Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 86: He Is a Madman!
John knew he had only five days to complete his quest, and the clock was already ticking. He wanted to cover all the existing paths on the first day to pinpoint the direction of the den and validate Elena’s method. However, the plan hit an immediate snag.
The paths they had carved over the past ten days were no longer clear; large numbers of monsters were roaming the corridors of light, forcing the trio to waste precious time clearing the way before they’d reach the end of every path and begin their tests.
As the situation proved to be different from what they expected, and when John realised how long and deep each path extended, he decided to slightly change the plan.
At certain intervals, John would signal for a halt and let Elena take command. She would point toward the four cardinal directions, and John would use from their stockpiled cores to extend narrow, temporary paths outward, ending them in spacious, circular hunting grounds.
In these pockets, the fighting went smoothly. John and Cissel teamed up as a whirlwind of blades, while Elena stayed safely back at the entrance of the narrow path. Her job wasn’t to fight, but to observe—counting every single shadow that lunged out of the fog into the light.
Just from performing this method four times, a clear disparity emerged. In some areas, the waves were manageable, consisting of roughly a hundred monsters. In others, the count spiked to one hundred and fifty. But at one particular pocket toward the north-east, they were nearly overrun by a surge of three hundred monsters in a single wave!
"Mark that area for now," John commanded, wiping sweat and the black blood from his forehead. He was now surer than ever that Elena’s method was the key to securing success in his quest. "We’ll keep scanning this path to its current end, then we turn back and check the other paths."
The sheer scale of their previous exploration was becoming an obstacle. John had never fully grasped how long these paths were until it took them nearly three hours of straight running just to return to the centre of their territory. By the time they finished checking half the routes, they had been on the move for more than twenty-two hours.
The results were staggering. Beyond proving that the monster distribution was heavily skewed toward the north, they ended up gathering more than five thousand cores in a single day of scouting.
In one final, terrifying pocket at the furthest northern reach, they faced a herd of five hundred monsters—one of the largest Fog Seekers waves they had ever seen since arriving in this world, the highest hunting ground count they met for the day. It was the prime candidate for the den location, provided that they wouldn’t find a higher count tomorrow.
When John and the girls finally dragged themselves back to the main orchard, they found a scene of total exhaustion and weird tension welcoming them. Luke was sitting far away from Ricky, his face a mask of weary frustration.
"He made us fight like madmen," Luke groaned as John approached. He gestured vaguely toward the edge of their territory. "He kept fighting until we had to handle a wave of three hundred at once! Three hundred! The guy is a madman, John! He doesn’t know when to quit!"
Luke was clearly at his breaking point. He had already consumed nearly one hundred fruits since they had started their core hunting duty. John wanted to remind his friend about their dwindling supplies, but seeing the hollow look in Luke’s eyes, he decided to let it slide. Luke needed to vent his exhaustion through eating.
"At least you gathered a good harvest of cores, right?" John said, trying to help his friend see the silver lining of Ricky’s moody, relentless aggression.
"Yes, we gained close to four thousand!" Luke puffed his chest out slightly, proud of the number, until he noticed the calm, unimpressed expression on John’s face. He froze. A realisation hit him! "Don’t tell me..."
"We were a team of three, so yes, we gathered more," John replied simply. He chose to omit the fact that Elena had stayed out of the actual fighting to perform her counting task.
"Sure, but... Hey, Ricky! Tomorrow we’re going to gather more cores than them, do you hear me?!" Luke suddenly stood up and shouted toward the other side, where Ricky was. Luke didn’t wait for a response; he turned around and collapsed into his bedroll to sleep.
Ricky, sitting alone by a small fire he had made himself, simply snorted in derision. John couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity for Luke; tomorrow was likely to be even more gruelling.
"I’ll stay with Cissel for the first watch," John announced. Despite the bone-deep weariness settling into his limbs, he wouldn’t risk an unguarded camp. Even if their nights had been peaceful so far, experience told him that big quests always brought deadly exceptions.
Elena was the most rested, but John wanted to reward her for the brilliant strategy that had saved them days of blind searching, so he sent her to sleep. He planned to let Ricky and Luke take the second shift, hoping that the shared duty might force them to find some common ground.
John and Cissel climbed to a high branch of a Blue Serpentile tree, giving them a vantage point over the entire glowing territory. Yet like other nights, the silence of the fog was heavy, and nothing passed through the fog veil inside their territory as John feared.
"Thanks for supporting me so far," Cissel said suddenly, out of the blue, breaking the heavy silence around.
The cold, distant image John had of her flickered for a moment. Her tone was soft, almost vulnerable—a stark contrast to the sharp-edged warrior he knew.
"Not just for what happened today," she seemed not mind his weird gaze, continued as she shifted her eyes away, looking out into the grey fog. "For all the times you’ve stood by my side so far."
John remained silent for a few seconds, processing the shift in her attitude, trying to grasp what she wanted to convey by saying these words. In the dim light of the cores below, the cold mask she wore seemed to have slipped, showing a side of her that he never seen before.
