Unchosen Champion

An endless expanse of dirt stretched across the interior of the planet, adding another plane to the basics of geography. The subterranean level was essentially undisturbed by anything except a corrosive breeze of mana, though the invaders had been content to temporarily make themselves comfortable with the system’s permission.

The Underlayer wasn’t entirely featureless, but specific characteristics were difficult to distinguish without closer inspection. When compared to the surface, the Underlayer was a completely blank canvas, lacking the effects of weather and erosion, like a freshly plowed and unused field. It was the type of landscape that would put a passenger to sleep if they were on a road trip.

Slight hills rose here and there, contouring to natural fluctuations in the subterranean surface, creating a rolling effect across the boundless stretches of dirt. Insignificant ridges ran across nearly imperceptible channels beneath the soil, bumps that might grow over time persisted, and clods of fresh dirt that naturally stuck together gradually formed fist-sized clumps, increasing one speck of debris at a time.

One of those small clods of dirt exploded into dust as a gleaming beam of light sliced into the soil surface. The light beam solidified as it dragged its summoner across the vast emptiness. Platinum was flying through the Underlayer, heading West with renewed purpose. She had no time to dawdle.

It had already been several days since she met the Champion of Ghost Reef, but his dependable presence was still on her mind. That stupid amount of power had lit a fire within her, having so clearly exposed the extent of her deficiency.

Even with the amplification of strength caused by combination attacks that she and Neon used to ensure their position in Neon Park, they couldn’t hold a candle to what had been demonstrated by Coop. He crashed through armies of invaders like a tsunami, demolished Field Bosses with masterful ease, and crumpled Siege Bosses as if they were discardable sheets of paper. He left nothing behind before he drove forward in search of more. On the other hand, the combined efforts of her entire alliance had left thousands of people defeated in order to accomplish the same feats just one single time.

She was thankful someone with the personality of Coop had been the one to climb so high. The things that motivated people weren’t always so honest, but he was clearly just unwilling to let an alien invasion kill his vibe. Platinum didn’t know what was going on inside his head, and everyone carried their own internal baggage, but Coop’s composure never broke while she observed. He was solely devoted to his cause and seemed to revel in his niche of responsibility, unbending in his urge to grind the enemies into dust and earn himself a vacation.

Coop displayed a level of commitment that Platinum couldn’t claim she had even attempted to reach. To her, it seemed like Coop was shouldering responsibility for all of humanity, while she ran away from anything beyond what Neon could force upon her. She had tricked herself into thinking she was doing her best when she was really burying her head into sand by ignoring anything beyond her immediate challenges.

The fact that Coop was reaching such highs meant that others not only could, but outside of Earth’s assimilation, already had. Platinum felt like she needed to increase her own efforts, because while Coop was content to ask nothing of them, she could easily imagine the demands that would come in the future from alien overlords if not human tyrants.

She needed to climb higher, independent of any relative comparisons to her peers, essentially broadening her horizons. Being a big fish wouldn’t work when their small pond was swallowed up by a galactic ocean. The system’s limitations on the assimilation had caused people like her, who had more potential, to grow complacent. It was weird to consider Neon Park, or even North America as a small pond, but it simply was.

Keeping ahead of the Primal Constructs, who were restricted by the system, wasn’t the end goal for humanity. It was the bare minimum to survive the introductory period of the galactic community. Ghost Reef had wisely set their sights higher.

In a way, Coop was like the breakaway rider in a bike race. The rest of humans on the leaderboard were in the peloton, conserving their energy with the expectation that the leader would exhaust himself. His pace was too extreme to maintain when compared to everyone else. However, now that Platinum had witnessed that leader with her own eyes, she knew he wasn’t slowing down. If anything, he was speeding up, taking advantage of the indolence of others. He was the only one straightforwardly chasing the true potential of humanity.