Unchosen Champion

Thick stands of unkempt canal grass, topped with distinctly feathery flowers, lined the water-filled culverts that separated the road from uninspired apartment blocks. The two-story buildings were united by unmanned and rusted gates, and shared unshaded parking spots. Cars partially filled the lots, visible to Coop whenever the breeze caused the overgrown grasses to lean the long blooms to the side. The vehicles looked like they belonged in a junkyard rather than having been commuter vehicles just a few months prior.

Coop was the only commuter these days, strolling down the middle of a road into the deteriorated suburban sprawl at the outer limits of Empress City. The sun burned the back of his neck, and heat rose from the cracked pavement beneath his feet, but he was totally distracted. His concentration was entirely on the current skill choices that awaited his decision.

The little vacation, trekking through the Everglades for spring break, had culminated in enough levels to bring him to his next skill choice, but level 250 had left him with a relatively uncertain dilemma. He had to decide which of four Abyssal Old Ones he wanted to pledge his current path to, each of which corresponded to an established element of his build. After eliminating more than half of the choices, he still had too many to choose from.

If the skills he would be offered for the foreseeable future would be defined by his current choice, he wanted to anticipate as much as possible, but he only had eldritch names and the impression their presence left on him to guide his decision. He reviewed the top contenders, treating the choice as seriously as when he had to choose a class with limited information, though this time all he had to go on were vibes and even less information.

Chaug-lith, the Faceless Inevitability - Revenant Class

Hauvian, the Cosmic Remembrance - Spectral Affinity

Ashevoth, the Hunger in the Mists - Path of the Mistwalker

Sethrak, the Deep Dweller - Mind Attribute

The Path of the Abyss hadn’t really begun yet. Apparently, there were several hoops for him to jump through before setting off, starting with gaining an affinity, and now an eldritch patron deity, but the prerequisites didn’t change how he envisioned paths. Before, he had likened them to the streets between blocks of skills, much like the real road he currently followed, with each intersection representing a choice of path, and the neighborhoods encompassing related classes. The street established by the Path of the Abyss just had multiple lanes. Coop thought that was simple enough for him to envision.

The concept behind the Abyss was broad enough to have room for several tracks. There was a large gulf between the vast void of space, and the depths of the ocean, or bottomless pits, overwhelming darkness, smothering silence, isolation, and even more ambiguous notions like moral despair, but they were all parts of the abyss, conceptually interconnected while potentially distinct.

Of the four Dedication options, the Old One that stood out the most was Sethrak, the Deep Dweller, since it wasn’t completely unfamiliar. When he used Inheritance of the Mists to defeat the Lich, the one that appeared was the Apparition of the Deep Dweller. Notably, it had granted him Mind-based abilities that were enough to overwhelm the fully powered up Undead Chosen. The fact that it was the representative of Coop’s primary attribute didn’t seem like a coincidence. The Deep Dweller had even been the impetus for putting him on the Path of the Abyss in the first place, transforming his active choices at the time by granting him its blessing.

Coop hadn’t forgotten the taste of power he had been granted. If Sethrak had only given him a small sample, the horrible entity had done a good job of making it enticing. He couldn’t deny the fact that he wanted to feel that power all the time.

Still, Coop was trying to make his decision strategically. In a way, he thought Mind was the most generalized of the representative Old Ones he was selecting from. As far as he knew, literally everyone within the system had the Mind attribute.

While Sethrak was easily the top contender off the bat, he didn’t want to dismiss the others before giving them sincere consideration. He would ignore that one of the Old Ones had called dibs on him and consider the others with equal care.

On the opposite side of the spectrum of something as broad as one of the basic stats, if he was interested in doubling down on his already extremely effective and proven kit, Ashevoth, the Hunger in the Mists was right there. Coop was already a Mistwalker, after all.

When he was contemplating the original path choices, before the Deep Dweller had carved a new one for him, he had all but decided on following the Path of the Mistweaver, chasing the Path of the Mistwalker with as similar a trajectory as he could imagine. He thought Ashevoth might be a good choice if he wasn’t completely sold on shifting completely to the Path of the Abyss.

A Dedication to the Hunger in the Mists was almost like a refutation of the abrupt change to his path. He could turn the Path of the Abyss into something similar to the one that had caught his eye in the first place, only with the addition of an eldritch benefactor, proving how relatively close the Mists and the Abyss were in the natural order of mana. He didn’t need to lament how the choice of path had been lost, because the path itself actually gave him even more options, including one that would be comparable to what he had wanted originally.

