Unchosen Champion

Coop forged ahead, ambitious enough to believe he could complete dozens more Slayer quest chains before the Eradication Protocol began. The confidence he had built in himself hadn’t faded, but he could sense opposing sentiments warring in the back of his mind. Would his actions be enough?

The Lighthouse was working just as hard as he was, and on a thousand different projects. He tried not to be nervous about the future and the limited time they might have left to prepare, but every time he thought about Lyriel’s predictions, he could feel his throat get dry and his palms a bit sweaty.

If the timelines were shifting around, the only thing he could do was keep his head down and make use of whatever amount they had left. With a nebulous deadline, it was the only thing any of them could do. They had essentially one chance to get it right, so he hoped they could all rise to the occasion.

Meanwhile, the beach called to him, practically singing his name, but he knew he wouldn’t fully enjoy downtime until safety was earned. Instead, he set forth, embracing the yearning to hunt instead. Coop was aware that, above all else, he was most in control of his own performance, and that meant doing what he could to ready himself for battle. He wanted more training, more levels, and more practice with new abilities.

Almost as soon as his spear landed on the edge of another continent, he was presented with a more complicated political situation than he had encountered in all of South America. It was exactly the opposite of what he was looking for. He envisioned a training montage, where he bounced between monster nests, highlighted in the spotlights of increasing levels. Instead, he stepped into the type of mess that only humans could create.

In South America, the forced isolation of the settlements in the north due to the empowered natural environment, and the calming effect of a centralized power in the south had established a surprising amount of collaboration throughout the continent. Such restrained and cooperative populations might have actually been a rarity, if his initial experience in Cape Town was anything to go by.

The first African settlement he officially visited was a fractured network of individual communities. To say they were loosely connected would have been an exaggeration. They were solely united through existing within the same settlement territory and nothing more. There would have been a dozen individual settlements within the ruins of Cape Town if they had the civilization shards to go around, and only a few of them would have been working together at all.

Coop wasn’t happy with what he saw, and the explanations he eventually received only made him feel marginally more optimistic about the state of the region. He stumbled upon a political knot when he wanted to mindlessly grind across the wilderness. There wasn’t time to untangle the tangles that humans could make.

The different groups hadn’t broken apart so much as they had never really joined together in the first place. Several coastal locations independently became strongholds against the early Primal Constructs, bracing against the shoreline all at the same time. They were essentially independent, despite existing in the same pre-mana city to the point that they could have all counted as residents.

As the assimilation went on, the group that controlled the civilization shard had grown the most. They openly accepted displaced groups from elsewhere in the city, but instead of joining existing communities, many of the displaced groups preferred to reform elsewhere rather than submitting themselves to new leaders. Their growth was marginal at best, but at least it had trended in the positive direction.