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Chapter 306: The Hunter
🕑 Added 2024-11-15 16:11:01 +0000 UTCCould the manifestations of Primal Constructs experience fear? It was a question that Coop couldn’t definitively answer on his own, though he was pretty confident the answer was no.
Based on all of his time in the assimilation, he was comfortable accepting that minions were effectively mindless and manifestations were only marginally more sophisticated, always fighting to the death in simple ways. They were all more like pieces in a board game than individual beings, using their particular set of attributes to claim territory and ultimately conquer the planet at the behest of their masters, one space at a time. They had a finite number of moves and usually only a single defined behavior. However, this new variant left him wondering about the limits of their complexity.
An Elite Primal Insurgent bounded through the underbrush, zooming through the subdued afternoon within the southern Appalachia periphery, barely touching the ground as its long legs desperately pushed forward. Dry leaves swirled in its wake before a separate set of relatively heavy steps stomped them back into the mud. The way the monster moved seemed to demonstrate that these particular specimens understood a compulsion for self-preservation, if not actual fear. It clearly had no desire to be caught by the haunting mists that had infiltrated its domain.
The hinges in its legs were more flexible than the human knee, able to bend both forward and back, and it fiercely sought to leverage its physical advantages over its pursuer. Each step was practically a long jump compared to a normal human’s gait, and it was so light on its feet, it left no footprints. Even if it did, its limbs narrowed to a point that they would have been unrecognizable to a tracker. There was no trace of its path, and if it could create a gap it would be nearly impossible to rediscover its location thanks to its unparalleled stealth. It sought obstacles as it twisted around trees, trying to break line of sight, running like a bipedal deer with a predator nipping at its heels.
Coop was that predator, his breath steady, as he rushed behind the monster. He was far less elegant than the alien, lacking the perfect precision that allowed it to pick out lines through the forest with the absolute minimal clearance necessary to rush forward. It hardly touched a single obstruction, avoiding anything that would slow it down in the slightest. Coop smashed through bushes, bounced his shoulders off tree trunks, and slapped leaves out of his way as he pioneered a cross-country track, his brows furrowed, and jaw clenched.
Fully stretched out, the Insurgent could easily grasp branches that were 15 feet above the surface, but it concentrated on speed and stealth to escape, staying extremely low to the ground with an impossible forward lean that pushed the limits of gravity. It cleared boulders by millimeters and slid across logs like the warped replica of an olympic hurdler, cast from a black glass that seemed to amplify its shadows.
No matter how fast it whipped through the thick forest, sweeping across trickling rivers with a single extended step, or weaving between gnarled old tree trunks to confuse its pursuer, solid steps inevitably followed. The persistent cadence of thumping footsteps overlayed with breaking branches, crushing leaves, and unencumbered deep breaths were practically designed to produce fear.
Coop was loud and clumsy compared to the sleek alien, but he was persistent. Human endurance was already an inherent evolutionary strength, but combined with his attributes, stamina, and resolve, he fully expected to run down the metallic alien, no matter how long it took. He imagined himself alongside the prehistoric human hunters that would have chased dangerous prey with nothing but a spear, exhausting them to the end, and worked to make those ancestors proud.
The Insurgent vaulted up a tree-lined outcropping, seeking the uppermost cliff while demonstrating impossible athleticism in picking out the narrowest of ledges to touch. It clearly believed the surge of motion would grant it a moment of solace while the human pursuer climbed up. The wave of mists that trailed behind its hunter, engulfing the low vegetation while promising doom would have trouble scaling the rock wall.
A few moments after it paused in the shade a complete silence fell on the forest. Not even the wind was blowing. The distant blue ridges seemed to wait, anticipating more from the competition between human and alien, but all else was quiet.
However, the silence didn’t last. The edge of the crest exploded as the hunter’s spear plowed through the lip of hardened rock. Amidst the debris, the Revenant appeared from a burst of mists, adamantly refusing to fall behind. Dust and gravel scattered across the outcropping as the real monster turned his head, eyes locking on the alien invader with unbroken focus.
The Primal Construct spun to escape, failing to comprehend exactly how much the roles had been flipped. It desperately sought refuge within the gloom of the expansive oak-hickory forest that had been swallowed up by the murky alien domain, but it had paused for too long, letting the human close the gap and draw near enough to lunge into melee range with the encroaching ethereal mists.
The alien burst back into motion after turning away, desperate to avoid the clutch of wispy fingers, but instead of accelerating back to its maximum speed, it immediately collapsed, unable to put weight on its forward leg.
