Unchosen Champion

Coop squeezed the handle of his morning star with a white knuckle grip. He was straining his eyes as he stared into the darkness of the hive tunnel, doing his best to spot any threats. There weren’t any of the red lights that would denote a Primal Construct was waiting in the depths, but he was still nervous. When he and Jett stumbled upon Felrog the Soul Snatcher the first time around, they were both caught by surprise when the Field Boss launched itself through the tunnel like the bullet from a gun.

This time, Coop was just leaning around the edge of the tunnel, not willing to put his entire body in the firing range of the boss. When he didn’t see anything after a few more seconds, he turned back to Jett to see what she wanted to do. He certainly didn’t want to blindly climb into the tunnel and not have any way to escape the line of fire.

Jett was gone again. Either she was already tired of getting her paws wet, or she was busy defeating the Frenzied Excavators that wandered into the shadows. The monsters seemed to like the darkness since it allowed them to hide their ambushes, but the shadows were already claimed by the territorial cat.

Coop sighed, realizing he was alone in the near pitch black basement, about to do something reckless in order to fight a Field Boss. Again.

At least he was a lot stronger this time around when compared to when he challenged Andamarius the Blight Howler, the Primal Tracker Field Boss in his golf course dungeon, just to test the strength of a boss.

Acknowledging his own growth, Coop used his newest ability to try and scout the tunnel without putting himself in too much danger. He activated his Fog of War ability and watched as a thin layer of misty white vapor gradually materialized on top of the shallow water that covered the floor. He remembered the light breeze that had been flowing out of the darkness during his first visit, but helpfully, the direction had changed so that the breeze was flowing into the tunnel this time. Perhaps it had found another exit.

He kept his Fog of War ability activated as he mentally pushed the fog in the direction of the hive. Manipulating his ability was a skill he had yet to develop but he had a huge mana pool to draw on as he fumbled around.

After consuming a few thousand mana, a sheet of fog that was only a few inches thick began to gradually flow into the darkness of the tunnel. Gravity helped, since the tunnel was angled slightly downward as it extended toward the interior of the island.

Coop waited as the fog slowly left the room. It was a surprise when he no longer received the overwhelming amount of sensory information that normally came with the ability. Once he was outside of the fog himself, he only had a limited connection that seemed to leave vague impressions of what was inside the fog rather than the deluge of information that he got when he was also inside.

There wasn’t any chance of him missing a Field Boss, even with just a fuzzy notion of what was inside the fog, so he stuck to the plan of letting it flow through the tunnel. Unfortunately, he found that his ability to discern anything useful got worse with the increasing distance. He needed to follow behind his Fog of War to keep it from becoming useless before it faded away.

With another sigh, he surrendered himself to heading into the hive himself. He hadn’t detected any monsters hiding along the smooth walls, so the only danger he was aware of was from the Field Boss if it was waiting at the other end. The fog moved forward like a cloud drifting with the breeze, languidly flowing through the tunnel. It was such a slow pace that Coop found his attention turning to the tunnel itself.

The walls themselves left an acrid taste in the air. The glassy interior consisted of melted coral rock, but he didn’t think it was heat that smoothed it out. Even in the dim light, he could see that the tunnel walls were quite pretty, like the pearlescent interior of a seashell.