Unchosen Champion
Chapter 389: Progress

Dozens of levels up the spiraling tower, another bout of violence intruded on the cold interior of the Ark. The assault extended a growing chain of continuous fighting, rising from the depths of the tower, showing no sign of stopping. Where most of the Ark was calm, quiet, with only the oozing substrate within each hexagonal cell shifting colors, the clashing disturbance on the tower was loud and conspicuous. It mirrored the stream that rose from the bedrock, climbing the floors with only one inevitable destination.

Coop had already lost track of the exact number of levels they had crossed. He considered the broad strokes irrelevant as he focused on absorbing the specific details of each individual demonic opponent as they went. He was sure they had crossed more than fifty levels, but probably less than a hundred, where each was a full circuit around the spiral with six distinct sections, five of which they skipped.

The actual number of levels didn’t matter to him. Even a thousand would have just been the start, considering the gargantuan scale of the tower. No matter how he looked at it, they had an enormous amount of ground to cover, but he only had reaching the end in mind, regardless of the distance. Anything less would be the same as failure and failure was extinction.

Coop targeted a Molten Golem with Depth Charge, aggressively initiating a mass fight against the escalating number of demonic monsters with the pulling ability he earned on the Path of the Abyss. His actions were boosted by a bit of momentum as the Champion gradually proved his worth and settled into properly climbing the tower. He was actively embracing the escalating challenge with each match. Even as he forged a routine, he made subtle iterations to increase his efficiency, resisting the Ark’s effort to impede their progress with improvements to himself and his party.

As the number of enemies increased, the already rare opportunities for any kind of break were effectively eliminated, but he adapted, finding a rhythm that ultimately bolstered his march to the top. Only he would be enthusiastic about pushing himself to the brink of his skills and barely scraping by, only for the reward to be an even greater challenge, but that’s what had placed him in the position to be the one facing such an ordeal in the first place. It was what had come to define the Revenant class.

The Ark’s internal response, like everything else designed by the original Exiles, seemed to have a fundamental flaw borne by its presumption of the hierarchy of power. It was only allocating the exact resources necessary to overcome the intruders, as if it would be impossible to overcome some calculated upper extreme.

Any minor success was the consequence of Coop pushing himself to the edge of his ability, recognizing that anything less on his part would be insufficient. Even at his current best, he might eventually be inadequate, but that only drove him to strive for more before he smashed into his ceiling. He had to be slightly better with every action to avoid discovering any potential roadblocks in his potential.

He smashed the lava-veined stone monster that had become his target with all of his ponderous strength, completely lacking the mental blocks that might hold a person back from going all out after repeatedly training himself to fight unconditionally. The action stifled an exhale as his muscles grew taut and his stats shifted, blasting the golem with absurd physical force for his expected level.

When his body absorbed the recoil of the collision, tiny beads of sweat escaped his soaked hair, hissing as they evaporated in the heat coming from the magma blood of the golem. Then he did it again, this time with his feet firmly planted on the ground, smashing his mace into the chest of the monster with even more strength. The second physical blow completed a series of motions that all occurred before the monsters on the platform even identified their prey, beginning with Coop throwing his spear from the previous level.

With a backdrop of yellow hexagonal cells that overwhelmed the deep red, Coop had mistjumped to his thrown spear from far below. He left behind the growing army of pursuing monsters to be dealt with later and flickered through the monochromatic world of mists. When he reappeared, he caught the projectile with it held above his shoulder such that he was facing the platform and already entering another throwing motion.

In a split second, before gravity even started dragging him back down, he selected his target and threw the weapon again. There was no real care in his choice, instead simply searching for the closest sturdy monster variant. This time it happened to be a Molten Golem but the Boxing Golems or even one of the true demon types would have worked just as well.

The moment before the spear collided with the selected enemy, he mistjumped again, placing himself in melee range as he quickswapped to his two-handed mace, and activated the mana pathways that applied his first skill in a combination of attacks. The smash formed a steaming divot in the outer shell of the monster, forcing it backwards while giving his second strike an even more obvious target.

The golem was caught by surprise, milling around with its fellow demonic monsters one moment, then being accosted by a battle hardened Revenant the next. Its only real warning was a burst of mists when an ethereal spear eclipsed the edge of the platform, but it lacked the Agility to properly prepare, regardless if it detected the threat.

