The smile that had barely formed on Coop’s face as he defeated the Icon of Mana rapidly transformed into a grimace. He could hear the bones in his ankle flex under the stress of his opponent’s grip. The monster was proving that it wasn’t actually dead just because he chopped off its head.

Coop felt a moment of pain and panic as the Icon dragged him to the ground and into the mixture of completely blinding mists. Shooting pain raced through his body while he lost all sense of direction in the disorienting soup of vapor, but allowing himself to be pulled down prevented his leg from being torn off. The monster changed objective and simply squeezed. Before his bones were crushed, he reactively applied Vaporform to escape and regroup.

Inside the world of mists, a shadowy skull stared at his incorporeal form as he put some distance between himself and the monstrous Icon. The appearance of his opponent even in the monochromatic plane caused enough of a shock to send Coop right back to reality after moving just a few feet away. It was as if the spectral domain had been invaded, but they merely shared an affinity deeply enough to put them on the same wavelength of mana. Still, it was terrifying to catch a shadow staring at him in such a way when everything else was essentially a blur of vapors.

Coop hopped a bit when he left the mists, avoiding the moment he put his full weight back on his ankle until he was sure he wouldn’t stumble. At the same time, the body of the Icon rose from the darkness along the floor like it was riding an elevator, ascending back to its full height, minus its head, in one smooth motion. In place of its helmet was a plume of tenebrous fog, flickering like a flame that was desperate to escape the rest of the armor. The same was true for its former shield arm. The energy it represented was barely contained within a cage of materiality.

The Icon retrieved its sword from the fog with its remaining hand and stepped into an attack, continuing their previous bout as if nothing had happened that might alter its purpose in the slightest. Black smoke billowed from its severed neck and shoulder, making Coop think it was already in the process of dissipating, but it was fighting without pause. Coop was forced to summon his shield after all, barely blocking the powerful attack before it caught him in the kidney.

When he braced with his injured ankle, he was distracted by an agonizing sting, hissing as he inhaled, but he was stable enough to withstand the empowered strike. He channeled the distress into a ducking attack that clanged against the armored torso of the monster on its unarmed side before he stumbled away and fully recovered his stance to continue their bout.

The uninspired attack might have been the last chance to get some free damage in as the black mist leaking from its ruined shoulder started to replace its missing arm. A group of cloudy tendrils started to solidify into a new mass of disjointed limbs, their tips evaporating in the darkness in a constant fight between manifesting and dissipating.

Despite his relative completeness in comparison, Coop found himself on the defensive, losing some of the momentum he had been fighting so hard to keep. It was too soon to summon another apparition with Inheritance, so he forced himself to concentrate and wield his aura before the fight turned for the worse.

After the tendrils of smoke gradually solidified and they continued exchanging blows, Coop ended up being smacked in the face more than once by partially transparent balled up tentacles. They burst into smoke on impact, but they were solid enough to draw blood. He was slightly slower than normal as he temporarily favored one leg, opening him up to quick unempowered counters that gave his already bloodied nose a lip and eye to match while he concentrated on avoiding the more dangerous blade.

The Icon was relentless, refusing to back down no matter how Coop slipped past its more limited guard. It parried or blocked when it could, but its inclination was to maintain an offense no matter what happened, sacrificing more mists if it meant landing even the smallest of counter attacks. It simply didn’t care about taking avoidable damage so long as it never gave anything for free.

As they continued to exchange blows, Coop started to feel uncomfortable. A vague skull of black smoke occasionally formed in the leaking fog above its neck. Without words, the Icon was demonstrating that it was unkillable. Coop dealt significantly more damage than he received, even taking the Icon’s head from its shoulders, but it was unflinching. It single-mindedly sought to defeat Coop, no matter what the consequences to its own body were.

Eventually, after stumbling beneath his own shield and being forced on his backfoot yet again, Coop finally understood what was happening a bit better. The Icon of Mana wasn’t based on him specifically, it was based on his class. What he was seeing was the intended potential of a Revenant with both spectral and abyssal affinities. It was a magic tank that relied on its superior defenses to relentlessly pursue its goals no matter what it needed to sacrifice. It was meant to be practically unkillable, returning from the dead until its mission was accomplished. All of that power was pressed into a mold of the ideal Revenant.