Then again, the Hunger in the Mists itself wasn’t that much more inviting than the Deep Dweller. Ashevoth was an enormous abomination that lurked within wafting mists as it stalked helpless victims that never knew it was there, despite its absurd mass.

Coop had often hyped himself up to be the monster in the mists when comparing himself to the invaders, but he never meant to equate himself to an actual eldritch horror. As far as his current choice was concerned, he only wanted to borrow power, not be defined by it. He worried about staining the mists with the abyss and what that would mean for himself. For Coop, there was always the fundamental idea toward retaining his humanity as much as possible lingering in the back of his mind, ever since the start of the assimilation and the introduction of mana.

When he received his second affinity, he wasn’t completely sold on how much the Abyss reflected in himself. In the end, he accepted that it fit far more than he originally recognized, but that didn’t mean he had any interest in letting it completely redefine his current build. He wasn’t even sure if he was content with diluting the mists with the influence of the Abyss at all.

Coop had really become the embodiment of the Mistwalker, at least in his own mind. With a completely new path, he had this idea of keeping the two distinct from each other and using his own judgment to incorporate them together. If it was possible, he wanted to avoid altering his current skills with the unknown.

More tactically, when it came to Ashevoth, it seemed pretty clear that physical domains of mists would be integral to tapping into its strengths. Coop didn’t want to become too dependent on Fog of War, no matter how it might evolve with the additional influence.

None of his skills had proven to be insurmountable. Each and every skill had been overcome in one battle or another. Dedicating himself to the Hunger in the Mists seemed like he might be hindering the potential diversification of his strengths granted by a second path, forcing him to lean on Fog of War even more.

Coop picked the dried mud off his forearm as he struggled with a bit of indecision. He boiled his overall dilemma down to whether or not he was happy with the breadth of his current build and therefore the mists. The answer was easy. He was definitely satisfied. If he wasn’t, he could clearly see using his new path to manipulate whatever deficiencies remained. The limitations that he previously identified had long been overcome with the addition of more and more stats. Mostly, all he really wanted these days was more levels.

“Hmm.” Coop vented his uncertainty, something in the back of his mind resisting change from being applied to what he already built. It wasn’t like he was opposed to doubling down, but he was more afraid of veering off course.

Maybe that hesitancy actually pushed him toward dedicating his path to Chaug-lith, the Faceless Inevitability instead. What better way to demonstrate his satisfaction with his class than to choose the representative of the Revenant?

The Faceless Inevitability even spoke to him in its depiction. Not that he thought of himself as an undying horror any more than a mist-lurking abomination, but he did view himself as just some guy whose primary advantage was relentlessness. He was something like the faceless inevitability of humanity’s defiance. If the resistance to the assimilation didn’t come from him, it would always come from someone else. In that sense, he wasn’t special. He was essentially faceless.

Chaug-lith may have been inevitable, but Coop wasn’t sold on the idea of dedicating his path in that direction either. The problem was that he had specialized his Revenant build in very specific ways that ended up excluding other clearly viable strategies. He had never really become the magic tank for a five man party that the initial class skills and description had suggested. As soon as he added mobility and firepower, he transformed himself into a stout skirmisher rather than a traditional tank. He didn’t need to revisit discarded strategies that would be rendered redundant by his current kit.

He would rather avoid having to cherry pick from skills that he had already diverged away from needing at the start. The Faceless Inevitability would almost certainly concentrate on the original promises of the Revenant class, but Coop was more than comfortable with his existing stoutness and the other ways his build had evolved. All he really needed was more levels.

When he looked back, he always returned to the idea that the combination of Retribution and Salvation plus the passive attribute bonuses formed the bedrock of his Revenant build. The skill evolutions that provided Legacy and Inheritance of the Mists had ultimately been the solutions to the gaps in his kit that he no longer needed to fill.

Both the phantasms and the apparitions summoned by Legacy and Inheritance were the clear embodiment of his Spectral Affinity. He thought it was interesting that the Path of the Abyss, which had initiated itself by offering the Abyssal Affinity, maintained a track for his original connection to mana.

“So, what about Hauvian, the Cosmic Remembrance?” Coop asked himself. He didn’t expect the Spectral Affinity to cause him to deviate from his perceived advantages, but how would it impact them?

His current build regularly called upon the collective power of the human species through the phantasms and apparitions, but going even further back, his proficiency in combat had been boosted by something he might define as human remembrance. He wouldn’t have been able to wield the skills he considered the foundation of his build without the subtle guidance granted by his affinity through the Haunted title.

