Sunny’s enthusiastic barking erased any further delay of Coop’s reunion with Ghost Reef. The retriever’s tail was wagging so hard his whole body moved like a snake as he swam closer, forcing his path to zig zag across the sandbars.

There were no more enemies in the immediate vicinity of Ghost Reef, though the horizon provided a hint of how much more was to come. The retriever excitedly guided Coop back, unconcerned with further combat. Sunny pulled Coop to the shallower waters as if Coop needed to be rescued and Sunny was the only one in the world that could do it.

As soon as Coop was released by the rescue dog, he was being waved down and shepherded by different soldiers toward the island. They celebrated his return and asked about the explosion they had recently felt, assuming it had been his doing, and completely unconcerned about his absence. They were just happy that he was back.

Maeve claimed him as soon as he hit the beach, steering him the rest of the way, treating him like he might get lost after his belated homecoming. She firmly squeezed his arm as she revealed where the bunkers had been hastily dug in what had once been the southern courtyard of the fort.

Everyone he passed was in surprisingly high spirits, almost completely contrary to what he had expected, but they didn’t leave their positions for long. Even Maeve sent him off with a gentle push forward with just a few words. His destination was what had become their headquarters, a mere hole in the sand near where the citadel had been.

He followed a few narrow and uneven coral rock steps before standing inside the main bunker. He passed a series of runic traps that could only have been devised by Elder Olani while squeezing past resting people and animals. They simply sat anywhere that they could find space, drinking elixirs and snacking on what must have been the last of stored rations, but somehow they were easily smiling at each other. They planned for the next fight, focused enough that they didn’t notice Coop.

When the bunker opened up slightly, it was filled with recovering soldiers who had been suffering the most against the corruption. They were being actively treated by humans and the healers from the medical center in a manner that was something out of pure fantasy. The healers were hovering their hands over their patients’ bodies, slowly guiding mana through them, like a mystical blood transfusion while dirty soldiers acted as nurses, wiping their foreheads with cloth during their limited breaks from battle.

Coop could only imagine the hopelessness the room might have been filled with before, but after the pressure from the Eradication Protocol was released, spirits were high and all the patients were improving. Patients that had been unresponsive were giving thumbs up to each other as their strength returned, quietly planning their return to the sides of their brothers and sisters in arms as soon as possible.

In the center, he found Marcus and Jones both advising human messengers that were geared up to physically run between destinations. They had holed up inside the civilization shard room, beneath the long destroyed citadel, making sure the key piece that propagated the inoculation against corruption stayed alive so that they could keep fighting for that much longer. The patients were brought as close as possible to benefit from the buffs and titles.

Marcus perked up at the sound of footsteps when Coop splashed into a few inches of seawater that had long flooded their coral rock dugout. “I shoulda known.” He exclaimed, hopping up with a huge smile expanding all the way to his eyes. “As soon as we realized that mountain erupted I shoulda guessed it, but it was too obvious when the corruption just stopped!” He somehow laughed, despite the creases of worry that had embedded themselves in his face. Even though they had mana, Marcus had streaks of gray in his hair that weren't there before, like the Eradication Protocol had truly aged him.

Jones slapped Coop on the back like a proud father, his other arm supporting Jett on his shoulder. “It’s about time you came home.”

Coop shrugged, feeling a bit of shock that his confidence in his friends hadn’t been wasted after all. “Glad to see you too, old man.” They shared a moment to let the relief wash over them as Coop scratched the cat’s back.

Marcus canceled whatever messages he had intended to send, replacing them with a declaration that Coop was back, and the messengers hastily exited.

“So,” Marcus began, eyes still widening, “we actually made it?” He wondered, face lighting up in surprise, his effort to temper his enthusiasm failing.

Coop nodded, but the shock of the state of affairs held his tongue. He didn’t know where to begin. The fighting wasn’t over, but they actually had a chance to stabilize themselves without mana seeping into everything and eating them from the inside out. In other words, victory was truly possible.

“Still need to clean up what might be a trillion monsters covering the planet, but they won’t respawn anymore.” Coop answered, voice drifting off as he found something distracting.

Coop focused on a strangely insistent alien aura he detected in one of the corners. One of the foragers that had been recruited near the beginning was cradling a pot of soil with a single stem poking out, topped by a lone unfurled leaf. The way the leaf bounced made it seem like it was waving at him.

Jones followed his eyes, recognizing his expression and knowing that Coop was a bit overwhelmed. “Ah, don’t worry. That’s Caisalya. She protected the fort by sacrificing her body when the shield went down, but she left a cutting with Ixia in advance. Supposedly, she’ll be fine now that she can get some sun. The gardeners have been keeping an eye on her in shifts.”

“Right.” Coop accepted the alien explanation without question, shyly waving back at the leaf, unsure if that’s what he was meant to do. “Where are the phantoms?”

