Chapter 280: Famine Beast
As the Revenant of Ghost Reef moved into European territory, the alien invasions were falling like dominoes. Loch Bridge had been reclaimed in short order and Glenveagh was cleared almost immediately afterwards thanks to the settlements’ relative proximity. Following the second settlement, a mere handful of additional mistjumps carried Coop to yet another set of control points. This time, there were about 250,000 Elite Primal Constructs split between the four fortresses housing the objectives.
Coop paused for a moment, assessing his quarry from a safe distance. Without any Siege Bosses, they wouldn’t even know he was there. He tilted his head left and right, stretching his neck as he considered how the situation was developing. Even after such a short time, he was getting the impression that Europe would be different.
Ever since leaving Iceland, Coop was finding settlements at a decent clip, barely having time to climb back onto the dirt tunnel treadmill before being interrupted by opportunities for combat. Travel times were cut down relative to North America in what was undoubtedly a positive development, both for Coop’s grind as well as the prospects of humanity’s assimilation. The less time he spent traveling, the better, and the more surviving shards, the easier time survivors would have in finding tame territory.
However, less enemies concentrated beneath individual super settlements gave Coop’s grinds less time to establish themselves as well. With the way he was implementing Inheritance of the Mists, the larger the enemy army the better, but his initial impressions of Europe had him wondering if they had avoided as much population consolidation when compared to North America.
Glenveagh had been assaulted by a surprisingly small group given its rise in the rankings. With only 120,000 Primal Constructs and 6 Field Bosses, it certainly wasn’t highly populated with human residents. Though he had considered a few explanations for their prominence on the leaderboards; the settlements also weren’t too far from other surviving civilization shards. Europe had a higher population density than North America in general, so he wondered if shards were more likely to be both found and protected due to that convenience.
More density also meant that the Primal Constructs had less opportunity to establish themselves in remote places, with more people nearby to disrupt their development and more pockets of tame territory limiting their growth. Perhaps that would partially explain why there hadn’t been any obvious standouts on the individual leaderboards as well. The gains were distributed more evenly across the region.
He suspected that the local people had been able to cooperate with each other, more like Neon Park’s territory than the North American continent as a whole, giving what seemed like smaller settlements the chance to succeed. Establishing connections to the different territories would be easier just by virtue of having less ground to cover, assuming they could establish solidarity.
In comparison, each of the areas that had joined the Lighthouse felt extremely isolated, forced to endure the assimilation on their own, for better or worse. Ghost Reef was all by itself in the ocean, the Endless Empire’s strategy had failed due to a lack of neighboring settlements for their Chosen in Empress City to blitz, and Neptune’s Bridge was engulfed by Primal Constructs even before the Underlayer Event had given them a means to establish strongholds. Then there was the Yucatan settlement being the solitary civilization shard in all of Central America, and the Swamp Lord’s base being so isolated within the Everglades, the sole surviving human hadn’t seen another person until Coop arrived months into the process. Coop was already anticipating a more consistent distribution of settlements in Europe, and that mostly signaled good things for his hunt.
Of course, he was simply making some preliminary assumptions based on the first few settlements that he discovered at the edge of European territory. Time would tell if he ended up encountering more settlements on average, but Europe did have a population greater than North America in an area that was less than half the size. Even if the continent didn’t actually start with more shards, depending on their distribution, they could have had a better chance of securing them in the early days. Basically, as Coop made his way further into Europe, his expectations were rising.
The third Primal Construct invasionary force since he hooked a right at Iceland was twice the size of Glenveagh, as was the Loch Bridge shard in what he presumed was Scotland. Coop aggressively assaulted the alien invaders as he found them, though this time he adjusted his tactics to account for his improved understanding of Inheritance of the Mists and the assumptions he was making toward civilization shard distributions.