Chapter 211: Retribution (Patreon)

There wasn’t anything particularly special about Coop’s heavy ethereal spears. When compared to the other weapons in Coop’s arsenal, the primary difference was how unbalanced they were. In fact, they were essentially identical to his regular spears in every way except for one; they were really, really heavy. The only change he made to his regular summon was to push the imaginary slider that determined the manifestation’s weight all the way to one side. The resulting density defied conventional wisdom. They would be useless if not for his absurd stat stacking giving him the Strength to lift them at all.

When Coop first accepted his Revenant class, the only two active skills he had taken were Retribution and Salvation. Passing over active damaging abilities had been a calculated risk, but given the isolation of Ghost Reef, he felt it necessary. The pair of abilities provided proper equipment when he had none available and enabled a basic attack focused build, one that wouldn’t be limited by downtime or be reliant on others in any way. The old fort didn’t exactly have a burgeoning network of artisans or mercenaries waiting in the wings to party up or craft for him on their remote island.

At the time, he was primarily concerned with making a coherent build while keeping in mind the limited options he had on Ghost Reef. He needed to be self-sufficient right off the bat, and there was no time to wait for a build to come together with additional skills while depending on teammates to fill gaps. Retribution and Salvation were the key ingredients to establishing the foundation that would keep both him and Jones alive as they divided the civilization shard’s responsibilities between themselves.

Retribution summoned weapons of solidified ethereal mists. Back then, Jones had helped him explore the skill’s limitations, and the two had concluded that Coop was bound to weapons from eras long past. They weren’t exactly correct, lacking critical information on the impact that mana was having on their world, but they were pretty close. The end result of the limitations on skills were the same. Coop’s arsenal was restricted to certain weapon types from specific eras. Luckily for him, humans had already developed plenty of innovative ways of killing each other at every level of technology, so he had an abundance of potential tools to test out. Too many, really.

From the start, the two active skills had exceeded expectations. Taking them both had immediately awarded Coop with the Ethereal title which seemed designed to prevent him from being disarmed while using a full set of ethereal equipment. Coop was happy with the ostensibly small bonus. He thought it could be even more functional with some creative application, though his imagination barely scratched its true potential. At the time, the additional feature provided by the Ethereal title led him to the idea of using thrown weapons. The disarm protection would be a convenient way to return deliberately discarded weapons back to his hand.

Jones assisted him in making adjustments when he first started experimenting with the skills, and Coop quickly learned that he could fine-tune the summons, adjusting the weight, balance, texture, and even appearance of the solidified mists. The flexibility astounded him. It was an early taste of what was actual real magic, flipping his understanding of what was possible upside down.

Coop and Jones worked together to get his initial weapons up to par, and one of the first changes Coop made to his spear was giving it more heft. It was his plan to use the weapon like a javelin when he needed a ranged alternative. If the weapon was too light, it didn’t have the mass to even fly through the air effectively, and given that the weapons were made from mists, they could be extraordinarily lightweight.

Adding weight and changing the balance of his spear had turned it into the weapon that defined his early tactics, providing the blueprint that kept him alive through fight after fight. Back when he was spending weeks hunting Ancient Defenders on the beach, he spent his time optimizing a single grind, experimenting with ways to become more efficient.

Later, he discovered that the Ethereal title wasn’t restricted to a one-way link where only his weapon would be returned to his armor. The Primal Kites pushed him to discover that the title could also drag himself through the mists to reconnect his armor with the weapon instead of vice versa, and Coop established another invaluable aspect of his build: mistjumping.

At first, he had resigned himself to aspirations of becoming an undying skirmisher, trading mobility for survivability, and trading lethality for relentlessness, but mistjumping turned his expectations upside down and woke the greed to have his build do everything. As far as he was concerned, being so agile completely broke the balance of the Revenant class. He wasn’t just the unyielding and defiant combatant that the class initially advertised. He was agile, tricky, and fast enough to transform what should have been limited options into entirely new avenues of destruction. If the Revenant was meant to be a proper tank with enough stats to stand toe to toe with raid bosses while allies rained damage on their foes, it was the titles that elevated it into something beyond expectations, with the Ethereal title, granted by Retribution and Salvation, opening the floodgates.

The Ethereal, Haunted, Bloodthirsty, Reaper, and Mindbender titles had all generated new pathways for the Revenant to exploit its advantage in stats and become an entire party by itself. Ethereal gave him disarm protection, access to ranged options, and the ability to mistjump, providing far more mobility than would have been possible otherwise. Haunted enabled him to develop the sophisticated technique of expert fighters with an entire arsenal of weapons through solitary repetition and practice. Bloodthirsty and eventually the evolved Reaper title added a level of resource sustain behind his layers and layers of defense that meant he could outlast just about anyone and anything. Mindbender made his stat stacking flexible, shifting the bonus stats he accumulated with the Revenant’s passive skills into whatever he needed at the time, and finally transformed the class into something that could truly ignore levels in favor of comparing raw stats.

