Chapter 338: Undiminished Return
Coop jabbed the three prongs of his ethereal trident into the sandy ground, letting it stand on its own at the peak of the perimeter ridge while he caught his breath. He let his head hang as he put his hands on his hips, chest heaving with each inhale. He watched droplets of moisture fall near his feet afterllecting from the tip of his nose and the ends of his hair. The sweat and seawater was the physical evidence of the exertion that had been necessary to oveme the oversized flying ray creatures.
The fifth layer of the Coral Forest had presented him with another uniquely demanding grind. This time, it hadn’t been hismbat power, travel speed, physical stamina, or target acquisition that limited his hunting efficiency. The biggest challenge had been toward his breath management.
The Gliders had a rather novelmbat strategy that focused on areantrol. As Coopntended with their swarms, the choking gas that they shot onto the surface was the primary issue he was forced to deal with. They fired rapidly moving, barely perceptible projectiles, starting at the size of a transparent volleyball, but when theyllided with the ground, they burst into a solid screen of thick spore-like vapors that easily empassed his positions.
He had made it a habit to hold his breath and gradually slide across the sandy bottom beneath the hanging seaweeds in order to minimize the effect of their attacks. Still, as he skirmished with swarms of the pseudo Elite creatures, they bathed the sandy surface with a mixture of gases that would have smothered the most impetuous of challengers, if not defeating them outright. The gaseous attacks applied a handful of debuffs, blinding and distracting their enemies such that they would lose their heads in the sweeping assaults of the deep-sea creatures even before the damage over time ticked down.
Coopuld imagine the selective pressures that had driven such a mutation,nsidering the proximity of their habitat to where the Chompers made their homes. The gases would have been the perfectunter to the hidden ambushes of the eel-like creatures hidden with the dark crevices of the gigantic sea sponge. However, the Gliders were much too large to easily fly through the porous structure. To him, it seemed like the two monsters had adapted in parallel to fill the available niches of the Coral Forest.
Coop’s magic defenses were absurdly high, especially for his level, so much so that the damage he would have taken from inhaling the orange and green bursts of gas was practically negligible, but he was innately aware that heuldn’t always rely on such passive solutions. Instead, he added anothernsideration to his meditative grind, one that reduced his exposure bynsciously manipulating his breath.
The actual landscape was as simple as they came, a vast butnsistent sandbar with a slight slope toward the interior edge. It was so unobtrusive, he was free to focus on other aspects of the fights besides navigation. The monsters came to him, effectively eliminating the necessity of target acquisition. He also didn’t need to worry about beingnfused or distracted by the thick clouds of spore-like gases, as Presence of Mind, Fog of War, and his passive mana sight allmbined to let him pierce the physical obstructions with ease. If anything, the haze created by the monsters only inhibited their ability to track his exact motions, rather than the other way around. Compared to the previous layers, the fights seemed to have been simplified, letting himncentrate on efficiently dealing with the poisonous gases.
At first, he would only hold his breath for minutes at a time, but as the number of monsters he fought increased, the spores of their defeatedmrades would linger, altering the dynamic of the battlefield. As the fights extended, he was presented with a choice. Either keep holding his breath for longer and longer spans of time, or periodically expose himself to the orange umbra or the green bursts. The options led him to carefully test what each of them did, each representing a uniquecktail of debilitation and damage. Ultimately he found himself pushing limits he knew should have been impossible rather than accept exposure to either as a fittingmpromise.
Under normalnditions, he would obviously need to breathe eventually. At least that’s what he had assumed, but as Coop stretched his lung capacity, he started to realize that with the introduction of mana to their bodies, his assumptions weren’t entirely accurate. In fact, someone with Coop’s stats might already be able to go indefinitely without breathing.
As with so many other functions within the new physical world, the limitation was actually on his mana pool. Holding his breath beyond his actual maximum applied a physical debuff that drained his mana at an increasing rate until he took another breath. It was such a simple and obvious divery that he felt like he should have known, but somehow divering the changes to his body left him umfortable. He had to stop himself from asking questions about what it meant to hang onto the idea of being human, and just how much mana had transformationally altered everything when it activated.
While Coop tried toncentrate on his grind, his sunscious thoughts were focused on the implications of replacing such a fundamental aspect of life as breathing. Somehow, he already knew that it was possible,nsidering all the other essentials that had been shifted by mana. They didn’t need to eat or sleep, and they didn’t even need to age or die, but it was all because of a previously unknown substance whosentrol seemedntingent on having access to the system. For all the struggling to retain his humanity, he wondered if it was already too late. He had to struggle to keep himself from being distracted as he wondered about various ramifications of an existence based on mana, especially after they would be denied integration into the system and galacticmmunity.
Coop slowly moved across the landscape, fighting frenzied swarms of the massive flying creatures as he went, pushing himself so that heuldn’t be distracted by engaging larger and larger pulls. He threw a three-pronged missile that took the monsters down, one after the other, all while holding his breath, thenuntered their ambushing divebombs in ways that caught them by surprise in the moment before they were defeated. The ethereal trident was a whirl of violence at range, and in melee, with Coop’s Agility, it matched thembined efforts of hundreds of the mutated creatures at a time. Hours went by, sometimes with no breaths at all, and Coop kept going.