“They’re all gone for the same reason. They can’t be respawned without mana, and the shard has none.” Marcus answered. “Isn’t that right Zak.”

The bird mayor confirmed from his perch on top of the shard, hunched over against the rather tight ceiling and shelves holding their trophies. Even the spectral relic that had been inside the lighthouse was propped up next to the surviving pink flamingo yard decorations and a small nest where Birdie was napping with the burrowing owls. Coop nodded, considering what should be his first step to clean up the mess.

There were barely more defenders than they had during the Siege Event on the surface. That meant expanding their perimeter much farther was probably out of the question. “Is this all that’s left?” He tentatively wondered, obviously assessing the damage as catastrophic.

Both Jones and Marcus shook their heads like they were disappointed he didn’t have even more faith than what he saw as an incredible amount, given Lyriel’s assessments of how an Eradication Protocol would play out. Here humanity was, holding out thirty times longer than the most inflated predictions could have guessed, and they thought he was underestimating them.

“The underground layers have been faring much better.” Marcus assured him. “We’re still holding nearly a hundred levels down. The natural stone really helped since the fortifications didn’t turn to dust when the enemies encroached on our territory. With the corruption gone, we won’t lose anymore ground.”

Coop exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “That’s good. Where do we need help the most?” He asked, planning on fighting on the frontlines where he belonged.

“Right here.” Marcus stated.

Jones nodded along. “The shard is still our priority and the surface has taken the most damage by far. The Icons have been concentrated up here the entire time and the bastards aren’t limited to just one. If they were, we would have managed much better.”

“Got it.” Coop responded, still thinking about reinforcements. “I wonder if I can use my mana to respawn the phantoms.”

“Give it a shot.” Marcus suggested. “Doesn’t do anything when we try, but the passive buffs are active, so we know it’s still alive.” He gestured for him to go for it. “You’ve got much more than we do, anyway.”

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Coop didn’t think anything of it, moving to place his hand against the civilization shard as he gathered his focus into his aura with the clear direction to respawn them all. As soon as he reached out to the shard, before he had really done anything, a spark of what seemed like red static electricity jumped to his finger, practically dragging his palm closer, and an energy wave burst from the surface in all directions when he made contact.

The final settlement upgrade was activated, forgotten by the Champion without the system status windows indicating his progress. The shard was still programmed by the system, after all. It remembered the quest regardless of interface elements.

The requirements had been three billion basic credits and 100% of the world’s population within their territory. It seemed like they had achieved the more difficult task by default and the faction had long acquired far more credits than necessary.

Coop expected the energy pulse to collide with the new limit of their settlement territory and return, like every other upgrade had in the past, but it just kept going. Instead of an incremental expansion of their territory it seemed like everything would belong to the Lighthouse.

At the same time, Coop felt his own mana pool react, as if it had expanded in a way that meant his stats had increased with another Champion title, though this time had to have been a multiplicative bonus rather than a flat increase. He was surprised how in tune he was with his mana pool, assuming the actual physical change was wrought from his increased connection with the shard itself.

He didn’t have a chance to turn inward and investigate further. To their collective surprise, the civilization shard actually changed color at the same time as the upgrade triggered. At first it swirled through a muddy purple from the bottom up. It darkened into an abyssal shadow as red and blue energies combined before it started to clear up and settle into a new shade. In the end it emitted a ghostly aquamarine hue that made it look like a much larger chunk of the spectral relic and matched with his ethereal manifestations after they had been brought into harmony with the abyss.

A bunch of different things had happened at once, but the color change caused Coop to react the most. “The heck does that mean?” He muttered, feeling like the shard was aligning closer to his specific characteristics than he imagined was possible.

Coop and the others returned to the surface as a small commotion drew their attention. Apparently, his command had been received. Phantoms had returned. The highest ranked manifestations of Ghost Reef made their appearance and greeted the Champion directly outside the bunker, near the edge of the eroded canal where they had all originally appeared the first time they returned. Compared to previous upgrades, it was only a few.

“It’s good to be back!” The Pirate Queen Kayla celebrated, stretching like she had been slumbering for a long time. First Mate Sharkbait and Captain Charon both silently agreed from her flanks.

“Is it just you guys?” Coop wondered.

“Are we not enough?” Kayla teased him as she presented the various Guard Captains who were the few that maintained a level appropriate for the settlement they belonged to, along with the other executive officers of both the army and navy. Then, she frowned. “No, I suppose without my ships we’re a bit weak.”

Gideon stepped up from among the other officers to help speculate, having gone through similar investigations with Coop in the past. “We’re slightly different from before," he observed, looking at his surprisingly corporeal hands. “Perhaps our relative rankings improved to reflect boss status.”

“That sounds good. Is it because the shard was upgraded?” Coop wondered.

