Chapter 171: Corozal (Patreon)

Coop spent a warm night in Corozal. Compared to Ghost Reef, the weather was just a little too hot and a little too humid, but the atmosphere was unexpectedly comfortable. Coop liked the vibes.

Fernando introduced Coop to the other residents, bringing him to the cafeteria they used as a gathering point. There weren’t many people, but they had all developed exceptional talents through professions alone. They each proudly explained their roles as they introduced themselves. A tiny old lady healed his ankle with an extremely high level mending profession while the others gathered around to gossip, like they lived for the chatter, and an outsider was the perfect excuse to rehash debates.

As Coop’s wound was healed, he learned from the mender that her profession was limited to what they called physical healing. They compared mending to first aid, akin to pre-mana treatment without the benefit of medicine. Basically, if Coop acquired any debuffs from his injuries, the mending profession wouldn’t be able to efficiently remove them, as debuffs had a magical component applied by the system that required magic to remedy.

There was a real risk of the Infection debuff forcing a longer recovery time, so his wound was thoroughly cleansed before it was dressed. He thought back to how Madison believed her profession was redundant when compared to her class, which she further thought was an insult to her actual life experience. In a way, he could see how under ideal conditions, she was right about mending being a lesser form of healing, but there were certainly circumstances where it would serve a valuable purpose. If she lacked mana, she could still treat patients, for example. Coop wondered if she had already experienced the benefits when she worked at healing entire armies on Ghost Reef’s doorstep, but was too stubborn to admit it.

The other residents exchanged stories while the mender worked, catching Coop up on the events that had led to their state in between chattering amongst themselves. In exchange, Coop told them about Ghost Reef, how the siege had looked from the inside of the dome, and the circumstances that led him to seeking out Chakyum. Once they were all on the same page, they treated him like a visiting grandchild, offering him gifts of food and even clothes since without his armor, he was basically in his bathing suit. He declined the clothes but not the food.

“So how did you get your profession so high?” Coop finally asked Juan when the suntanned man pulled up a chair and joined the group. Coop was hoping to learn the fisherman’s secrets for his own progression.

“Heh.” Juan laughed between bites of fry jacks while the others looked on, knowingly expectant of his answer. “The secret is repetition!” He stated, like he was revealing the secrets of the universe to Coop. But Coop was too disappointed with his answer to mask his facial expression, feeling his smile fade like he had been told he wouldn’t get dessert.

The old man scoffed. “You youngsters don’t get it! Always needing instant gratification... What you need to do is repeat the same thing over and over again, all the time.” He leaned forward dramatically. “Constantly keeping your hands busy is the key ingredient to gathering so much power.” Juan elaborated while pinching his bicep, to the continued consternation of Coop.

Coop supposed he wasn’t being lied to, but the man was essentially suggesting Coop needed to grind. Of all the people in the world to suggest grinding, he was telling Coop. He shook his head in disbelief, though he considered the idea anyway. He could return to grinding the Ancient Defenders; maximizing the frequency of loot would be the most obvious way of power leveling his Scavenging profession. At least until he found a good way to chain kill Boss level monsters, grinding something he could continue indefinitely would be the way to do it. Still, he thought it was ridiculous. Coop needed to gain experience as well anyway, so he sadly let go of the dream he was having where he had level 1,000 Scavenging in a few days.

“Don’t listen to him.” Fernando cut in. “All he does is nap on the pier all day and wait for fish to bite.” He looked at Juan with a sly smile for an old man. “Besides, Juan is only level 450.”

“Hey! That’s pretty much 500.” Juan leaned forward, placing his snack down to argue his position. “Good enough to stand tall amongst you geezers!”

“You said over 500.” Fernando pointed out, remembering the exact words Juan used better than the fisherman. “Only Gloria is near 500 right now.”

Juan sputtered dramatically, playing along with Fernando’s ribbing as he had his exaggerations exposed. Coop tried doing the math while they bickered, and figured they were averaging a full profession level every four to five hours for the entire duration of the assimilation. Given that they couldn’t actually be working on them every hour of every day, he was profoundly impressed with their progress. Back home, most of the residents hadn’t even had access to a profession for most of the assimilation. He imagined that if Jones hadn’t been incapacitated, he might be rivaling Corozal’s profession masters. Back when it was just the two of them, he had received early levels in his archaeology profession.

