Chapter 364: Kata Tjuta
Coop was deep within the Australian Outback, relishing the crisp night air as it soothed his slightly sunburnt skin. The upcoming day was bound to be another hot one, so he savoured the nightly reprieve, knowing that it was a fleeting comfort. Leaning his back against the lone tree within eyeshot, he was a silent sentinel, stoically anticipating daybreak.
Despite the relaxed posture, his senses were alert, both natural and unnatural. He was ready for the moment that he was needed, if that moment would come at all. In the meantime, he waited.
The frequency of Field Bosses and other Elite Primal Constructs had rapidly diminished over the course of his stay. At first, they represented a massive surge of aggression comparable to the relentless frenzies normally reserved for special events. He had to utilize almost every skill just to prevent them from reaching the collapsed domain that he protected, but once he wiped them out, respawns were a relatively rare occurrence. They came in waves that he easily dispatched when they came at all. It simply took too long for the regular variants to evolve for them to provide useful reinforcements to the Region Boss hidden within the core of the besieged Fallen Zone.
Instead, Coop was mostly left alone with the unique landscape of Central Australia while his local companions tested their limits in seeking to conquer the most hazardous of the Primal Construct formations, knowing that the Unchosen Champion had their backs. Coop bided his time, always willing to take an opportunity to catalogue an environment that he had yet to explore. He gazed up at the tree that sheltered his campsite, just reminiscing about all the amazing places he had seen before turning his attention toward his more immediate surroundings.
Ghost gum trees were just about the only shade providers within what he guessed was a thousand mile radius, but to describe their canopy coverage as sufficient would have been an unfair exaggeration. The tufts of leaves at the end of each branch hardly made an effort. Still, he consistently returned to the one tree that could give him any valuable relief from the sun, even if it was only partial, while remaining in proximity to the contested core of the Fallen Zone. The space beneath its branches had become his temporary headquarters.
Looking at the ghost gum trees had him convinced they were a species that shared his original spectral affinity. At night, with their leaves hidden in the darkness, their exposed trunks made them seem particularly macabre. Solitary individuals sprouted among the low grasses or rocky orange ground, looking like skeletal totems that had been scattered sparingly across the mostly flat landscape.
As Coop looked up toward the branches of his tree, the crimson light from the Milky Way was bright enough to reflect off the smooth ivory bark and not much else. He listened, hoping to add to the image that he would remember, but aside from the occasional rustle of leaves caused by the weak wind, there was nothing in his vicinity. Presence of Mind revealed no birds or mammals sleeping through the night, and there weren’t even the types of buzzing insects he thought belonged in the area. The impact of the alien invaders hadn’t quite faded from the region.
The natural landscape may have been oddly still, but the night was not actually silent. The sounds of battle had been roaring since before Coop selected his encampment. He could make out the distinct sounds of metal clangs and the roaring explosions of magical fires even as dawn approached.
A pocket of dense mana had formed, congealing upon his aggressive companions after retreating from the broader landscape. He recalled his first experience with an Omega Construct Region Boss and recognized that he was beholding the same scenario, except from the outside instead of within. The powerful boss intended to confine its opponents to the darkness and overwhelm them with the minions it had formed across the landscape, but Coop was at least partially stymieing that strategy by wiping out every construct left on the outside. Whether the Region Boss liked it or not, it was on its own against the motivated human challengers.
When Coop explored the nearby environment, hiking across the miles of open wilderness all the way around the compressed domain, he made sure to stay close enough to be summoned himself, and always ended up back in the same place. The turbulent mana contained the war as much as it could, but he was there just in case his allies decided it was time for him to step in. A Region Boss was a legitimate threat, though he had already proven strong enough to overwhelm them on multiple occasions, he knew better than to underestimate their potential.
Coop had been camping with this particular wizened gum tree for almost seven days. There were only a few locations on the planet that had felt more isolating than the middle of Australia, in an 800 million year old sedimentary basin that had been subsumed by a Fallen Zone for nearly a year prior to his arrival.
He was reminded of the exposed sand bars within the Sahara Sea, still lacking the natural flora and fauna that would inevitably turn the shallow waters into a habitat, or the Manaus settlement in the Amazon rainforest with hardly a connection to the rest of the world even before the assimilation severed what remained. There was also the South Pole of Antarctica and the ice formed from such extreme weather even the ocean was shoved away, the salt flats in Bolivia where the sky and ground united into one singular plane, or the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan surrounded by mountains that appeared to scrape the clouds. The ecology of each location was dramatically different, but the seclusion he sensed in each place was something of a parallel.