Unchosen Champion-Chapter 309: Edge of the Abyss

One hundred and one warriors fought on the broad coastline of the Mississippi Sea, kicking up gritty dirt with powerful lunges and calculated cooperative defenses. They were swarmed by black glass covered enemies that were twice as tall, with limbs twice as long, who sought to abuse their stealth abilities and gouge out the vital areas of their opponents. Their slender arms terminated in spear-like hands and were perfect for slipping past defenses to pierce exposed flesh. More frequently, they were shattered by the unyielding counter attacks of the disciplined phantasmal gladiators and sent back into the surrounding gloom as nothing but gouts of black mana smoke.

The collisions of pointed glass blades clashing with steel shields sent sharp clangs across the battlefield before being smothered within the encroaching darkness. The rattling of armor and shifting of mechanical joints inundated the makeshift arena, with the steady breathing of the Mistwalker at the forefront of it all. It was a condensed pocket of chaotic violence within an enormous and oppressive domain that threatened to suffocate the small area of fog.

The immediate area around Coop had transformed into a dreamlike chamber, where only a small portion wasn’t subsumed by the shroud of the Fallen Zone. Coop and the phantasms were like toy figures spotlighted on a foggy stage, completely surrounded by an impenetrable darkness that had been gathered together by the Omega Construct as it failed to make more direct contributions to the battle. Looming above the combatants were its six menacing eyes, the only reminder that there was more to the world than fifty square yards of barren beach, obscured by a murky haze and ringed by empty void.

Together, the phantasms whittled the Elite Primal Insurgents down, always beneath the watchful red eyes of the Omega Construct, ominously stationed within the darkness above the black water. Its efforts to support its minions were repeatedly thwarted by the abyssal spear of the Revenant until it was forced to alter its strategy. No longer were arcing blasts of turbid mana sent toward the skirmish. Instead, it waved its wand around in the darkness, causing the glow of its eyes to flicker when obstructed by its limbs, occasionally jabbing forward with enough force to create a gust of wind felt on the battlefield before another wave of Insurgents appeared from outside the pocket of fog.

They would fire their needles, sending a wave of thousands of projectiles that were inevitably blocked by the large rectangular shields of both Coop and the phantasms. One or two might slip through, wounding a limb, or embedding into a torso, but they weren’t enough to weaken the overall formations, especially because the Revenant was always the most exposed and therefore attracted the most focus. The constant flow of enemies was less of a threat and more of a source of mana and health once he was in the flow state of a satisfying grind. Any injuries incurred were almost immediately recovered as he fought with an intensity unmatched by Construct or phantasm.

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Coop kept a close eye on his phantasmal companions, preventing them from dropping too low in numbers at any point from their own injuries. Over time, despite cutting down innumerable Primal Constructs, the human intruders were completely surrounded by the alien enemies. They were forced to defend from all angles, including leaping stealthed strikes from above, as if they were an individual squad that had overextended themselves into the middle of an enormous enemy army. They were simply outnumbered by too many Insurgents, and even as Coop picked up speed and destroyed their opponents out front, more came rushing from the darkness at the sides, as if to demonstrate there was an unlimited supply of manpower for the Primal Constructs.

The Omega Construct had its own strategy, one that unexpectedly had multiple layers. The threats of basic combat were obvious, but the mind games were a surprise. Even though it clearly had a limited number of Elite Primal Insurgents it could use at one time, much like the maximum capacity of phantasms granted by Legacy of the Mists, it created an atmosphere that made it seem like the enemies were endless, infinite, and inexhaustible. The full extent of the alien army was impossible to discern at any single point, as their opponents could only perceive a limited area, and the numbers of visible Insurgents were constantly fluctuating. They danced in and out of stealth and more were always bounding from the perimeter, attempting to flank, or assaulting them from above. It was clearly a ploy to crush morale as much as it was to mask their movements.