It rolled along the ground before bouncing into the trunk of a late blooming dogwood tree where it was able to look back, its shining shell marred with scrapes and smudges as white petals floated around its position. The spear was jabbed into the ground where it had stumbled, pinning one of its legs into the stone topped surface, dismembering it. The limb was still twitching as it struggled to find leverage on the surface of the outcropping before disappearing beneath the cloak of vapor.
Coop marched forward, ahead of the wave, still steady, despite the cross country marathon he had been running for nearly a full 25 hours. He resummoned his ethereal round shield and calmly crushed the head of the crippled Elite Primal Insurgent, all business about the brutal task. It was a routine he had repeated many times in the course of this hunt. By this point, he was well aware of the habits of these monsters.
He was already prepared for the needles, fired from nearby stealthed Insurgents, letting Fog of War embrace him like a jacket. These Elites shared an important similarity with the Prowlers back home in that they waited for others to exhaust themselves before continuing the exchange, creating a gauntlet for their opponents that went beyond individual parties, spreading to all the monsters hidden within the region.
As far as they were concerned, their compatriots were merely bait, gladly sacrificed for the benefit of executing the perfect surprise attack, while extracting every bit of energy from their prey as possible, but they failed to account for human persistence.
Even more than their attack patterns, the individual monsters were always leading him to more packs, waiting in their stealth states. This wasn’t his first successful chase, but the hundredth, and the thousandth kill. He hadn’t forgotten his mission for Neptune’s Bridge, and he was using the patterns of the monsters to travel deeper into the Fallen Zone. Some kind of boss monster was almost certainly waiting for him.
If he didn’t find a boss monster, he was softening the interior of the expansive domain, which would hopefully draw the perimeter inwards and give those human defenders fighting on the edges some temporary relief from the persistent assaults. No domain could continue expanding if it underwent such an onslaught, or lost control of its center, so if nothing else, he was hindering the continued growth of the alien territory while he spent time on the hunt.
But Coop still expected to find a boss monster, treating the Fallen Zone like any other domain. In the past, they always had preliminary kill requirements, so he saw no reason to believe the more calcified version would change the normal conventions, with or without a quest to delineate the rules. Until he learned otherwise, he would trust in his previous experiences.
A single needle passed through the air, penetrating the layers of mists, but failed to find its target, despite being perfectly accurate and seemingly impossible to react to. The projectile collided with a stone beyond the arena with a crunch and splashed a small amount of vivid green acid that glowed in the reddish murk of the Fallen Zone before ineffectively fizzling out.
Coop immediately moved to retaliate, passing through Fog of War like a wraith while keeping his Vaporform skill activated. He translocated along the exact trajectory of the projectile, guided by Presence of Mind, parallel to the edge of the ledge, and moved directly in front of the stealthed monster. He had been anticipating the repeated pattern of timed attacks, and recognized the slight signature of a hidden Insurgent within his personal domain. The monster’s doom was only inches away, and it had no idea.
The combination of Vaporform and Fog of War allowed him to relocate in an instant, essentially Mistjumping without the use of his weapons and armor, cutting out flight times in exchange for limiting his range to the mists themselves. There had been no need to burn large portions of his mana pool on summoning apparitions with Inheritance of the Mists, so he had been free to generously wield his other skills. He found the new combination to be rather terrifying.
When he returned to the physical world, the monster had no time to react before it was lifted off the ground by a one-armed spear thrust. The weapon penetrated its torso from point blank range as Coop manifested from the mists with no warning whatsoever.
The Insurgent’s stealth failed upon receiving critical damage and Coop could see his own reflection as he used his other arm to swing his shield, edge first, and decapitate the vulnerable enemy, sending its triangular head clattering into the trees. He drove the spear toward the ground, smashing the rest of its body, and shattering it into shards of black smoke.
He was still looking down at his kill, glowing in the spotlight of a level while the remaining members of the monster pack appeared, knocked out of their stealth formation by the loss of one of their packmates. They were all standing along the edge of the outcropping, stationary sentries within the misty forest, and all but one was greeted by an ancient phantasmal spearman, leaping from the mists with absolute killing intent.
[You defeated Elite Primal Insurgent (Level 420)]
[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]
[You defeated Elite Primal Insurgent (Level 417)]
[You defeated Elite Primal Insurgent (Level 422)]
…
Compared to his time spent in the Underlayer, the levels were honestly not that bad. Level 487 was his new high water mark thanks to the Insurgents, but some things never changed, and Coop was eager to hit higher echelons. The enemies made up for their relatively sparse numbers with significantly higher levels and elite status, but he had still only gained five levels in a full day of hunting back and forth across the forests. It wasn’t bad, but he was spoiled after his time spent in the underground, where such constant combat would have resulted in several orders of magnitude more kills.
