Chapter 299: New High Score
With no more enemies remaining in the Underlayer, Coop flopped to the ground and laid on his back in the middle of the transitioning control point. He released himself from the Inheritance of the Mists, bidding the Apparition of the Pillar of Heaven farewell, though with the way Coop was connected to the mists, it seemed like they were never really gone.
The massive sigh that escaped Coop’s lungs caught him by surprise. He knew he was tired, but he hadn’t realized just how much the exhaustion had permeated to his core. It should have been obvious, given the mission he had accepted for the Underlayer Event, but the power disparity had deceived him.
It didn’t exactly help that the comedown from wielding the strength of Atlas hit him like a truck. He groaned as the hangover sapped his strength and thin mists leaked from the reopened wounds in his skin. He felt haggard. Thankfully, the other objectives had been captured by the crowds of people brave enough to witness his battles, but the last one was his to claim.
He took a few seconds, just watching the ring of light gradually change colors while glittering debris fell across the underground. The vaporous mana clouds of the Underlayer were slowly recovering after experiencing unprecedented levels of turbulence from his slams all the way on the ground. For a while, there were no thoughts running through his mind.
His shallow breaths were the only sound to reach his ears. They were urgent, like he had been on the verge of drowning, though he felt no discomfort. WIth no more monsters on his agenda, the agitated energy he hadn’t realized he was holding onto seeped out of him. He had no more strength to suppress it.
It took a few minutes, but eventually, his body calmed down. Coop, feeling like the dirt was surprisingly comfortable, decided to relax for a while longer. There was no more rush, right? Without moving, he checked the leaderboards, finally at a point where they wouldn’t change again until the event completed.
Underlayer Event Settlement Scores:
Ghost Reef - 147,344,759 (x1) Neon Park - 5,819,973 (x13) Nyiragongo - 5,765,266 (x13) Shinjuku Gardens - 5,713,684 (x25) Aotearoa New Zealand - 5,229,358 (x5) Silvervalley - 5,121,756 (x11) Gangcheon - 5,105,138 (x15) Can Gio - 4,496,012 (x11) Englischer Garten - 4,460,000 (x8) Ordesa - 4,150,000 (x7) First, Coop double checked his math, making sure that Ghost Reef had overcome the challenge assessment of Shinjuku Gardens. He had decided in the middle of battle that he was all clear, but without taking the time to count, he wasn’t completely confident in his arithmetic.
“Barely.” He muttered after calculating Shinjuku Garden’s final score.
In the end, it had actually come down to the last army of Primal Constructs. Coop breathed a sigh of relief that it had worked out.
The only way Coop could have improved their score would have been to move even faster, but the speed that they had completed the Underlayer Event was already absurd. According to the timer that had been ticking down in the background, there were 387 hours remaining. They still had roughly one third of the original 1111 hour timer to go.
Scrolling through the list of settlements, Coop decided he really couldn’t find any significant faults with the progress of his own shard. Ghost Reef’s raw score was shockingly close to the total of all the other settlements on the entire planet combined. The difference was essentially a few million here and there from factions like Neon Park and the Assembly of Settlements that had forces gaining their own points before he arrived. The small settlements across Asia accounted for another small chunk, but the largest difference came from New Zealand.