Unchosen Champion

Punihuil turned out to be a relatively small base, managing with fewer than 100,000 human residents. They mostly lived in scattered camps looking down on several different beaches near the location of the civilization shard, as if trying to stay as close to the core of the settlement as possible. Coop had been anticipating significantly more, and not only because of the way others in bordering territories had gossiped about the influential emperor who was the most famous resident. That was a major factor, but Coop had high expectations even before he had heard rumors of this emperor.

Punihuil had also broken into the top five on the settlement leaderboards more than 150 days before Coop arrived. At the time, he had assumed they had received an enormous influx in refugees, but it seemed like that wasn’t exactly the case. At least, it hadn’t occurred in the way he had imagined it.

The local leaders were excited to welcome Coop and the procession of penguins that had followed him, treating the animals with at least as much appreciation as they did for him. Coop was more than happy to see it, considering how many of the birds were near enough to his level for it to make sense. It seemed like the longer the assimilation went on, the less it became necessary to demand respect for the wildlife. The people who continued to survive were more likely to be exposed to the benefits of cooperation in the face of planetary invasion.

Coop ended up having a large crowd gather in order to give him a rundown on their experience while the penguins waddled into the cold waves splashing on the rocky beaches to hang out with their families on the rocky outcroppings. The whole dynamic reminded him of his first visit to Corozal, where the elders couldn’t wait to share rumors and collect information from outside of their social circles. Coop was happy to oblige, but thanks to regular visits from the Tempest Fleet, they were actually at least as up to date with Ghost Reef as he was. Instead, he made his contribution by telling them about the different places he had visited all across South America. In turn, they shared details about their settlement.

A pair of unchosen local tour guides had claimed the shard at the start of the assimilation, discovering the alien object after checking on how the native penguins were doing after the meteors fell. The shard had landed on one of the small islands off the shore, where the birds nested, so they had been rightfully concerned. Since it was a civilization shard and not a mana seed, there was no damage and during their investigation one of them ended up becoming an early Champion, just like Coop.

However, the penguins had disappeared. The assumption had been that they were spooked by all of the upheaval that had occurred at the start. All they could do was wait to see if they would come back.

Over time, other survivors joined them, first arriving from Ancud and other smaller towns on Chiloé Island, but eventually also from the larger Puerto Montt. They brought more information regarding the assimilation, enabling them to get a bit more organized before the first settlement event began, but the penguins remained absent.

The settlement barely survived their single wave Siege Event thanks entirely to the position of their shard on a rocky outcropping, off the shore, that funneled the basic monsters into an unbreakable chokepoint, but the experience had been harrowing. They believed they were truly done-for after realizing the apocalyptic scenario they had found themselves in. Many of the original refugees started leaving, hoping that existing within the untamed wilds of Patagonia would be safer than waiting for the next settlement event, as if they could be overlooked by the invaders if they didn’t congregate together.

However, not long after the event, reinforcements started arriving in the form of wild animals. The missing penguins that had disappeared at the start of the assimilation were coming back. At first they arrived as individuals that circled the area then returned to where they came from, but soon the lone scouts came back with larger groups, then multiple species, and eventually entire parades of the birds came from land and sea. Punihuil grew exponentially as the aquatic birds made their return.

As they were being completely overrun by penguins, a pair of barely thawed humans finally showed up with some nonsensical explanations of emperors and kings. The locals assumed they had lost their minds, but provided them with temporary shelter anyway. The start of the assimilation had been enough to cause anyone to lose their sense of reality.

The pair were in search of their own companions; a large group of scientists that had been on Antarctica when the assimilation began. According to them, they had left the frigid south pole in search of a civilization shard. One was supposedly on the coast of the icy wilderness, but they had been unable to locate it, believing that it had been destroyed before they arrived.

The next civilization shard was Punihuil. The small group of fisherman and guides welcomed the two survivors, but hadn’t realized they were also welcoming the armies of penguins that had gathered at the South Pole, who then used Punihuil as the core of their growing empire, swimming through the oceans and along the coasts and rivers to secure more and more land from the alien invaders. They even acquired a subordinate shard for Punihuil, pushing it further up the ranks of settlements.