Coop’s sardonic chuckles echoed through the hall in between clangs of metal as the picture finally came together. He had inspired the system to create a new boss monster, but the system had screwed up its build, misunderstanding Coop himself, and made it unimaginative and boring. It only had the stats of a fully empowered Icon of Mana, properly distributed into a crazy tank, but it lacked the multipliers that made the Revenant of Ghost Reef so potent on offense as well. That’s why it had seemed like Coop was on the verge of taking the advantage all the time. Their total stats weren’t so different, even if its technical level far surpassed his own, but there was a disparity in the balance between offense and defense.

While the monster pushed him back, Coop reignited his own confidence. He swapped between weapons more frequently, revealing how truly flexible his build should be. The Icon stuck with the longsword, only occasionally drawing its spear when the distance was right for a thrusting lunge or if it needed to attack from range, but otherwise it was painfully basic. Not much else was needed if consistent pressure was the primary goal, but it lacked the deadly creativity inherent in humanity.

The air in the mist-filled alien throne room crackled as both contenders stretched themselves to the limit of their respective strategies. Coop, in his ancient gladiator armor, was showing both the experience and scars of innumerable solo battles, but he stood firm in the face of the system’s idealized version of his class.

His exposed mainhand gripped a spear of pure ethereal mana, vibrating with an abyssal aura he carried across his arsenal. In the moments where the tip collided with the monster’s sword, his wrist trembled with building exhaustion, but his glowing eyes burned with his own unyielding resolve, backed by an immense pool of mana that was only half spent.

The speartip exploded like it was strapped with magical dynamite everytime they exchanged blows. Waves of energy were sent across the Icon, and without its shield, it was forced to contend with the piercing force with just its sword. There was no way to mitigate it all with its basic technique.

The Revenant Icon was a hulking silhouette of darkness, leaning heavily on its defensive stats to soften glancing blows into practically nothing. Though it didn’t demonstrate any fatigue and not a moment of weakness, Coop kept bashing it with hammers so heavy they hinted at their own gravity, then slid away to slice and poke with polearms so sharp the shadows barely reacted when they were cut.

An instant was all it would take for the momentum to fully shift and Coop aimed to make every single one the potential spark. He slipped close and swapped back to his sword with his aura shifting like a whip when the situation called for it, then switched back to a more patient posture with his spear to solidify any advantage he gained. Bit by bit he had exceeded the design of the Revenant, growing beyond whatever parameters were meant to be in place. That had been his entire journey, long and arduous as it was.

If he took one extra step backwards, the Icon would thrust with its own piercing lance, so he sought to carefully occupy the no man’s land in his opponent’s tactics, refusing to back down. A single misstep would put him in grave danger, whether it was to the spear one way or to the solidified tendrils the other, and that was assuming he could reliably keep the longsword at bay in the middle.

Coop felt like he was fighting with something as inevitable as death and taxes, forced to balance on a tightrope, but it made no difference to him. The same had been true countless times before.

More importantly, even the obsidian suit of ornate armor that absorbed the gray light of the palatial room started to show tarnishes and scrapes. Coop could be relentless too, and he was sure he could find an advantage as long as he didn’t give up. Fighting a pure tank that massively exceeded his actual level was a bad deal, but it wasn’t impossible after everything else he had gone through. A few more apparitions might be all it took.

He tried messing with the density of his weapons, unwilling to simply wait for victory to come his way. He smashed the Icon with a volatile spear at near point blank range, but the monster just stepped through the shrapnel and kept fighting. As soon as Coop lacked a weapon, it drew closer, seeking to secure the kill, ignorant of the damage it was taking.

Whenever he mistjumped or Vaporformed, the Icon stuck with him, equally mobile with only its own version of Vaporform, but utilizing the feature of their shared class in a different way than Coop did. Rather than to be evasive, the Icon applied its movement skills to stick with its target no matter what, the way a real tank should.

Phantasms were blasted away by pulses of dark energy, and they were rarely effective in even causing the most minimal amounts of damage, but Coop wasn’t completely without his own advantages. The secondary effects of his passive skills gave him the potential to keep ramping, his attacks ignoring more and more of his target's valuable defenses. What could be worse for a tank as pure as the default Revenant than to have its armor shredded? Coop fought with his teeth showing, somehow excited by the challenge he had found.

