JaceVAmor
patreon
Chapter 188: Firefighting
🕑 Added 2024-01-24 16:11:01 +0000 UTCCoop double-checked the temple at the top of Huracan’s pyramid, seeking hidden loot that may have been squirreled away within. He wouldn’t be a proper scavenger if he left anything of value behind, but there was nothing that immediately caught his attention.
The High Priest had created a modest throne room with a crudely forged seat opposite the main shrine entrance and little else. Other than the snuffed out living flame suspended in an oversized black stone brazier above the pit full of ashes, there were no other furnishings. The walls contained a series of worn patterns that Coop was sure would be extremely interesting to Jones if he were there, but Coop couldn’t make heads or tails of the message they sought to display, and they were from an era that was long gone. There wasn’t even a chest hidden behind the throne.
Shrugging as he turned to leave, slightly disappointed that he hadn’t discovered any treasures accumulated by the High Priest, he took a closer look at the hanging brazier. He was considering whether he should take it with him so that he wouldn’t be leaving empty handed. The brazier might make a decent reward. It would probably fit inside the lightroom of the lighthouse if he wanted something more antique to house the Spectral Relic.
When he pulled the hanging ornament closer, he found something rattling around inside. When Coop scooped the culprit up, excited to see what he found, he was surprised to find a large quartz-like gemstone, almost the size of his hand. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that it was another large, uncut Unique relic called the Seed of Wind. Coop admired the stone for a moment, letting it sit in his palms, watching swirls of gray flow inside the clear surface. Huracan had been using the relic to feed the now snuffed out flames.
He didn’t have a quest to retrieve the relic, but he still imagined what it would have been like to collect an obviously wind themed item instead of the stone with ethereal affinity. If Ghost Reef had Charlie as Champion, and she completed the first bonus objective, they might have ended up with an unending protective storm instead of phantoms.
Coop nodded with satisfaction as he checked his status, happy that he had been properly rewarded with loot.
[Status]
HP - 14520/14520
MP - 8249/27540
Class - Revenant (Level 177)
Profession - Scavenging (Level 131)
Affinity - Spectral
Race - Human (Rank 1)
Faction - None
Strength - 75 (+2754)
Agility - 75 (+1377)
Body - 75 (+1377)
Mind - 2295 (+459)
Intelligence - 75 (+2754)
Acumen - 75 (+1377)
Unallocated - 0
Titles - Champion III, Haunted, Ethereal, Reaper, Slayer VII, Dauntless, Stacked, Defiant, Siegebreaker, Mindbender
Skills (Active) - Invocation, Fog of War, Presence of Mind, Vaporform
Skills (Passive) - Mind Over Matter, Adamance, Practical Application, Arcane Comprehension, Clarity of Purpose
Quests - Fortune Seeker (18/50), Upgrade Town to City
Basic Credits - 6,218,155
Coop was still managing to make some pretty consistent progress, even when many of his normal activities provided him with diminished experience. Grinding monsters without Slayer quest lines could have been better if the monsters were equal to his level, but defeating a ridiculous number of Elite Ruin Nebulas had still added a few more levels to his total, in spite of the frequent experience gap between himself and the lower leveled monsters.
However, more than half of his progress had come from killing the High Priest of Chakyum. Coop shook his head as he considered where the experience he gained had ultimately come from and found himself a bit unhappy with the progress. He wanted to deal with Chakyum sooner than later, so that he could get back to hunting monsters exclusively, regardless of any diminished experience gains he would suffer.
On the bright side, he had a new skill and he was earning plenty of credits during the Yucatan expedition. Vaporform was his newest active skill, joining the likes of Presence of Mind which gave him the ability to manipulate and detect auras, his primary area of effect skill in Fog of War, and his combined summoning skill, Invocation. Retribution and Salvation, his original active skills, had been upgraded with Legacy of the Mists and Inheritance of the Mists, respectively. They had evolved from simple skills that manifested his ethereal weapons and armor to also have the ability to summon phantasms and apparitions. With their additional features, the system merged them into Invocation.