Coop had seen some interesting and powerful classes during the assimilation, whether they were held by humans or animals. He had often found himself envious of their specializations, feeling inadequate in the face of a hyper-focused area caster like Charlie’s Aeromancer, the firepower and mobility of Jett’s Sentinel of Shadows, or a momentum generating class like the giant pig’s Eater of Worlds, but he had never found one that he would willingly trade his Revenant class for.

Retribution might have been the single most important skill that he picked up. It was at the center of it all. Retribution was the focal point of his whole build and the skill gave his titles a pathway to interact with the Revenant’s specific advantages.

The skill had gone through some changes over time, the first being the evolution to Retribution+ after accepting the Legacy of the Mists upgrade at the start of the Path of the Mistwalker. His weapon summoning skill didn’t only summon weapons after its evolution, expanding its capacity by adding ghostly phantasms that wielded their own ethereal weapons to his arsenal. When he activated the Legacy upgrade, warriors of past eras joined the fight at the expense of reserving a minor amount of durability in his current weapon.

Then, after collecting Salvation’s equivalent evolution with Inheritance of the Mists, the two original skills of his Revenant class merged. Neither of the skills were limited to manifesting simple ethereal equipment after the merger, summoning phantasms and apparitions that fought alongside him or even threatened to possess him, respectively. The new merged skill, Invocation, represented a turning point in the skills. They had expanded in scope. His commitment to only a few active skills had resulted in a significant expansion in their capabilities.

Ever since upgrading both of his ethereal summoning skills, he was able to push through more boundaries that had limited Retribution’s arsenal. The most obvious change came with his ability to summon proper two-handed weapons. His equipment had increased toughness, better stats, quicker manifestations, and that was ignoring the completely new features. The phantasms were essentially a burgeoning army of ghosts, with stats that matched Coop’s, and the apparitions were a whole other bag of worms.

That brought him all the way back to his heavy ethereal spear. All he did was make a regular spear heavier. Simple. But that meant packing the spear with more ethereal mists than normal, and during his experimentation with manipulating the density of his weapons during the siege event, he had found that the results could be quite dramatic. The lesser density of his shattering brittle shields hadn’t been what he was looking for at the time, but the higher density in his bunker busting spears could be pushed until the pressure made them volatile.

With the various evolutions that Retribution had gone through, his ability to increase the density of his spear had improved dramatically. The heavy spear that he was throwing at the High Priestess of the Cult of Chakyum couldn’t be compared to the first examples used to strike at the underground burrowing Raid Boss, Gaol the Unveiled Blade, nor to the explosive missiles that first annihilated hidden Primal Kites beneath the sandbars of Ghost Reef. The current heavy spears were that much heavier.

Coop’s muscles strained as he pitched the explosive javelin across the submerged cathedral, growling from deep in his chest as he was forced to fully exert himself to get the missile moving. He was entirely expecting the High Priestess to swap places with another crystal clear water orb, as she had already demonstrated the evasive maneuver to avoid his first throw, but he was more excited to see what would happen when the extreme pressure of her orb interacted with the pressurized spear. Would the spear be crushed? Would the orb be pierced?

“Let’s find out.” He breathed as he released the spear.

The spear shot through the watery reflections that were being cast from all across the chamber, giving the arena an incorporeal feel. The missile narrowly avoided an orb that was rapidly spinning while creeping along the swirling grooves in the glassy floor, then another orb shifted slightly above the spear’s trajectory as it continued in its programmed path and Coop threaded the needle.

“Psh.” The High Priestess expressed her disappointment in Coop’s apparent lack of diversity in attacks, flicking her bangs out of the way as she snapped her fingers to move to safety. The velocity of the heavy spear was less than the previous throws that had caught her by surprise, and she believed she was already adjusting to Coop’s capability.

If she really thought she was getting a handle on Coop, she would have to think again. The heavy spear struck the mass of water that she exchanged places with, embedding its entire length into the high pressure environment. For a moment it seemed like the result would be the same as his regular spear, with the orb crushing the insignificant weapon. Then, it exploded.

Ethereal shards tore the water orb apart, shredding the perfectly symmetrical manifestation like an overfilled water balloon. Water cascaded in all directions, as if the spear had poked holes in an invisible dam that was barely holding an incomprehensible amount of water back. There wasn’t enough water to flood the entire enormous chamber, but Coop was surprised by just how much water the orbs held, and that wasn’t all. His spear had exploded with enough force to send shrapnel rocketing in all directions before dissipating. Nearby orbs were also pierced, though they didn’t experience the same catastrophic failure as the one that took the brunt of the damage, they still leaked like an entire lake’s worth of water was held within their confines. The simple rotational patterns were broken as the orbs skittered across the arena, smashing into others as they deflated.