Thanks to his enthusiasm, the scales tipped in his favor unexpectedly, when he was wielding his spear, empowering it with his aura as he targeted the monster's chest. The tip dug into the armored filigree across the Icon’s sternum, and the ensuing blast of aura ripped a portion of its backplate from the rest of the set. The shadowy armor plate flew across the chamber before clattering to the ground, and at the same time the Icon’s solidified smoke limb and skull lost their structure completely. The resemblance of its missing parts returned to that of dark flames emerging from the gaps instead of a physical being, and they were joined by a third burst of energy flowing from its back.

Another plume of black smoke billowed from the dark armor, further diminishing the limited light surrounding their duel. Just as Coop felt like the momentum was turning to his favor, the Icon lunged, pressing even more desperately than before. It left behind chunks of damaged armor as it went, shedding them like a molting abyssal creature in an effort to conclude the fight with diminishing patience as the advantage slipped further away from its grasp.

The smoke within the Icon’s armor churned, more tendrils lashing out so that the missing arm transformed into multiple elongated whips and its head was nothing more than a volcanic geyser. The hexagonal floor cracked under the sheer force of the Icon’s aura as it fully unleashed its own incredible strength derived from Earth’s leylines and the system’s eons of experience.

Coop met the charge face to face, digging deep into his own well of mana as he aimed his spear at the remaining pieces of solid armor protecting the Icon’s chest. Despite knowing that he was pushing his limit, it was even more obvious that if he held back he would die when the Icon escalated its pursuit. It would be one or the other, no matter what.

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He planted his feet with confidence, his ankle no longer slowing him down, and as he thrust his ethereal spear, it bored a hole of pure energy through the abyssal smoke that reached toward him. It pierced the dark armor as the monstrous long sword was halted by his shield in a shower of sparks.

At the edge of the newly created gap in the smoke, Coop barely spotted a nexus of energy that had his scavenger instincts screaming that he had finally caught a glimpse of a weak point to target. Like the mana cores of the other forces of mana, the Icon had the equivalent of a heart hidden within the smoke-filled mass it claimed as a body.

The clash had already been different from all their previous contests. Both warriors were wielding energy beyond the physical world, incorporating the domains of their mana as they swung. Coop was already repeating his attack, keeping his feet firmly planted while sliding his right foot a few inches further back. The small bit of information had changed the dynamic of this clash for them both. When they struck each other a second time, it was a cataclysm of magic that momentarily blinded Coop’s senses.

He was forced back to reality when the Icon’s blade, wreathed in dark energy, slammed into his round shield and the excess power leaked right through his manifestation, burning across his arm and into his chest, as if the Icon was aiming for his heart as well. It was telling him that he had weaknesses too. Blood exploded from his wounds, painting the ethereal manifestations in glistening red.

The physical impact sent a shockwave from their position, peeling off bits of the hexagonal tiles while his joints rattled, but neither of them ceded even an inch of ground. It was the magic power that caused damage.

Coop’s magic defense may have been the best of his layers of protection, but it wasn’t enough to mitigate everything. Coop barely held his ground as the shimmering lights dissipated from his vision and mists drifted from his injuries, but his spear arm had fully extended with the perfect form he had endlessly practiced.

Despite the unblockable damage he had taken, the Icon was actually worse off. Coop’s second empowered spear thrust had provided a platform for his mana to stretch into a god-killer lance. The shadowy essence of the Icon recoiled and another chunk of armor was peeled away while the wave of energy from the attack shot across the entirety of the palatial room.

Energy pulsed from other cracks forming throughout the Icon’s form, its defenses finally breaking down and leaving it a mess of broken bits of obsidian. It shed the rest of its breastplate as it moved forward, abandoning any pretense that it was humanoid by revealing the gloomy mists within its torso.

The Icon ignored its diminishing physical form, abandoning the mold it had been implanted into. Instead, it braced its remaining armored limb with tendrils of shadow to deliver what might have been a two-handed attack if it wasn’t mostly just a mass of darkness with an arm holding a blade above two armored legs. The gleaming sword was wrapped in shadow that ripped through the air as it repeated its previous successful assault, betting on the blood it had drawn.