The Revenant passive skills included abilities that covered five of the six primary attributes. Mind Over Matter added one bonus point to Body for every two points in his Mind stat. It also had the additional effect of reducing his health damage by 50% and applying it to mana damage instead and had been the very first key defensive piece in his build. Without Mind Over Matter he wouldn’t be nearly the juggernaut that he had become, but sometimes it caused him some problems. It would always be a large source of pressure on his mana pool, and if it wasn’t for Practical Application relieving some of the strain on his resources, Coop’s road would have been much more difficult.
Practical Application also converted half of his Mind into another stat, this time Agility, but it had the bonus effect of reducing the mana cost of active skills as his mastery with those skills grew. Practical Application essentially broke the limit on the more basic skills that had flat mana costs, decreasing the cost one mana at a time as he repeatedly used the abilities. Mistjumping the way he did would have been impossible without thousands of repetitions reducing the resource cost to nothing, and summoning phantasms would be similarly freed from the constraint of mana soon enough. Legacy of the Mists, the upgrade that summoned phantasms, was down to nearly half of its original 500 mana cost after the long grind sessions on Elite Ruin Nebulas in the jungle.
Clarity of Purpose gave one point of Acumen for every two points in Mind, and also granted his attacks the ability to ignore a minor portion of his opponent’s defense, stacking with each strike. On an individual basis, the passive effect was underwhelming compared to the other two examples, but combined with the influence of Mindbender’s shifting bonus stats, Clarity of Purpose’s armor shred meant that nothing would stand against Coop’s pummeling for long. Even the most robust opponents would find themselves exposed to his attacks.
In a way, Clarity of Purpose was the most similar to Practical Application’s mana reduction. A reduction of a single point of mana was useless, but eventually it added up. The same could be said about ignoring armor. Coop just needed opponents that could withstand enough attacks for Clarity of Purpose to make itself felt, though that wasn’t something he felt comfortable wishing for. At this stage in the assimilation it was rare for fights to be as drawn out as even the duel with Huracan, but that didn’t mean there weren’t sturdy opponents lurking out there. Coop was a walking example of someone who would be exposed by abilities that could ignore defense, but if he ever let someone hit him enough times to stack a debuff like that, he’d have even more problems.
Adamance and Arcane Comprehension were the final two passive skills and they were the simplest. Each lacked a secondary component, fully investing into adding bonus stats to their respective attributes instead. Adamance added one point of Strength for every single point in Mind, and Arcane Comprehension did the same for Intelligence. Given that both stats were primarily contributing to raw damage, Coop was happy for them to be hyper focused on their one purpose.
The only attribute that lacked a passive skill was his most important stat of all: Mind. Every single point he had been able to assign, since the very beginning of the assimilation, had gone into Mind. The single minded investment had been crucial for his success. Going forward, if Coop was going to continue punching above his weight class, it would be essential to continue on the path that he started with his earliest choices. Otherwise, he would need enough downtime to try to make up for lost time investing in a different direction, and considering the way the assimilation was going, he doubted a slowdown was in the cards.
As he exited the threshold of the temple atop the pyramid, he tested Vaporform, confident that it wouldn’t have an adverse impact on him as he traveled, unlike a certain Inheritance skill.
The effect was instantaneous. Coop’s vision warped, suddenly pitching him into nothingness. He imagined a pulse of ghostly energy that shot out from his feet, gliding across every surface,tracing their outlines as it extended into a hazy distance, and revealing details for him to perceive at the speed of light.
“Woah…” Coop attempted to mumble, surprised by the unexpected transition to what he was ready to christen ghost vision, but no sound came out.
