Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 167: An Earth-Shattering Transformation to Everyone!
After repeatedly shouting, Luke finally heard it, leaving him utterly baffled. "What is she talking about? What cores? Eat them?"
He looked between the sea of dead bodies littering the base of the walls and the distant figures of Ricky and Cissel. But as Elena watched her friends frantically digging through the corpses, take something out and eat it, a flash of realisation hit her like a lightning bolt.
"Dammit! They’re referring to the ingestion of the cores, remember?" She turned briskly toward Luke, her eyes wide with renewed hope and excitement. "When we first came here, we were so weak we could barely kill a single monster. Remember when John told us about the cores and had us ingest them to get stronger?!"
"Damn! I remember now!" Luke’s eyes shone with a newfound brilliance as the memories of their first days in the trial came rushing back. "Damn me for forgetting this! Those monsters have cores? And we can actually eat them? We can let our weapons eat them too?!!"
He said it as if he were speaking to himself, a frantic monologue of revelation. But the next instant, he whirled around to face the five confused Bulltors standing by. "What are you waiting for? Take us down there at once! Move! We have a feast waiting for us!"
The five Bulltors were just as bewildered as their peers down on the field. They couldn’t fathom why these humans were suddenly so eager to dive into a pile of carcasses. Nevertheless, they obeyed. Luke and Elena descended the walls with a singular target, ignoring the carnage around them.
They started hunting through the dead bodies with intensity that reminded all the Bulltors of the terrifying Hivemind race, scavenging and consuming with a mindless, driven hunger.
Yet, the Bulltors couldn’t see the reality yet! The humans were growing stronger with every single core they ingested. Back at the start of their journey, the Fog Seekers had a hard limit of one hundred cores each for the humans and ten for their weapons.
But these new monsters were different; they were higher-tier entities. Not only did they have a significantly higher limit, but their cores held vastly more power than the simple Fog Seekers.
The yellow monster cores had a limit of two hundred. Ricky and Cissel felt the rush of power with every swallow until, upon reaching the two hundred and first core, the yellow stone remained a cold, inert ball inside their mouths. As for the Fog Wrathers’ deep red cores, they had an even more staggering limit of four hundred!
They couldn’t actually hit the limit for the Fog Wrathers yet. Although the cannons had killed five thousand in the first wave, the bodies were scattered over a long course along the base walls and back at the trap John devised.
The team simply didn’t have the time to scavenge them all while the seventh wave was breathing down their necks. They salvaged what they could in the immediate vicinity, with the luckiest of them reaching a count of fifty.
In the middle of their excitement, the team missed one crucial point, however. Back then, John had instructed them to first clear the fog using the Fog Seeker cores before ingesting them.
In their current haste, they were simply taking the cores raw without activating them. This meant they were only receiving a small portion of the potential benefits of the cores!
At a later time, when they would eventually learn about this, the four of them would deeply regret it. And yet, thinking back on how dire and dangerous their situation was, they wouldn’t feel too much regret. By acting at this critical moment, they had managed to do the impossible: they had turned the tables around.
"Don’t forget to feed the weapons!" Luke’s voice bellowed from the direction of the walls as he began pressing the yellow cores into the wood of his club. He could already feel the changes in his own body; his muscles felt denser, his reaction time sharpened, and the massive club felt as light as a feather in his grip.
Nearby, Elena was moving with a speed that defied human logic, her form blurring and creating faint after-images as she dashed between corpses. When she fed her two small sledgehammers with the yellow cores, she felt them vibrate with hunger. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂
They began to transform right in her hands! Small thorns sprouted from the metal heads, glowing yellow and looking deadly. A soft hum resonated from the sledgehammers every time she swung them through the air. And that was just the beginning.
The most shocking transformation, however, occurred within Cissel and Ricky. The surge of the two different cores’ energy finally provided the spark needed to unseal their second abilities, the unique, powerful abilities that had given John nightmares long ago back at the Academy!
The two had never discussed it since coming to this pocket trial world. They had tried to trigger them in the early days and failed, eventually pushing the thought aside as they dealt with the overwhelming tasks of survival.
But now, as the yellow and red cores’ energy flooded their bodies, the thought of trying again rose naturally in their minds. And with the very first attempt, they succeeded.
"Hahaha! I’m back! I’m back, motherfckers, hahaha!"
The sight of the gruesome wounds appearing on a monster from Ricky’s manifested tentacles made him roar with laughter. But the changes didn’t stop at mere manifestation.
The deep red cores from the Wrathers held a great amount of power. Ingesting them didn’t just unlock their secondary abilities; it pushed those abilities far beyond what they had been capable of before they ever set foot in this world.
Ricky could now manifest and control twelve tentacles simultaneously, each one a whip of pure, destructive force. As for Cissel, her transformation was even more chilling. She could now vampirise Mental Points from five different opponents at the same time.
She could feel their life force flowing into her, making her feel energised and refreshed, while leaving behind nothing but dry, shrivelled husks where monsters once stood.
In the span of only a few minutes, the humans who had been struggling to take down a single monster had been completely reborn! They were now an unstoppable force of nature, leaving the Bulltors far behind in the dust.
"What the actual fck just happened?!!!"
Watching the ground-shaking transformation with his own eyes, Lanmar couldn’t help but exclaim in total shock. His golden glaive hung limp in his hand for a moment. "Did they perform some sort of forbidden magic and flip the roles? Why does it look like we are now the weak humans and they are the mighty Bulltors?!!!"
He turned to look at his gang, but all he saw was the same immense shock reflected in their eyes. No one had an explanation. No one had ever imagined that something so miraculous and so terrifying could happen to the fallen race of humanity in a span of a few minutes.
