Chapter 349: The Scenic Route
Champion Ramona of La Piedra helpfully pointed out the main combat zones around her settlement. If she was skeptical of Coop, she hid it well, willingly pointing out the weakest areas of her territory. There would be no skin off her back if he failed, but if he succeeded, it would further establish the influence of the Lighthouse. She had already had time to interact with Juliana and other members of the Jaguar Sun, and they had set the stage for his arrival, vouching for both his legitimacy and his capability.
In between events, La Piedra had to deal with numerous monster areas, each more or less the equivalent of the Primal Tracker golf course near Empress City. The invaders spawned, gathered, and eventually spilled out, accumulating territory for the planetary sponsor. She pointed at the problematic areas of the past, sweeping her hands across the landscape to demonstrate the extent of the worst of the Infestations they had been forced to overcome in order to survive. Their elevated position, at the top of the rock, was perfect for a presentation of the settlement.
For the most part the invaders were adequately contained, with monster expansion curtailed by a combination of defensive combat and the taming effect of settlement territory. It seemed like settlements in an assimilation naturally entrenched themselves in such a way, dealing with raids as they came, by naturally following the path of least resistance. However, the further their territory expanded, the more they had invaders pressuring the perimeter and chipping away at their progress. Eventually, their expansion would stall out. At that point, they would be lucky to maintain their accumulated territory, and that was all assuming nothing catastrophic occurred during the periodic settlement events. He supposed he should be thankful that the events were designed to be spread across the entire duration of the assimilation rather than hammering them repeatedly at the start.
Ramona revealed that, like the hunting zones around Ghost Reef, the monsters elsewhere tended to occupy relatively small sub-regions for themselves, concentrating into secluded locales before advancing and expanding if given the opportunity. However, unlike Coop’s island settlement, there was significantly more ground for the monsters to attempt to seize. Fractured monster zones ended up appearing all over the place, where the same variant inhabited multiple places, slowly evolving into their own boss types and establishing Infestations and Hives if left unattended.
While the territory of La Piedra was vast, with hundreds of dangerous areas, it was only home to three different Primal Construct variants, and only one of them was new to Coop. Despite the challenge of more expansive threats, La Piedra had yet to be threatened by natural Siege Boss ranked enemies, but the residents regularly handled Field Bosses that pushed into settlement territory. At this stage of the assimilation, most human forces had to defeat at least one Field Boss to continue to survive and for the larger settlements, such threats would have to be routine.
Rather than designate the areas by monster variant, like the Adventurer Guild had done on Ghost Reef, the locals named the individual spawn zones the way a community might nickname specific neighborhoods. Orange Strip currently had a Field Boss expanding its reach, Tobogan Island was in the process of resetting, and the Sonia Pier was next in line for a counter-assault led by the Champion’s guards. All three were places with the same type of monsters, but they were each in different stages of evolution. On the whole, the entire dynamic was closer to the underground layers of Ghost Reef, where areas with the same enemies naturally stratified based on human activity and proximity to concentrations of mana.
Then, beyond their territory, the wild lands produced more difficult challenges that mostly only became a problem when Elite raids threatened the boundaries of the settlement, some even approaching numbers that rivaled individual waves of the Siege Event. For the most part, the residents rarely ventured too far outside for fear of running into such a development unprepared, and if they did leave, it was usually only when they had a specific destination in mind. The neighbors were far, and the vast majority of independent survivors had long since coalesced into the grander settlements. The assimilation steered them into a purely defensive posture, isolating them further over time. It was clearly all by design.
Ramona had already given several suggestions to Juliana regarding potential hunting grounds, happy to send Coop to the most problematic areas in their territory, if he was truly such a game changer. However, Coop offered to roam even further, easing the burden on the settlement by taking care of areas that hadn’t been previously culled. A tame hunting ground within settlement territory was a bit too easy for the Revenant of Ghost Reef and was better left to others. Once his intentions were established, she better elucidated the broader region, unable to give him a specific waypoint and instead providing a general picture of their part of the world.
Basically, the forest that Coop had taken for a single connected biome actually encompassed dozens of specific ecoregions, and each was further broken down into smaller areas where natural concentrations of mana ebbed and flowed. From what he could understand, the broader factor was the underlying Andes mountain range and how it impacted interior rainfall. Of course, in nature there weren’t necessarily clearly defined boundaries between such environments, so Coop hadn’t recognized the gradual change that was occurring as he traveled across mountains and valleys to arrive at La Piedra.
Ramona explained that the Ruin Tracers tended to prefer the Pacific humid forests that extended through Central America and into the South, further to their west. These were habitats that were defined by extremely high rainfall and relatively moderate temperatures. They had been the dominant ecosystems during the cross country run with the warriors of the Crossroads. If Coop looked back, he would have recognized the jungle specifically surrounding the Yucatan settlement as a similar environment.