The last survivor of the pack ran, barely registering what had happened and why it had been spared. It crashed into the underbrush as it gained speed before settling into the smooth rapid pace that defined their sleek movements. Coop raised his head, dismissing his notifications as he leaned forward to give chase.
Coop turned the alien hunters into his prey for another full day after, steadily traversing through the Fallen Zone in several southern states. As the red sky continued to darken at the end of the second day of his grind, and third in the domain, he had covered another 500 miles of zigzagging forest on foot, hounding the Primal Insurgents until they led him to the eastern shore of the new Mississippi Sea.
A spear tore from the edge of the darkening forest, ripping through the air with unstoppable momentum as it left the mists behind and entered the open space of a black sand beach. It crossed a hundred yards of empty air before striking its exhausted target. Another Elite Primal Insurgent was impaled by the ethereal weapon. Coop took his time, head on a swivel as he returned to a wide open area, shield manifesting from a swirl of mists that flowed from his position. When he finished the crippled invader off, he was already bracing for the inevitable retaliation.
But the attacks had ceased. Coop was left waiting near the edge of a large body of water, a sleek mechanical alien disintegrating into black dust at his feet. He looked around, noting that the forest had stopped hundreds of yards away from the water, forming a rather ugly stretch that was nothing like the tropical shores he was familiar with. It was a shame for any beach to be in such a state and it immediately made him feel indignant toward the assimilation.
The water was viscous and black while remaining uncannily still. Each slight wave left a thin line of white foam that lingered on the dark sand before the liquid sank beneath the surface, cycling back out into the body of water. To say it was unappealing would be an understatement. It was like an oil spill had polluted the former river.
Coop rubbed his foot on the ground, wondering if calling it sand was even correct. It was more like rich dirt interspersed with smooth round stones, lacking the fine granularity that gave a beach its distinctive appearance. He suspected that the actual substrate had been dragged out from deep underground when mana activated on the planet. The color was strange enough, but he knew there were volcanic beaches out there that were of a similar gradient. It was the lack of anything else that made it particularly unusual.
The vegetation that might linger at the edge of such a river was completely absent, as if the section of land had been scoured clean, all the way up and down the shore. His were the only footsteps that had marred the wavy ripples that spread as far as his eyes could see. There was no evidence of any animals braving the waterfront, seeking a drink in the suspicious water, and he couldn’t see the other side, the opposite coastline appearing too far beyond the horizon.
He propped his spear onto his shoulder, wondering if that was it for the Insurgents. Perhaps the last to flee had no other packs to turn to, and Coop had successfully wiped them out after it led him to a dead end. Unfortunately, defeating thousands of the Elite monsters had only provided a total of ten levels. He wouldn’t have said no to more, greedy for progression as he was, but what he was really looking for was their boss.
“Careful what you wish for.” He reminded himself, glancing toward the setting sun as it painted the sky a crimson red that bled into the surface of the water.
He had time before he needed to chase the horizon and head to Kansas. He considered whether or not he should head back to Neptune’s Bridge to see if defeating so many Insurgents had any immediate effect. He wasn’t sure if an enormous domain like the Fallen Zone would contract at all, even after so many of its core inhabitants were defeated, but grinding had never really failed him, so he remained hopeful. In the worst case scenario, he could return to the edges in order to hunt the weaker regular variants of the Primal Constructs for a few days and see if that led him anywhere.
Coop rested for the moment, enjoying the strange bloody sunset as it crept across the cloudless sky over a blackened sea. It felt like he was standing on the edge of an alien ocean on a completely different planet. The more familiar forest was far behind, and the domain continued to be eerily silent, as if it lacked sufficient atmosphere. There were no crickets or cicadas buzzing in the distance, no frogs chirping, no birds calling. It was just Coop, his spear, and a light fog that always trailed behind.
As Coop appreciated the strange solitude, the inland sea started to bubble. At first it was subtle, far enough from the shore to be unnoticeable, despite the stillness, but the disturbance grew, becoming more violent as the seconds went by. He couldn’t help but laugh. It seemed like he wouldn’t be lonely after all.
The last Elite Primal Insurgent hadn’t led him to a dead end, but rather to the next enemy. Perhaps it would be the Field Boss version of the Insurgents. Coop watched, anticipating a logical escalation to the challenge of the Fallen Zone.
Comments
PikaAndrew
Tftc
Kurt A
I wonder if killing this one will summon an icon of mana
Jarryd
Not for elite variants
Conrad Manaugh
Curious what the boss will be
Sammot
Does he not get a slayer quest for the insurgents?
