Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 166: Ingesting the Cores!
"That’s exactly why we have to stop using them!"
Cissel stood her ground, acting stubborn. "The waves are doubling, Ricky! If we waste all the grenades on these few thousand, what are we going to do when a hundred thousand show up? We kill the ones scattered by the first blasts with our blades, expand the gap. We only use the grenades if we get surrounded once more!"
"She has a point," Reody suddenly interfered, his massive broadsword cleaving through a yellow monster with a sickening crunch. "Yet your strengths... It’s weirdly lacking compared to the standards of the trials. It shouldn’t be like this."
This was a very puzzling point in Reody’s and the other Bulltors’ eyes. From their perspective, every race that entered these pocket trials had strong members fighting here. They had expected the humans to be as strong, or at least close to them.
On top of that, once they joined and fought inside the pocket trial, their strengths would slowly grow. But to the giants, it felt like the humans were stagnant, held back by an invisible ceiling that prevented them from even growing as other races did.
"I need to talk with John about it later," Lanmar suddenly added. It felt like the act of fighting the monsters and seeing how brittle they were had returned the old, arrogant Lanmar to the surface. "Let’s now focus on killing as much as we can. We’ll leave the rest for the base defences to handle once we retreat."
Lanmar’s opinion was what everyone eventually settled upon. And yet, his and Reody’s casual remarks about how Ricky and Cissel’s strengths were lagging behind the other races made both pause. The same thought flickered through both of their minds simultaneously.
They thought back to the very beginning, the moment they first arrived in this world and faced the Fog Seekers. They had discovered the hard way that their original attributes had been sealed, leaving them with only one percent of their true powers to use. Back then, they had celebrated the restorative effects of the Fog Seekers’ cores, feeling the surge of reclaimed power with every ingestion.
But as the days passed and the challenges mounted, they had forgotten that point entirely. Their recent successes, fueled by their success in building the base, had blinded them to the fact that they were still fighting with a small fraction of their powers.
"Let’s pick a few cores," Ricky said, as if they were sharing a single consciousness. And Cissel nodded immediately.
The Bulltors, who were still swinging their weapons in wide, violent arcs, were baffled when the two humans suddenly stopped fighting. Instead of striking at the approaching monsters, Ricky and Cissel dropped to their knees beside the nearest fallen yellow monsters and began digging through the yellowish remains.
"Is it the right time to be scavenging for cores?!" Lanmar shouted, his voice dipping back into its panicked tone as he saw the humans occupied with the dead, taking out yellow cores, while the living were still closing in.
"You said our strength is lacking," Ricky shouted back, his hands plunging deep into the chest cavity of a dead monster. He pulled out a faintly glowing, yellowish core.
"And you’re right! Since the first moment we set foot here, our power was locked away. But the monsters we fought before gave us part of our locked powers back through these! So why wouldn’t this new type of monster do the same trick?!"
Without even waiting for Lanmar or other Bulltors to grasp the meaning behind the words, Ricky and Cissel both placed the slightly larger, warm yellow cores inside their mouths.
Then the magic happened almost instantly.
The two of them recalled vividly how it felt when they ingested the smaller Fog Seeker cores. The cores would dissolve into a hot, refreshing liquid once they touched the tongue. They also remembered the bitter sensation of reaching their limit, when the cores would remain cold and solid in their mouths, signifying they could absorb no more of that magic.
But as the yellow cores touched their tongues, they felt the power dissipating into their bodies in a rush of plausible heat. Their eyes shone brighter with a sudden, renewed excitement!
"It... Works!!" Cissel shouted, her voice echoing with a newfound thrill. She turned fiercely toward Lanmar, Reody, and the others. "From now on, protect us! We need to increase our power if we’re going to survive the next waves!"
"Ok," Lanmar muttered, looking completely confused. The rest of the Bulltors shared his bewilderment. None of them had ever heard of a race using monster cores in such a way to boost their strength.
One of the other Bulltors, driven by a sudden burst of curiosity, decided to try it himself. He dug into a nearby corpse, grabbed a yellow core, and tossed it into his mouth, trying to chew it like a piece of tough jerky. The sound of cracking was heard, but it wasn’t the core, the Bulltor ended up with several damaged ivory teeth and a sore jaw. Nothing else happened.
"But which cores will you consume?" Reody asked, sighing as he watched his fellow warrior nurse his bleeding gums. "There are two different types of monsters here! It isn’t just these yellow ones."
Reody’s casual words caused Ricky and Cissel to freeze all of a sudden, as a sharp realisation hit them. He was right. There wasn’t just one type of monster surrounding the base; there were two distinct species. There were these new, yellow hybrid monsters, and then there were the original threat, the Fog Wrathers.
"We’ll consume both!" Ricky said decisively, his eyes darting toward the massive piles of dark red flesh remains near the walls.
Cissel turned her head toward the walls as well, spotting Luke standing by Elena’s side.
"Get down here!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice weakened over the chaos of the battle. "Get the cores from the two types of monsters and eat them! Both of them!"
