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Chapter 371: Favoritism
🕑 Added 2025-04-16 15:11:01 +0000 UTCRamona Rojas was tussling with intensifying doubts regarding her assignment. She couldn’t help but ask herself if the leaders of the Lighthouse really knew what they were doing.
She had to admit that they had been completely validated by the start of the Eradication Protocol, and the time leading up to the pronouncements had been extraordinarily productive such that she was happy to have placed her trust in them, but that only accounted for so much credibility. When the consequences of their inadequacy was extinction of the human race, any perceived deficiencies were that much more conspicuous.
She subtly shook her head, unsure if she really wanted to judge their competence. A negative result would mean that she, and virtually everyone else, had made a huge mistake. The enthusiastic determination that had her reporting to her assigned fleet as soon as the Eradication Protocol began was fading with each passing day, and for one reason in particular: her previously unknown commander.
One of her shard security guards-turned-party members squinted his eyes at her, probably worried that she wasn’t comfortable with the red haze, but before he said anything, he went back to adjusting his gloves, just in case they had to join a fight after all. The mass of cannons took care of most monsters appearing in the open, but every once in a while individual demons caused moments of havoc on the decks before being put down.
After their trans-Atlantic trip, they had sat idle in the North Sea for far too long, just letting the enemies gradually become more dangerous. The stressful inaction had her contemplating the series of events that concluded with her becoming subordinate to a wisp of a girl.
Ramona had made some difficult decisions based on the advice of the powerful strangers that had first arrived at the base of the rock that protected her civilization shard. Juliana from the Jaguar Sun had already sold her on the Lighthouse by the time Coop showed up to lend them a hand.
The Jaguar Elite had painted him as an absolute force, brave and gracious, but his first impression had been that of an amazed tourist, excited to see what their country had to offer. Afterwards, he had made the apocalyptic invasion of monsters seem like a complete triviality, exuberantly clearing a path through an entire continent. Being in his presence, even temporarily, had been enough to convince her that cooperation would be wise. That he had fallen from the top of the leaderboards hardly mattered to her judgment.
When the more official seeming ambassadors from Ghost Reef started to arrive afterwards, she had more or less determined that the best course forward for all the residents of her settlement was to be absorbed by the much larger and more organized faction, anchored by the Unchosen Champion. She was fully committed before even visiting the island.
The residents of La Piedra had been scraping their way through the assimilation, but they had not excelled the way Coop had. So for their sakes, she had bargained for a safe place in Ghost Reef so that the population could safely transfer. Rather than be subsumed by an oppressive force, they were welcomed into the fold with experts facilitating the transition at every point. They even sent people to help pack and move, making sure that no one was forced to leave anything behind.
At every point, they were surrounded by individuals more powerful than she was. From the ambassadors and diplomats to facilitators, scouts, and guards. The passive demonstration of strength left her and everyone around her impressed. If the Lighthouse was not benevolent, they could have easily conquered just as much of the world as they did through cooperation, if not more.
The training facilities on the island helped her and her people get up to speed in terms of levels, but for the most part her followers were still unremarkable civilians tucked away in one of the many levels of Ghost Reef. The community they had formed still existed, but it was rebuilt within a deceptively spacious underground cavern and sheltered by the efforts of much more powerful individuals.
At the same time, she and the pinnacle warriors that had been holding the settlement together against the alien invaders volunteered to be fast-tracked onto a hardcore elite training path so that they could better contribute to the broader faction. The Lighthouse had aspirations for them all, and they all received equal investment, but because she and her handpicked allies were already ahead, they thought they could contribute more to the faction on their former settlement’s behalf. It was a small exchange that would benefit the faction, but would benefit themselves even more.
Like all the residents, Ramona and the others were equipped with the Ghost Reef Standard Issue armor, and even those like her, who didn’t necessarily wield a weapon to use their skills still had their pick of handcrafted treasures. Over time, her Witchbane class had conformed to her adoption of a sword, offering her new skills as she progressed through the training that had turned her into a wicked fencer.