The first crushing strike knocked it off-balance, but that was merely the preliminary setup. Coop was employing his combination of Abyssal skills to alter the battlefield in his favor from the get go. The impact put the whole Ark on notice that the fight had climbed to yet another floor.

The force of the heavy two-handed mace crashing into the golem on the second strike was enough to apply the grouping skill across the entire platform of alerted monsters. A dozen Imps were grabbed by the abyssal pull, snatched up and stuck to the surface of the dented and staggering Molten Golem like flies caught on a glue trap. They were the enemies most susceptible to Sunken Grasp, lacking the absolute mass to passively resist being yanked across the platforms.

A surprising number of Hellhounds were also affected, falling as they fought to resist the abrupt force. Their claws scraped against the hexagonal tiles as they scrambled against each other, with the closest groups becoming vulnerable to the overall combo. At this level, the hounds roamed through the crowded platforms in packs, no longer fighting as individuals.

Without the system aiding in the application of skills, Coop’s explosive Depth Charge was slightly less consistent, but it was still the ability he activated first, applying it with the opening smash that baptized the level in combat. The red light that blinked and beeped with increasing intensity before the ultimate explosion was completely absent from his current skill, as establishing the visible element was entirely done by the absent system. The actual delay before the explosion also varied a bit, depending entirely on the package of mana that he applied with his attack, revealing a bit of the underlying process that went into such a skill that was normally automated by the system.

Three and a half seconds after his first strike, and two seconds after Sunken Grasp pulled the entire company of demons with varying degrees of success, the Depth Charge detonated. A cascade of black water and abyssal mana erupted from the Molten Golem, large enough that it annihilated all of the Imps and a handful of the staggered Hellhounds.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

None of the golems other than the initial Molten Golem were eliminated, too heavy to be drawn into range and too sturdy to be killed by anything other than attacks that directly damaged their core, but a second one had been destroyed as Coop swung his weapon around while waiting for the explosion. Two Horned Demons watched on, appearing unimpressed by Coop’s arrival, closer to the center of the tower, as if they were noblemen observing peasants.

With the platform less obstructed, Coop’s two-handed mace morphed into a monstrous greatsword. The hefty weapon was his current solution to closing the gap in power between himself and Horned Demons. At the same time, Lyriel finally arrived, having been holding off the pursuing demons while Coop cleared the landing. The abyssal explosion was her signal to join him.

An airstrike of silvery mana sliced through the air as she gently landed on the edge, crashing into the left Horned Demon while Coop rushed forward toward the rightmost enemy, sword over his shoulder. The general strategy between the Unchosen Champion and the former Avatar of the System had slowly developed such that they both already knew their roles well.

The shortcuts they had sought by skipping multiple levels had ended in failure, further complicating their journey so that Lyriel was forced into accepting the grind by his side. There were transparent membranes above each level that actually blocked their paths if they tried to jump beyond a single rotation of the tower.

The membranes were one-way barriers, allowing them to pass through from the top without even noticing they were there, but when approached from the bottom, they were solid enough that multiple spear throws hadn’t been enough to even reveal them to sight, let alone destroy them. He suspected those membranes were what had kept the panopticon construction of the Ark in shape when the bridges or rings rotated, extending all the way across the vast interior of the vessel, though they might have only become solid to them when Lyriel and Palisteon had their designations changed from visitors to intruders. It seemed like they had to fight at least one section before moving on.

The fact that they weren’t allowed to bypass larger sections of the tower also forced Coop to confront the fights head on, no longer able to look for excuses and shortcuts. They continued to skip what they could, but they both knew that over time, they would end up having to properly confront the other types of monster as well. They put it off for the time being, embracing their growing comfort with the demonic opponents for as long as possible.

When the time came to test the others, Coop suspected it would be easier to hold out on one level and pick off their most basic versions before battling entire platforms worth of novel opponents. He would have raced ahead forever, except it didn’t seem like there would be any end to the increasing density of monsters.