“He’s not misleading you with fish tales though.” Fernando continued as he gathered Coop’s attention. “We really just keep working on projects. All day and all night. It helps that we have some synergies between our skills and no need to spend a lot of time fighting monsters.” He nodded toward Coop’s elevated ankle, temporarily wrapped while it fully healed. “That trap wasn’t created by a single person. Juan’s fishing line is the key, as it is mana enhanced to prevent fish from escaping, but I tie the knots with weaving, our tracker sets the traps, and our gardener reinforces the trees. Essentially half the town contributed to that one snare just to catch the Elite Ruin Nebulas. They have a tendency to abandon a limb to try and continue on their paths, so there are enhancements on the line to keep them there until someone can come to deal with them.”

“We’ve never had any rip the entire tree out of the ground.” Juan pointed out, shaking his head as the image of the crown of a tree slamming into him replayed in his head. He might end up with nightmares from remembering the shock.

Coop still felt disappointed in himself for being caught, but at least he could console himself that it took quite a bit of training, planning, and execution from an entire community to accomplish his ensnarement. And ultimately, it hadn’t been able to keep him tied up indefinitely.

“...Actually.” One of the others interrupted, sending a meaningful look to Fernando.

“Ah, good idea.” Fernando agreed before smiling at Coop. “Would you mind coming with me to check on our perimeter? We are bound to have caught several monsters by now and could use someone with the combat skills to easily eliminate them.”

“It’s the least I could do to thank you for your hospitality.” Coop accepted as graciously as he could. His ambassadorial skills were certainly improving with experience.

Fernando guided Coop for a few minutes around the town, presenting several Elite Ruin Nebulas that had been caught in their own traps. Not all of them were the same construction as the one that Coop was snared by. Some were quite a bit scarier, forming a tight web of constricting string that pressed the limbs of the monsters into a tight ball that Coop only needed a single jab to kill the motionless Constructs. They were alive but completely immobilized.

Coop shuddered at the idea of being caught in one of the suffocating and seemingly unbreakable nets. He was thankful it was only his ankle that had been wrapped up. Other monsters wriggled above piles of dead but undissolved limbs as they struggled to escape.

While Coop defeated the exposed monsters, Fernando explained that at first they had avoided the experience gained from killing them, but now they were simply falling too far behind to easily get the job done. The first time they encountered a Field Boss, they realized the limitation of their strategy, but it was too late to rethink their completely defensive distribution of stats and lack of combat skills with the multipliers to keep up with the increased scaling of the evolved monsters.

Coop could see how the monster evolutions would have been a problem. Sometimes it was hard for him to remember, but the jump from regular monsters to elite was pretty big, even from examples of the same level. In fact, if he looked far enough back, he could recall when Shane’s entire party struggled with single regular monsters that were half their level, and how gingerly Gibson’s party had to control individual encounters of Ancient Prowlers. Back then, they were essentially struggling with the inverse situation compared to Corozal, where they lacked the additional stats provided by professions. Not to mention that even though stats were everything to Coop, for other people they were merely one variable in a much larger calculation that included skills, gear, and experience.

The townspeople relied on a neighboring village to occasionally send warriors to help them out in exchange for some limited trade, but they had been unable to make the trip for some time. Afterwards, the wandering Jaguar Warriors were the only ones they could count on, but they were few in number and rare in appearance.

After clearing a dozen monsters for the villagers, Coop signaled for Windchaser to come to port. The residents of Corozal were a good group of people, surviving as well as they could, and he had no qualms with pulling them into his network of settlements. They were few in number, but each could pull more than a normal individual’s weight, even without class levels.

He eventually accepted a chance to sleep for the night after presenting Amanda and Mikey B to the gathering and letting them take the attention, representing Ghost Reef and getting to know Corozal. From what he learned, just contending with the jungle would be hard work, so he grabbed some rest in preparation for many more nights where he would be without the opportunity to relax.

The calls of wild animals echoed across the distance. The droning of countless crickets swept through the night, occasionally interrupted when a larger animal made its own presence known, but it only took a few seconds of silence before the bravest of the insects started the song back up with the rest joining in. Roars, barks, howls, and screeches confirmed the continued existence of nocturnal predators in the rural jungles further inland. In the middle of the night, a drizzle of rain tapped at the wooden pavilion that protected his hammock. Even afterwards, the heavy drops cascaded through the leafy canopy and provided a percussive lullaby through the rest of the night. Coop found the ambience reassuring, if a bit wild.

