Unchosen Champion-Chapter 373: Unsystematic
Coop frantically waved his hand around, silently praying that the key on his finger would be recognized by something hidden within the strange mountain before his mana was entirely ripped from his existence. There was no indication that the alien rock formation was anything but the largest meteorite to ever collide with Earth, but Lyriel insisted that there was more to it than met the eye.
It was her plan that had granted him the access key in the form of a ring, and it was her belief that the mountain of solidified mana was an Ark established by the system for the benefit of the Exiles. She asserted that it could administer a vital antidote that would alter the course of life in the universe.
Whether they liked it or not, with the Eradication Protocol firing up, humanity had become anathema to the galactic order. That meant they had been banished and were on the way to joining the ranks of the Exiles themselves. Supposedly, the Ark represented their chance to rectify the final judgment and modify fate itself.
Lyriel’s confidence had been enough to convince not only Coop but also all of his advisors that her plan was worth exploring. It was the only alternative to simply withstanding the rest of the assimilation with the forces of mana running rampant on the planet. As a result, the Champion of Ghost Reef was conspicuously absent from the island stronghold as the residents weathered yet another grand challenge.
However, the violent mana storm within the Underlayer was enough to dissuade anyone from sustaining full faith in the Avatar of the System. It only took moments before Coop was left with the sense that maybe it would be better for him to get back to the beach. Unfortunately, even then, the thought had come too late.
Lyriel stayed close to him, consciously projecting patience, but Coop could tell she was barely holding back her anticipation with the way she dragged him along. She had not only provided the key, but supplied the plan that promised to end the Eradication Protocol once and for alI. It wasn’t something she had only come up with recently, but a longstanding goal that had become her life’s purpose ever since her own experience with a failed integration. For her, this was the culmination of tens of thousands of years worth of persistent determination and the virtual extinction of her people. Her certainty was completely implacable.
As they burned precious seconds with still no reaction from the so-called Ark, Coop couldn’t help but harbor some doubts toward Lyriel’s plan, thinking maybe desperation had blinded her over time. The crystallized mountain that had crashed into the planet seemed like nothing more than a hunk of rock, large enough that it should have annihilated the planet after it slammed through their atmosphere.
According to the Exiles, it was actually a vessel, and it should respond to the ring that she bound to him after he defeated the third Icon of Mana. Maybe she wanted to believe too much because nothing was happening no matter where he waved his hand.
To Coop, the story seemed like a fairytale that the Exiles shared in order to maintain a shred of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation. He could imagine needing the lifeline as he also faced an eternal future where a fundamental property of the universe was out to get him and everyone he knew.
It was only that he could envision her desperation that he continued to go along with her proposal. Otherwise, he would have been much happier fighting the forces of mana in a more direct manner, with his spear in one hand and shield in the other. They could take his mana over his dead body if they actually managed to take him down.
Still, if he could raise his voice over the storm of mana to double and triple check with Lyriel that she was sure about the mountain, he would have. Unfortunately, the ambient mana within the Underlayer was in such a frenzy, he was lucky to get a glimpse even a few feet beyond his outstretched hands. All he could do was grit his teeth and struggle through. The mana storm was thousands of times more dangerous than on the surface.
The violent energy raged in his ears and clawed at his body, ripping away his ethereal manifestations in mere seconds after they first appeared, forcing him to confront the scouring intensity with his bare skin. If the system continued to provide a numerical value to his mana pool, he was sure it would read zero with no hope of regeneration. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised to discover a debt placed upon the resource, one that threatened to chew through his health like the overuse of an Inheritance.
He had personally witnessed the way the tremendous nugget of solidified mana representing Lyriel’s Ark flew through the atmosphere before it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico on the day of the assimilation. The only clue that it might be synthetic was that it hadn’t cracked Earth in half when it penetrated the crust and embedded itself deep beneath the bottom of the ocean. It extended so far down, it appeared within the Underlayer and continued thousands of miles below the surface. Like the civilization shards that had accompanied it on what seemed like a long journey through space, mana had softened the blow, though both were unlike the mana seeds that broke off and crash landed where they independently formed mana wells.
Coop was no expert in geology, whether on Earth or in space, but even up close, the mountain seemed like a natural formation. It lacked the type of deliberate structure that might indicate it was created with a specific purpose in mind, but Lyriel firmly gripped his wrist as they slowly circled the enormous outer perimeter in search of an entrance. She was vehement that something would happen even without vocalizing her thoughts.
