Unchosen Champion

“Go fish?” Coop asked the table, but he didn’t even get an answer.

The Illusionist scooted over for Coop to have a seat next to her. He sat down and she gave him a strained but friendly smile that almost reached her eyes, one that the secretary probably repeated frequently while dealing with the public in the pre-mana days. Coop actually thought it was an upgrade from the nervous looks they shot him from their corner booth when he first let them stay in the settlement.

However, the rest of the party all sat quietly, staring into their drinks, ignoring their cards while taking quick glances at each other. The party was agitated, but at least he knew whatever was bothering them wasn’t due to his presence anymore. They’d all been through a lot together when considering the experiences of the siege event. Coop even felt a comradery with the residents he hadn’t officially met and Shane’s party had been along for the ride from nearly the beginning.

“Alright. Lay it on me. What happened?” Coop prompted the group. Of course, they all looked at Shane and let their party leader answer. It was a familiar pattern that had kept the group together through a variety of situations during the apocalypse.

Shane used his fingertips to push his hair behind his ears and straightened up in his seat before he answered. “It’s nothing, really.” He started, but it was obvious wouldn’t accept a non-answer. “We’ve just been banking on getting experience inside a Mana Well ever since we returned from the sponsorships. Then, you told us about the one right there in your backyard, and we really got our hopes up, but we are quite a bit behind being able to venture inside this one.”

He sighed like someone who had refused to give up only to find his goal was impossible. The weariness he felt was evident. “We spent the day doing more research in the library, trying to understand what is driving the invaders to develop as fast as they are, but we haven’t found a satisfactory answer outside of variable mana concentrations.” Shane glanced at Arthur who simply dipped his head in agreement. The group waited for him to continue, none of them had anything to add that would contradict his disappointment.

“The traditional scaling in a Mana Well is based on distance from the core as it behaves like some kind of mana emanator or magnifier. This leaves the initial monsters, referred to as first stage monsters, at the lowest level in the well, and therefore the easiest to hunt. Inside a plunging well, like the Coral Forest, the first stage would be at the upper most locations, furthest from the sinking core.” He stopped and shook his head in disappointment. “They were easy enough to find, but they had levels that were at least in the 90s. All of our identification abilities only displayed question marks.”

“We’ll need to do quite a bit of hunting around the islands before we can have a proper hunting party, and that’s only if the monsters don’t continue growing. To make it worse, if they’ve grown that rapidly during the opening days of the assimilation, the odds of them slowing down and stopping their progress suddenly are low.” Shane sighed again, understandably upset that their long term plans were being derailed even though they had made a massive leap forward through experience gained from the siege event. In the moment, they clearly felt like their efforts were wasted and they would be left behind.

While Coop commiserated with the party, he couldn’t help also being a bit excited when being presented with the challenge. He mentally penciled in ‘exploring the Coral Forest’ as one of his near future endeavors while he waited for the time-gated settlement upgrade and Jones’s recovery. It would be good to mix it up with his Slayer title chasing by delving into a dangerous abyss. He would need to test the experience gains inside of a vaunted mana well to determine if a shift in his personal priorities made sense.

Coop had an idea. “You guys aren’t that far off.” He said optimistically, before he quickly refreshed his memory of their levels, gently shifting his aura to inspect theirs. They were between levels 57 and 66, which actually was depressingly far off. Their melancholy was a little more understandable given the disparity.

He tried offering an alternative anyway. “I’ll check it out myself. Depending on how I match up with the monsters, maybe I’ll be able to escort parties through portions of it.”

Arthur leaned forward to join the conversation. “Mana Wells introduce significant variability to power, it isn’t recommended to simply compare levels.” He warned rather pessimistically. “They won’t be bound by the rules the system imposes on the planetary sponsor. It is a pure reaction from mana densities that establishes the well.”