Coop corrected the mistake that had left him exposed to so much damage, shifting his aura so that it bolstered his shield while he completed a third nearly identical spear thrust. He was equally riveted by the damage applied to his opponent, unable to turn away.

He tilted his head to the side as the enemy blade dug into the solidified mists of his shield, avoiding the edge from clipping his temple by less than an inch while he stretched his spear forward. The near-death shift had his adrenaline surging as he responded with the final upward thrust of his weapon with the experience of a billion repetitions.

The point smashed into the dark armor where its belt should have been, but the mana shot through, exploding like a cannon fired slightly upwards at point-blank range as he sought to destroy the core hidden somewhere within. Black smoke erupted from the Icon’s back, shooting hundreds of yards through the upper chamber before merging with the darkness, but it was already dragging itself back together as Coop gripped his spear.

Coop pulled his weapon back, seeking his target in the smoke, effectively reloading after completing a triple spear thrust the same way he had even against the Ancient Defenders back when he first started making up skills for his basic attacks. However, as the Icon reformed, it kicked him in the stomach with the last portions of armor on its body, sending him like a bullet through the air before skidding across the hexagonal tiles until he crashed into the outer membrane of the mana current in the center.

Coop ignored the searing pain and his inability to breath, rolling to the side as blood dripped from his lips. He hopped to his feet in preparation of a deadly follow up, surprised that the Icon had so desperately created such distance between them. Up to this point, it had been adamant about sticking to its target.

However, one look revealed that the Icon was also reeling. It hadn’t moved from where they had exchanged blows, a dozen hexagons away. He could hear it hissing, though it had no voice to begin with, as if it was struggling to keep itself together after almost all of its armor had been eaten away by Coop’s Clarity of Purpose secondary effect. Only one arm and two legs remained of the obsidian armor that had seemed impenetrable.

As it recovered enough to rise back to its full height, a boom echoed across the chamber as the sound barrier was broken. The Icon had a split second to dodge the mana-empowered regular spear that Coop had thrown, but when it planted its foot to the side, a phantasm burst from the mists and smashed into its remaining armored shoulder with its shield just in time for the spear to arrive.

The momentary diversion created by the already dissipating phantasm allowed the missile to slam into the Icon’s smoke-filled upper chest, boring a hole through the smoke that revealed its core of concentrated mana for another split second, swirling like a miniaturized planet of energy a bit lower than expected. The blastwave that resulted from the aura explosion of the spear completely obscured the Icon, but it provided Coop with enough confirmation of the weak point in his opponent.

As the smoke cleared, the remaining armor the monster wore had shattered beneath the pressure, falling to the ground along with the blade. But the Icon maintained a shadowy presence, like a monster of smoke and defiance that would always refuse to die. As it readjusted, it strengthened its posture as much as a mass of mists could have any stance, a storm of shadows building around it.

As it adjusted itself, it siphoned the remaining light from the room, absorbing mana directly from the atmosphere and all that was carried through the Ark by the stream behind Coop. All the energy from the leylines whipped past him to further energize his target. The Icon was rapidly empowering itself, concentrating it onto what Coop realized was its surviving core, deep within the writhing mass of smoke. It knew it was exposed, and was finally pulling the trigger on its own ultimate moves.

Coop resummoned his spear, unwilling to allow the monster to prepare itself for what would almost certainly be a deadly and unavoidable attack, but there wasn’t much to continue targeting, just a storm of shadows. He knew that the level of unfocused energy it was accumulated would be like an enormous mana bomb if it simply exploded, and if it was a focused blast there would be no defense that could hold against it.

Coop planted his foot and launched the missile into the quickly expanding smoke, ignoring the bassy thrumming with each oscillation, then propelled himself with the followthrough. He chased the attack with all the speed he could muster in order to double down on his gambit. He would kill its core before it killed him. That was the choice he decided on. A simple plan that even he could follow.

The fear that swelled in his chest was enough to overcome the remaining pain in his ankle and have him moving faster than ever before. He’d be lucky to have any regrets, since that would mean he was alive. Even he knew that diving into an explosion was a bad idea, but there was never any room for half-hearted judgments when it came to combat.

