Unchosen Champion

Mud splattered onto Coop’s cheek, adding a fresh layer to previously dried stains that decorated his face. His lunge carried him forward, through the spray, and he pierced the metallic head of an Ancient Vanguard with all three prongs of his ethereal trident, firmly gripped with both hands. A crunching sound reverberated through the thin fog bank as he struck the monster and followed through. The fiery red-orange glowing weak points hadn’t been something he looked for in a long time, but target practice had become a part of his grind for no reason other than precision training.

The Primal Construct cracked as Coop leveraged his momentum and drove himself forward, pinning the monster onto its abdomen before it started to disintegrate. The water kicked up by Coop’s footsteps finally splashed back down, like the delayed applause for an extremely brief but dramatic exhibition match.

Mana smoke wafted into the misty domain that had been gliding across the Everglades until the sun set. The grind continued into the dark of the night with the haunted mists lingering above the shallow waters that defined the environment. They were the type of mists that would cause the more vigilant to lock their doors to keep the chill away, and anything else that might be lurking outside.

Coop didn’t stop moving, his expression frozen in concentration with just a hint of the smile that couldn’t be suppressed. He let the notifications of his progress wash through his consciousness, absently assigning his attributes as he redistributed his weight to the side, already flowing into the next movement while the initial giant ant monster disappeared.

[You defeated Ancient Vanguard (Level 207)]

[+378 Basic Credits]

[Quest Complete! Defeat Ancient Vanguards IV]

[You have a new quest!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

His intense aggression persisted, unceasingly, as it had for the last 16 hours, occasionally punctuated by the glowing spotlight of a level gained. Grinding was meditation and it had become one of his more reliable therapeutic tools. Sometimes he just needed to put his head down and let physical actions drown out all the thoughts and worries that piled on. Beneath a universe of stress, Coop had a dependable way to center himself.

The trident’s prongs melted into mists, reforming into a flat blade, plainly dangerous with its excessively sharp edge, and the grip of the shaft followed suit, morphing to match the new weapon. Coop’s hands shifted with the change as if his body and the weapon were in perfect alignment. He was a simple weapon and the ethereal weapon was an extension of himself.

The mists resolidified in the brief moment it took for Coop to flex his abs and twist his arms, lashing out, and slicing the lingering droplets of water with a powerful strike that wouldn’t have been as devastatingly effective with the trident. The blade sang as it cut through the misty and humid night air, letting the droplets add faint percussion.

An ethereal glaive exited the wafting mana smoke, striking at an ambushing monster that had leapt toward Coop’s right shoulder as soon as he destroyed its companion. Another burst of mud and water preceded the low level regular monster as it was split in two, with three of the red weak points fading on each side before the rest of the monster began to dissipate. Its momentum carried the mana smoke forward, past Coop as he held his posture and completed the strike.

[You defeated Ancient Vanguard (Level 211)]

[+384 Basic Credits]

[Defeat Ancient Vanguards V (1/11111)]

Coop already had the glaive over his right shoulder, letting the backswing carry it into position, as if he was preparing to throw it forward, back end first. The weapon was still transitioning into his ethereal spear, reversing its orientation, while he went through the motions. Coop was demanding that his skills kept up with his body, practicing with an intensity that was complete overkill for his current opponents.

The instant that the ethereal spear solidified, his foot was already firmly planted in the soft ground, and the projectile was blasting through the thin fog bank, carving a channel in the water with its backdraft. Coop was fully in the zone.

The lead monster of the next pack caught the tip of the spear exactly between the six illuminated eyes and crumpled. As it began to disintegrate, two monsters on its right flank and one on its left caught spears of their own, thrown with demonstrably less force, but still accurate and deadly.

Similar ethereal spears had been launched in a volley along with Coop’s, but they hadn’t been thrown by him. The small squad of phantasms that had joined him on his hunt continued to follow his lead, coordinating themselves on an unnatural level. Hunters and warriors representing the predecessors of the Calusa, Tequesta, Muscogee, Seminole, and Miccosukee had formed a small warband that supported Coop’s grind. They remained in the wings of the fog, flanking Coop as he picked his way through the marshlands.

These were the same phantasms that he had summoned at the very beginning, almost a full day earlier. They defied their time limits, revealing another layer of evolution to his skills that had come with the previous upgrade.