Rather than the typical turquoise that Coop had come to associate with his ethereal abilities, the pulse had been closer to a blueish gray, sweeping the natural color out of whatever it touched. Aside from the color difference, the motion reminded him of the times that he summoned the phantoms to Ghost Reef, just faster. The blue-gray line swept outwards, outlining the edges of the pyramid and expanding into the valley and up the walls, revealing everything as it moved.
The entire pulse only lasted a split second, the time it took for him to blink, behaving more like a radar ping than the waves of magical energy Coop had witnessed before, but the end result was something that he was certainly familiar with. It was the representation of the world when he was transitioning between points when he teleported with one of his mistjumps. He realized that the aesthetic was a natural result of his senses compensating for a physical change and representing the world through a different lens, as if Presence of Mind was the only way he had ever detected his environment.
Everything was engulfed by the mist. Everything. And now he was mist.
Coop was standing at the top of the primary steps, in the same place where Huracan had looked down upon him. However, the world was washed out and gray. Coop had entered the monochromatic world of mists and it wasn’t just a fleeting visit while he effectively teleported. The pulse that he had witnessed was merely his senses adapting to the change. At least, he believed it was his senses influenced by Presence of Mind, maybe it would be better to think of it as his soul, but that made him uncomfortable.
When he caught a glimpse of his arm, his neck almost snapped as he whipped it down to look at himself. He actually was a ghost. In fact, he looked almost identical to the way his phantasms appeared in the real world: misty and ethereal. It was like he had crossed a threshold into their mirror dimension. A spirit world that existed on top of the regular world.
He deactivated Vaporform and everything returned to normal in another instant, with the color returning from the outside edge of his vision inward until it reached his own body. The change had been so abrupt, it was almost as though the misty dimension was a figment of his imagination.
He tested it again.
The change occurred in the blink of an eye, but it was undeniable that he stood atop a smoky pyramid in a monochromatic world of grays that extended beyond the horizon. The cloudless sky was a hazy sea of pale swirls and slow currents, and the horizon faded as if he was standing within the thinnest Fog of War he could manage, wrapping the entire world. While it was different from the all-encompassing knowledge of his personal domains, it was still something more than his regular senses, like his aura was more in-tune with his surroundings than normal. Since it was still night time, he could actually see further in the abnormal realm, like he had a spiritual night vision.
The mana cost of Vaporform wasn’t too bad either, behaving like a small drain on his total resource while he lingered in the alternate world. There was no upfront cost, so Coop’s idea of using the skill as a defensive utility seemed like it would be achievable, even ideal. Instead of taking hits that he couldn’t avoid, whether because he was unable to dodge or couldn’t block, he would now have another option to essentially transform his body into an incorporeal form that allowed the attack to pass through before he returned to his solid form. If he wasn’t slippery enough before, he would certainly be closer with the new skill.
Of all the skills he had acquired, he felt like Vaporform might actually be the craziest. Most of the others were simple things once he accepted that a form of magic existed, but Vaporform was changing him on a fundamental level that he didn’t really understand. Coop shuddered as strange ideas regarding the essence of self involuntarily flooded his mind.
“It’s fine. It’s fine.” He consoled himself, trying to avoid panicking. “I’m still me.” He confirmed, staring at the palms of his hands as if they would confirm it to be true. They did. Sort of. Someone more zen than he was might have felt like they were becoming one with the universe, but for him, losing himself was mostly scary. He clenched his fists and did his best to move on by distracting himself with the skill itself.
Toggling the skill on and off barely registered on his mana pool, but leaving it on for an extended period of time eventually consumed enough to force him back out. The drain escalated as time went on. The resource cost of the skill wasn’t something that would impact him in combat, but if he wanted to use it for other purposes, like reconnaissance for example, he would need to be mindful of his resources. In a way, he ended up getting a stealth skill as well, something he had wanted at the start, but had abandoned the idea in favor of applying Fog of War for a more active camouflage.
