Unchosen Champion

Coop felt unsatisfied. If he was going to eschew any modesty and embrace the most ambitious of his aspirations, he would need to rise to the occasion in a way that was currently impossible for him.

His first battles in the Underlayer Event revealed multiple problems with his typical straightforward approach. It wasn’t that he was ineffective in defeating monsters, as that absolutely wasn’t the case, but his overall approach would need to change if he wanted to fulfill his broader goals. His ambition demanded innovation.

The issues were almost entirely macro scale problems. Since he had slowly solidified his methods, he worried that altering them would create major obstacles to overcome. He simply couldn’t individually kill monsters much faster than he already was with his normal strategies, but he really needed to increase the rate that he cleared enemies. As he was, he was limited by stats, but waiting for more levels wasn’t an option.

His actual efficacy was absurd. He was easily a one man army, but he needed to be better. The Underlayer Event demanded more than his usual relentless tactics if he wanted to have an outsized influence on the global results. The goal wasn’t exclusively experience and long-term progression this time around, so his reliable grinding tactics designed to keep him at the best possible condition through steady battles had serious room for improvement.

At this point in the assimilation his build had snowballed to the point where it felt like he was smurfing against the system-limited opponents. He had an inkling of what it would have been like if any of the formerly contracted aliens had been unleashed into the events, and it wouldn’t have been pretty. It was a shame he couldn’t tap into them as a resource to increase Ghost Reef’s coverage, but they had their own important role to fill with the galactic community’s attention on the Lighthouse.

He shook his head at himself, slightly unsure about how to proceed. He gazed out along the Underlayer’s unchanged sterile horizon and frowned to himself. Unfortunately, there would be no underground sunsets or sunrises to count on bookending his days. His usual anchors were unavailable in the sterile underground and he would be steadily moving away from his friends.

Coop consciously inhaled a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment to reset. The problem wasn’t whether he was capable of defeating the Primal Constructs. He had already proven that he could, back when he was significantly weaker and lacked his current experience. The problem was with how quickly he needed to do so much. If he was really going to keep going, defending more and more settlements and the residents they protected, he would need to be significantly more efficient. It was basically a logistics issue. He had just defeated 20,000 enemies at a rate that exceeded one per second, and it wasn’t enough.

Thankfully, several of the limiting factors on his usual grinds were eliminated by the event within the Underlayer. He didn’t need to sweep a natural expanse, seeking out his targets in varied environments, and there was no waiting for respawns to refresh his grind areas. All the monsters were already there, gathered up and waiting to be farmed.

Efficiency had been a constant pursuit for the Revenant ever since the first grinds on the beach. This was no different. He simply had less time to adjust, with a strict, firm deadline looming over the entire journey.

As he waited for the fourth Empress City control point to turn blue from the center of the ring of pale light, he used the tip of his spear to carve small channels in the soft dirt, squatting on his toes as his mind recalibrated his role in the event. Behind him, dug into the sediment, ‘Coop was here’ was prominently displayed in bold blocky letters, like a teenager’s first attempt at graffiti. He’d tagged each of the control points with random phrases and symbols for no real reason while he thought about how he would accomplish what he wanted for the Underlayer Event.

The challenge in the underground wasn’t one that required him to scrape and claw another day of survival. It was about properly wielding the strength he had already accumulated in order to seize a broader victory over the assimilation itself. He naturally held back when he fought, avoiding overexerting himself against any individual opponent so that he was always prepared for possible escalations in his encounters.

The assimilation had trained him to anticipate surprises, and wasting effort on the equivalent of overkilling would normally be detrimental to his grinds. Usually, he only wanted to expend exactly the amount of energy necessary for each individual opponent so that he would be as fresh as possible for the next unknown challenge. Entering any individual fight at less than 100% was a risk that he did his best to mitigate.

Applying his normal combat philosophies to the underground, he cleared the first Primal Construct assault without ruining his mana income, making sure to only spend as much as he could recover as he fought. He limited the number of phantasms he summoned as he sought the equilibrium that was necessary for his infinite grinds, though their mana cost was approaching zero. The fact that he needed to summon them more frequently due to the ley lines of the Underlayer countered the improvements they had made in efficiency. He also avoided wasteful Fog of War domains in favor of leaning on his personal stamina to individually take care of the enemies with what he viewed as another much more renewable resource: his own effort.