Coop’s Acumen still only granted them a few minutes to exist on their own, but within Coop’s Fog of War and while defeating a constant stream of enemies, they were able to persist indefinitely, so long as they had mana flowing to them. The unification of his skills had provided more benefits than he had been able to test without actual combat. It seemed like the combination of Legacy of the Mists, Fog of War, and Infusion had provided this specific advantage, letting the phantasms draw from the mists to passively sustain themselves. After 16 hours of grinding, Coop was ready to conclude that they would last as long as they had enemies to defeat.

[You defeated Ancient Vanguard (Level 209)]

…

[You defeated Ancient Vanguard (Level 214)]

[+390 Basic Credits]

[+1 Piercing Mandible Part]

[Defeat Ancient Vanguards V (5/11111)]

[Congratulations! Your profession has leveled up!]

Coop didn’t even acknowledge his progress, mistjumping to his spear and continuing his slow journey south. His profession level was benefitting from the grind even more than his class level, but it would take time and several Slayer grinds before it caught back up. He stepped out of the mud and onto a dry patch, seeking to draw out another pack of monsters.

He had intended to cycle between Ancient Vanguard spawns at the edge of the Swamp Lord’s territory, contributing to its expansion, but the alligator minions had followed him too closely. The spawn zones were too far away, and the minions cleared any monsters that returned before Coop had a chance to create a suitable route. They encouraged him forward, forming an enormous wedge that warped the battle lines between the Primal Constructs and the minions of the Swamp Lord.

Coop had become the tip of the spear, at least for a little while. It hadn’t taken him long to outpace the territory’s ability to expand, but he kept his grind going regardless. His contribution was greater by resetting their future opponents rather than holding back for the limited time he could spend fighting at the side of the reptiles and their minions.

The Ancient Vanguards were pack ambushers, most closely similar to the Ancient Prowlers that had a small spawn zone outside of the fort, on the interior of Rock Key. Rather than stealth fighters with a nasty stacking debuff, like the monsters he was already familiar with, the Ancient Vanguards were burrowers that dug underground, and they were straightforward combatants. They were physically strong and had powerful attacks based on pointed limbs and spiked mandibles, but compared to the Champion of Ghost Reef they lacked a few thousand attributes to be a proper threat. In their current state, they were fodder.

Oddly enough, it seemed as though they struggled with the muck that they had made their home, as if the environment was just slightly beyond their limitations. Coop wasn’t an opponent that they could afford to have any disadvantages against, and he punished them for their greed.

Coop kept his hunt going far beyond the Swamp Lord’s territory, entering the untamed areas in search of more challenging examples of the monsters, and in doing so, he discovered dozens of other conflicts already occurring.

Early in the day, his thrown spear ended a stalemate between a level 182 Common Snapping Turtle that had shattered two of an Elite Ancient Vanguard’s legs and was clinging to a third. The area around the duelists had been transformed into a mud pit as they scrambled with each other in a struggle with no clear advantage. The two had been locked in combat for some time, with the turtle’s defenses being too much for the monster to overcome, but the monster’s size advantage gave the turtle a hard time and prevented it from being finished off.

Coop’s spear annihilated the Primal Construct and the turtle quickly scooted into the nearby shallows and swam away into the murky waters without so much as looking back.

Later in the afternoon, an individual Wood Stork made a spectacle of itself as it battered an entire pack of monsters by itself. The large wading bird was finishing the Primal Constructs off by flapping a single time to launch itself into the air with a beat of its feathers. Then, using its oversized feet, it slammed into the muddy, entrapping ground with earth shattering force, stomping the life out of a slowed monster. It repeated the aerial attacks, jumping out of range of counters and crashing back down on another before Coop had the chance to help.

As the sun set, Coop avoided a dry section of oaks, noting the circular webs that engulfed the interior of the tree stand. The webs were an asymmetrical, tangled tapestry, but clearly still effective. A dozen Ancient Vanguards were twitching in resistance to the spider webs. They had no chance of escape, and judging by their various states of decay they were already defeated, they just didn’t know it yet. It took a careful survey with Fog of War and Presence of Mind before he noticed the level 302 Golden Silk Orb Weaver that had turned the copse of trees into a horror show. It was only the size of a quarter, with long red and yellow legs, but Coop had less than zero interest in messing with something like that.

