Chapter 351: Quito to Iquitos
On the fourth day, Coop, Juliana, Felix, and Sierra passed between a pair of snow-capped volcanoes and finally spotted their next destination. The view opened up to reveal yet another massive city, large enough to once again catch Coop by surprise with its magnitude. In fact, Quito, Ecuador might have been the largest individual metropolis he had seen in his entire life. The buildings just went on and on for as far as his eyes could see, as if it was genuinely endless.
He spent a few minutes contemplating the city skyline, noting how the streets contoured with the geography in between impressive mountains on either side. Unless mana had caused the tallest buildings to already collapse, there were no real skyscrapers, but unlike most of the previous cities he had visited, the high rises weren’t completely engulfed in overgrowth.
Instead of being reabsorbed by jungle, the streets were decorated with ichu grass bundles and chuquiraga shrubs that bent with the wind. Stubby polylepis trees established the only prominent leaf canopies, just enough to give some of the boulevards and colonial cathedrals a truly enchanting feeling, but not quite conquering the overall urban sprawl.
Eventually, he concluded that Quito seemed particularly enormous because development was forced into a long corridor by the commanding mountain range. It was already ridiculously high, to the point that Coop had a mild headache and some slight dizziness, symptoms of altitude sickness that all of his companions were experiencing more severely.
The change in elevation actually forced them to slow down during the last section of their journey, but Coop didn’t mind. At the end of the day, he was an uncultured tourist, seeing places he never imagined. The three Slayer titles he had already collected made the pace of his whole journey more than acceptable so far. He was already off to a running start. In the meantime, he would be a witness to some of South America’s wonders, before the Eradication Protocol indelibly altered the world.
He might not have been the perfect guy for the job, but he would mentally chronicle the sights and sounds of each location, just in case the perfect person didn’t get a chance to do the same. For him, it was motivation to progress, to protect what he could, but no one would wish for anything to be completely forgotten, no matter what happened.
Coop felt a bit of a chill as he took in the views, catching sight of his breath, despite the season. He had the idle thought that it was still summer, but then he wondered if they were actually already in the southern hemisphere. Wouldn’t that mean it was suddenly winter? Coop had no idea. If a place had more than a wet and dry season he was already out of his element.
Either way, the cold was exacerbated by a light drizzle that was so fine, the wind actually carried it back into the air instead of letting it fall. The whole city was damp with mist, just wet enough for smooth surfaces of various plazas to reflect a bit of sunlight. It wasn’t necessarily what he expected for the first point of interest in a country literally named equator in Spanish.
Instead of seasons, he really should have been paying attention to elevation. Three quarters of their trip had been a rapid trek across hundreds of miles of cattle ranches and low hills, dotted by individual trees that had exploded in size such that they seemed like green islands floating in the sky. It was terrain where both Juliana and Sierra could truly maximize their speed. Coop would mistjump into the distance, covering miles in seconds, then have a few minutes to mingle with the local fauna or explore wild meadows and climb the extraordinary trees. As far as he could tell, they were near enough to sea level the entire time.
Surprisingly, the cows remained, and Coop had identified more than one bull that wasn’t just leveling, but Chosen as well. As a result there were few Primal Constructs to distract from their hike before they reentered the mountains, and of those monsters they did encounter, they were familiar variants, too underleveled to slow any of them down. Coop may not have been specifically grinding, but he still managed to defeat tens of thousands of monsters while traveling.
Coop expected things to change as they started to climb, but the trip maintained its relative peacefulness as they went. They each had their own theories as to why, considering proximity to shard territory and other unseen animal populations, but Coop suspected that the Primal Constructs were struggling with the altitude itself, just like them. Even he felt lightheaded at times when they reentered the Andes mountains, but the elite alien invaders that they did run into were positively lethargic.
It was the wild animals that ended up threatening their party the most, with Felix getting into hissing matches with local pumas that nearly matched his level, and Andean condors curiously checking them out from above. The already enormous birds had expanded their wingspans so that when one hovered over, it felt like being buzzed by a commercial passenger plane. Despite the attention, they made it the rest of the way without any serious incidents.