There was no symmetry or sign that some intelligence had designed anything beneath the rocky surface. It really just seemed like the system had taken the equivalent of a celestial-sized boulder and tossed it through space. With the way the energy in the Underlayer was roaring, he really doubted he would survive a full lap around the perimeter, and that was assuming such an entrance would have lined up perfectly with the Underlayer. To him, it seemed just as likely to be thousands of feet above the ground or buried deep beneath the dirt.
The world’s mana rushed and flowed around them, like it was trapped within the tunnels and forced to seek an escape valve to relieve the pressure. As a result, the individual chasms that connected the underground to the surface had become fonts of overactive energy, exploding onto the surface like broken fire hydrants. Their contribution enhanced the haze that covered the planet and would probably transform the whole world into an equally corrosive place if given enough time.
For Coop, being immersed in the corrupting energy felt like his bare skin was being sandblasted while he struggled to wield the overwhelming power of a particularly ponderous Inheritance. His soul, his essence, or whatever it was that represented the connection with mana felt like it might shatter, taking his existence with the fragments as they scattered with the wind. Even with the Purification Chip’s buff, inoculating him against the corrupting effect, it was genuine torture to spend a single moment within the torrent.
It seemed like Lyriel’s vaccine only reduced the deleterious effect of mana, instead of completely shielding from it. Taking the pressure down a notch so that it was easier for individuals to withstand was valuable, but in the Underlayer, the mana was turned up to 100. Bringing it down to 99 hardly provided any alleviation. Compared to the surface, where the atmosphere was at a three and bringing it down to a two was a significant change, or within Lighthouse territory where it was already reduced to a one, there was barely any difference for Coop in the Underlayer.
He lamented that the protection they had been granted wasn’t absolute, dreaming of a complete immunity against the storm. It was no wonder the Protocol so effectively eliminated species deemed unfit to integrate into the galactic community. It enacted a completely unfair passive advantage that was effective all on its own.
Coop managed to keep it together by focusing on the way his individual muscles moved. He established a simple exercise where he concentrated on moving and flexing, starting from his toes, moving to his ankles, calves, and up his body, down to the tips of his fingers, then back around. It wasn’t something he could really explain, but it was kind of like reminding the mana that he had accumulated who was boss.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Essentially, he was actively manipulating the effect of his Mindbender title as a form of controlled conscious meditation. After so much practice, grinding and fighting, the only person that was surprised with his proficiency over his personal mana was himself.
The whole struggle revealed more about the relationship between mana, the system, the galactic community, and all of its members and non-members. He distracted himself from the pain and the task by doing his best to make sense of everything.
His conclusion was that all the Strength that he had gathered wasn’t really magic, but learned behavior as his actual muscles adjusted to the presence of mana and he adapted to utilizing the malleable force. It was through his actions that he had acquired the energy; it wasn’t some gift to be withdrawn at the whim of an external power. The same was true for all of his stats, his skills, and even the titles that had decorated his adventures. This was the ultimate, barely-kept secret of the system that truly separated the Exiles from the galactic community. The system was not a higher power.
The whole time he had progressed, everything was presented in the wrong direction to give the system more credit than it deserved. When the system applied the Dauntless title, it wasn’t granting him the exact damage bonus against future bosses that it delineated, it was revealing the bonus acquired by specific accomplishments and assigning a value relative to everything else within its realm. It wasn’t dictating the new reality with mana, it was calculating it.
If there hadn’t been a readily available magical explanation, Coop might have recognized the improvement in his performance as simple confidence wrought from actual, lived experience. The second boss was always going to be easier than the first due to his improved familiarity and the self-confidence that developed at the same time. In other words, practice makes perfect, even with mana in play.
To take the theory another step further, Coop suspected that he wasn’t exactly gaining stats from the Slayer titles either. He was actually training his body or mind to use the mana in ways that represented the equivalent leaps forward. Diversifying his opponents added to the breadth of his experience and extensive repetition perfected his actions. The rewards had been the fruits of his own labor rather than prizes bestowed by an inscrutable god-like entity. Somehow, for his personal preferences, that made the progression even more meaningful. It never needed to be wrapped up so that the system could regift his own bounty.
It seemed like if he thought about it, he could explain most things with genuine progress as opposed to gifts provided by the system, and everything else could be attributed to the omnipresence of mana. All the magic was just their growing comprehension of different ways to manipulate mana. All the stats were different layers of mana resonance, internal, external, physical, or mental.
So, how did his spatial storage work? The items were broken down and rebuilt by mana, a record of their existence stored within his mana pool. What about Apparitions and Phantasms? They were also entities, ideas, characters, and people, artificial or not, that had been recorded in mana and given a new existence, or made real by mana itself. Universal language? Shared information.
The system seemed more like a catalogue that provided values to everything indexed by mana, explaining an existence with mana through numbers and labels. It was superfluous to their actual lived experience.