The many months of persistent routine before the Eradication Protocol began had been a montage of experience gains. They trained, sparred, hunted, rested, then restarted, over and over, almost everyday. They grinded Slayer titles, explored mana wells, and traveled across multiple continents with countless supportive buffs and constant guidance. The plan was to have them gain as much power as was physically possible in order to contend with future dangers that they could barely imagine. They were assigned to a particular group, a small part of an even larger force meant to reinforce specific locations as the future revealed itself, with backup plans, fallback routes, coordination points, and a thousand other schemes that really made them feel like they would be going to war.
Even after all that effort Ramona had barely been in the top 1,000,000 humans by level. Coop was almost 400 levels ahead of her and she was the highest individual to come out of La Piedra.
While their progress had been encouraging, the difference between her and their leaders was also reassuring in its own way. Knowing that even if it came down to it, there were unbelievable talents backing them up was a source of reinforcement.
She hadn’t interacted with Coop a single time since her meeting in La Piedra, when their respective positions were drastically different. After so much time, she almost had trouble melding the memory she had of the kind, ambitious young man, and the almost mythical figure his unique name at the top of the leaderboards conjured up. It was no wonder that rumors of his achievements were akin to legend, spinning unbelievable tales.
Supposedly, he could cause earthquakes with his raw Strength, destroy Siege Bosses with his shadow, and even bring the dead back to life. There were stories that when he stared into the Abyss, it blinked first, that his spear could shatter the planetary shield but he left it for their own sakes, and that there were alien factions lining up to pay him respect. Obviously none of the rumors were remotely true, but the extent of his power had many believing the impossible.
The thing was, even the people overshadowed by the growing folklore surrounding the Unchosen Champion were exceptional to an extreme. All who were a part of the Lighthouse were in good hands. The commanders that had been distributed across the world were each extraordinary in their own right, and many had lore approaching that of Coop by virtue of their personal achievements, abilities, and other qualities. There were paladins, angels, titans, and superheroes in their midst and they all had stories swirling.
That’s why Ramona was dealing with such persistent befuddlement after the Eradication Protocol began. She and her party had been appointed to the flagship of the Tempest Fleet’s sixth armada in support of northern Europe, working directly under its elite veteran commander. The name on the assignment only had a few rumors surrounding her existence, and they were spoken only in hushed whispers because they were not the heroic stories told about basically every other person in the top 1,000 of the leaderboards. All the other leaders had earned the right to stand at the head of such a force, but theirs was a complete unknown.
In fact, the girl hadn’t appeared in the list at all. No matter how many times Ramona had scanned the full catalogue of names before the Eradication Protocol, no one named Irina came close, making it seem like they had some alternate identity that would prove their legitimacy. The mystery of their inscrutable commander had been the source of several whispers leading up to the second apocalypse. Surely, she had a separate identity that had been somewhere near the top.
When they finally met, after the Eradication Protocol began, it was a disappointment. According to the girl herself, she had no preferred nicknames. Calling her Irina was her personal preference, which meant that Ramona couldn’t be sure there wasn’t some mistake that had accidentally made a leader out of someone that should have been supporting others.
To Ramona, it made no sense for a virtual no name person to be assigned such an enormous responsibility and be expected to execute the level of mission that would require the firepower carried by an entire armada. They weren’t meant to sit on the sidelines, they were the big guns. Dangerous and important missions were in their future. Someone as high as the top 25 would have been more appropriate.
Irina was basically a child, easily young enough to have been Ramona’s college-bound daughter. She didn’t even take the threats seriously enough to wear the Standard Issue Armor or carry any of the expertly crafted weapons, opting instead to don a long-sleeved bodysuit beneath a brightly colored sundress as if she was on her way to dance practice instead of war. She kept her long hair in bouncy twin tails held with thin yellow ribbons tied into bows, and despite the apocalypse, had been smiling the entire time with various levels of enthusiasm, like she was chaperoning an elementary field trip to the zoo. Everything about her had Ramona wondering if there was some nepotism at play. Maybe Coop had a sister, but unless he wanted to get rid of her, it still didn’t make sense to send her away from Ghost Reef. Still, it had to have been some kind of favoritism.
