Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 31: Part 3 of the Serialised Quest!

[Ding! Part 3 of the serialised quest is here!]

[Ding! Secure the big win and get closer to your two suspicious friends!]

[Ding! To achieve the quest goals, you’ll need to:

Train with the two students, Cissel and Ricky, on a daily basis! Familiarity meter will unlock; you’ll need to be at least in ’Friendly’ status with one of the two by the end of the Quest. Secure a win for your class in the competition!]

[Ding! Quest Duration: 1 week!]

[Ding! Quest rewards will be assessed according to your overall performance!]

"Sht!" John couldn’t help but curse out loud. "You want me to befriend those two psychos? No way! I just spent the last week pounding them into the dirt, and now you want me to bring them flowers and talk about our feelings?"

The system, as if sensing his resistance, flickered with an ominous red hue.

[Ding! Failure of this quest will deprive you of fully synchronising the system to 10%, missing your chance in your Evolution Task!]

"..."

John went silent. He didn’t need the system to add that last warning, as he had already deduced his progress days ago. He was sitting at 8% synchronization. He lacked just the last 2% to hit that critical 10% threshold.

"Evolution task?" John muttered, his anger replaced by a sharp curiosity. "What the hell is that?"

[Ding! Your synchronisation level is too low to answer this question!]

[Ding! 1 Mental Point is deducted!]

"Stingy as ever," John sighed, rubbing his temples. He was more curious now than ever. The system hadn’t called it a "Quest"; it called it a "Task", which spoke a ton about how special and important this was.

"Time will tell then," he decided, trying to push the mounting anxiety aside. "First things first... These two. I’m sure they’d rather see me hanging from the academy gates than share a meal with me. How can I change someone from being ’Hostile’ to ’Friendly’ in seven days when I’m the one who hospitalised them?"

He recalled how the two generally acted. Ricky was a walking tower of arrogance, convinced he was the protagonist of his own epic tale. Cissel, on the other hand, was an enigma—she looked and acted as if she didn’t belong to the same reality they were living in.

John scratched his head, knowing that if winning the competition against the second-years was already super hard, then the social requirement of the quest was bordering on the impossible.

"I need to think of a way," John decided, realising that brute force wouldn’t work its magic here. "I’ll let life take its course during the upcoming days. For now, I want to know what kind of secret Ricky is hiding. That’s the only leverage I might have."

John knew the best way was to follow Ricky like a shadow, but his previous spying attempts had been humiliating failures. He still hadn’t cracked the code for a stealth program.

"At least I’ll try my luck tonight," he whispered. He waited until the clock crossed ten, marking the start of the forbidden hours. He walked calmly out of his dorm, his footsteps light on the carpeted hallway.

As a member of the official training team, he now held the privilege to walk freely during the night.

’If I were him, I wouldn’t delay,’ John thought. ’I’d move at once tonight to do whatever it is that requires such secrecy.’

John’s thoughts momentarily drifted to the Library. Part of him burned with the desire to go there right now and hack it. If he had this night-roaming privilege, the Library was a treasure chest waiting to be picked.

’Yet I have a far more stressful issue at hand. I have to prioritise Ricky.’ He knew the probability of Ricky having a similar reason to be out was high, but his illicit reason was what mattered.

He moved toward a secluded balcony overlooking the central garden. The garden was a sprawling mess of deep green flora and dark, twisted hedges. He ducked into the shadows of a stone pillar and waited.

He didn’t hesitate to use his Wireframe Sight ability.

The world shifted into a grid of cold green lines. He scanned the foliage for any abnormalities. For three hours, he spotted nothing but the weak sounds of birds and the occasional scuttle of a garden rodent.

’Was I wrong?’ John questioned himself as the fourth hour approached.

Just as he was about to give up and head back to his dorm empty-handed, he saw it.

A flicker.

A shadow, darker than the surrounding gloom, detached itself from the heavy brush, passing fast through the tree line at the edge of the garden.

’Wireframe Sight!’

John didn’t hesitate. He activated the ability. The oppressive darkness of the night was instantly pushed aside, replaced by a digital world. To John’s eyes, it was as if the sun had suddenly returned.

In the centre of this grid-based reality, he spotted the silhouette. The figure was moving with high speed, weaving through the architectural lines of the academy with a fluid grace. But what caught John’s breath wasn’t the movement—it was the codes.

Inside that silhouette, pulsing with a rhythmic, white light, were more than twenty special codes.

’Is it him?’

Seeing the sheer density of these glowing codes left John hesitant, his mind racing to cross-reference his memory. He couldn’t immediately decide if that person was Ricky or not. The count had changed. The last time he had inspected Ricky during their bout, the number had been lower.

’But his special codes have been increasing since the first time I ever inspected him!’ John realised, a cold sweat pricking his brow.

Unable to reach a final verdict, John kept his distance, tracking the target through the green-lined environment until the figure slipped into the dormitory building. The shadow used a side staircase, a secondary access point far from the one John currently stood above.

’Should I follow him then? If I can see which room he enters, I can narrow down his identity once and for all.’

Before he could make up his mind to move, a flicker at the periphery of his vision snatched his attention back toward the garden. It was a subtle distortion in the code. When he pivoted his gaze back toward the dark expanse of the greenery, he spotted a second person.

This one only possessed five special codes, but they were familiar.

’It’s her!’ His eyes gleamed in a flash of triumph. ’It’s Cissel! That means the person from earlier was definitely Ricky! And just as I expected, she was following him like his shadow.’