“Life goes on.” He mumbled optimistically as he dozed off.

After the assimilation, the rural farm lands had been recaptured by the explosive growth of mana empowered forests. Vegetation made the most of the early influx at the start of the assimilation, just like on Ghost Reef with the giant palms and towering mangroves. The local Primal Constructs in the Yucatan were particularly adapted to take advantage of the forested canopies, establishing themselves throughout the region at the very start. The jungle had expanded right up to the borders of cities, towns, and ruins, blurring the lines between the untouched wilderness and the settled lands even further than before, providing the monsters with ideal circumstances to lock down wide swathes of territory.

The people who lived in the region concentrated themselves into the nearest towns, seeking safety in numbers when faced with the unknown at the start of the assimilation, away from the dangers hidden in the branches of trees. Information spread rapidly through the region, entirely by word of mouth, as they collectively struggled to understand the situation. The presence of a civilization shard and the potential safety within an official, system sanctioned settlement was a big part of the earliest gossip. Many people migrated in the first days, trusting the ones who were Chosen to lead them, but even more stayed put. Not everyone could pick up and leave, whether it was due to receiving news of the settlement too late, an inability to make the journey through rugged terrain, or simple stubborn refusals to abandon their homes.

Others also stayed voluntarily, fighting hard to ensure the continued existence of those who didn’t make the trip for one reason or another. They battled the rapidly progressing monsters in order to provide the small islands of safety away from the centralized authority that formed in the Yucatan. At first it was simple kindness, where individual warriors protected their neighbors, but over time the actions evolved. The official settlement wasn’t as benevolent as had been hoped and the ones who remained outside of its reach turned into a resistance to the hegemonic rule over the region as connections formed. Corozal was one of a few dozen known safe locations scattered around the untamed areas of Central America that owed their survival to the efforts of the volunteer fighters.

The siege event had created chaos, even outside of the settlements, and most of the outer towns wound up abandoned, unable to survive frenzied monsters attacking them through the days and nights with so few fighters. Rather than accept defeat at the hands of the Primal Constructs, they joined the Jaguar Sun, the group of resistance fighters that opposed the Cult of Chakyum that intended to get rid of the priests and take over the settlement, but they had failed in their effort. Since the end of the siege event, Corozal had been left on its own, only receiving the occasional aid from a traveling warrior here or there and maintaining contact with a few other places through their own efforts. But as time went on, their isolation grew.

Honoring the labor of those warriors that had ensured their existence in the early days, the residents of the remote towns were open to offering support when they could. In the case of Corozal, they were kind enough to lend Coop the hammock and let him sleep while Amanda coordinated with Fernando. Windchaser docked at the end of one concrete pier and the pirates settled in for the night on board, letting Juan fish from its deck while the crew gambled and drank.

There were only 13 local people who had managed to stick around through the challenges of the assimilation. Most of them were extremely underleveled, having been spared from forced recruitment by the Cult of Chakyum by virtue of a slow start in levels and embracing that fact. They had made it to the Yucatan settlement in the first week, but were uncomfortable with the conversion to Oathsworn that the faction in control were pushing. So they claimed their professions and ultimately returned home where they had been passed over by roaming priests on multiple occasions in favor of more fruitful grounds.

Coop learned that the Priests of Chakyum were scouring the countryside in search of survivors to recruit for their once mysterious purposes. Some were aggressive, but most acted in the same manner as the Envoy had when he visited Ghost Reef, vaguely offering something that sounded similar to aid. Those who went with them never returned unless they had been converted to Oathsworn Humans themselves. As far as the locals knew, the racial evolution was some sort of blessing offered by the leader of the Cult of Chakyum, but it was an unkept secret that their base of power was built on sacrifice. The more any individual progressed, the more likely they were to draw the attention of a priest who was hungry to collect that accumulated experience.

The survivors in Corozal noticed the fixation on class levels, and since they had already delayed class leveling from the start while traveling, they opted to concentrate entirely on their professions instead. They had half a dozen people with profession levels that approached 500 or more. None of them had advanced their classes to level 20.