It wasn’t like the Ark lacked reinforcements. As they climbed the tower, the number of monsters just continued to rise. It was to the point that Coop expected the limitations to be entirely physical rather than based on manpower. He summoned a bit of hope thanks to his experience in the Underlayer, defeating massive armies of Elite Primal Constructs. No matter how much they outnumbered him, there were only so many enemies that could engage at once.

On the Ark’s tower, they were further limited by the surface area of the hexagonal platforms. It didn’t seem like the tower would expand itself, though that was still a possibility as they drew further toward the top. He allowed himself to hold onto a bit of optimism. As long as he and Lyriel could defeat some of them, they might be able to take on all of them. That’s why he pushed so hard to reach that point.

In the meantime, as he claimed yet another arena with Fog of War, he was actively investing in Lyriel. The climb wasn’t only an opportunity for himself to gather the necessary experience to establish a grind on the many demon variants. It was also a chance to show his alien comrade that she was amply capable herself, building her confidence so that she wasn’t constantly in a state of panic and aggravation when confronting the forces of mana.

In a way, he knew it might have been a bit cruel to force her to fight, but they didn’t have the luxury of being conscientious. Instead, while his Fog of War spread and phantasms joined him, she wielded her mana with a complicated expression on her face. He silently encouraged her, hoping to essentially level up his companion for the times ahead.

Her opening strike slammed the left Horned Demon with enough force that it folded forward, unable to withstand the raw power. One of its blackened horns snapped off in the ensuing beam, the broken portions disintegrating into black particles that were consumed by her silvery energy. Its skin tore off in strips before it recovered its composure and stomped forward and the energy beam faded.

She followed her opening strike with a cascade of similar blasts, each coming straight down. Golems and Hellhounds fell victim to what had only crippled the Horned Demon. She managed to destroy more enemies than Coop had with his Depth Charge and Sunken Grasp combination with a single volley of top down barrages of pure energy.

He clenched his jaw, acknowledging her easy power as something he could only recreate under specific circumstances with his most powerful skills or enhancements. As his greatsword clashed with the demon’s claw, sending a shower of sparks through the mists, and three different phantasms landed their own coordinated attacks, he thought he might not actually be that far off from the former Avatar. Give him another few thousand levels and he’d be right there with her, his basic attacks matching her massive expenditures of mana. That was way closer than the system assumed, considering she had closer to one hundred thousand levels than the few thousand he envisioned acquiring himself.

Coop grinned in the middle of his fight, spinning as the demon lashed out, transitioning his narrow dodge into a horizontal strike. The demon lowered its elbow to avoid absorbing the attack with its torso, but at the same time another three phantasms leapt in from the opposite side, each wielding their own massive greatswords.

The trick with the surprisingly perceptive Horned Demons was as basic as any of the other demons. All he needed to do was strike them with simultaneous assaults. They always defended what seemed like the most dangerous attack, which usually ended up being his own, but that let at least one phantasm land their own opening strikes before they were countered by passive fire damage.

The greatsword simply provided the most damage in a single attack, reducing the number of individual strikes they had to slip through before the demon was weakened and defeated. Lyriel still destroyed hers first, also wiping out twice as many of the remaining lesser demons while Coop dueled with his Horned Demon, but the difference wasn’t as much as he would have expected.

The scary thing about her proficiency was that it all already existed. Unlike Coop, who was constantly trying to learn and adapt, progressing in every possible manner, she was simply exposing the layers of power already accumulated. She had to conquer the thoughts that made her hesitate, overcome lingering fears, control the constant state of desperation that burdened her soul, and shed the doubt of her position, but she was already incredibly strong.

It was a slow, painful process of rediscovery on her part. Coop had already witnessed setbacks, moments where old fears surfaced, threatening to push her back down into the spiral of self-recrimination and guilt that she carried in her psyche for those that had been lost. They were engaging with the exact same monsters that had killed her entire species, all sacrificing themselves on her behalf, before she ultimately lost her whole planet. Coop felt like he had no right to shame her as she struggled through layers of doubt, instead quietly supporting her and encouraging her successes.

Palisteon chirped, mewed, and squeaked at her, probably a better emotional support companion than Coop could ever be. Instead Coop avoided judging, demonstrated his trust by fighting alongside her, and together they all took steps forward, climbing the tower one step at a time.