Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 102: You Owe Me a Date!

The D-1000s, lacking a visual on their assailant, madly opened fire at almost everything around them, including their own members. John lay flat, pressing his face into the dirt as beams of laser shots sizzled through the fog just inches above him.

He waited for an entire minute, until all his planted bombs had detonated and the frantic blind shooting of the machines’ laser guns finally died down. Once he stood up and brushed the dust from his shoulders, he was welcomed by an unexpected surprise!

"Damn! They killed most of the machines in the mad firing!"

John had expected to return to the fray and see a large group of vigilant D-1000s waiting for him. Instead, the fog was a graveyard of green codes. Twisted metal, shattered sensors, and smouldering power batteries lay scattered across the ground. In their panic, the machines’ crossfire had been more lethal than his own bombs.

"There are still a few rats left," he whispered, his Frame Recognition picking up faint, distant green code structures.

Out of this massacre, scattered groups of tens of machines had managed to survive the madness. And like before, they were trying to regroup, putting as much distance as possible between them and whoever—or whatever—was attacking them. They were moving deeper into the fog, their retreat now a desperate scramble for survival.

John didn’t hurry to attack them directly this time. He knew their real intentions now. Instead, he took a wide curve through the dense fog and raced to get ahead of them, while keeping a close eye on them using Wireframe Sight to spot any change in their pattern.

As he feared, the machines remained on high alert and adopted new strategy; they would stop every few minutes and open fire at their rear, blindly raining laser shots into the darkness, aiming to kill the hidden enemy they felt was biting at their heels. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

John patiently waited for half an hour, maintaining his lead while making sure they kept this routine fixed. He watched as the scattered remnants slowly coalesced into a single, final gathering of slightly over five hundred D-1000 units. It was the last of the retreating army.

Because he had overstayed his welcome in the fog, he made sure to clear a small area of fog at the last minute, which he covered with his Sandbox ability to mask his presence from the machines’ sensors.

Then he moved!

’Logic Bomb... Thirty seconds...’

He was slightly exhausted after all the crazy fighting, the relentless running back and forth, and the immense psychological tension he had suffered from in the past few hours.

And yet, he pushed himself over the limit. He ran like a blur in the fog, moving as fast as his tired legs allowed, planting bombs on every machine he could reach at the front of the group, while absorbing their Mental Points to replenish his.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

The final wave of explosions came in a synchronised roar, destroying what was left of that group. The rest got shot down by their mates in the subsequent blind firing, as usual. And what remained of them were killed easily by using less than a dozen Logic Bombs over them.

"Phew, it’s over," John sighed, his breath hitching. He made three slow tours around the perimeter of the wreckage, killing whatever astray D-1000 unit he found till there was none.

He didn’t stop there, he returned to the wreckage site, prodding the broken metallic bodies with his sword to make sure there wasn’t a single D-1000 feigning death or waiting in ambush.

"Still no notification of ending my quest... It seems there are still lots of monsters alive back there."

He slumped against a piece of debris, too exhausted to jump back into another battle right away. His stomach gave a sharp growl of protest. Out of habit, he reached into his storage and took out a pile of Blue Serpentile fruit to eat, looking for the quick sugar rush and vitality boost they provided. Yet, the moment the fruit touched the air of the deep fog, something totally unexpected happened!

*Sizzle!*

Just as he took the fruit out, it felt like there was a violent chemical reaction to the fog around him. Like wildfire catching dry leaves, a brilliant blue flame erupted from the pile. In a sudden reflex, John threw the burning fruit away, his heart hammering as he watched the blue fire dance in the grey fog.

Following his throw, the pile touched the ground and exploded into a violent pillar of blue fire—one that took the flickering, majestic shape of a serpent. It rose its fiery body high in the air, translucent and terrifying, unleashing a roar that seemed to vibrate the ground under his feet!

"What the heck was that?!!"

John had never tried to eat the fruit inside the deep fog before; they had always been within their cleared territory. As he watched the fire die down as fast as it had appeared, the blue serpent dissolving into dancing specks of blue light, he couldn’t help but hesitate. He waited a few seconds for any further reactions, then cautiously went to check what was left in the scorched earth.

"This..."

There, in the centre of the blackened patch, he spotted a weird cluster of blue codes, similar to the ones present in the fruit, but vastly more concentrated. It wasn’t a pile of fruit anymore. It had fused into a single elliptical object with a rough, crystalline surface, about the size of a closed fist.