Any opposition couldn’t afford to lose too many individual fighters, lest they quickly be overwhelmed, so Coop made sure to be responsive with casts of Legacy of the Mists, holding on until the balance shifted back into his favor. No matter how many enemies were thrown at him, so long as he kept the mists flowing, his shield up, and his weapon moving, there was a chance that he would turn things around. If there was any individual person in the world that wouldn’t be overwhelmed by fathomless numbers, it was the Champion of Ghost Reef. Coop had never been one to be frightened or discouraged by unendurable challenges. He just took them one step at a time.

Fog of War played an integral part in preventing his phantasms from being swallowed up by the darkness. As the battle pressed upon them, constantly threatening to push beyond their limits, Coop incorporated Vaporform more and more. It was his best way to discern the hidden Insurgents who were constantly trying to generate ambushes upon him and his soldiers. The combination of Vaporform and Fog of War could effectively replace his mistjumps, so long as he remained within his domain, allowing him to flow with the mists himself, sweeping across gaps like a wraith, reappearing wherever he pleased in the misty domain. The tactics were slowly growing more and more natural to the point that whether he was in or out of the world of mists didn’t matter so much. He’d keyed in on the Insurgents so that they couldn’t hide from him any longer.

While Coop focused on the immediate battle, he couldn’t help but feel some sense of gratification as his platoon of phantasms racked up the kills and the experience built up. The fact that he couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel made absolutely no difference to him in the moment to moment battle. He crushed the glass heads of nearby insurgents with the edge of his shield while piercing their torsos with the black tip of his abyssal spear, then spun to sideswipe another with the shaft of his weapon, all with an inappropriate smile imprinted on his face as he eagerly anticipated the next level.

This was exactly the type of encounter he was conditioned for. At first his manifestations were barely hanging on, forced to adjust to the stealth abilities of the Primal Insurgents, but as they grew comfortable with the abilities of their opponents and Coop personally joined the fight with his own growth, they built momentum, and the battle became a satisfying challenge to tackle. It was definitely not the reaction the Primal Constructs would have hoped for, but they hadn’t understood what they were dealing with when they committed to taking over Earth in the first place. If the Omega Construct listened closely, it might occasionally hear joyous laughter in between clangs of glass and steel. Forget about manipulating morale and generating hopelessness in the face of an unfathomable enemy; they had successfully presented a worthy challenge that piqued Coop’s engagement to its maximum. His battlelust sparked joy.

The phantasms may have been outnumbered, but they proved themselves to be a difficult force to crack. The grind provided by the Omega Construct was good enough to satisfy both Coop and the nagging sensation of his Abyssal Dedication. Each level made himself just a little bit stronger, but those small gains were also applied individually to all of the phantasms as well, essentially multiplying already multiplied bonuses a hundred times, and as the fight went on, the momentum kept building in the ghosts’ favor. It was only a matter of time before the Omega Construct would be the focus of their efforts, and Coop couldn’t help but grin at the thought.

As the tide slowly but inevitably turned and the number of Insurgents diminished, Coop prepared to lead his companions forward and enact his overwhelmingly simple plan to defeat the main boss. However, before they got to that point, they were surprised by waves of new enemies. Field Bosses of every variety charged through the darkness, still wet from crossing the dark sea or covered in broken branches, mud, and damp leaves, as they single-mindedly heeded the call of the Region Boss and dove into the fray. The Omega Construct had clearly been in the process of signaling an alarm to its subordinates while doing its best to keep its challengers occupied.

The Field Bosses were welcomed to the battle by the Mistwalker using the power inherited from the Mists. If the Omega Construct had believed the Revenant was already at his limit, it received a nasty surprise. Enormous elemental attacks evaporated the swollen figures of Field Bosses, even as they backflipped into massive slamming attacks, rattled tails to generate surprise stunning strikes, or howled to apply non-targeted debuffs.

Coop had his own tricks up his sleeves, and in this case they came in the form of bursts of god-like power, demolishing his targets and tearing gouges in the domain of darkness that surrounded the battlefield. The blasts unveiled small portions of the forest, the rest of the beach, or the churning black sea while the gloom of the Fallen Zone struggled to reform in the gaps, slightly weakened each time. Maybe he undersold himself a bit by recognizing that he was just some guy compared to the planet conqueror of a boss, because he could also be a conduit for the history, dreams, and nightmares of an entire planet through his connection with the Mists.