The monster swelled into a Region Boss sized smoke cloud, somehow still maintaining its vague form at the center. It was reaching out with a mass of tendrils like it intended to swallow its opponent like a whale inhaling a single krill. Coop obliged, in a way, following the tunnel his aura-empowered spear created down its throat with a chain of explosions. At the same time, the energy held within the black mists erupted.

Despite the emerging chaos, Coop could comprehend what was happening with perfect clarity. The Icon was putting everything, all the power that empowered it to be practically unkillable, on the line. Everything was for the singular purpose of defeating its opponent.

“As if I’d let you.” Coop thought, gritting his teeth as he rushed forward.

They were both Revenants. The Icon was constructed through a template, siphoning all that mana through the Ark, designed to literally stand at the top. Coop was built brick by brick, fight after fight, rising up from nothing. He wouldn’t give up. Never. The difference between them was growth beyond design.

Coop readied himself for the first blastwave, lifting both arms across his face, bracing his shield like he was running through a concrete wall. He focused every ounce of his will to survive so that he could kill this monster.

His spear kept going forward, bursting with his aura as Coop doggedly chased after it, a fitting representation of his entire journey. He chased the relative warmth of his ethereal energy, pushing through the encroaching cold that promised death for him and eventually all he knew, still believing he’d win.

With a defiant roar he charged through the first physical pulse of flaring energy that hadn’t been broken by his spear and immediately doubted he would actually make it. For a terrifying moment he actually witnessed his limbs disintegrating layer by layer after his shield broke, and his momentum was hampered. He was forced to cast his Call of the Void skill if he had any hope of going further, concluding that this was exactly the type of emergency he saved the damage conversion for.

The energy that would have killed him was redirected into himself, full healing his body and bolstering his resistance so that he was able to progress all the way to the center, pumping his arms from within a pocket of protective abyssal waters, but every pulse slowed him down, like he was pushing against an entire ocean of mana. He could only squeeze his jaw and clench his fists as he kept charging directly into the heart of the expanding shadow, passing through pulse after pulse of increasingly powerful beats.

There was nothing to dodge or parry and any manifestation would be destroyed before they solidified. Even the mists were swept away from the upper chamber. He was left with no options other than just moving with a single essential purpose to destroy the core of the monster before he was destroyed himself. The tendrils raked across the abyssal waters that protected him, disintegrating as they turned to shadowy claws and sought to tear at his flesh. He ignored the blows, his desperate focus unshakable.

He drove his body forward, aiming for the single pulsating orb of dim black light, twisting with orbitals like a miniature planetary system. Then, the final explosion erupted, the Icon’s essence practically screaming in outrage at Coop’s rejection of death. The energy burst with a final devastating pulse, a last gasp that could end worlds, just to destroy some beach bum.

But Coop had been fast enough, leaping into the damage with reckless abandon, closing in on the core as he was fueled by all the struggles he had gone through since mana activated on planet Earth. When he reached out, there was no more resistance, only a searing, agonizing cold that flared from the depths of shadow.

That was the moment that Call of the Void ended, and Coop was left totally exposed to the eye of the storm. The darkened mists thrashed, collapsing inward as the explosion ripped through his body, completely overwhelming his defenses. His remaining armor that had been protected in the abyssal cocoon scattered like shredded wrapping paper just as his clenched fist reached the core.

If only he had delayed casting the skill by one second, he could have succeeded, but maybe he wouldn’t have been able to build the momentum to close the gap. His last thought was to review his previous action, analyzing how he could have done it better, as if the final bout was just another part of an unending grind where he could incrementally improve for the next set of actions. The thought process that had driven him to the top, stayed with him to the end.

When his knuckles grazed his target they were exposed to the bone, and already softening as bits of ivory mists eroded away, but the orb shattered into obsidian fragments when his aura reached its core, before Coop’s body lost all of its momentum, just barely achieving his goal. The Icon of Mana had landed a world-ender of an attack, and in exchange, the Revenant of Ghost Reef had connected a desperate haymaker right to its metaphorical jaw.

What remained of his physical form fell to the ruined floor with the last of his momentum and the dying torrent of smoke slowly diminished, its source eliminated. He laid among his leaking mists and blood, motionless, barely recognizable amidst the fallout. The dim light in the upper chamber gradually returned as the stream of mana recovered, but none of the beings that had occupied the space demonstrated even the slightest movement.