While he took in the scenes, flipping the skill back and forth and developing some level of comfort with the changes that occurred each time he swapped between dimensions, he noticed a flickering light in the distance. When he deactivated his skill and looked in the same direction, he could clearly see orange and red illumination against the dark horizon that crawled up the next set of hills outside the valley. The light had been hidden by the first set of rocky outcroppings around the valley, but now had extended far enough to climb up the next group of hills.
Coop’s eyebrows shot up as he realized what he was seeing. The savannah was burning. Of course it was, Coop thought. He had just battled with a man who claimed to be the God of fire. As Coop’s spear formed in his hand, he had already committed to rectifying the consequences of their fight.
He let his spear fly, planning on putting the fire out before it burned its way across the entire region. Dry as it was, a fire would find plenty of fuel. For now, it hadn’t spread very far, growing from hot embers that had floated far enough away from the valley to ignite grasses at the edge of the High Priest’s area of influence. The pine savannah would burn quickly, so it was urgent for him to smother the flames before the fire really got out of control.
When he mistjumped adjacent to the erratic line of flames, he found that it was both thinner and much larger than expected, covering a wide swath of the hill and extending all the way around the temple as it spread in all directions. The dry grasses of the pine savannah were perfect kindling for a fire to sweep across the lands, and the lack of thick vegetation meant that the dry breezes were only obstructed by the low-grade hills, remaining strong enough to fan the flames with a consistent current of air as they leapt forward in short bursts of popping ignition.
Coop spent the rest of the night, fighting the flames with his battle axe. The flames weren’t his normal enemies, but like most of the obstacles he had run into, they were also defeatable through brute force. Aside from smothering the burning embers by simply smashing them like the genius he was, he eventually settled on creating enormous fire breaks ahead of the flames. The excavations he established would have been a monumental effort to properly dig, but Coop utilized his Strength to repeatedly blast craters into the sandy ground as if he was grinding invisible monsters. Everything was easier when he put his head down and took action. It was the perfect salve for the small existential crisis his new ability had generated.
The sun rose while Coop worked, sweating and focused. Morning came and went while Coop carved an enormous sandy ring in the savannah, in between the rolling slopes of the hills, with Huracan’s temple pyramid in the exact center. By the afternoon, somehow, Coop’s amateur project had worked. Thanks exclusively to his tireless effort and not because it was a particularly well-developed strategy, he succeeded in preventing a wildfire from ravaging the land. The inside of his ring was burned, but the outside remained a unique habitat of pines and yellow grasses. He sighed, wiping soot from his forehead with the back of his hand, only managing to create a thicker smudge as he summoned his spear and prepared to leave the place behind.
He figured that as soon as he left, a lightning strike would start a natural fire that would burn the rest of the grassy savannah. In a way, it was the same issue he had with trying to save the whole planet versus just those that were in Ghost Reef. He couldn’t be everywhere and do everything, so he compromised by just doing his best.
All in all, the black mark on the otherwise undisturbed environment wasn’t so bad. If anything, the flames might have helped cleanse the area of the Cult of Chakyum’s footprint, letting all of the fire-adapted species reclaim the region with a fresh start. They had been suppressed by the excessive ancient mana that had saturated the valley, pushing them away from the fire God’s temple. The massive concentration of mana had been enough to leak into the entire habitat, detectable by Amanda and Mikey B even from a great distance. When Coop first entered, it had caused him some discomfort, but ever since the High Priest was defeated and the living flame was snuffed out, the atmosphere had been trending back to normal.
Coop nodded to himself happily, feeling like he had been a responsible person, restoring the area to the best of his abilities, and the ground rumbled in response. While he looked over the valley, a fountain of raw energy shot into the sky from deep below the foot of the pyramid. The rumbling continued, sounding a bit too much like a roar instead of rock and stone. Coop’s shoulders slumped.
“Seriously?” He muttered, flabbergasted that things kept chaining one after the other.