Time was a concept lost in the frenzy of this battle. Normally, Coop was always conscientious of his time-to-kill as efficiency was a major factor in his grinds, but the zone that had encroached the arena strangled his senses. For a long time, the only question was whether or not Inheritance of the Mists was off cooldown. If it was, he embraced the power of entities he was relatively familiar with, like Ares or Azrael, and others he was being exposed to for the first time, like the giant beaver monster, Wishpoosh, an enormous earthen colossus, Ullikummi, and the horrifying elephant serpent, Grootslang. The Field Bosses of the Fallen Zone traveled thousands of miles only to be executed upon their arrival.

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The Omega Construct couldn’t possibly respond to the powerful mythical beasts cooked up by humanity’s collective imagination and experience. All it could do was send simple variants of the Primal Constructs into the awaiting jaws of a curious species’ many attempts to explain the unknown. Even at nearly equal level, they were essentially fodder for the Mistwalker to chew up and spit out.

Coop fought on, preserving the phantasmal spear and shield testudo formation by eroding the assaults of enemy reinforcements while also periodically blasting his spear beneath the menacing red eyes, toward the darkness enshrouded torso of the boss, just to remind both himself and his opponent exactly what the goal was. He wasn’t fighting against an individual enemy, nor was he grinding the variants of the Primal Constructs. This had become a battle against an entire alien domain that had been inscribed onto the surface of Earth, and he had every intention of winning decisively. It didn’t matter if the system decided this was Construct territory. He would excise it like the cancerous tumor it represented.

The Fallen Zone may have seemed empty while he explored its interior, but that was only because he had bypassed the extensive layers of enemy spawns. The assault on Neptune’s Bridge had merely been a small portion of a much wider effort by the aliens to expand in all directions. Coop’s foray to the center of the Fallen Zone had finally drawn enough attention to drag everything to the defense of its leader, the Omega Construct, and the grind it created was glorious.

For all Coop knew, he could have been fighting for weeks by the time the oppressive domain had withered enough to reveal the waves of the sea once again, but when it did, he pressed forward as if the real battle was just beginning, as fresh as he had been when he first stepped up. He dared the Region Boss to personally retaliate, putting himself into range of the massive black glass arms. It was a personal challenge in the midst of a much grander fight.

The Omega Construct complied, as it had no other choice but to respond to the Revenant’s provocation, though the scene was different than what Coop would have expected when he first arrived.

Coop stood in front of the phantasms as they continued to fight encroaching Elites and the occasional Field Boss, in an effort to march forward, but he wasn’t exactly the ghostly gladiator that matched the manifestations of Legacy of the Mists any longer. The image he had of himself had to change with his current transformation.

Darkness bled from his aura, matching his deep black spear and abyssal shield. The spectral mists were confined to his Fog of War and 100 summons leaving him with the infinite depth of the abyss whenever he stepped beyond the world of mists. It wasn’t a reflection of his mana pool so much as it was an extension of his redefined affinities. The weight of the depths had fully inundated his more generic manifestations, seizing the opportunity to paint the Revenant in new colors that almost seemed to absorb the limited light in crushing darkness.

The ethereal wisps that emanated from his equipment had changed into abyssal fumes, dark as the deep sea, where the wavelengths of visible light are long scattered by depth. The fumes didn’t just float into the atmosphere and disappear, either. Instead, they sank to his feet, like a fine shower of black water. Tendrils of shadow leaked from his blackened charcoal manifestations, a hint of the direction that his path was taking.

The Region Boss had awoken him to the edge of the abyss, finally revealing the path that had been eluding him for so long in its demand for reverence. Coop succumbed to the feeling, getting a small taste of his personal eldritch power whenever he blasted an Insurgent with his spear and shield.

When the Omega Construct slammed its arm down, seeking to squash Coop into the dark sand, he hesitated for a moment before he sprinted to the side and flickered away in a preplanned mistjump that baited the arm into the center of the battlefield. The hesitation was like the call of the void, as he was tempted to test his shield against the city block-sized fist.

