Unchosen Champion

Coop felt unsatisfied. If he was going to eschew any modesty and embrace the most ambitious of his aspirations, he would need to rise to the occasion in a way that was currently impossible for him.

His first battles in the Underlayer Event revealed multiple problems with his typical straightforward approach. It wasn’t that he was ineffective in defeating monsters, as that absolutely wasn’t the case, but his overall approach would need to change if he wanted to fulfill his broader goals. His ambition demanded innovation.

The issues were almost entirely macro scale problems. Since he had slowly solidified his methods, he worried that altering them would create major obstacles to overcome. He simply couldn’t individually kill monsters much faster than he already was with his normal strategies, but he really needed to increase the rate that he cleared enemies. As he was, he was limited by stats, but waiting for more levels wasn’t an option.

His actual efficacy was absurd. He was easily a one man army, but he needed to be better. The Underlayer Event demanded more than his usual relentless tactics if he wanted to have an outsized influence on the global results. The goal wasn’t exclusively experience and long-term progression this time around, so his reliable grinding tactics designed to keep him at the best possible condition through steady battles had serious room for improvement.

At this point in the assimilation his build had snowballed to the point where it felt like he was smurfing against the system-limited opponents. He had an inkling of what it would have been like if any of the formerly contracted aliens had been unleashed into the events, and it wouldn’t have been pretty. It was a shame he couldn’t tap into them as a resource to increase Ghost Reef’s coverage, but they had their own important role to fill with the galactic community’s attention on the Lighthouse.

He shook his head at himself, slightly unsure about how to proceed. He gazed out along the Underlayer’s unchanged sterile horizon and frowned to himself. Unfortunately, there would be no underground sunsets or sunrises to count on bookending his days. His usual anchors were unavailable in the sterile underground and he would be steadily moving away from his friends.

Coop consciously inhaled a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment to reset. The problem wasn’t whether he was capable of defeating the Primal Constructs. He had already proven that he could, back when he was significantly weaker and lacked his current experience. The problem was with how quickly he needed to do so much. If he was really going to keep going, defending more and more settlements and the residents they protected, he would need to be significantly more efficient. It was basically a logistics issue. He had just defeated 20,000 enemies at a rate that exceeded one per second, and it wasn’t enough.

Thankfully, several of the limiting factors on his usual grinds were eliminated by the event within the Underlayer. He didn’t need to sweep a natural expanse, seeking out his targets in varied environments, and there was no waiting for respawns to refresh his grind areas. All the monsters were already there, gathered up and waiting to be farmed.

Efficiency had been a constant pursuit for the Revenant ever since the first grinds on the beach. This was no different. He simply had less time to adjust, with a strict, firm deadline looming over the entire journey.

As he waited for the fourth Empress City control point to turn blue from the center of the ring of pale light, he used the tip of his spear to carve small channels in the soft dirt, squatting on his toes as his mind recalibrated his role in the event. Behind him, dug into the sediment, ‘Coop was here’ was prominently displayed in bold blocky letters, like a teenager’s first attempt at graffiti. He’d tagged each of the control points with random phrases and symbols for no real reason while he thought about how he would accomplish what he wanted for the Underlayer Event.

The challenge in the underground wasn’t one that required him to scrape and claw another day of survival. It was about properly wielding the strength he had already accumulated in order to seize a broader victory over the assimilation itself. He naturally held back when he fought, avoiding overexerting himself against any individual opponent so that he was always prepared for possible escalations in his encounters.

The assimilation had trained him to anticipate surprises, and wasting effort on the equivalent of overkilling would normally be detrimental to his grinds. Usually, he only wanted to expend exactly the amount of energy necessary for each individual opponent so that he would be as fresh as possible for the next unknown challenge. Entering any individual fight at less than 100% was a risk that he did his best to mitigate.