Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 89: A Brutal Fight!
John threw a series of orders like a true leader before throwing himself back into the fray. As the grey tide surged forward to fill the vacuum left by the explosion, John didn’t immediately dodge.
Instead, he purposely let one of the monsters hit him with its four sharp edges, sickle-like claw, mentally assessing the damage to see if he could adopt a strategy that was far more lethal—and far more reckless.
[-4]
[Ding! Your HP Regeneration Ability is triggered!]
[+5]
’Not bad!’ John took note of the exchange, a cold grin spreading across his face. He realised he could throw himself into the thick of the meat grinder without much worry. Just from the first activation of his ability, the damage dealt was negated at once!
It was a perfect loop; he could use his body as a shield from time to time, repeatedly cheating the system and activating his regeneration passive in succession to maintain a front-line presence that no normal warrior could hope to match.
He didn’t hurry to use his Object Lockdown and Logic Bomb abilities again. He wanted to save his Mental Points for the peak of the surge.
Instead, he moved like a whirlwind, waving his sword to cull the monsters still twitching on the ground after the explosion, or the newly arriving fellows who came in smaller, disjointed numbers, while replenishing his Mental Points using MP Absorption ability and his left hand.
He didn’t realise it at first, but the Logic Bomb had a secondary shockwave effect that helped relieve the pressure momentarily by disrupting the momentum of the monsters in the immediate vicinity.
Yet, after almost twenty seconds, the effect faded, and the situation returned to being as dire as before. The pale grey codes began to stack up until the world was nothing but a wall of monsters.
"Fire in the hole!"
*Boom!*
"Fire in the hole!"
*Boom!*
He repeatedly used the combination of his abilities whenever the density of the monsters escalated beyond his control. After repeating this cycle five more times and successfully activating his HP Regeneration ability seven times in a row, he bought enough time for the girls to do their work.
Behind him, the darkness of the fog was being eaten away by the light of the cores the girls used. They were creating a spacious arena behind him that would allow them to fight properly rather than being suffocated in a narrow corridor.
"It’s enough!" he suddenly shouted, retreating after using his duo abilities for an additional time to create a final shockwave. "Prepare to fight in the heart of it!"
The girls hurried back, their breathing heavy, before the three of them grouped together at the dead centre of the new clearing. The area Elena and Cissel had expanded was five hundred meters in every direction—a wider battlefield that could finally accommodate the sheer volume of the incoming horde without them being pinned against the fog walls.
"I lost track of the monsters attacking us!" Elena suddenly shouted the moment John joined her and Cissel. Her sledgehammer was coated in black blood, and her eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and battle lust.
"No need to count! This is the closest spot to their den for sure! Let’s just kill all of them before exploring beyond!"
Then, a brutal fight occurred—one that left the first day’s last wave of one thousand Fog Seekers looking like a mere warm-up!
John used everything he had in his arsenal. In addition to Object Lockdown and Logic Bomb, he began weaving in Code Destruction, MP Absorption, and even his Speed Lock ability.
By the end of this fight, which lasted for staggering two hours of non-stop combat, he ended up with slightly over 50 Mental Points remaining, and a landscape littered with thousands upon thousands of dead monsters, forming large heaps of skinless hills.
"Hoof... Hoof... What the heck was that just?!!" Cissel was leaning over, hands on her knees, struggling to catch her breath. Her chest heaved, and her hair was matted with sweat and dust. The fight was for sure the hardest they had fought since coming to this world. And yet, their loot from it was staggering.
"That’s what it means to be close to the enemy base camp," Elena said, also sounding exhausted, yet her long, brutal training for years showed its value.
She didn’t collapse; instead, she began eating several of the stored Blue Serpentile fruits from her storage device to replenish her stamina. "The good news is we must have exterminated a front watch point of their den. The area around shall be safe for quite some time."
John moved his eyes around, verifying her claim with his specialised vision. The fog was finally still. There wasn’t a single moving monster shadow in sight, even when he activated his wide-range Wireframe Sight and scanned for over a hundred meters in every direction. The pale grey codes had vanished, leaving only the dark grey structure of the fog.
As he started to move, the girls followed suit, gathering the harvest. After working for half an hour, their combined haul exceeded five thousand cores.
"What shall we do now?" Cissel asked, looking at John with a new level of respect hidden behind her weary eyes. "Shall we go back and bring the others with us?"
She clearly feared that they might face even larger groups as they approached the actual den. Yet, thinking about the hours that would be wasted going back and forth across the path, John decided otherwise.
"Let’s first locate the den. Once we know exactly what we’re dealing with, we’ll go back to bring them," John decided. He looked toward the dark horizon. "Let’s be ready to create wider areas on my mark. We don’t need to be overwhelmed like that again."
The three of them began to walk cautiously into the unknown. They travelled for almost an hour in a tense, expectant silence; their vigilance was set to the maximum. All of a sudden, Elena stopped dead in her tracks.
"Do you hear that?!"
The look on her face was one of profound, bone-deep shock. John mistook it for another wave coming; he whirled around, his sword raised in vigilance, checking the fog for any subtle movement, while Cissel tightened her grip over her daggers, her body tensing for a spring.
But Elena wasn’t looking at the fog. She was tilting her head, her eyes as wide as a full circle.
"It’s... It’s the sound of running water!!!"