If Ramona had a question, she received an encouraging smile from Irina. If she had a report: an excited smile. A complaint? A supportive smile and sincere sympathy. The poor girl was definitely happy to be participating, but Ramona was just as worried about her as everyone else. There were a thousand ships worth of troops following her lead, relying on her strength to be the platform for executing their plans. It was too much to play around with, especially with humanity’s fate hanging in the balance.
When they received their first major orders through the ship’s beacon, Ramona was drawing closer and closer to panic. They were being sent to break a siege that had developed in Poland, but Irina opted to leave the majority of the armada in Odense. When questioned, she had explained it was so that they could move quickly and provide relief as soon as possible, but Ramona had felt the dread building in her stomach, realizing that they might just die instead.
Next, they left all the fast-moving ships except for the one carrying Irina and a dozen other parties at the small outpost in Gdańsk. This was in spite of the gauntlet they would have to run, with thousands of fiery devils, golems, and hellish imps already forcing everyone into constant action just to prevent the ships from being turned into burning cinders. Only Irina remained idle, leaning on the bow as she watched the river ahead, nose turned up so that the chill wind was blowing on her face and lifting her twin tails behind her. Whether it was confidence, arrogance, or innocent ignorance that compelled her behavior, Ramona was filled with unease.
Then, when they carved a beachhead with the cannons and disembarked on the banks of the Vistula River a dozen miles north of their destination, Irina opted to make the ground crew just herself and Ramona’s party, again for speed and to avoid risk to the ones with weaker constitutions if they ended up outside of Lighthouse territory for too long. The ship beacon would keep them stable.
By that point, Ramona was sure she was being given a death sentence, but every time she spoke up Irina just consoled her like it was Ramona that was having trouble adjusting to the situation. Irina promised over and over that she would deal with the most difficult foes, but coming from the cute girl, it felt like a prank.
It may have been the start of spring, but Poland was cold and dark, and not entirely due to the blocked sun and crimson skies. Individual snowflakes drifted through the air and everything that wasn’t crimson was gray. The ground was soaking wet and it seemed like all the trees had turned black, still lacking leaves from the previous winter season.
Ramona watched as Irina skipped into the bleak landscapes, barefoot, in barely above freezing temperatures. She was like a drop of sunshine that would be extinguished at any moment. Every argument that Ramona presented was cheerily dismissed as her worrying too much, and that no matter what happened, Irina would take care of things. Unless they had to fight Coop himself, she would win, or so she said. The other party members just went along with it, perhaps already abandoning logic at some other point during the assimilation.
They were constantly ambushed by fiery golems who disintegrated the remnants of civilization as they lumbered forward, sending plumes of ash with every stomping lurch. The drastic swings between hot and cold only served to highlight the battles from the moments of relative peace. One minute they were sweating, skin being scorched, and the next was uncomfortably cold and wet. The random spawns of monsters were easy enough to dispatch, and thankfully, Irina let them take care of the increasingly dense groups.
Ramona was a flash of purple energy as all the training ultimately paid off. Her practice enabled her to maintain the explosive impulse that empowered her counter-attacks, lunging into battle and slicing through stoneflesh abominations even without specifically activating the skills at the perfect times. Instead, she was wrapped in mana herself, taking her physical prowess and transforming it into bursts of magical malevolence directed at the heart of the monsters.