At first glance at the way the system worked, the professions would appear to be supplementary at best, but they had found ways to defend their town by applying their skills in unusual ways. As it turned out, a fisherman and a weaver could combine to make some pretty solid perimeter defenses, as presented to Coop on his tour, and the others were no slouches either. A gardener replanted the tree that had been dragged around by Coop, revealing some abilities that resembled Caisalya and Ixia’s advanced mana control when they encouraged the growth of flora, the old lady, bent from age, had mending skills that rivaled Madison’s entire class when it came to healing non-magical injuries, and a middle-aged man with the Tracking profession offered to guide Coop to the next village to seek more news the next day, so long as Coop could both keep up and protect him from monsters.

Coop, in turn, offered them the choice to evacuate to Ghost Reef, promising sanctuary in his settlement territory, but for the most part, they remained skeptical of the system’s structure. A handful of them agreed to visit, but wouldn’t commit to anything permanent. Coop would leave it to the Ghost Reef residents to impress them, letting Windchaser carry the tourists while leaving Coop, Amanda, and Mikey B in what amounted to enemy territory. A round trip would take a full week, at least.

It only took a brief negotiation to get Fernando and Juan, the de facto leaders of Corozal, to agree to turning the small town into an official outpost. Being able to place a mana pylon and establish a pocket of settlement territory was an incredible salve from the constant pressure of roaming monsters. Unfortunately, the pylon’s area didn’t even cover the entire town center, but rather than simply waiting until they were overrun, it gave them hope that continuing to survive would be possible. The miniature civilization shard was stationed in the central park, beneath a gazebo that sort of resembled the placement in Ghost Reef. It wasn’t exactly Balor’s citadel, but it still managed to mark the shard as an important feature, though on a smaller scale.

The actual relationship between Corozal and Ghost Reef would still be negotiated, but Coop was happy to just let the first outpost be semi-autonomous. He would have been willing to create an entirely new settlement for them to run, but the mana pylon only acted like a limited remote access point to the civilization shard back home, and that meant that only he and his advisors could actually develop the outposts. Coop started the process by purchasing one of the system prefabricated perimeter defenses and surrounded the tiny settlement territory with a corrugated wall that wouldn’t be of much use other than designating the current edge of the safer territory. Balor would be ashamed of its construction, but the residents intended to capitalize off its existence to leverage their professions in new ways. The wall only protected a few triangles of grass, the pylon, and a small dry fountain that occupied the park. The park around the pylon would be their final bastion should their profession defenses eventually fail.

As generous as Coop was, he wasn’t willing to make Fernando or Juan an advisor with access to the entire network of settlements his people were coalescing, just so they could manage a town with barely more than 10 people in it. Maybe later someone would get a promotion, but in the meantime, the residents of the now official Corozal Outpost were exploring ways to apply their professions and rejuvenate their town with the additional link to the Lighthouse territories. As it turned out, Juan’s fishing profession and the gardener could both generate some of the rare materials that Coop sold en masse to the contracted residents, meaning they already had a method of generating credits and the others were determining what they could produce that would be valuable to the crafters. Without their own contracted residents or system services, crafting materials had been rendered useless, but Ghost Reef had the stations to use them.

After Coop fully explained his purpose, the residents of Corozal treated him like a guest of honor, promising to help him as much as they could. Knowing that the highest level human on the planet was challenging Chakyum brought some excitement, but it was tempered by fear of disappointment. They warned him that he would likely need to battle his way up the hierarchy, starting with the local priests, until he could learn the actual location and identity of the leader of the cult. They weren’t exactly confident in his chances, seeing as the Jaguar Sun’s rebellion already set, but they wanted to help him all the same. He found that they weren’t exactly that impressed with his progress. It seemed like they believed he was actually really slow since their profession levels absolutely dwarfed his apparent level.

Coop grumbled to himself a bit because his plan of having a hidden reservoir of stats with a high level profession had been usurped in a much more committed fashion by the people in Corozal. He took solace in the fact that his passive skills still made his build monstrous. Even with their extraordinary professions, it had taken their collective strength to temporarily best him. There still hadn’t been any examples of individuals who had progressed so thoroughly in both class and profession when compared to him. He’d have to live up to the standard he hoped to set, and that meant standing up to the Cult of Chakyum.