In the grand scheme of the Underlayer Event, Empress City’s assault was small potatoes. With 245 settlements on the planet, humanity would need to collectively clear the assaults of something like six settlements a day, though they were each clearly designed to run all the way to the end. Defeating the invaders was one thing, traveling to them was another, and actually capturing the points was the extra cherry on top. It didn’t seem possible to contribute as much as he wanted with the way he operated in the past.

Empress City had taken him more than five hours, including the travel time, to claim. It was fast, considering it was the first day of the assaults, but it was also way too slow if he wanted to clear the whole thing on his own. The settlements with the lowest challenge assessments couldn’t take so long. He would definitely need to adjust his tactics once he reached Neptune’s Bridge, but what he could change didn’t come to mind right away.

He couldn’t travel any faster and he couldn’t make the points transfer control any quicker. The only thing he could change was how rapidly he defeated his enemies. He shook his head as he chewed on his lip. He was already at his limit, as long as he continued to operate with his usual tactics. More stats would incrementally improve his ability, but that wasn’t a short term solution. It was almost like he needed to flip his regular gameplan on its head.

He grunted at the thought of turning his tactics upside down, putting a pin in the idea. Before the last of the Empress City control points turned blue, he checked the leaderboards, not intending to stop again until he was claiming another set of the objectives.

Underlayer Event Individual Scores:

Coop - 21,000 (+21,000)

Camila Alvarez -3,364 (+0)

Platinum - 1,024 (+422)

Sila Tupua - 864 (+342)

Kenny Wolfe - 743 (+0)

Zach Miller - 717 (+0)

Gibson - 623 (+0)

Neon - 619 (+190)

Carlos Alvarez - 606 (+606)

Callagun - 565 (+361)

Coop chuckled at himself, letting himself be distracted from his tactical considerations. He looked so selfish, taking all the points while his allies stagnated.

In general, his aid would probably go completely unappreciated once he was fighting for the sake of complete strangers outside of his faction’s influence. For now, his actions were expected, but if things went well, he would be fighting for places he had never reached. He figured he would need to put on a good show if he ran into anyone. He was representing Ghost Reef and the Lighthouse after all, but somehow it felt unlikely he would have many opportunities to show off.

The state of the Underlayer seemed like it would be relatively lonely. Clearing the invasions on his own was the far more likely outcome. If they hadn’t made it into the Underlayer, they would probably remain oblivious to his contributions, not that he particularly cared. If he could drag anyone forward with his momentum, that would be great, but if he was honest with himself, he was primarily motivated by his desire to flick his nose at the Primal Constructs and the galactic community more broadly. They might not know what his middle finger raised toward them meant, but his score would be a statement they should universally understand. Ultimately, his ability to send the message necessitated continued progression.

His actual point total was off to a running start. Empress City, despite having a human population that was around 15 times larger than Ghost Reef, only had twice as many Primal Constructs assaulting it. Maybe it was less than expected, but that was plenty of enemies to put him way into the early lead.

He already knew that using Ghost Reef as a baseline would be a bad idea, and his first comparison was good enough confirmation that he was correct. The Underlayer Event clearly took the settlement’s population into account, but there was also a minimum assessment, a floor so-to-speak, and Ghost Reef’s population was making itself comfortable in the basement. 10,000 Elite Primal Constructs and a single Field Boss was the minimum attacking force, regardless of population.

Coop was unhappy with the thought that there were other settlements with challenge assessments as low as theirs, undergoing an unfair assault while they hadn’t been endangered in the slightest.

Not everyone would have 15,000 phantom humans backing them up, enabling them to send their entire population into the underground. They would need to pick and choose who would stay and who would go in order to ensure the security of the settlement on the surface while defending themselves in the Underlayer, and that was if they had access at all. Then the event wouldn’t dynamically scale down to their population in the first place if they were below the minimum threshold. He thought it was unfair. The assimilation was too lazy.

He moved on to the Settlement Scores to see how others were doing.

Underlayer Event Settlement Scores:

Ghost Reef - 43,000 (x1)

Empress City - 21,000 (x1)

Neon Park - 12,521 (x13)

Aotearoa New Zealand - 5,952 (x5)

Kyzyl Cross - 2,500 (x1)

Gangcheon - 1,404 (x15)

Can Gio - 847 (x11)

Silvervalley - 117 (x11)

Shinjuku Gardens - 0 (x25)

Nyiragongo - 0 (x13)

Pushing Empress City to number two was pretty amusing. It was almost a shame he couldn’t keep forcing its score up the same way he could with Ghost Reef.

