Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 118: The Giants Are Coming!

"Anything aside from the thunder and lightning?!" Cissel asked. She was already having her own suspicions. She had seen the flicker of genuine alarm in John’s eyes the moment the fog changed colour. While the thunder was deafening, something told her there were far more stressful issues than just a brown thunderstorm!

"Do you think," John began, choosing his words carefully to guide their expectations, "that in the middle of all this, if there is a machine squad or wandering monster groups trapped inside the fog, wouldn’t they be pushed toward the only safe area? Toward us?"

"What do you mean?!" Luke turned his head sharply, scanning the fogline as if expecting a legion of D-1000s to march out of the haze. "Are there any machines even left in this sector?"

"I’m just saying," John shrugged, but his casual attitude didn’t fool anyone. If there was someone who could sniff out dangers and opportunities before they manifested, it was John.

"Let’s get ready then," Ricky said solemnly. Cissel and the others nodded in grim agreement. "If anything comes out of that fog—be it metal or meat—we must move fast and kill it before it can find its footing."

"Damn! The fog is getting closer again!" Luke suddenly screamed, pointing at the southern edge where the brown wall was visibly advancing. "Let’s throw more cores! We can’t let it touch us!"

"No, it’s enough," John said sharply, stopping Luke’s hand. They had already thrown more than a thousand cores into the big core. "We’ve burnt through a massive portion of our haul, and our supply is finite. We need to save the rest for the future. If the core can’t hold it back with a thousand, it won’t hold it back with ten."

"Tsk!" Elena rolled her eyes, her hand gripping the short handles of her sledgehammers. "I don’t know about the rest of you, but right now I really miss those ugly monsters!"

John had felt the same way a long time ago, but his main focus now was tracking the newcomers. With every passing minute, the giants drew closer. Whenever he checked the map, he found their numbers decreasing constantly. The thunderstorm inside the fog wasn’t just noise; it was literally tearing the giants apart.

He knew now that entering that brown fog was a death sentence. That was true for him, and certainly for his friends.

’I can’t go out there and intercept them now,’ John thought, watching the red dots blink out one by one. The idea of breaking off from the team to try his luck against the newcomers was impossible, given the lethality of the tide.

The one hundred giants he had spotted initially had lost over twenty of their members in the last twenty minutes alone, and many of the survivors were moving with the staggered gait of the heavily wounded.

They were coming—broken, bleeding, and desperate. And yet he couldn’t go out and get advantage of that.

’Still... This might be something good for us,’ John thought, viewing the unfolding chaos from a different angle. ’If they end up losing more members and suffering more wounds, then it will be way easier to fight them once they break through the fog line.’

He moved his eyes around the immediate vicinity. The area they were currently in wasn’t suitable for a large-scale engagement. Their primary food source, which they had successfully penned, was nearby.

He didn’t want to risk the giants or the dangerous fog tide endangering their long-term survival by trampling the enclosure or roasting the meat herd by lightning strikes.

He shifted his gaze toward the wall of brown fog. He needed to strike a delicate balance: he had to keep that deadly fog at bay, maintaining a perimeter that was far enough to keep them safe from the thunder, but close enough that the incoming enemies wouldn’t have time to recover once they stumbled out of the haze.

If they emerged near the camp, he could instantly alert the team, catching the giants while they were still disoriented and gasping for air.

"Let’s arrange ourselves then," John said suddenly. Six hours had passed since the first notification, and the map showed the giants were now less than thirty minutes from their position.

"Sitting here together won’t help us spot the danger until it’s on top of us. We need to organise ourselves. Someone stays behind to manage the core—feeding it one hundred cores every hour to keep the fog away. The rest of us will scatter in the four cardinal directions to spot anything abnormal and shout."

In the last six hours, the fog had compressed their world. The brown wall was now only half an hour walk from their camp in every direction. To maintain even that small pocket of safety, John calculated and tested in the past hours that they would have to burn through their core supply at a steady, one-hundred core hourly rate.

"I’ll stay behind then," Elena said, stepping toward the glowing magical core. She knew her overall combat strength was lacking, and she was likely the most vulnerable thanks to being the only unlocked attributed person in the group. "I’ll keep watch over the core and keep it fed. I’ve got more than enough cores to reach the night."

"I’ll take the southern direction then," John decisively said, pointing toward the path the giants were taking. He spoke quickly to prevent Luke or Ricky from arguing about the distribution of labour. "Each of you pick a direction—East, West, and North—and head toward the perimeter... What are you three doing?!!"

John had barely taken ten steps toward the South when he realised he wasn’t alone. He spun around, startled to see Cissel, Ricky, and Luke all walking in a tight formation right behind him.

"What?" Cissel asked, rolling her eyes as if his question was the height of absurdity. "Why the look of shock? We all know that the direction you picked is the one that’s going to have all the action."

"Let’s save everyone’s time and walk directly toward the source of the danger," Ricky chimed in. He gave John a long, meaningful look that suggested he was starting to piece together the patterns of John’s intuition.

"I still can’t see through how you do it, John, but everyone knows by now: you can sniff out danger or opportunity long before it manifests. Why would we waste time guarding empty areas when the real threat is coming from there?"

"I just feel more secure with you, big bro," Luke added with a shrug. Unlike the suspicions of Cissel and Ricky, Luke’s motivation was rooted in simple, unwavering trust. "So let’s stick together. If danger appears from a different direction, we’re fast enough to move as a unit and stop it together." 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"Fine," John muttered, realising he couldn’t talk them out of it. He gave Ricky and Cissel a final, lingering glance—half-annoyed, half-impressed by their sharp instincts.