Unchosen Champion

When Coop’s debilitating Soul Rot debuff expired, he ran after the fleeing field boss. If there was one constant tactic that he had employed, it was pressing his advantages when he had them, but Felrog the Soul Snatcher had evaded him.

Coop had no idea which tunnel the monster had escaped into, and there were way too many passages to try guessing. They covered the walls, angled up and down and split and forked in a maze that Coop was glad he hadn’t been lost in when he followed the first tunnel. Coop couldn’t even carefully track the monster’s steps, searching for leaking oil, as now that the fog was gone, he was once again the target of the streaming surge of Frenzied Excavators.

Infuriatingly, he could hear the air blasts that Felrog emanated from its tail to launch itself through the tunnels. Coop did his best to follow the sound, smashing Excavators the whole way, as it led him further beneath the center of the settlement and toward the edge of the hive chamber.

On the bright side, his health was completely filled despite taking damage in the first encounter with Felrog, thanks to his Reaper title and the constant flow of event monsters. His mana was in a precarious state after his initial investment into Fog of War, a mistjump with Soul Degradation, and health protection from Mind over Matter. Hopefully, it would recover quickly enough as he only had enough for one more mistjump until his Soul Degradation debuffs expired.

The illuminated chamber that Coop had occupied turned out to be one of four open areas, arranged around a central feature in each cardinal direction. Coop was inside the east chamber. Each of the others had similar glowing columns and smooth pearlescent surfaces. There was a deep cavern in between the four chambers that led down so far Coop felt like his ears popped when he looked over the edge. The pure darkness below yielded nothing.

Looking up, following the flow of the breeze with his eyes. He could see the flashing of spells in the distant darkness and realized this was the sinkhole in the courtyard. It seemed like the residents had successfully moved up to the edges while he was fighting down there. Apparently, he had been holding up enough of the Excavators to give an advantage to the midrange skirmishers up top.

Another pneumatic air blast drew his attention back down. Felrog had positioned itself directly underneath Coop, but the monster wasn’t in the sinkhole. Coop suspiciously shifted, trying to find the source of the sound while fighting more Frenzied Excavators. Every swing of his morning star smashed another monster into the ground.

The ground erupted as he fought and searched. Felrog shot out at its full speed, entering the upper cavern like a missile launching from a silo while managing to successfully target Coop. Felrog was the Ruin Excavator Field Boss after all. They thrived on ambushes.

Coop had the ground underneath him completely removed and he was slammed by the extended claws of the Field Boss, launching them both up the sinkhole.

The sudden acceleration completely disoriented Coop, stymying any smashing attack he had planned, and the collision applied ten more full stacks of Soul Degradation. His mana costs and cooldowns would make his skills unreliable, if not completely unusable.

When his watering eyes finally refocused, he was weightless. He rotated until his head was down and his feet were up and he realized that he was soaring through the air, above the fortress courtyard, in the late night sky. He hadn’t been this high looking down at the fort outside of a previous nightmare that left him feeling alone after Jones was cursed, facing a world of challenges. Judging by all the spells flashing around the fort, from the southern wall to the northern courtyard, he obviously wasn’t facing anything by himself. That just motivated him to contribute more and make sure he was pulling his weight.

He rotated a bit more and realized that Felrog was also in the air, deftly angling its claws so that it could plunge into the battlefield like an olympic diver executing a perfect dive.