Empress City may not have received any credit for resident contributions, but their entire Primal Construct assault had been eliminated, giving them full credit for each of the Primal Constructs and the single Field Boss that had assaulted them.

Ghost Reef continued to benefit with a proportional increase to his own score. He’d keep grinding, but beating the challenge assessment multipliers didn’t seem like a real possibility at his current rate, as impressive as they were. Ghost Reef shouldn’t be able to place first this time around, even if he was the clear frontrunner on the individual scores. He expected the larger settlements to have Primal Constructs in the millions to destroy, and the large settlements would receive double credit for each one they defeated. Ultimately, it was a completely lost cause if he couldn’t adapt his tactics to the demands of the Underlayer.

The actual settlements that had started fighting were mostly among those with the largest populations, and therefore the ones with the best chance of building high scores. He supposed that made sense. They would have the manpower to explore the underground as well as having the largest territories around their settlements to capture a connection to the Underlayer. It wouldn’t make it any easier for him to stay at the top of the leaderboards, but it was fine.

However, other than the battles he was present for, only five total settlements appeared to have even begun defending themselves. It was the first day, but he didn’t think it was a good sign that so few had established themselves during the first 25 hour pre-assault window. He suspected that most were using that time to enter the Underlayer in the first place. Compared to Ghost Reef, it was a completely different situation.

The only real chance for Ghost Reef to stay at the top would be for most of them to remain inactive while Coop figured out a better way to clear them all on their behalf, but it wouldn’t be great if they were that reliant on him. That was just adding unnecessary pressure onto his back. Did he even have the bandwidth to meet his own expectations? He shrugged, betting that he would find out.

The only surprise among the settlement leaderboards was another of the smallest settlements, Kyzyl Cross, with its own x1 challenge assessment appearing among the others. With a flat 2,500 score, he guessed they had fully cleared exactly one of their four control points.

“Good for them.” Coop declared, wishing for them to be one settlement he wouldn’t have to visit. If more of the smaller settlements could handle themselves, Ghost Reef would be in better shape with Coop free to find the larger Primal Construct armies and take advantage of their numbers to boost his scores.

Unfortunately, the state of the rest of the world wasn’t making him feel particularly optimistic. How many Primal Constructs would Neon Park have to defeat, if they were being assaulted based on a population they assumed was 13,000,000. They were talking something like 2,500 times more than what Ghost Reef dealt with. It was insane, really.

No matter how the numbers scaled, Coop fully expected the larger settlements to be forced into battling for the majority, if not the entire duration of the event. Even the smaller ones would need to pace themselves if they hadn’t developed any powerhouses ahead of time. Of course, that was all by design. The event was meant to last until the end, though Coop intended to break expectations himself.

Ghost Reef may have been off to a good start in the Underlayer Event, but they hadn’t forgotten the difficulties the system events could impose upon them. It was because they had survived the Siege Event that they understood what others might have to face this time around, but this time, they were in a position to help. They also had plenty of reasons for offering aid, whether altruistic or not, and every intention to follow through.

Coop went to check his own status, knowing he had defeated 20,000 Elites and a Field Boss, but he noticed almost nothing had changed. They didn’t drop any materials, so it wasn’t a surprise that Scavenging hadn’t leveled up, but the real shock was that he had only received a single level.

Non-elite regular monsters of relatively equal level on the surface, in the same numbers, would have given him just as much experience, and that was without considering any associated quests. The Primal Constructs seemed like another scam.

He grunted in disappointment, stabbing his spear deeper into the dirt. Maybe the real scam was the Underlayer. The mana that would have normally gone to his progression was dispersed into the underground instead. Combined with the diminishing returns he would inevitably experience after progression nearly 100 levels beyond his opponents, and thought he was looking at a disappointing amount of progression when he looked at it from a raw numbers point of view.

“Actually...” Coop tilted his head to the side as he reconsidered.

On the other hand, it had only been five hours in total. One level in five hours was really not that disappointing at all.

Coop nodded to himself, realizing that the entire Underlayer Event might need a shift in his perspective. Everything needed to be reconsidered, from his style of combat to the rewards he was pursuing and the progression he could expect.

“Alright, I can do that.” He reassured himself.

When the control point’s perimeter pulsed a thin blue ring, rising up toward the ceiling, confirming that the point had been captured, Coop stood, facing north. With a running start, he threw his spear as hard as he could, aiming to reach Neptune’s Bridge next.