Chapter 358: The Omega II
Coop and Lyriel moved across the frozen landscapes full of vigor. They didn’t need to vocalize their mutual agreement to avoid wallowing in the bone-chilling climate, instead racing as if they could outrun the cold. While it wasn’t a contest they seemed capable of outright winning, the exertion helped temporarily stave off the debuffs that accumulated in the extreme environment.
Lyriel may not have been as fast as Coop, but without any obstacles inhibiting her motion, she was plenty capable. She drove forward, leaning into her momentum with enough haste to leave a physical trail despite never letting her feet touch the packed snow. Coop, on the other hand, flickered between the monochromatic world of mists and the monochromatic world of reality, making his spear into a harbinger of the Revenant. He exploded from the mists and plowed forward with his own strength, periodically resetting before he launched the missile ahead. Together, they set a pace that was sufficient to get the job done before either of them froze.
The conditions of the continent were so poor, Coop wouldn’t have been comfortable sending his spear much further into the obscured distance to speed them up. He was already pushing the limits of his perception, and since they were in firmly secured enemy territory, he thought it best to avoid being too reckless, no matter what the eponymous Reckless title represented for his last foray into a Fallen Zone.
After hundreds of miles, Coop concluded that they must have been on solid ground, though it was just the same blanket of snow covering sheets of ice as before. The main difference was in the less uniform surface. The wind was unable to knock down the occasional jutting feature, and soon jagged mountains rose from the frozen landscape. Coop even spotted rare dark stone surfaces contrasting with the grays where the underlying stone was exposed, mostly on the leeward sides of the more precipitous features.
Mika had offhandedly mentioned the potential for 20 million square miles of sea ice surrounding the continent, so Coop had no idea what to expect after leaving the ship. Based on the researcher’s guidance, Coop suspected that they had been veering on and off the Antarctic Peninsula before finally climbing the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. For what it was worth, for a location that he had been warned was known for shedding state-sized icebergs, it was frozen solid.
It was shortly afterwards that Coop also started finding the local Primal Constructs, mostly trapped within the top layers of ice, either embedded into the ground or completely swallowed by snow. It seemed like the end result of letting the environmental debuffs stack up for too long was a crowd control that was significantly more potent than Coop had imagined. He had imagined a temporary stun, but for the Primal Constructs who had succumbed to the cold, it appeared to be permanent, or at least would last until the conditions changed. Whether Antarctica would ever be warm enough to free them was a question he couldn’t answer.
Coop put the first invader out of its misery, gaining a free level for practically nothing. As long as he could avoid sharing the same fate, it seemed like hunting in Antarctica would be extraordinarily straightforward. The real challenge was certainly in contending with the cold.
Somehow, after the first kill, finding the monsters immediately became easier. It was like his instincts were somehow understanding imagined alien tendencies, so once he found one, he had a better idea for discovering the next. The Primal Constructs had grown familiar to the point of predictability.
He could also better determine where to strike them to inflict the most efficient damage with a mere glance, as if his subconscious measured their exact anatomy after destroying so many previous iterations of the alien manifestations. Rather than spotting weak points as obvious as the glowing eyes that he relied on in the past, it was more like he could tell how to avoid causing unnecessary destruction that would compromise specific parts of the metallic creatures while still fully defeating them. It felt like he had gone a step beyond simply hunting to a level of comprehension regarding his targets that nudged into actual expertise.
He briefly wondered if it was his Haunted title reaching yet another threshold, but it wasn’t exactly the same, lacking the mental reward for proper execution of techniques. The instinctive recognition wasn’t related to his technique so much as it was a result of expertly deciphering his targets after incalculable amounts of practice.
Coop mostly just went with the flow as was his habit when it came to mana-related developments, happy that this one seemed advantageous. Maybe he had just reached the nirvana of a dominant hunter. He had destroyed enough of the invaders to have earned something from all the practical experience.
The Primal Beasts that had barely laid claim to the empty wasteland seemed vaguely like metallic salamanders, with four limbs that were splayed out so that they had a lower profile than other equally sized invaders. Rather than grippy fingertips they had blades that might have been dangerous had they not been frozen solid. Unfortunately for them, their low profiles meant their entire bodies would have been buried by snow, even if they weren’t already frozen. They might have been good at climbing rocky edifices but they had been sent to a frozen wilderness.