns from above turned out to be a series of trophies. The walls that separated the observation decks from the animal pens were lined with python skins, hung over the top edge to dry out. Numerous snakes had been defeated, ranging from enormous monsters exceeding thirty feet in length to smaller, but still intimidating, five to six foot snakes.

If the skins had been hung before the assimilation, Coop expected them to be more deteriorated, either faded by the sun or otherwise eroded by the elements, exposed as they were. Instead, they seemed brand new, as if the collection had been started after the assimilation had begun and was actively growing as time went on.

Coop wandered closer to the wall, checking out the snake skins with a bit of consternation. In a way, the invasive species was almost as much of an invader as the Primal Constructs to the local creatures, but the overall scale of the destruction the two types of non-natives would cause wasn’t exactly comparable. Neither the consequences, nor the motives aligned in a way that would allow Coop to consider the invasive snakes to be as much of a threat as the alien invaders. It wasn’t like he was in any position to judge the morality of reptiles fighting each other, considering the conflicts he had participated in, whether he was justified or not.

If he looked at it from an alligator’s point of view, he supposed the end result of a snake invasion was pretty much the same. Their survival was at stake either way, whether it was challenged by pythons or alien manifestations. They were fighting over habitat, and clearly, the alligators had taken the upper hand over both challengers for the time being. They had been the ones to claim the territory and establish an Infestation.

As Coop slowly strolled along the perimeter of the main animal pen, he felt as though the story of the local Infestation was being presented to him like a museum exhibit. The battles that had been fought were between parties that he hadn’t initially expected. Rather than the Primal Constructs taking a preeminent role, the alien planetary sponsor was a third party at best.

The evidence was in the damage to the snake skins. Coop examined jagged bite marks, imagining equally large gators wrestling with the massive snakes as the constrictors wrapped their bodies. He traced scrapes that terminated in lost teeth, still embedded in the thick reptilian armor. Coop had to assume that far more Primal Constructs had been defeated overall, but they didn’t leave any evidence beyond experience and maybe the occasional title. On the other hand, the war between reptiles had left a clear testimonial in the form of snake skins and lost alligator teeth.

Coop watched the pond as he considered the circumstances that formed the Infestation, with a pseudo faction of alligators being established after prevailing over both types of invaders. It wasn’t like they had a civilization shard or mana pylon to act as a focal point for the territory’s mana. Instead, they were effectively excluding other claimants by establishing their own stronghold. He concluded that the absence of other representatives was the essential element that allowed an Infestation to be created.

From the perspective of the vast majority of factions in the galactic community, the entire assimilation was a territory grab. The civilization shards created individual city-states that started with the ability to radiate their own territory, expanding with population and settlement upgrades. If they survived and upgraded to the necessary levels, they were granted further tools to expand, including the ability to evolve into what were essentially nations by taking control of other civilization shards to make them subordinates, or settling even more territory with mana pylons.

An Infestation seemed like an inferior formation compared to the more structured systems, something like a barbarian territory in a competition of nations. They lacked the crucial elements that made settlements a permanent feature, like the ability to passively suppress the development of Primal Constructs and the system connections provided by the shards. Infestations could be toppled at any point, and the system actively encouraged such conflicts by granting combat quests to outsiders that discovered their territory.

However, Infestations clearly had a role in the assimilation, being useful for factions to develop footholds and stage their forces before holding more permanent claims. As far as the galactic community was concerned, these were actions reserved for those with more advanced knowledge of assimilation, far more than could be expected from Unchosen indigenous populations.

Coop shook his head as he reconfirmed that their planet wasn’t exactly what the galactic community anticipated. When it came to Earth, it wasn’t solely human civilization that threw off expectations for a baseline planet, instead, it was the underlying pressures that had led ancient human predecessors to group together in the first place. Human society was merely the most obvious consequence of those pressures. The forces of evolution that resulted in adaptation and speciation had sculpted all of the planet’s inhabitants into hardened survivors on a genetic level.

Maybe wild animals were getting a free pass from mana’s Eradication Protocol thanks to their lack of technological development, but the fact was that they had been under the same pressures as humanity. Life on Earth was defined by the survival of the fittest, and the more Coop learned about the rest of the galactic community, the more obvious it was that the competition to survive was rarely as excessive as it was on Earth. The aliens were uplifted from planets that acted as incubating cradles, never being forced to develop the desperate instinct to survive or perish due to a complete lack of environmental threats, competition for resources, or interspecies predation.