She drove into oversized demons, causing them to explode into magma as she passed through, blade held forward in one steady arm. Her party members easily dispatched the smaller, weaker variants as they tried to swarm, treating them like nothing more than a nest of Primal Constructs. Their power varied substantially, but Ramona was qualified to challenge Field Bosses solo, and with the support of her allies, could take the lead in a Siege Boss raid if sanctioned by the faction, such was her progression. The larger golems only rose to the level of Elites, so they were well within their capacity.
However, it grew increasingly clear that they really needed an army to approach the glut that had formed around Warsaw. The outer perimeter had collapsed early, losing its integrity when assaulted from the inside and out at the same time. The walls were barely an outline implanted on the ground, allowing them to step straight across. The physical erosion of mana had put the outnumbered defenders at an early disadvantage.
Countless burning stone monsters swarmed the land, howling in rage, causing the red haze to be tinged with black smoke. They pressed from all directions, apparently seeking the holdouts closer to the city center. Irina had only led them to the outer limits, where low-rise apartments and shopping centers had been the norm before mostly turning to ash.
Within the city limits, the fighting had devolved into brutal urban warfare, with the local people using disintegrating rubble in the streets to form temporary blockades while contending with flanking attacks that riddled buildings with smoldering holes. When the buildings collapsed, the small squads of defenders would retreat to another block, calling out warnings and doing their best to maintain coordination with their allies before they were corralled into one place and overwhelmed. Millions of demons sought to conquer barely a few thousand humans, and the number of enemies continued to rise.
It was an excruciating close-quarter melee that had the vastly outnumbered defenders incorporating makeshift weapons and shields to bolster their temporary positions. Shouts of fury and courage drifted through the warzone, followed by rumbling explosions and the crackling of flames. For the most part, the humans weren’t outgunned yet, but they were being inundated with opponents, outnumbered by absurd ratios that Ramona concluded were only worth calculating if her goal was to extinguish all hope.
The snowflakes floating from the sky mixed with embers and smoke as the fiery monsters rampaged. Unbelievable numbers had already manifested, and as the figures grew, individuals evolved into higher forms. Those were the ones that threatened to eliminate the main advantage the surviving humans still held. They were larger, tougher, and more powerful than should have been possible in such a short time.
The largest example caused Ramona to pause, sure that an Icon of Mana had already turned its eye on the local forces. If that was the case, it was already over. She would have been forced to retreat from a Siege Boss without further support. Fighting anything else was suicide.
The brutish monster they spotted was head and shoulders taller than the four story building that separated them, focused on smashing something that momentarily prevented it from moving forward. A thousand tiny demons danced around it like tiny sparks drifting from the reddish stone flesh and behind them, others rushed to fill the gap that Ramona and her party had formed as they pressed forward.
As they defended their flank, the boss raised a pitch black two-sided stone axe, each blade the size of a house, edge glowing with heat and emitting flames that seemed to be burning on dirty fuel. It trailed huge plumes of dirty smoke as it crashed through the air, and slammed it down. The tremors it created caused several other unrelated buildings to spontaneously ignite before falling as it stepped forward to continue its onslaught.
When Ramona’s breath caught in her throat and she hesitated, subconsciously refusing to move any closer to what would be a sure death, Irina handed her a folded up piece of cloth and ordered her to hold position.
Irina rushed toward the block of buildings that separated them from the monster, first running, then transitioning to all fours like some kind of feral beast that had Ramona’s Witchbane instincts lighting up. Twin streaks of blood red energy leaked from her obscured irises, leaving a trail as she sprinted forward. It was like the kind girl had been possessed by the real devil that these forces of mana were merely imitating.
Ramona watched, mouth agape, as Irina scrambled up the side of the structure separating them from the fiend, jumping two stories in a single leap, then jabbing her fingers and toes into the stonework with freakish strength that seemed to come naturally. She ripped her way up, using the stonework like a competitive climbing wall, and completed the course in a matter of seconds. Ramona glanced at her own fingers for a moment, realizing that her hands would have broken from the effort, and also that her arms were covered in goosebumps.
