Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 233: Five Days Passed
"The last wave is coming, get ready!"
Five days had passed in brutal fighting against the monsters. Since the whole Bulltors force had arrived in the Hiveminds territory, the pace of killing the monsters had accelerated to a breakneck speed.
Of those five days, the most gruelling were the first seventy-two hours, during which John had relentlessly led his friends, the Twelve, and Lanmar’s group into constant fighting during the night and good parts of the day.
It had taken every ounce of their strength to take over the yellow monsters’ dens. John had destroyed the first two yellow monster dens on that first frantic night. After a brief midday sleep, he returned to crush the third. He was determined not to let a single monster core last beyond the eleventh wave ever again.
By the time the third den fell, he opted to obtain its core rather than hack it, leaving him with two reset cores, precious insurance policies for when they eventually returned to Athanasia.
From that point on, John’s strategy shifted to target the new yellow monsters’ dens. As each Wrathers wave would revive the yellow monster dens, he had to take them down after the tenth wave was killed. Yet there was a catch that made him struggle in the first couple of days; he couldn’t tell how many waves erupted from each den.
The dens were already scattered far away from each other. And with lots of Wrathers around, it was so challenging to identify the lightning falling on the dens than the ones falling on the Wrathers.
So he decided to take regular travels across the three dens, until he decided it was better to clear the entire monsters first, clear the Wrathers waves, so he could easily identify when a new yellow monster wave appeared.
After five days of constantly hacking every yellow den that attempted to sprout, he raised his total count of Pocket Trial Ownership fragments to twenty-four.
He was now on the precipice of gaining three more; as the final, massive wave of Wrathers was about to erupt from the central zone, and with it, the final step to end the nightmare he sought seeds for his enemies and found himself forced to fall into was about to be over.
After the first two days, the immense threat that once seemed insurmountable had been broken. The situation had stabilised into a normal slaughter, much like the one John and his friends had mastered back in their home territory.
The monsters were still numerous, but they were no longer a chaotic tide filling the entire territory. They were getting fought in organised fashion, while he, his friends, and the Bulltors handled the different fronts with much ease. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂
The Bulltors large group, now three thousand strong following the rapid recovery of a thousand wounded warriors, had transformed into a true standing army.
Under John’s outposts’ help and the leadership of the Twelve, they moved with momentum and demoralised the group of Bulltors that hadn’t experienced since coming to this pocket trial. Yet, despite their own prowess, the Bulltors remained deeply shaken by the abnormal strength of the five humans.
The Twelve had partitioned the army into twelve specialised divisions, each fanning out to hold a specific coordinate and intercept any monster wave. John, his four friends, and Lanmar’s original Bulltor squad formed the thirteenth front.
This final group, despite having the lowest number in all groups, was an anomaly; they moved faster, hit harder, and killed monsters with a casual brutality that made the other ten Bulltor groups look like amateurs.
Then, there was the weird ritual.
After the two brutal days had passed, and after the conclusion of every wave, a scene unfolded that left the Bulltors scratching their heads in bewilderment.
The humans would scatter across the battlefield, frantically dissecting the mountain of monster remains with eye-catching obsessiveness, collecting every single core they could find. To the Bulltors, cores were minor conveniences, sources of heat and light for a cold night. They saw no inherent value in the trash of the apocalypse.
Yet the humans pursued these cores with a religious fervour, even breaking into loud, heated arguments over harvesting rights and territorial boundaries on the corpse-strewn field.
Driven by a curiosity he couldn’t suppress, Galnar had eventually approached Lanmar to ask for the truth behind the madness. When Lanmar explained that the humans seemed to consume the energy within the cores to transcend their limits and grow stronger, Galnar had simply stared at him for a long minute before walking away without saying anything.
He already heard about how John used the cores before to strengthen himself, his friends, and his gears from Reody. And yet, even when he saw what John did with the generators, cannons, and energy cells, and even when he heard the same story twice, he dismissed the entire story as a blatant fantasy.
He assumed Lanmar and Reody were simply bound by an order of secrecy and didn’t want to share the humans’ true secrets. To him, John was a wizard, so he could do such stuff, but his four friends weren’t like him. So there must be another reason for their craziness, one that he decided to dig deeper into and learn about in the future.
"This time it’s different!" Luke’s voice suddenly boomed, interrupting the internal musings of the nearby giants prepared to welcome the last Wrathers wave.
Luke had developed a peculiar habit over the last few days: delivering a rousing, high-morale speech to the Bulltors before every new Wrathers wave. He stood before the ranks of the armoured giants, his massive club resting on his shoulder.
"This time, we aren’t just defending a line and killing useless red and yellow skinless freaks! We are going into that central spot, into the heart of the rot, and we are going to claim the life of the damn bastard leading these monsters! Today, we say enough to all this brutality and danger. Today, we end this entire hell once and for all!"
"HORAY!"
