Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 174: The Terrifying Enhanced Four Cannons!

Unlike what his friends thought, John wasn’t depending solely on the one hundred defensive towers he had laid. Those were his secondary line. His real trust was in the four enhanced cannons he had left on the ground.

He knew he was risking them by placing them so far forward, which was why he deployed his defensive towers to ensure the area closest to the upgraded cannons remained a dead zone for any monster that dared to get close.

Grasping his intentions through the chaos, his friends overworked themselves to the point of collapse. In just half an hour, they managed to clear the remaining stragglers of the tenth wave.

As the last yellow monster fell, the four of them stood amidst a mountain of corpses, panting in sheer exhaustion from the crazy and continuous fighting they had endured over the past several hours.

"Let’s drink and rest for a few minutes, then move on to help him," Elena said, her voice raspy. She took out a flask of cool water, while others followed suit. The sensation of the cold liquid hitting their parched throats tasted like the best remedy in the world right now.

They sat for a brief moment, their eyes fixated on the den across the river. From their vantage point, they could see thick, terrifying pillars of lightning raining down over the den in a fierce bombardment.

John was the closest to the epicentre, so he saw the phenomenon clearly: the lightning wasn’t hitting the yellow core itself; it was striking the metallic ground all around it, as if creating a sanctified, or perhaps cursed, perimeter of high-voltage energy.

Then, the world was suddenly covered with the eleventh wave of these monsters. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

The air seemed to ripple as hundreds of thousands of yellow monsters materialised out of the den. Because John had placed his defensive towers and cannons in such proximity to the den, the moment the monsters appeared, they were fiercely hit. The roar of the defences he hastily laid was deafening, but even amidst the explosions, something new emerged.

"Damn! These cannons... That’s overkill!" John exclaimed, frozen in his place, out of immense shock.

In the middle of the first wave of attacks, four distinctive explosions were very prominent and impossible to miss. Standard cannon fire shots would typically swell for ten meters upon impact before detonating. Yet, the four cannons John had enhanced with the cores were behaving differently.

Their shots swelled to cover tens of meters in diameter. Their explosions weren’t just simple shockwaves; they exploded while launching lots of thick, swirling balls of condensed purple energy that flew for a small distance, and further exploded upon touching the ground!

It was a field of rolling thunder. He watched the enhanced cannons harvest tons of the monsters, so many, in fact, that he briefly feared they’d kill every single target before he even had the chance to hack the yellow ball! However, before he could even think of reeling them back to conserve targets, their singular, devastating side effect appeared.

"Tsk! They didn’t last longer than ten minutes, and they’ve already emptied their energy cells!"

John watched as those scary cannons suddenly sputtered and stopped firing. He didn’t need to perform a check to know the reason. There was one thing that would kill any cannon: the total depletion of power. The enhanced output had drained the energy cells at tens of times the normal rate.

"At least they performed perfectly in the first test," John muttered, storing the four spent cannons back into his inventory. He watched as the massive surge of monsters, no longer suppressed by the terrifying explosions, finally managed to gather themselves in huge, suffocating numbers. "But this energy problem isn’t going to be easy to fix."

Despite the wall of yellow flesh advancing toward him, John didn’t retreat. He calmly walked toward the huge number of monsters without a single speck of worry in his eyes. This time, he didn’t rely on Lightning Dance.

He kept waving his sword in wide, devastating arcs. He moved with a speed that blurred his silhouette, killing as many as he could while advancing steadily forward.

In the next twenty minutes of relentless slaughter, he finally arrived at the heart of the den.

Unlike the chaotic carnage occurring just a hundred meters away, the immediate area surrounding the yellow core was empty and peaceful. Not a single monster occupied the space. Even when he stepped close enough to touch the core, not a single monster had tried to stop him.

"Interesting," John mused. Standing in this unexpected safe zone made him wonder if this was a lingering effect of the core’s authority or something related to the lightning baptism of the ground that evaded the core entirely.

He looked back and spotted his one hundred tower and the six remaining cannons he had left behind; they were still roaring with deadly attacks, halting the advance of the eleventh wave effectively.

On the opposite riverbank, he spotted his friends fighting fervently. They were fighting through the dense yellow masses that stretched to the other bank of the river, while trying to reach his side to help.

"It’s time to put an end to this..."

John pressed a bloodied hand firmly over the yellow surface of the core. This time, there was no shield stopping him.

[Ding! System Handshake Established!]

[Ding! You have successfully synchronised with Fog Golden Core 5872346!]

[Ding! Please keep your hand in place for five minutes!]

John knew that after these five minutes, the core would be tamed and the den would be destroyed. As the timer began to count down, he moved his eyes around the battlefield. Surprisingly, he felt a slight pang of regret that he had to put an end to these useful monster tides so soon.

If he had a choice, he would have let the den run for a little longer, perhaps another few waves, just to harvest enough cores to satisfy all his future needs and upgrade every single cannon in his base.

"I believe there are already over three hundred thousand monsters currently on the field, not to mention the previous waves... I shouldn’t be this greedy," he whispered. When he realised what he was thinking, that he was actually disappointed he didn’t have more monsters to kill, he couldn’t help but break into a fit of laughter, shaking his head at his own absurdity.

He had grown so incredibly powerful that facing a tide of hundreds of thousands head-on wasn’t a problem anymore.