At least that was Coop’s working theory. It wasn’t like he knew what he was talking about, and he couldn’t begin to answer why the system was there or to what end it took control of their lives, but when his fundamental understanding of reality kept adding new layers, he had no choice other than to go with the flow. In the end, he just wanted to figure out how to make steady progress and avoid stagnation.
It actually frustrated him that even though he had sought specifically outlined paths of progression provided by the system, he may have just been cultivating mana himself. He supposed the customized skill offerings made more sense when it was understood as the system twisting itself to match his own faculties, but it was the deception that he didn’t appreciate. The actual truth might have enabled him to optimize his progression even further.
It felt like he had been tricked, though in the moment, he couldn’t think of anything he specifically would have done differently. It wasn’t like they hadn’t figured out that the system was clearly riddled with imperfections while certain measures of progression made little sense. When his class level reset, he had barely been weakened at all, and the actual difference could have been explained by his own mental blocks, like how a lack of confidence might prevent a fully committed movement, weakening the impact.
Maybe he should be thankful that he had gone through that experience of re-leveling, since as result, the Eradication Protocol barely phased him. He knew many others had struggled with what felt like having the rug pulled out from under them, but for Coop it was almost business as usual, just with a bit more conscious effort in some of his more supernatural skills as he replicated the pathways necessary to establish magical effects.
There were groups among the residents of Ghost Reef who were performing actual sorcery with mana, projecting their power through invisible connections that he barely understood. Charlie in particular actually demonstrated an increase in potency after the system expelled them all, able to wield concentrations of mana that couldn’t even exist before the Eradication Protocol began. Perhaps that revealed even more about the specific role the system played in the regulation of mana.
She exemplified an alternative to Coop’s grind-based internalization of power, focused more on expanding on the mastery of mana beyond accumulation. She may have been overshadowed by Coop’s levels, thanks to the existence of system leaderboards, but she might actually be a prodigy with spells.
She wasn’t the only one that had already been adapting to life without the system before it was lost, feeling more like it was limiting them than enabling their skills. The core residents of Ghost Reef were already pushing the bounds of mana and the system in order to add to the combined research into their new reality. Many of them suddenly felt as though the shackles that had restricted them had been lifted, like they weren’t being judged by a standardized test any longer and could finally reveal their actual unique expertise.
Of course, Lyriel was already proof of concept when it came to existing without the system. Losing access was obviously not the end, though her perspective was difficult to understand, considering her practical worship of the system and those she believed created it.
For comparison’s sake, while Coop struggled with the erosive Underlayer mana, Lyriel just blasted her aura, filtering the corrosive mana before it reached her delicate skin, making it seem like she existed inside of a narrow bubble of calmed atmosphere. She was more in-line with Charlie’s mastery over mana than his own. It appeared to be a more elegant solution than his, but Coop powered through. He may not have been as elegant, but he wouldn’t be outdone.
The Soul Shroud proved to be absolutely essential for visualizing space within the Underlayer. Without it, Coop would have been completely blind, like trying to walk through a crimson hurricane-blizzard combination, but even with it equipped, it only encompassed a bubble extending a few arm lengths away. He couldn’t imagine attempting to actually use his eyes in the torrent of corrosive power unless he wanted to lose them.
Of course, he recognized that this was Lyriel’s plan all along, having helped design the features of his Unique item with this scenario in mind. She knew mana would be in a frenzy and she knew that they would be fumbling around in the Underlayer, rotating around the mountain in an effort to make it one step further toward her ultimate goal.
Lyriel abruptly stopped them both and it took Coop a full five seconds before he realized why. The outer crust of solidified, stone-like mana on the mountain had developed a deep fissure. Tiny chunks were breaking off, disintegrating in the abrasive wind, and turning into equally diminutive puffs of smoke as the mana changed the discarded exterior material from solid to gas.
The deterioration escalated until a miniature landslide was built. Boulders tore from the surface, causing Coop to step back, though none of the debris stayed solid long enough to hit the ground. As soon as any portion lost connection from the rest of the formation, it lost its cohesion, and dissipated like a defeated monster manifestation in the flow of mana.
When the last layers fell inward, Lyriel finally let him go, rushing inside the freshly formed cavern ahead of him. Coop followed one step behind into the darkness, eventually passing through what felt like an invisible membrane that wobbled for a moment with the disturbance. At first the barrier clung to him like a plastic film, but his momentum carried his body forward, leaving the pliable sheet to reform behind him, though he never felt so clean afterwards.
Then, he froze in the darkness, holding his breath and wondering what exactly he was getting into.
