Chapter 151: Keystone Species
Coop was taking time to decompress while the girls cleared the golf course one fairway at a time. Finding a way to distract Charlie from her lingering thoughts of the previous battle had actually been the distraction he needed for himself. While the girls fought monsters, Coop explored his abilities. The pair made quick work of hundreds of Primal Trackers with each of their engagements once they established their strategy.
While Coop was impressed by the efficacy of their massive pulls, he was absolutely not willing to exchange his consistent grinding style for one that had requirements for downtime.
“No chance.” He mumbled to himself as he considered the trade off.
The Coral Forest had completely rid him of any inclination for that sort of bargain. In the girls’ case, the downtime allowed them to constantly provide feedback to one another, or otherwise entertain themselves with small breaks, while iterating on their tactics. However, Coop was a solo grinder and the mandatory breaks in between pulls didn’t take long to become more of a mental challenge than the actual fighting. He felt like momentum was too important for his own state of mind, and on some level, the repetition was what he subconsciously latched onto. When he fought, he chased the feeling of being in the zone which was further heightened by the guidance given by his Haunted title. The girls had developed their own cadence.
Camila expertly corralled the wolf-like monster packs, dodging their attacks and preventing them from establishing a consistent battle-line. They wanted to encircle her and allow their formations to aid them in striking out, but she was too spry, gracefully weaving through gaps between parties that even Coop barely spotted. She maintained a steady perimeter around them instead of the other way around, forcing all of the aggressively pursuing packs into a centralized cluster where Charlie’s tornadoes would inevitably spawn. From outside the crowd, Camila was able to use her perfect counters to prevent any stragglers from escaping, living up to her class name by intercepting them as they endeavored to avoid the tearing storms.
Charlie’s abilities had developed such that her Aeromancer spells, which normally had fixed formation times in exchange for absolutely no cast time, were still able to establish deadly atmospheric disturbances at a much faster pace than when she first received her skills. Practice had given her better insights into manipulating the wind to both conserve her own resources while more efficiently summoning storms. She wasn’t just shoving the wind around, but actually working with the geography and recognizing the local weather in order to cooperate with the natural patterns instead of blasting her way through heavy expenditures of mana. A gust of wind would kick start an attack or a steady breeze would become the foundation of a ramping pressure. Her cast time was unchanged, but she had enhanced her speed all the same. He suspected that she was maintaining smaller formations, creating them when they were convenient, then stacking slightly larger ones, utilizing each previous entity as a building block to boost the next until she reached her desired result. She moved like a conductor directing an orchestra of wind.
Coop admired the improvements that both of the girls had slowly incorporated into their fighting-styles, and he was slightly jealous how they had formed such a tight pair that could work together so smoothly. For his part, though, he wasn’t just watching them fight. He spent almost every minute with a new ghostly companion.
None of the phantasms communicated with him, but he strongly suspected that they understood him. Maybe it was intuition based on his experience with his Haunted title, or perhaps due to his many animal acquaintances, but he was under the impression that even if they comprehended nothing else, they still grasped his words, and more importantly, his intentions.
The fact that the phantasms appeared to have some comprehension went against how Coop recognized the limitations on ‘minions’ as designated by the system. It was even a bit disconcerting at first, considering they would simply cease to exist after a matter of seconds, returning to the mists. Coop rationalized the peculiarities by remembering that even though they were minions, they were summoned by him specifically. The phantasms had a special connection to him. He figured most minions needed the ability to interact with their summoner on some level. If the minions started having conversations with either of the girls, then his thin level of understanding would go out the window. Thankfully, nothing of the sort had happened yet.
Charlie summoned a slightly different tornado to finish off the eighth hole’s final group of Primal Trackers. The girls were having no trouble clearing the monsters, even in the densest portion of their spawn area. The Trackers had nearly doubled in level since the girls had faced off against them to complete the first few stages of the Slayer quest chain, but that was nothing compared to what the girls had become. Coop doubted there were many challenges that they would need his help with anymore, at least when it came to the Primal Constructs.
The new tornado was a narrow, stringy thing, but significantly taller than most of her more efficient tornadoes, reaching all the way into the fluffy clouds of the bright blue sky. Instead of being a solid funnel of wind, it was a crooked dagger that Charlie was able to shift, giving her more precise lines of attack. The tighter circulation increased the velocity of the wind, but also seemed to lower the duration of the formation. She wasn’t letting the fights drag on, though. In addition to tearing gales, she had launched blades of water before she started manipulating the wind, and those blades were being wielded by gusts that were reaching out and mowing down the Primal Trackers that were putting every effort into avoiding being swept up by the storm.
The limited initial coverage from the thinner tornado was more than made up for with the deadly striking power of her normally slow moving water blades, and of course, Camila was supremely reliable in filling in the gaps. When one of the Primal Trackers was bisected with an even cleaner cut than what Coop’s bladed weapons could produce, he angled his head, impressed by the water’s edge.