He really thought he had properly avoided triggering additional boss fights after the living flame was snuffed out without any further action, but then he went and drew what he imagined would end up seeming like a giant summoning circle on the land and let the center burn.
Coop raised his arms and stretched his back, before taking a deep breath and resetting. The charred smell of burnt wood inundated his senses, but had the desired effect. He couldn’t just leave whatever development was occurring without at least taking a look. He nodded to himself, and threw his spear back at the temple, planning on utilizing the elevated vantage point to determine what was up while giving him an easy path of retreat if necessary. Hopefully, whatever it was would be quick.
When Coop arrived at his destination he was met with an unusual scene. The valley was completely obscured by disturbed sand, suspended in the air like a storm had lifted all the loose grains, but it was almost completely motionless. Coop felt as though he was observing another version of Fog of War, except it was composed of sand and dust rather than his mists. The cloud lingered in the valley giving no sign that the sandstorm would settle.
It hadn’t been so long that Coop had forgotten the hard-packed sand. It was baked together by who knows how many years of dry heat and even when he fought Huracan, who was utilizing superheated gusts of wind, most of the grains were hardly disturbed. The whole valley bed was more like brittle concrete than a beach, but something was disrupting the environment in a unique way.
Coop concentrated on Presence of Mind, unwilling to personally venture down the steps of the pyramid and investigate. For a few moments, he just stared at the curtains of fine golden sand, as it slowly billowed around the valley, like a cloud moseying across the landscape. There was nothing to detect, as far as he could tell.
He tried Vaporform, but quickly realized that wasn’t the skill’s purpose. The world of mists wasn’t a special domain like the one created by Fog of War. It was just the regular world seen through a different lens, one that Coop had only brushed against while mistjumping and summoning skills. The actual change was with occuring with himself, not the world.
He toggled the skill off and frowned, unsure about how to proceed. The fact that the strange weather pattern had settled in after tremors shook the ground and a pillar of magical energy had shot into the sky meant that he felt like he couldn’t just ignore it. Something had caused this event, and unless he was imagining things, it had roared like some kind of earthen dinosaur. As much as he would have believed this phenomenon was a result of his firefighting, he knew that it was something else that had been simmering for longer than a single day. Now that it had boiled over, he needed to determine what it was, or at least figure out how threatening it would be.
The rocky hills that bordered the valley had cracked, proof that he hadn’t imagined the quaking, leaving crumbling rocks to slowly bounce down until they were swallowed by the sand cloud, disappearing silently as they dropped. Then, while he watched the dust and debris, a single wing emerged, extending beyond the top of the obscuring sand formation, somewhere between a bat’s wing and a reptile’s webbed fingers, with long nails at the end of ribs that supported the leathery surface. Coop finally received some feedback from Presence of Mind in his aura search, and his frown deepened.
[Siege Boss: Inevitable Conclusion (Level 175)]
[Shadows of Time]
[Icon of Mana]
Comments
Ethan Crittenden
Wouldn’t his profession be scavenger not scavinging
Amadhe
Yes, yes. I really appreciate the time you took to explain Coops Skills and Status in this chapter. It was getting a bit confusing and I did spent at least twenty minutes attempting to memorize his current status for the future. I think the part that confused me most was that Invocation is now composed of Retribution and Salvation. I must've missed the merge message somehow. Just to further clarify, the Inheritance Skill is also part of Invocation, right? I think the two that probably contributed the most to my confusion was definitely the upgrades from Legacy of the Mists and Inheritance of the Mists. They upgrade the abilities, but aren't on the Status itself (and we've seen it in the past as well) and so I think that's where my confusion initially began. With Legacy, I just began attributing it's effects to one of the other skills, but got confused since I half-remembered it was a separate upgrade. Anyways, thanks for the chapter and happy to see another Icon. I imagine Coop as Tai Lung in the picture linked below: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwyqhmv6s7y041.png
DuskDeadman
New icon, let's gooooo
