Chapter 246: Territorial Claims
Ultimately, Coop decided to circle back to the Placid Lake Outpost after taking a quick survey deeper into the occupied territory. The reptilian sentries of the region were too adept for him to avoid with his limited stealth abilities, so he leaned on the other advantages baked into his kit. In this case, his speed.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that this particular Infestation was less of an invasion on Earth and more of a stronghold of native fauna. In fact, their claim was so strong, he felt like he was the one invading as he mistjumped in a wide semicircle away from the local alligator minions. He had never really been motivated to conquer new lands from others, and it was pretty clear that this land was already occupied. His actions would definitely be in line with conquest if he chose to open up with violence while intruding on their territory.
Coop didn’t need to defeat one of the creatures to recognize that they were almost certainly the reason for the system-created Infestation. The initial quest objective to settle the Infestation was to defeat 6,000 minions, and if he stopped to count his splashing pursuers, he expected the number to get pretty close to the total requirement. There were no other alternative minions, especially with these specimens actively maintaining their territory. It seemed like they were doing a good enough job to completely suppress the untamed Primal Constructs, unlike other wild areas that Coop had visited. The reptiles dominated the environment.
The alligators may have been particularly suited to the Everglades, even able to climb trees, but they had no chance of matching the speed of Coop’s unrestrained movement skill. He planned to lead them deeper into their own territory while he took a circuitous route back to the Outpost, using the opportunity to check for any other points of interest before he returned. It wasn’t like he expected to find a corrupted Mayan pyramid being used as the home base for a High Priest, but it wouldn’t hurt to check for other landmarks. If there was some other cult forming in the swamps, it would be better to discover it sooner rather than later.
Coop didn’t want to go directly back to his own claim either, just in case he would accidentally lead a wave of Elite Alligators to the small refuge and handful of guards. He suspected that if he did accidentally lead the mob to the doorstep of the Outpost, the Lighthouse territory would be subdued by the greater Infestation territory and one of his first Mana Pylons would be lost.
Instead, he continued to mistjump deeper into the unexplored swamps, avoiding the minions as much as he could. If it came down to it and he still wanted to avoid confronting the animals, he thought they might need to fight a sort of cold war border battle, where the two territories competed with each other at the edges by pushing territory rather than actual physical combat. It seemed as though the alligators had already been engaging in that sort of passive competition, growing their Infestation one pool at a time, adding alligators to their assemblage as they went.
Coop had experienced enough settlement territory, witnessing how it formed, expanded, contracted, and was destroyed to have some ideas for how it might work. His quick thought was that the Outpost needed to increase its population enough to encourage territorial expansion. As it stood, the Placid Lake lodge only ever had a handful of guards, but the Infestation was obviously raising its population. The difference in population trajectories put pressure on their perimeter, preventing the Mana Pylon from expanding its reach.
Mr. Gibson had witnessed the quest requiring 5,000 defeats for its objective, but Coop could clearly see that it now asked for 6,000, and he was sure Gibson wouldn’t have made such an elementary mistake like misremembering the most important detail of the quest. That meant the population of alligator minions had increased by 1,000 in three weeks while the Outpost remained static. While there was definitely some natural expansion of territory, the primary driver had always been the number of residents representing a specific territory.
Coop understood the growth by looking at it in the context of Ghost Reef’s population increases. 1,000 new residents was only impressive if ignoring the possibility of immigration. Certainly, there were more than a few thousand alligators in Florida before the assimilation, probably closer to one or two million, but they were typically solitary reptiles. Even the golf course near Empress City was home to at least one well-established individual. If there was some way to get some of them to work together, he didn’t see why they couldn’t actively recruit more, especially if the individuals had a chance to grow accustomed to the uplifting power of the first few skills granted by mana.
When Ghost Reef received influxes of residents, their territory was typically granted further expansion as the settlement iterations improved. Other settlements held even greater territories by virtue of their absurd populations; the Yucatan Settlement being the first, obvious example. The same principle could be applied to any kind of territory, from Settlements and Outposts, to Mana Wells, Infestations, and Hives. Whether that was because the living populations acted as conduits for their representative territory’s mana, or if the numbers were unstated objectives and meeting a certain requirement triggered the increases as a reward wasn’t exactly clear. At the moment, the end result was all that mattered anyway, and it was clear enough that territories and populations were directly correlated.