Unchosen Champion

A clump of dirt, around the size of a quarter, bounced against a haphazardly stacked pile of similarly shaped chunks before tumbling down the side. Coop had one hand planted on the ground while he sat, sifting across the surface of the earth with his other. The larger clods crumbled in his hand, giving him more appropriately sized ammunition for his little game.

“I wonder what Shane is making everyone do.” He muttered, feeling lonely again now that he had no enemies to kill.

As he recovered from casting Inheritance of the Mists, he reanalyzed the results and gradually realized that the first iteration of his new tactics still had room for improvement. Quite a lot, actually.

In the future, he was guaranteed to reach settlements that were large enough that each of the forts would have armies as large as the entirety of Neptune’s Bridge assault, maybe even larger. Coop couldn’t afford to exhaust himself after only a quarter of the enemies were defeated when he confronted more expansive forces.

When the numbers climbed to such extremes, even most of the mist-granted skills would be insufficient to strike all at once. Even a fully empowered Aeromancer, like Charlie, would lack the coverage necessary to crush the distant forts of Primal Construct forces in a single bombardment, and that was ignoring limitations on firepower. The Underlayer Event just wasn’t designed for a single actor to have so much influence.

If Coop expended all of his resources before the advantage was tipped in his favor, leaving himself weakened with significant forces still standing against him, he would wind up being even slower than if he had simply paced himself as usual. Treating the larger battles like a simple grind would overtake the explosion of violence given a large enough pool of enemies and a long enough period of time. His rate of recovery after Inheritance was simply too much of a burden to ignore.

It wasn’t the first time Coop had considered the tortoise and the hare when it came to his battle tactics, but the allegory was once again suitable. The difference this time was that there wasn’t a binary choice forcing him to do one or the other, like when he chose his skills. The scope was also different, encompassing 44 days rather than 111 years. The assimilation may have been a marathon, but the Underlayer Event was more of a middle-distance race at most. The skills granted by Inheritance of the Mists condensed any race into the final leg, but it could only do so much.

Now that he was a Mistwalker, he had a lot more flexibility with how he interacted with the mists. The obvious changes to his ability to manipulate his weapons, or flicker through his mistjumps were representative of a larger, more esoteric change in his relationship with mana. When it came to Inheritance of the Mists, he wasn’t as bound by crippling debuffs that required him to make the most of the connection while it existed because he would be left completely vulnerable afterwards.

Coop would still be confronted with crippling exhaustion if he expended all of his resources, but it was caused by the depletion of his stamina instead of the instability created by seizing power he wasn’t ready for. The fact that even his endurance was stretched thin by the utilization of Inheritance was testament to the demands of the possession. Coop’s greatest strength had to be his tirelessness, and even he was knocked down by the Apparitions.

His issue was no longer with the Apparitions threatening to cause his aura to burst. It was his inability to pace himself while using their skills. However, he was underutilizing another feature of Inheritance of the Mists that hadn’t really been a factor to consider in the past.

While he gained access to the Apparition’s arsenal, he was also granted multipliers to his stats by being bolstered by their presence. He thought he was making a mistake ignoring the empowerment and focusing only on the flashy skills now that the mere appearance of an Apparition wasn’t overwhelming by itself. He didn’t have to forcefully utilize as much as he could before the power was withdrawn or something within him broke now that he was a Mistwalker.

He hummed, wondering if that was also part of the lesson the Battlemaiden had left him. The devastating power was a double-edged sword. Coop expected there to be a happy medium in between, where he still found a way to pace himself while incorporating the Apparitions, but he was wrestling with undefined concepts while he waited to recover from his last bout.