Unchosen Champion

Juliana was lost in thought. She stared into the flickering flames of the tiny campfire with a gaze full of smoldering intensity. Her face was a portrait of exhaustion that somehow managed to hide her internal despair, but her eyes told the whole story. They focused on the fire as if the embers could give her the unasked answers that dominated her inner monologue. The wet twigs they had used to start the fire quietly popped and crackled as they burned, but she didn’t receive any words of wisdom as she listened. There were no hidden messages being relayed to her, no matter how badly she wished for one.

The little fire sent wisps of white smoke up through the trees that she found herself tracing as she gave up on finding an unconsidered strategy buried within the campfire. It felt like the last vestiges of hope she had were drifting along with the fumes as the flames failed to answer her silent plea.

She had been reconsidering how they would approach their prey over and over, but a hopeful solution evaded her ruminations. No matter what angle her thoughts took, she could only conclude they needed to abandon the effort and move on. The bottom line was that they were outclassed in this match, but that knowledge did nothing to assuage the grief of potentially leaving innocent people behind.

As time went on, the difficulties continued to rise, and they would inevitably run into insurmountable challenges more and more frequently. At least this time, it could be chalked up to a mismatch in abilities rather than a simple overwhelming power gap. They were the rock trying to defeat paper in a predetermined game of rock, paper, scissors. Taking that angle left a tiny sliver of hope for later battles, but in the future they might not even find that much solace. The Priests of Chakyum were gaining too much power.

The loss gave her time to really think for a bit while they waited for debuffs to fade. The results of such an endeavor were never good, especially because she had come to some hard realizations that she had happily ignored for as long as possible. Ultimately, it amounted to the fact that they were doomed from the start.

“Damn.” She whispered at the fire, cursing their luck or the higher power that had written their fate in this way. It didn’t matter which.

In order for people to survive in this new world they needed several different elements to come together. That was just the way the assimilation went, indifferent in its casual cruelty. Unfortunately for her and the companions she met along the way, they started without a key ingredient for success: a civilization shard. Despite the disadvantage, it wasn’t like they hadn’t tried to earn the right to live on. Juliana wouldn’t disparage those who had died before her, struggling until the last second to carve out a place in the future, but they were all only in the introductory period of a much more extensive gauntlet. There was no way they could keep up the struggle for the years coming, or the decades and beyond.

“Maybe it’s time we hunker down.” She quietly suggested. They could definitely survive longer if they focused on defending themselves only, but vocalizing her doubts cemented them on her heart more than she expected. She already expected to die. The time would come and there wasn’t much she could do about it.

Her companion’s nostrils flared before he responded, but his expression remained the same. “I won’t.” He refused in a voice that was hoarse, but steady. His eyes didn’t leave the fire. “Never.”

Juliana felt pity for him. He was driven by something she didn’t exactly understand, like he was called specifically to fight for those he considered brothers, actual relations be damned. It would almost certainly be the end of him. There were too many people who couldn’t fight for themselves, and no one could shoulder all of that responsibility themselves. He wasn’t thinking about years or decades. Only the present mattered. Looking at him, she didn’t feel reassured by his stubbornness, but she still didn’t want to quit first.

She sighed, not looking forward to another round in the Butterfly Cave. It was a famous destination in the pre-mana days, attracting adventurous nature lovers and field scientists alike. She and her companion would have to recover until the next morning before making another attempt to visit the enticing habitat, but that was obviously the plan. The longer it took, the less likely they would even save anyone. Then again, just killing a priest was a worthy endeavor, one that they willingly undertook when they could, and this was no ordinary priest.

They had several more hours of daylight, having abandoned their infiltration in the morning after barely making progress through the entrance of the priest’s enclave. She and her partner were both content to let Felix stand guard while they waited for their skills to cooldown and resources to rejuvenate. That just left Juliana to her thoughts. Nothing good ever came from letting her mind race, but she couldn’t switch it off.