Irina disappeared over the edge at the top of the building, but a fraction of a second later, she leapt high enough into the air to be seen again, this time on the opposite side of the roof, heading toward the shoulder of the demonic general. Both her arms were held up in the air while her legs were tucked beneath her, giving her the countenance of some kind of nightmarish mythical predator. The amount of time spent traversing the building was too short, as if she had experienced a burst of speed that would have had fighter pilots passing out, but her attack wasn’t one that a normal human would have adopted.
Irina swiped at the neck of the gargantuan enemy as she flew forward with enough speed that Ramona expected her to die in the collision. It would have been a shock if her nails managed to form even a scratch on the stone surface.
But Ramona choked on her doubt when the demon’s head was lopped off, a jagged tear ripping through its throat, preceded by exaggerated claw swipes depicted in a more powerful red energy than the haze could hope to mask. Irina disappeared on the other side, suddenly on the hunt after seeming so indifferent to the monsters.
The roar of the beast had been cut off by the sound of stone being demolished and impossibly sharp claws slicing the air. The sudden switch caused a moment of silence before its head smashed into the ground with a massive thud, sending a cloud of ash and debris into the air as the body started to dissipate.
Afterwards, an inhuman screech echoed from the city, sending a chill down Ramona’s spine. It was like something that would have sent her ancestors fleeing from their homes for fear of being consumed.
Thankfully, Ramona’s training really kicked in after the spectacle ended, because they fought for hours while her thoughts were elsewhere. They diligently obeyed their commander, who had directed them to hold a nondescript corner just outside of the downtown. Waves of enemies approached them, but her party dug in, preventing the monsters from reinforcing the forces closer to the city proper. None were as gargantuan as the demonic giant that had been quickly dispatched, leaving more appropriate enemies for the party.
Eventually, Irina returned, and she was as cheery as ever, though portions of her skin were covered in ash and dust. She directed them back to their ship after taking her dress back from Ramona, planning on reuniting with the armada in case they were needed elsewhere as if nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred.
Ramona had so many burning questions, but she carefully asked only one. “Was that an Icon of Mana?”
For the first time since they met, Irina truly frowned, disappointed with her answer before she gave it. “No. It was too weak.” She pouted for a moment. “There were a dozen others at about that strength encircling the area.” She added with a sad sigh.
“Oh.” Ramona responded, unsure how to react to such obvious bloodthirst emanating from someone who had demonstrated nothing but a cheery disposition beforehand.
“I really wanted to kill the first one.” She added, flashing teeth that Ramona had never noticed were quite so sharp, despite the constant friendly smiles. “Y’know… to prove that we could.”
“I see.” Ramona did her best to seem normal despite being in the presence of someone she had spent a long time not only underestimating but misunderstanding as well.
“Don’t worry!” Irina continued, gently patting Ramona on the arm as she returned to her usual self. “The European Community is redistributing their forces to account for chasm locations. I think that’s why so many enemies appeared here. The mana pylons don’t seem to be able to counter the super fuel so the monsters got some extra energy that boosted them up.” She explained with an encouraging smile. “I eliminated all of the immediate threats, so our friends could regain their footing. They probably won’t need any more of our help for a while with the brigades from Ukraine and the Baltic states shifting around. As long as we keep the Lighthouse territory coverage solid, we’re all good.” Irina concluded cheerily.
The doubts that had plagued Ramona for so long were quiet for a long time afterwards. The leaders back at Ghost Reef apparently knew what they were doing much better than she could personally assess. Irina was clearly a terrifying force. One that Ramona was glad was on their side.
Comments
JaceVAmor
places where the Underlayer connects to the surface
Arlano
What are those "chasm locations"?
C. Adkins
THEORY TIME! The icons of mana are the corrupted forms of past civilizations that failed the assimilations for being too advanced. The angels are the elven people like the Avatar, the parasites are like her little worm buddy. So, the end boss will be Coop fighting a corrupted form of himself. Like ghost of mana or something