“Maybe.” Kayla responded. “I think we’re slightly more than before. What else did you do differently this time?”

Coop shrugged. “I used my mana.” He added, though it didn’t seem like he had actually spent any.

It was more like he had prompted the shard to reserve some of its own, the way his phantasms reserved durability on his weapons in lieu of his actual mana pool. He assumed that was why the color had changed. Like with his own skills after being expelled from the system, he had only imitated the system’s function, and tapped into the mists the way he was more familiar with.

Kayla matched his motion. “Could be.”

“It is a bit strange, though.” Gideon added, glancing at Kayla to see if she noticed. “We didn’t reach our maximum capacity. The mana expenditure had a priority granted to the previously committed, but if additional mana is accumulated, you can continue to spawn more phantoms.”

“Really?” Coop wondered, though with so few he should probably have expected them to have a larger allotment. There were only a few dozen officers assessing the situation on the surface. “Hopefully, me being outside of the system isn’t a problem.”

“I can say that as far as we phantoms are concerned, you can continue to rely on us.” Gideon promised.

Kayla hummed. “I only know about my crews, but they’ll get the job done as usual.”

“Do you really not know how many eligible crew members you can have?” Coop wondered, remembering she knew exactly how many ships and sailors the Tempest Fleet was allowed to summon at the start.

“Well, it’s really a lot. Like an incomprehensibly large number with too many digits to comprehend at a glance.” She stated. “It’s far more than it should be, unlike the first time around when there were pretty specific limits.”

Gideon nodded, apparently having absorbed the same information as Kayla. “There are more than one hundred billion potential phantoms.”

Marcus coughed in surprise while Jones raised his eyebrows and spoke up. “If that’s accurate, it would represent every human that has ever lived.” The old caretaker faced Coop and gave him a complex look. “And that means our territory is the whole planet.”

“Wait, what?” Coop was taken aback, not fully realizing Ghost Reef had expanded that much. “So every human that ever existed could become a phantom?”

“It seems that way.” Gideon postulated.

Jones looked as shocked as Coop. “Amazing.”

Marcus was shaking his head in awe at the conversation as he recovered. “We, as a species, will never be the same. Immortality and second chances, unrestricted by resources…. If we make it through this, what will we become?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Jones tried tempering their thoughts.

Gideon spoke up before their imaginations continued to run wild. “But to become a phantom is to give up some of what makes us human. Remember, we are bound to you and the settlement in an absolute way. Its result is unquestionable loyalty to Ghost Reef, its Champion, and as an extension, the Lighthouse since our very existence relies on you. Not every human soul recorded by mana would want to wake from their slumber, and even fewer would accept the restrictions, especially not knowing about what Coop, Ghost Reef, and the Lighthouse represent.” He further surmised.

“It still completely changes our perspective on life itself.” Marcus pointed out. “The implications are really crazy.”

“If we weren’t constantly distracted by survival, the fact that mana already eliminated natural death should have already done that.” Jones pointed out, being an example of someone who had regained quite a bit of youth.

“Just a few hours ago, we were genuinely facing extinction.” Marcus muttered, his thoughts clearly drifting toward the future.

Coop couldn’t even begin to guess at what else they would have to think about, but he did know that they would basically be building a new society from scratch. In that sense, it was better to move forward with their eyes open. Whether it was a rebirth or a renaissance would depend on them.

“So this time, only you guys spawned?” Coop asked, wondering about just how much mana they would need in the long run, and bringing their focus back to what they had to do in the immediate future in their fight against the remaining forces of mana.

“There are ten million more who have mustered at the base of the chasm in the Underlayer.” Gideon stated while Kayla snickered in the background. “They needed more room and that was the closest uncontested open space to the shard.”

“Ten million?” Coop repeated. “My mana didn’t even change and that many returned?”

“The fully upgraded shard is a reflection of its Champion.” Gideon offered, unsure if the bit of information helped.

Marcus had tilted his head at Coop’s question. “If you’ve got more mana, try summoning more.” He suggested.

Coop led the way back into the bunker and repeated the process with the civilization shard. Unfortunately, nothing happened the second time around. Still, they had already returned all sorts of people, from ancient warriors to individuals that had been minding their own business at the start of the assimilation, scrolling through their phones, before a meteor or early monster cheated them from experiencing the rest of the apocalypse.

Coop grunted, slightly disappointed to have already hit their current limit. “Can we keep upgrading the shard somehow?” He wondered.

The others were lost in their own thoughts, shaking their heads, before Marcus gave another suggestion. “Maybe not the shard, but you will probably find a way to upgrade yourself, won’t you?”

Jones chuckled. “There’s plenty of monsters around. There’d be no harm in trying.”

Coop just shrugged at the suggestion. “...was gonna do that anyway.”