As Coop’s grind continued into the night, he couldn’t help but wonder if the Primal Constructs had any regrets about becoming the planetary sponsor of Earth. The galactic community had many factions that had mistakenly spent fortunes to sponsor individual humans to try and take over the entire planet in what anyone actually on the planet could have warned was a fool’s errand. By now, at least some of them, like the Endless Empire, would be lamenting their lost credits.

The Primal Constructs had committed even further than any other faction by going for the whole planet. If the Everglades were anything to go by, it was way too much to chew. Then again the Everglades were one of a kind, but if even the environment was hindering the monsters, he couldn’t imagine their prospects were much better in even more extreme habitats. He supposed the settlement events would also be the ultimate decider in regard to how wise of an investment they had made, but if he were in their shoes, doubt would certainly be creeping in.

The Ancient Vanguards that sought to dominate the central portion of the Everglades hadn’t been having an easy time, that was for sure. Though the native fauna wasn’t coordinated in its resistance, the individual battles still made it difficult to control the territory, delaying the inevitable takeover that the invaders aimed for. The delay had gone on long enough for the Swamp Lord to establish a clear opposition as well.

As the sun rose and Coop kept finding regular monsters further and further away from both the boardwalk and the Swamp Lord’s territory, he recognized that the Primal Constructs were never given an opportunity to continue developing. When he was in the Yucatan, he had been the one that needed to reset the region, defeating Elite versions of the regular monsters just to make it possible to complete the Slayer quest chains. In the Everglades, he only found one Elite for every three or four regular monsters. Only one from every pack of Ancient Vanguards existed long enough to accumulate mana and develop into an Elite, and that was without human intervention.

The Primal Constructs were still on pace to control the region, but they were lagging slightly behind the progress they had in Central America, and both regions had obviously slipped behind the developments in the southern states if the rumors of the Fallen Zone were anything to go by.

He wondered how the rest of the world was doing. The Primal Constructs had been relegated to the back of his mind ever since human-represented factions had become a more pertinent challenge, but if there were places where the invaders were left alone, they would probably become problematic.

Coop did his part to ruin the Primal Construct’s chances in Central Florida. The sun was rising on Day 121 when he defeated the last monster necessary to complete his quest chain. For almost 50 hours he had killed a normal monster every 10 seconds while the elites that were interspersed with them didn’t contribute to the count.

[You defeated Ancient Vanguard (Level 217)]

[+378 Basic Credits]

[Quest Complete! Defeat Ancient Vanguards V]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Slayer title upgraded!]

Coop took a deep breath and gazed across the oddly shaped body of water that had replaced Lake Okeechobee, satisfied with reaching Slayer X. Ten titles in 121 Days.

“Not bad.” He decided, capping off his grind at the top of a mound overlooking the water.

The lake itself had simply become a deeper portion of the Everglades. There was no clearly defined shore, but there was a tree line in the distance, opposite to where Coop stood. He felt fulfilled. If everything else failed him, he could always go back to grinding, whether Slayer titles were on the line or not.

The phantasms all returned to the mists while Coop watched the sun rise. The east had ignited with a fiery palette. Streaks of orange and red bled across the long wispy clouds that spread from horizon to horizon as the sun conquered the night. The reflection off the tranquil surface of the lake magnified the spectacle. The line between the water and the sky was impossible to decipher except for the trees that dotted the horizon, silhouetted giants that swayed in the morning breeze like they were stretching themselves awake.

A thin layer of natural mist clung to the water, tinged with a soft orange glow reflected from the sunrise. It felt like the lake was rousing itself beneath the kindling sky. Then, at the moment that the sun peeked above the horizon, golden beams shot across the landscape. The thin mists burned away and a new day began. The sky brightened to the point that Coop had to look away, back to the west, where the sky was still shimmering.

In the distance, moving across soggy grassy meadows, he identified a solitary monster skittering in the fresh light. It skulked through stalks of grass, trampling cattails on a hundred needle-point legs. A metal centipede roamed like it owned the place.

[Elite Primal Lurker (Level 251)]

[(Agility)]

[Minion of the Primal Constructs]

Coop chuckled to himself as he assessed the new enemy, the satisfied smile that had found its way on his face as he witnessed another dramatic sunrise transitioning with a bit eagerness seeping into the expression.

“Why not?” He asked himself as another monster type baited his attention. “I’ve got a few days, don’t I?” Another Slayer title before the Underlayer Event was certainly in the cards.