Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 41: Speed Stat!
John couldn’t help but shake his head in disbelief. What was desperation? This was what desperation truly meant! The sheer gap in power was colossal. "Yet no game ever posed an impossible task! There must be a hidden trick that will help me clear all that!"
He analysed the Boss. The monster was deadly in every way he could imagine, a titan of raw power and impenetrable defence. The only potential drawback was its low speed, 20 compared to the Elites’ 40. Yet, that was a small mercy, likely balanced by its massive build, heavy weight, and the crushing force of its attacks.
Taking a single hit from that thing wouldn’t just hurt; it would instantly kill him. And even if the boss stood idle and acted like a punching bag, John knew his current sword wouldn’t score any damage more serious than 1 point—the minimum pity-damage hard-coded into almost any game system for when an attack fails to breach a defence threshold.
"Even if I coded a new sword with the Level 10 materials, I still stand no chance at all against it in a fair fight... And seeing there are only fifty monsters here, it means there isn’t a normal stage at all! Does it mean they will all enter the Frenzy State once I step further into the hall?"
He had to expect the worst. The more he thought, the darker his chances seemed. Against the high defence of these Elites, his only hope lay in his Object Lockdown-Code Destruction duo. But even then, his MP wouldn’t last against fifty of them.
"Yet there must be a catch," he whispered. He didn’t hurry to step fully into the hall. Unlike the games he played back on Earth, he knew dying here wasn’t a Game Over screen; it was a final breath. He kept searching, alternating between his normal sight and his Wireframe Sight ability, scanning the vast hall for any environmental trick hidden in the vicinity.
"There..."
Just as he was seconds away from giving up, he noticed something in his Wireframe vision. There were strange clusters of codes pulsating at one side of the hall. At first, they were hard to distinguish from the ambient white noise of the dungeon, but when he fixated on them, the pattern became clear.
"Special green codes... If the basic codes in this dungeon are white, which is the reverse of the Athanasia game world structure, then it makes sense for any special codes here to be green..."
He couldn’t immediately tell what the purpose of these codes was. Were they power-ups? Traps? Or perhaps environmental hazards he could trigger against the Goblins?
He began to scan for similar clusters, and his heart skipped a beat as he spotted four more at different locations across the hall, including one that was positioned relatively close to the entrance where he stood. Yet the monsters were far closer to him than that cluster, so he knew he wouldn’t get there smoothly as he desired.
"I have to try and see what these are," he muttered. He didn’t know if they were boosts or nothing at all, but if he wanted to clean this place and survive, he had to take even the slightest chance he could find.
"Time to work," John muttered, the grip on his sword tightening. He slightly adjusted his plan to match his new goal, incorporating the discovery of the green code clusters into his survival strategy.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold and made contact with the cold stone ground, the air itself seemed to vibrate. The entire group of fifty scary Goblins jolted back to life, their eyes snapping open in unison!
"It’s as I expected," John said, his heart hammering hard. He wasn’t startled by the sudden change in the monsters’ attitude. "Yet luckily, there is no Frenzy State... Yet!"
He feared jinxing himself, so he bit back any further commentary and focused entirely on his next step. The Elites weren’t just bigger; they moved with a malice that the previous monsters he faced before lacked.
The first thing he did was to take the initiative. He knew that if he waited for those scary elites to close the distance and swarm him, it would be too late. He instantly activated all of his abilities.
Waving his sword like a man possessed, he lunged toward the closest cluster of three Elites. He aimed to first test his deadly combo on them before proceeding further toward the green code clusters.
[-25] [-20] [-25]
The first three monsters he targeted with his Object Lockdown-Code Destruction combo showed these staggering damage numbers. In the previous halls, such numbers would have been a death sentence for a goblin. Yet here, with their sky-high HPs, this looked more like a minor sting than a deadly hit.
"Even the crippling effect caused by the combo in the past hall lost its effect here!" John noticed with a jolt of alarm. Even though the combo did its magic and shattered a portion of their code, the Level 7 Elites didn’t suffer that much. They didn’t even stop!
They moved with a terrifying speed, flashing like bolts of lightning in his eyes. They began to pivot and weave, attempting to surround him in a triangular pincer. Beyond them, more monsters were flashing fast, heading straight toward his spot with ground-shaking footfalls.
In the back of the hall, the Boss remained motionless on his throne. It watched the fight with a detached, cold gaze, as if it were watching an interesting show. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚
*Roar!*
The sound was deafening, a chorus of loud screams for his death. John’s previous halls tactics depended on hitting and running, or locking and running. Yet this time, he didn’t select any of those for his opening gambit.
"I will do my best to kill the three of you before your brothers arrive!" he growled.
He welcomed the scary moves of the big wooden clubs with his timely evasive movements, slowly retreating towards the corridor, just in case. His mind was calculating at a furious pace.
With every evasion, he struck a monster using his Code Destruction ability, while simultaneously moving his sword in a blur to create more wounds and add more damage using the Bleeding effect.
"Tsk! I have to retreat!"
The fight hadn’t lasted more than fifteen seconds when he noticed the secondary wave of monsters closing in. If he stayed any longer, he would end up dead one hundred percent.
Without looking behind him, he ducked under a massive club swing that would have crushed his skull, pivoted on his heel, and headed directly toward the narrow corridor. "Time to test my theory," he hissed, his lungs burning. He stood inside the entrance of the corridor, his back to the wall, ready to jump out and keep running if the monsters showed no sign of stopping.
"Phew!"
Seeing the Goblins pause in their tracks just at the lip of the hall, with weird, confused looks over their ugly faces, made him finally heave a deep sigh of relief. The invisible boundary of the hall acted as a safe zone for him.
"Now I have my safe spot. Time to repeat this!"
He waited for twenty more seconds, watching the monsters slowly begin to return to their initial spots. He didn’t wait for them to stand idle as before; he feared that if they returned to their dormant state, they would end up getting healed or the Bleeding effect would be crushed by the dungeon’s reset logic, like how his ability suffered when he first got into here.
*Roar!*
The moment he stepped in again, the Goblins roared in unison. Like a scripted encounter, he spent another fifteen seconds hitting the same three monsters he had targeted earlier, layering more Bleeding damage and shattering more codes, before hurriedly retreating back to his safe zone.
"Again!"
Once the monsters were halfway to their original spots, he trespassed inside the hall once more. He kept repeating the same leash-pulling tactic over and over again, chipping away at their massive HP pools with patience, until he finally killed the first three Level 7 Elites.
[Ding! Congratulations! You killed Goblin Bug Monster Level 7.]
[You gained: +1 Speed stat | Mental Point Cap +1]
[Ding! Congratulations! You killed Goblin Bug Monster Level 7.]
[You gained: +1 Speed stat | Mental Point Cap +1]
[Ding! Congratulations! You killed Goblin Bug Monster Level 7.]
[You gained: +1 Speed stat | Mental Point Cap +1]
"Speed stat? Speed stat? Am I reading it right?!"
John couldn’t believe his eyes. He stood in the safety of the corridor, his chest heaving, and double-checked his profile to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating from the stress. Speed had been his most stagnant stat, the one thing keeping him from truly dominating the dungeon’s high-level monsters so far.
"Damn!" he sucked in a cold breath of air. The math was suddenly very, very attractive. "There are around forty of these Level 7 monsters in here. Does that mean if I clear them all, I’ll gain forty points in Speed?!"
If that were true, his Speed would jump from 11 to 51. He wouldn’t just be able to keep up with the Elites; he would be able to run circles around the Boss. The impossible dungeon had just revealed its most valuable reward. And he liked it!
