Chapter 312: One with the Abyss
Coop fell to his hands and knees, crying out in agony as pulsating tendrils threatened to rip out of his bruised skin from the inside. Through his blurry vision, he watched in horror as prehensile stems bulged beneath the surface, creating ripples that flowed across his forearms, surging and twisting until they reached into the back of his hands and caused his fingers to twitch uncontrollably.
It was the kind of awful sensation that he never could have imagined before experiencing himself. He was living a nightmare that was so unreal it would have woken him up if he was so lucky to have been asleep. Coop gasped as he dug his fingers into the sand, refusing to let them be dominated by the pain.
On some level, the tendrils calmed down as he mentally struggled to stifle their progress, though they continued to wriggle, as if he was a newborn babe exploring the use of his limbs for the first time. They were already a part of him.
He was in shock that such torment had been his reward. He had done this to himself after becoming the first to overcome a Region Boss and then also successfully defeating the Icon of Mana that came afterwards. Briefly, he was riding the highest of highs, recognizing his accomplishments after taking a beating from the motes of power, then he was brought low by his own volition. It felt like it would have made more sense to have been infected by the Icon, but this was the result of his own progression, having been initiated long before he entered the Fallen Zone.
Tears of black blood poured from his eyes and hissed when they fell onto the dark sand as the abyss gradually became his dominant affinity, threatening to erase his Dynamo title in favor of something completely new. Spectral mana was swirling from his sweat-soaked pores, being expelled from his arched back as it was replaced and Coop heaved and spasmed.
He could feel himself changing, and he was terrified of what he would become. Flashes of the mutant undead abominations he had met in the past painted a gruesome picture that he wanted no part of. It seemed like he was on the verge of becoming an eldritch abomination instead, but rather than be gifted such a thing from an experienced faction, he had earned it for himself.
The abyss within had been born through his voracity for progression. His steady pursuit of experience gains had passed all the tests necessary for the system to take notice and acknowledge his efforts. The unending hunger of the Deep Dweller had been a parallel representation for his unwavering desire to progress. The series of Dedications had established a borderline impossible gauntlet, but he had defeated millions of enemies to cross thresholds and pioneer a new path previously unexplored within the galactic community as the system struggled to interpret the records of humanity.
The unique combination of human imagination and his own steady forward momentum was forging a completely novel route for utilizing mana. It threatened to climb straight out of his body, shedding his past self to metamorphose into a completely new species.
“No!” He roared, vocalizing his choice as prompts repeatedly buffeted his muddied vision, demanding that he complete his evolution and abandon humanity for something fresh, different, and potentially more potent. The system had long played at uplifting basic entities into new species, and Coop seemed to have made himself its most recent project. He wasn’t in need of such an uplift, and he didn’t want it. He was doing everything in his power to express that.
“Cancel!” He gasped, seeing the consequences of the transformation as unacceptable, especially after the Mists had already shown exactly how invaluable his connection to humanity could be. How many times had he proven the formidability of humanity? Why did he have to leave it behind?
“I won’t!” He shouted through a hoarse voice, reinforcing his resolve in any way he could. He wasn’t even sure why it was so important to him, but it always had been, just as he meant to preserve the environment around Ghost Reef as much as he could, he didn’t want to change into something unrecognizable, creating a schism between himself and the place he held dear.
Even if a new primary affinity could be better, it wasn’t what he wanted. He couldn’t sacrifice that much just to gain new racial passives, even if they promised the potential of dominion over immeasurable depths of the sea and deep space, as if humanity couldn’t conquer those frontiers for itself. There were prices he wasn’t willing to pay for personal progression, and losing his humanity was certainly one of them.