The Cosmic Remembrance certainly embodied that aspect of his experience. But Coop had already theorized that part of his and other humans’ relative strength was due to their shared history. The Cult of Chakyum’s High Priests had tapped into cultural power that simply didn’t exist in the broader universe, and Coop believed he was benefitting from the same aspect with simple combat experience throughout the ages.

What if dedicating himself to the broader cosmic entity actually diluted his ability to tap into human-specific experiences, replacing them with those of the galactic community? He shook his head, feeling like if there was any dedication he might need to avoid, it could be Hauvian. It was similar to the problem he had with Ashevoth, the Hunger in the Mists, where he was worried about both relying on and altering Fog of War, only Hauvian was linked to an even more fundamental aspect of his current build in the form of access to the recorded history of humanity.

Coop summoned his ethereal spear, watching the ghostly aquamarine wisps drift from its surface. He was already leaning toward Sethrak, the Deep Dweller, and even when considering the others, his mind wasn’t changed. The Deep Dweller seemed to be the most likely to actually provide him with the opportunity to create a distinct build to weave into his current one without contaminating his current skills with its influence.

He tried thinking about the choice from a different angle. Reflecting on his experience with the Apparition of the Deep Dweller, he shivered at the crushing weight of its attention. The immense pressure of the depths, the absolute and inescapable force of gravity: they were distinct from his mists, and they had been addicting, but they made more sense in the context of what he was looking for. How many eldritch entities did he really want to get involved with anyway? None preferably, but if he wanted to progress further, maybe just one.

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” He muttered to himself, twirling his spear with one hand at his side.

The Deep Dweller hadn’t been all that bad. Maybe there was some retroactive analysis happening, but the apparition had ultimately allowed him to use its power while ignoring its demands for allegiance. Coop had declined servitude, keeping hold of his purpose and the Deep Dweller had been content to simply share its hunger. Then again, wasn’t this skill choice actually forcing Coop into pledging himself to one of them anyway? Maybe Sethrak had been confident in its influence.

“It’s fine...” Coop spoke, willing it to be true. He didn’t feel manipulated.

These weren’t actual Great Old Ones, they were just the system stretching its own limits to provide Coop with an appropriate path based on human lore. Surely, he could handle it. The line between fiction and reality was blurred by mana, but there must have been restrictions. Mana itself was certainly limited, though what those limits were was so far beyond human understanding, it seemed like magic as a whole. Since these eldritch entities were merely representations created by the system, he thought they might be better considered to be Mid Old Ones instead.

Coop winced at the thought, finding it less reassuring than dangerous. “Should probably forget that before I choose.” He decided. The Deep Dweller had been directly in his mind, after all. The last thing he needed was a pissed off God entity accompanying him during his grinds.

In the end, he had to pick the Dedication to Mind. Ideally, he could build a second package of Abyss-related skills alongside his Spectral skills that would absolutely be powerful, thanks to his distribution of stats. Coop thought that a Dedication to Sethrak had the most possible upside with minimal potential for downsides compared to the others.

He shrugged, reminding himself that Paths were temporary and it was his class and affinities that truly defined what would come. None of the other potential benefactors could really be upset with how much consideration he had given them. He selected the Dedication to Sethrak, the Deep Dweller, ready to explore his new Abyssal affinity.

“Serve a starving man and he will be nourished. Serve a voracious God and it will grow insatiable.”

Coop raised an eyebrow as he received his new passive skill. Before he could review the changes, a subtle rumbling sound echoed in his head, simultaneously distant and near, vaguely similar to ominous laughter.

Coop stopped his casual walking and looked over his shoulder. The empty road was as it should have been, with the sun causing the pavement to shimmer in the heat. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

He squinted his eyes, and spread Presence of Mind in all directions, confirming that he was alone. There were no tentacles stretching across the horizon or dangling from space. Coop paused for a few moments before he shook his head and started walking again, confused by the sinister feeling beneath the bright light.

His new passive skill appeared at the end of his list, but more specifically, he had been granted Reverence (Rank 1) rather than a simple skill name. It seemed as though the system was implying there would be more ranks to come.

Upon review, the description of Reverence was simple, ‘Supplicant of the Deep Dweller.’

A single black wisp of mana caught his eye as it drifted from the tip of his spear. Coop supposed he really was starting on the Path of the Abyss.