It was almost like an allegory for Coop’s own process for leveling up. Where Coop felt like he was truly earning his levels, collecting experience through blood and sweat while others sought shortcuts under the guidance of factions. Historically, it was the same for life on Earth. Every species won the right to live, whether by dominating their habitats or adapting to environments that would otherwise be too extreme, carving out their place in the world and being forced to maintain it in a perpetual cycle of life and death. Ignoring humans, any of the uplifted animals would have the drive to establish a dominant faction within the community based on instinct alone.

As Coop distracted himself with thoughts on the different experiences extraterrestrial life had undergone, he wandered through the make-shift shelter, leaving the baby alligator pond behind to check the others and explore the core of the Infestation’s territory.

His thoughts on the difference between the extremes of Earth and what had been described to him by Balor as what was standard elsewhere were interrupted when he turned a corner and detected the aura of another person beside an empty, clear water pool. The other sections had all been empty.

Coop froze, eyes immediately scanning the water before finding the man lounging on a lawn chair. The stranger was in the shady corner of a concrete pen, with the small pool at his side, sleeping beneath a ragged umbrella that barely clung to life as a shield against the sun. His erratic snores choked his breathing and he shifted his head to the side to hide his eyes from the sun, unaware of Coop’s presence.

The man was covered in dirt, splotched with mud, with a grubby bandana tied around his forehead that was barely suppressing a wild greasy mullet. His eyes were still closed, and he had bits of debris stuck in a scraggly, unkempt goatee. His dark blue coveralls were equally dirty, folded down so that he seemed shirtless, revealing small colorful tattoos scattered on his torso like an amateur artist had used his skin for practice.

The pant legs of his coveralls were rolled up to his knees and he had one leg propped on the armrest of the chair with the other leaning off to the side at the edge of the water. He had sturdy untied combat boots on his feet, painted in dried muck that extended beyond his ankles. If Coop was inclined, he could trace the man’s path by following the mud-stained footsteps that meandered to the edge of the paddock, near a table with an impressive combat knife jabbed into a board that held another snake skin.

A white-topped red cooler was open next to the lawn chair that held the man, and one of his hands was dangling inside of it, as if he had fallen asleep while retrieving another beverage. Scattered all around his corner of the derelict zoo were crushed beer cans, including a handful that floated in the shallow pool at the man’s other side. Coop inspected the unconscious specimen’s aura, wondering if this man was somehow responsible for the Infestation.

[Human (Level 106)]

[Feral Grappler (Body)]

[Untamed]

Coop grunted at the man’s level, finding it ironic that he had been subconsciously building up the feats of Earth’s inhabitants, just to find such an uninspiring example at the center of the Infestation. He supposed the man was more or less keeping up with the assimilation, but he certainly wasn’t overachieving like they were as a species.

Coop stepped forward, planning on nudging the man awake with the tip of his spear so that he could ask a few questions. Despite the lanky man’s appearance and relatively low level, the fact that his class was a grappler seemed like a hint that it would be best to keep him at a distance, just in case. He certainly fit the bill for a scrappy fighter.

As soon as Coop closed the distance by a single step, the small clear pool at the man’s side exploded in a churning froth as a massive unnoticed gator shot from beneath the surface. Coop stepped backwards, caught completely by surprise despite specifically eyeing the pool of water as he turned the corner. The fact that the small circular pond was completely free of vegetation had given him a clear view of the white colored bottom, but his eyes had played a trick on him. The shallow pool was deeper than he thought.

The alligator that occupied this pool was albino. The white surfaces beneath the water weren’t layers of concrete, but actually the scales of the massive coiled beast. Coop inspected it as he shifted his spear protectively, drifting further backwards as he prepared to fight the red-eyed monster.

[American Alligator (Level 296)]

[Alpha Concept (Strength)]

[Primordial (Exotic)]

“That’s more like it.” Coop assessed, satisfied to find a level that made more sense for forcing untamed territory into a properly organized domain.

