Chapter 217: Monsters in the Jungle
The trek through Central America hadn’t been a complete disappointment. The Jaguar Sun hadn’t been able to liberate as many people as they had hoped, for a variety of reasons, but their unwavering progress through the jungle had enabled many of those who avoided the ire of the Cult on their own to catch up and join the procession. Coop wasn’t able to keep track of the constant flow of newcomers. It seemed like whenever he looked away, the number of warriors would multiply. Still, Juliana in particular was upset by the gap between expectations and reality.
He glanced over at her as she continued to pet Felix. She seemed to struggle with showing her emotions. As much as she believed she maintained a neutral expression, she frequently worked her jaw and the lower lids of her eyes twitched as she fought with her thoughts. As the days went by and they marched through the jungle, Coop thought there was no one that needed a vacation more than she did.
Juliana and Felix were well-known liberators. They had developed their reputation through freeing captives of the Cult. However, as time had gone by, there were less and less captives available for them to save. It was a natural function of the Cult’s activities. Those who could be captured already had been, and those who successfully avoided the Priests were even less likely to be caught later. Where Tzultucaj would just keep stomping forward, she was more conscientious of her limits, and she knew if she continued on the same trajectory, a hurdle she might not be able to get over would inevitably appear.
Earth as a whole had barely scratched the surface of the assimilation. Yet, people like Juliana, who had embraced a particular niche and found early success, were already being forced to adapt as the circumstances changed. The assimilation was an extraordinarily volatile event. Coop wasn’t sure if he was successfully adapting as time went on, or if he had lucked out on his particular path. As many human-made distractions as there were, grinding was a throughline that had consistently been the way forward for him. Even in the Yucatan, grinding had been the alleviation to the disappointment of unusually limited experience provided by the Cultists.
Coop was quite happy to find yet another monster variant as the army made its way through the jungles. Once they reached further into Mexico he was introduced to what was considered the bane of the region. Surprisingly, it wasn’t another High Priest or some other group of lesser members of the Cult. It was just another type of regular monster.
There was a pursuit hunter variant of the Primal Constructs dominating the land, called Ruin Tracers. From what he heard, the monsters were an extraordinary difficulty in the past. They were ultimately the reason the Jaguar Sun hadn’t been able to sustain itself during the siege event. There were many individual Jaguar Warriors who bore the scars, mental and physical, of being chased down by the monsters and forced into desperate battles for survival at earlier points of the assimilation. A large portion of the combat experience among the warriors had come from their battles with Ruin Tracers.
The Ruin Tracers were similar to the Primal Trackers that roamed South Florida, but they weren’t exactly the same. The Trackers around Empress City were wolf-like pack hunters that applied debuffs revealing the location of any prey that fled their groups. The Tracers, in contrast, didn’t rely on debuffs. Instead, the Tracers seemed to be motion-activated solitary hunters. They chased after anything that came within their range, chaining leaps together as they bore down on their prey, before pouncing like tigers through the brush.
Ruin Tracers were what might be created if someone took a large mechanical quadruped, about the size of a pre-mana jaguar, gave it an oversized head, and replaced all four of its limbs with metallic frog legs. They had enormous spiked teeth, shaped like hooked nails, that jutted from their excessive vertical mouths, unable to be contained, and seemed designed to prevent escape more than chewing or tearing.
When the original Jaguar Sun moved through the region, gathering people as it progressed, they inevitably drew the attention of every Ruin Tracer that had spawned during the assimilation. They were wildly pursued by thousands of the monsters while the siege event put everything into a frenzy.
On top of their numbers and their feral behavior, the Tracers were untamed by settlement territory in the first place. They had risen to higher levels during the early stage of the assimilation relative to the humans, and many had begun evolving into elites. The people who had simply followed Tzultacaj in his rampage were not prepared to meet their rampage head-on. They dragged more and more until the entire army was threatened by hordes of agitated monsters.
Coop understood. Even without an event, the way the monsters trailed after the army actually reminded him of the waves of the siege. The Tracers jumped and climbed on top of each other as they jockeyed for position at the front of their assaults, refusing to let whoever they targeted find solace. Coop only needed one look into a Ruin Tracer’s mouth to recognize that it was a monster he would much prefer to fight from the top of the fort’s walls. Coop found himself repelling as many as a hundred at a time at the rear of the march, feeling a bit like he was defending the moat bridge back home.
Unfortunately for the monsters in the jungle, Coop was an even greater monster. At first, he engaged with them directly, swapping between weapons as he tested their abilities and sought the most efficient way to defeat them. There were two different situations in which he spent time experimenting with how to hunt the particular monster variant. The first was when they were already activated with a target acquired. The second was when they were still in their more dormant mode, where they waited to pursue prey.