[Ding! You acquired Enhanced Blue Serpentile Seed!]

"Seed?!" John was captivated by the object in his palm. He looked at its code structure closely. "How do I plant it? Will it yield a towering tree? Will it take years to grow?" He couldn’t imagine sitting around for decades waiting for a harvest; he couldn’t bring himself to imagine staying in this world for more than what his Evolution Trial mission needed.

[Ding! You’ll have to figure this out yourself by trying!]

[Ding! 1 Mental Point is deducted!]

John rolled his eyes at the interface. The system was becoming increasingly stingy with its information, charging him for a non-answer.

Yet, he knew the pattern by now: whenever the system withheld knowledge and responded in this cryptic way, it usually meant the answer would be apparent to him the moment he tried to plant the seed. It was a prompt for experimentation, not a refusal.

"I’ll worry about you later," John muttered, storing the heavy seed in an inventory slot. He moved his eyes around the desolate, machine-littered battlefield. "It’s time to head back... And I’ll eat a few fruits whenever I finally get out of here!"

The battle with the D-1000 legion had spanned a vast distance, drawing him kilometres away from his friends. He began the long trek back, clearing small pockets of fog to maintain his safety.

When he finally broke through the final curtain of fog into the valley basin, he saw a sight that made his brow furrow in irritation: thousands of monsters were still swarming around his friends.

"They regained their composure? What were Ricky and Cissel doing?!" John had assumed the two of them would have grasped the window of opportunity.

The monsters should have been in a temporary state of absolute confusion following the loss of the Ogolith and the literal destruction of their den. He had expected to return to a field of corpses, yet there were still thousands of Fog Seekers in the area, roaring and pressing in on the group.

He paused just long enough to scarf down a handful of Blue Serpentile fruits. As the juice hit his tongue, he felt a wave of refreshment wash through his tired body.

"Time to end this quest!"

He moved toward the monster horde from the outside, striking at their rear like a lightning bolt. Fighting these creatures after the intense, high-stakes battle with the D-1000s made them look like babies in comparison.

Their movements were sluggish, their attacks predictable. John didn’t even need to use a single ability. He didn’t need to think of complicated manoeuvres. He simply stepped inside the reach of the first monster, landed a clean, vertical slash, and voila—it died.

"Will you come to us or should we come to you?!"

Seeing John cutting through the monsters like he was taking a casual stroll in the park made Ricky speechless at first. Then, realising his own exhaustion, he shouted across the battlefield, his voice strained.

"Scatter! Kill the monsters in different directions!" John shouted back, his voice booming with authority. He could tell as he got closer that, by force of habit, his friends had stuck together in a tight circle. While it felt safer, it allowed the monsters to concentrate their mass, cornering the humans and pushing them backwards toward the cliff ruins.

All they needed to do was scatter, and the monsters’ numerical advantage would be negated as they struggled to track multiple moving targets. But Luke had a different, louder opinion.

"John, I’m tired!" Luke shouted, barely parrying a clawed swipe. "I can’t fight them on my own! My arms feel like lead!"

"Me too!" Elena chimed in.

John glanced at Elena and felt a pang of sympathy. She had suffered through the same gruelling hours of running and fighting that he and Cissel had, but without the benefit of unlocking her attributes. He rolled his eyes, spinning to decapitate three monsters that aimed for him simultaneously.

"Then move in groups of two! Sticking together in a four-man clump is making things harder for all of you!"

Suddenly, Cissel did something totally unexpected. Instead of moving toward Ricky as John had anticipated—given that Ricky was physically the closest person to her—she ignited her speed and lunged through a gap in the monsters toward the faraway John.

"..."

Ricky was visibly taken aback by this subtle yet decisive move. He stood frozen for a second, watching her back.

"Fine! I’ll fight alone then! I didn’t do my part regularly in the past few days anyway, I’m not tired like all of you!" He was fuming with a sudden, silent rage, and he channelled that anger into his blades, becoming an unstoppable whirlwind of steel against the monsters surrounding him.

"You promised me a date," Cissel said as she drew closer to the stupefied John, her blades working in perfect tandem with his. She couldn’t help but chuckle at the expression on John’s face. "Don’t think I’ll let you die before fulfilling that promise!"

"..."

Hearing this made John freeze in place for a heartbeat, his sword hovering mid-air. He shook his head, trying to process the absurdity of her bringing that up in the middle of a slaughter. Yet, despite the surprise swirling inside him, a genuine tinge of a smile appeared on his face.