More significantly, jets of ocean water sprayed into the previously sealed chamber like geysers. Shrapnel from his spear had smashed into the floor beneath the orb with enough force to crack the glass-like surface. A spiderweb of fissures crawled around a small portion of the arena, threatening more destruction as the foundations of the palatial formation were threatened.

“You’ll kill us all! You… You! You’re crazy!” The High Priestess wailed from the back of the chamber, horrified by Coop’s lack of restraint and pointing a finger at him.

Coop wasn’t so sure about her concern. Mana had done strange things to all of them. They didn’t need to eat, they didn’t need to sleep, and they could survive so many other impossible environmental scenarios. Pressure, heat, and cold did little to slow his allies back on Ghost Reef  and some of his enemies continued fighting without blood or muscle. Coop suspected they didn’t really need to breathe either, but even if they did, he had backup lingering near the ceiling that had already proven they could stave off the water.

Any potential diatribe from the Priestess regarding Coop’s state of mind was cut short when the third member of their little affair reminded them of her presence. Sierra the Cloud Dancer was waiting for the Priestess to commit to dodging one of Coop’s attacks to add her own follow up. Two blasts of air smashed into the Priestess from above, like invisible fists for a one-two punch, causing the Priestess to stumble to the side. When she recovered her footing, she appeared uninjured, if a little more disheveled. She spared a glance at the Cloud Dancer that skipped between much slower orbs in the air toward the opposite side of the room. When the Priestess looked back at Coop, frustration painted her face.

Coop was summoning another heavy spear, ready to bring destruction to the High Priestess.

“Why go to these lengths? We’re on the same side!” The Priestess contended, more concerned with her own well-being when she realized the risk to her stronghold.

“I’m not on your side.” Coop maintained as he stepped into another throw.

Before he released the spear, the High Priestess stamped her foot down in aggravation and the water orbs picked up speed, spinning faster as they rushed toward him. They spun fast enough to shed some of their water in rings around their core. She added flowing waves of water that shot between the orbs like solid walls meant for testing crumple zones in cars, but they did little to add to the already chaotic battlefield she was establishing.

Coop adjusted his aim, tracking the orbs and waves as they raced across the tracks like they were obstacles in a duck hunt game, and let his spear fly.

The ethereal spear narrowly escaped multiple orbs and a wave before clipping the edge of an orb halfway to the Priestess. The torn orb spilled its contents, creating a whitewater deluge that spread across the arena and diverted the slightly slowed spear through one of the walls of water, cleanly penetrating it like the High Priestess’s original tidal wave that approached Corozal before the spear sank into a different rising orb. In the end, the projectile didn’t reach its target, though it still exploded, causing another mesh of cracks in the floor after tearing through multiple other obstacles.

“We do what we must to save humanity!” The High Priestess shouted when she confirmed she wouldn’t need to dodge his last projectile. “Those who fall behind can still help the rest of us win.”

Coop had to take long strides to avoid the stampede of water orbs. When one nearly caught him it was blasted by Sierra, shifting its trajectory just enough to skim by his side as he twisted out of the way. He skittered around the giant orbs feeling like a mouse being attacked by bowling balls. A few assists were necessary from Sierra when another wave of water walls expanded from the High Priestess, but he thought he would manage to come out the other side without too much extra effort until he was caught in a pattern that left him no chance. An inverted wedge of the crushing orbs rushed toward him, sealing his path.

“Shame.” The Priestess commented curtly, possibly seeing her reward for taking Coop back to Chakyum disappearing as she anticipated his destruction. She stumbled again when a blast of air clipped her back. “Now to deal with this annoying fly.” She vowed, tossing her ruined braid over her shoulder and scanning the canopy for the Cloud Dancer.

As soon as she took her attention away from the stampede, the center orb exploded and the entire cathedral rang like a gong. Coop’s brand new heavy morning star had survived the pressure of the attack, crushing the tidal orb like a pumpkin after he applied a leaping smash from above. The web of fissures in the arena’s floor expanded from where the head of the mace rested and water sprayed all around him as he stepped forward.

He hadn’t mistjumped out of the way of the inverted wedge because he was summoning a new variation of one of his older weapons. While the morning star was much heavier than before, the main difference was the absurd density he had poured into the mace. It went beyond his volatile spears, transforming into something that simply couldn’t be crushed.

At least, he hoped it couldn’t be crushed. He had no idea what would happen if it did. He had to use his whole body to fling the dripping morning star off the ground and back up to his shoulder, but it would turn the threat of the stampeding water orbs into a true carnival game.