Unchosen Champion

With the settlement safely in the hands of the nonhuman residents and no Icon of Mana to hunt down, Coop would be able to fix his attention on the Underlayer Event itself. The meteor mountain wasn’t going anywhere, so like on the surface, he put it out of his mind and concentrated on the battles to come. Maybe, when the event was concluded, he would take a touristic trip to the bottom of the meteor mountain, just to satisfy his curiosity. As far as they could tell, there wasn’t much else to visit within the Underlayer.

When the event countdown finally began, no one needed to say anything before people were taking up their positions in the front line trenches. People rubbed the dirt off their hands on their Ghost Reef Standard Issue Armor, activating their full-face helmets and readying their weapons ahead of the initiation of the event.

Each of the last 10 seconds were punctuated by an unnatural beep that echoed through the tunnels of the Underlayer. Coop imagined the sound mirrored within the mana domes of each settlement. He couldn’t help but smile a little as he took his place front and center in the front line trench as the anticipation built.

The traumatic time of the Siege Event had somehow evolved into battle scars that made him proud. The patterns in the system’s events were a forced reminder of their experiences, and Ghost Reef was heartened by them. They had made it through that ordeal, so they could make it through this. Coop’s ethereal spear was held with a loose grip, comfortable, but ready, and his allies wore grim faces of confident determination beneath reflective visors and dirt-streaked skin. The Primal Constructs had picked the wrong battle.

Every time the number counted down, shifting from 3 to 2, and finally 1, a strangely nostalgic alternate tone rang out. Coop watched as the timer finally hit zero and a loud buzzing announced the start of the Underlayer Event. His eyes left the system display and darted across their dirt covered no man’s land, seeking the first hints of their enemies.

“Southeast!” Jonah the waiter called out from the rear battle trench before the system’s ringing broadcast had completely faded from their ears. Immediately afterwards, Coop heard the gravelly voice of Fred Brown, the renowned architect that had helped design all of the buildings on the surface yell, “Southwest! It’s close!” from behind the interior mound.

Coop didn’t need to turn his head in either direction because looking directly south presented him with a similar scene to what the others were witnessing. A large disc of energy appeared first, like a ceramic plate that superimposed itself onto the ground, claiming a large area of the empty dirt and transforming it into a clear cylindrical arena with translucent borders. A distinct red light glowed from mana embedded in its center, and rather than being a solid object, it seemed more like a marker, designating the area as an objective.

Once the bottom plane was completely formed and the walls of light stabilized, a different set of tall metallic walls began forming from the ground up, beyond the outer edges of the arena-like objective. The structures grew one pixel at a time, outlining the foundation of an extremely simple square metal castle that climbed up from the dirt with the clear intent of guarding the cylindrical arena, confining the objective within its borders.

The construction process was similar enough to purchasing a service from the system to be completely familiar to the defenders. The invaders were arriving from off-planet.

When the protective castle was completed, obstructing the central platform from view mere seconds after it appeared, a formation of Elite Primal Constructs climbed to the top. They posed like proud sentinels on a tall wall, with energy from their spawning still wafting from their shoulders and drifting into the Underlayer’s glacial current.

If the defenders had never seen the aliens before, they would have seemed imposing and dangerous. Unfortunately for these particular Construct manifestations, they had arrived beneath Ghost Reef. The residents were unimpressed.

The outer walls of their fort formed a roofless square fort that was around 50 yards across and several stories tall. The defenses were made of what appeared to be a lightweight lusterless metal that matched parts of the alien manifestations. To Coop, the structure seemed modular, with jigsaw-like connections at each corner and around what he assumed was the main entrance. Otherwise the walls appeared solid. Coop expected a few thousand Primal Constructs to be waiting inside, at most, and there were four of the structures.