At the same time, the sleeping man fell out of his chair, sending aluminum cans clattering across the concrete while his umbrella toppled over and he struggled to make sense of his surroundings.

“What the hell, Dorothy?” The stranger exclaimed in a heavy accent only found deep in the backwoods, spoken by those who would properly describe themselves as Florida crackers. He furiously wiped the water that had splashed him awake away from his face . When his eyes focused and he spotted Coop’s spear he put a hand up as if to stop him. “Woah man, let’s be cool!”

Coop and the alligator were both holding their ground, but the man had said enough to cause them to hesitate before escalating into outright conflict.

“Who’re you, stranger?” The man asked Coop as he climbed back to his feet, rubbing his lower back as strolled over and leaned onto the white alligator’s hide. His relaxed demeanor did more than words could have done to ease the two fighters away from combat. It seemed like the man was a natural beast tamer.

Coop kept his eyes on the gator, judging it to only be the second largest example he had ever seen, despite its level. It was slightly smaller than the SUV sized Apex Predator living in the golf course outside of Empress City, only around the size of a fully featured sedan. When the Alpha Concept didn’t seem like it would escalate the confrontation to a physical fight as long as Coop didn’t, he slightly lowered his spear.

“I’m Coop.” He responded to the question long after the question had faded back to silence, still watching the larger threat. “Who are you?”

“Coop?” The man muttered like he was chewing on the name. “Where have I heard that one before?” He asked himself. Coop just shrugged slightly, waiting for the man to introduce himself. After a few more seconds of muttering, he slapped the albino alligator on the back like he got it. “Pearl’s kid that went off to work the gas station in Yeehaw Junction, right?” He guessed, snapping his fingers, but frowned in a way that tilted his thin facial hair to the side when Coop failed to affirm his guess. “Nah, that’s not right, his name was Hoop wasn’t it? Or was it Scoot?” He fell back into contemplation.

“You from around these parts?“ He finally asked, leaning forward as he struggled to recognize the spear-wielding stranger.

Coop shook his head in response.

“Welp.” The man gave up with a shrug that resembled one of Coop’s before getting into his own greeting. “I’m Bobby Jon Walker, owner of this here establishment. I’m afraid we’re closed for business. None of the airboats work, most of my gators got too big or too smart for wrasslin’, and the skunk ape wasn’t real unless you counted Dwayne when he got too drunk and wandered off every other weekend.” The man introduced himself with a light-hearted laugh and unsuppressed hospitality.

“You getting a lot of business these days?“ Coop wondered, not sure if the man was playing around or had managed to stay clueless to the state of the planet.

“Ain’t seen another soul since I drank something funny and the gators got all organized and had their rebellion after the storm.” The man answered. “Thank goodness for the silo.” He chuckled to himself. “I reckon I’d have sobered up already without it. I hope you weren’t hoping for a gator show.”

“Actually, I’m here about the Infestation.” Coop admitted.

“Ah, I think I know what you mean. You gotta talk to Ol’ Dorothy. She’s the Swamp Lord now.” Bobby Jon responded, pointing at the white alligator.

“Huh.” Coop grunted, not sure if he should be surprised by the hierarchy. In any case, he wasn’t. Forming a system designated Infestation wasn’t a complete departure from the natural order for animals on Earth.

Bobby Jon turned away like with the reveal of the leader of the Infestation his role was complete. He retrieved the empty cooler from the side of his toppled over chair, hoisting it up onto his shoulder after shaking the last few empty cans out.

He turned back to Coop and nodded his head to the side once. “I’m gonna head down the silo to restock. Ya’ll play nice, now.”

Coop watched with a bit of confusion as someone treated him with the same nonchalance that usually came from his side. It was a little taste of his own medicine. Bobby Jon wandered over to a nondescript heavy door inlaid into a thick concrete wall, off to the side. Coop expected it to be a simple shed, but the door revealed a second bulky blast door inside. When the second interior door opened, it exposed a series of solid concrete steps leading down into the darkness. Bobby Jon didn't hesitate as he took the steps.

Coop looked back at the unmoved albino alligator and tilted his head. As the two stared, Coop received an update to his quest.

[Eliminate the Swamp Lord 0/1 or Establish an Alliance 0/1]