As soon as the arm landed, the phantasms finally disrupted their unbreakable formation, rushing to land attacks on the looming boss while its limb was in range. They committed to suicidal attacks, enacting Coop’s simple plan to stack the passive effect of Clarity of Purpose. Coop’s Acumen passive skill allowed his subsequent attacks to ignore a tiny portion of the defenses of his targets. There were never enemies that survived long enough for what had become his least useful passive effect to contribute. At least, that was until the Omega Construct had appeared as an opponent.

A hundred phantasms jabbed their spears into the glassy metallic arm, repeating the motion with no regard to their personal survival, seeking to reduce the defenses of the robust Region Boss to as close to zero as possible. As a result, the Omega Construct had its powerful defenses shredded such that its armor would be worthless in a test against the Revenant.

The boss reacted surprisingly quickly, yanking its arm out of the ground as if it had been stung by a swarm of fire ants, and as it did so, it used its opposite arm to send a tidal wave of the black water, tainted with acid, toward the shore, as it had a hundred times before, but never with such urgency. Individual phantasms embedded their spears into its metallic flesh and were carried away, still stabbing, doing as much damage as they could before they lost their grips and were killed by the corrosive damage. Their rectangular shields fell into the turbulent water with dramatic splashes before dissipating back into mists, but the boss seemed to stumble backwards, jerking away as much as it was able.

Then, through the wall of water that rushed onto the shore, sweeping away the pursuing invaders that had suddenly been left behind, the abyssal spear exploded through, like a missile penetrating a concrete bunker. The projectile blasted directly in between the top two glowing eyes on the monster’s face with a supersonic velocity that was driven by the hyped up Revenant and his fixation on reaching the conclusion.

The spear crashed through the Omega Construct’s forehead like a bullet, exiting out of the top of its glass skull, carrying a giant chunk of metallic viscera from the back of its head due to the angle that it had been thrown from.

Coop mistjumped into the darkness, directly above the Region Boss, at this point utilizing the tactics he had perfected in the Underlayer, and called upon Inheritance of the Mists.

Meanwhile, the tidal wave swept the beach clean, destroying the remnants of the battle between phantasms and Constructs. The entire battlefield was a soup of fog, ethereal mists, fizzling acid, mana smoke, and steam, but Coop had penetrated the darkness in order to engage the Omega Construct.

Time slowed while Coop swung down, and he was possessed by a silent apparition of the Headsman. The coalescence of human executioners mirthlessly guided the edge of his axe down, accepting this role as one meant to be done without emotion. It was his duty to claim this scalp and mete out punishment.

Red sparks exploded from the collision as the axe split the mechanical head down the middle, gouging deeper through the cavern created by his spear throw, and the glowing sinister lights flickered off, one pair after the other. The boss hunched forward as it sank back into the dark water, and Coop fell with it, releasing himself from the possession as he splashed down into water and smoke, receiving a flood of notifications as he went.

[You defeated Region Boss: Omega Construct (Level 450)]

[+1382285 Basic Credits]

[+1 Gift of Suffocating Despair (Unique)]

[+1 Mark of Haunting Pursuit (Unique)]

[+1 Blackened Soul of Glass (Unique)]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations! Your profession has leveled up!]

[Congratulations! Your profession has leveled up!]

[Congratulations! Your profession has leveled up!]

[Congratulations! Your profession has leveled up!]

[Skill options available.]

[You have acquired a new title!]

When Coop splashed back to the surface, spotlighted by a burst of new levels on top of dozens gained previously, the first thing he noticed was the return of the stars. Countless specks of light twinkled down on Earth from behind the planetary shield after the glass dome had shattered.

The second thing he noticed was the way mana flooded the atmosphere, clearing the gloom and washing out the darkness in the water as the domain that had been carefully curated by the Omega Construct collapsed. Mana from all ends of the region appeared to rush back to the source in the Mississippi Sea in order to dissipate.

As he waded back to the empty shore, the last thing he noted was the way the excess energy began fusing as if something threatened to rip the fabric of reality in order to enter his world.