Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 183: The Scary Logic Bombs

"As expected," he muttered, his eyes darting to the tiny red number that floated briefly above his head after landing. It was a negligible scratch. He turned all his focus toward the horizon, where the first wave of red, skinless monsters was roaring towards the base.

’Time to check my enhanced abilities... Wireframe Sight!’

The next moment, the world expanded into the familiar, high-definition code structure he had grown accustomed to. The range was vastly enhanced. Before, he would see the distant codes get blurred out. Yet now he could see the grid stretching out far into the distance.

"Still not suitable for battles," even with all this, he knew the ability lacked the highlighting function of any incoming attacks of the Frame Recognition, plus the additional effect of pinpointing the safest evasion path for him.

So he simply reactivated his most basic battle ability and waited till the monsters drew close enough to be one hundred metres away from him.

"Well, the first test is concluded normally," John shrugged, his hand squeezing the hilt of his sword. ’Time to check the CC ability... Object Lockdown!’

The moment he activated the ability, something new happened. He noticed he could now focus his mind to lock onto specific spots on distant targets within his special vision.

As he looked at the approaching horde, red circular sniper marks appeared over the monsters he focused on. The moment he locked onto five specific targets, he felt a mental click, a sensation of snapping a digital lock into place.

Five Wrathers, sprinting at full speed at the very front of the line, suddenly stumbled. It wasn’t just a trip; their bodies became rigid. Their momentum carried them forward, but because their joints were locked in a frozen state, they simply slammed into the ground and slid like heavy boulders, causing the monsters behind them to trip and pile up in a chaotic mess of red, skinless flesh.

Their big bodies acted as a liability now, and their density served as a trigger for a massive pile-up. In succession to this, violent bolts of lightning landed on all the monsters strangled in this mess, an unexpected effect for using his ability!

As the five initial targets froze into indestructible pillars of flesh, the hundreds of monsters charging directly behind them couldn’t decelerate in time. They crashed into the statues and fell on top of them, creating a chaotic cascade of falling and stumbling that halted the momentum of the entire northern flank.

On top of that, all of them triggered the lightning to rain down over them, making it feel like the lightning was madly enraged by their behaviour, not trying to safeguard them.

"Nice start. Time to test if I can repeatedly use it," John whispered to himself. He knew the ability had a five-target limit with a five-minute duration. It would be a significant tactical disadvantage if he had to wait for those five minutes to expire before he could freeze more enemies.

As he saw how the ability triggered the annoying lightning for hundreds of monsters, John wanted to expand the effect to hundreds more.

Determined to test the limits, he triggered the ability for a second time, and it worked! He didn’t waste a second, instantly targeting another five Wrathers. They were attempting, with hundreds of others, to circle around the initial pile-up. With a mental flick of a digital switch, the code snapped into place.

"That’s even better!" John cheered as five more monsters suffered the same fate. The resulting bottleneck was becoming a masterpiece of battlefield control, affecting the gushing, large number of monsters behind them and driving a big, satisfied smile onto his face. Yet, he didn’t intend to stop at simple crowd control.

"Change in plans," he evilly smirked. ’Logic Bomb... Three-second timer!’

He had originally planned to methodically test his abilities one by one in a sequence. However, seeing how Object Lockdown had created this perfect, dense cluster of targets and deprived them of the lightning protection, setting the perfect stage for his Logic Bomb, he didn’t hesitate to pivot. The opportunity was too perfect to ignore.

Using his remote placement, he marked only three of the frozen targets. Since he didn’t initially plan to use the Logic Bomb ability this soon, the ten monsters he targeted previously were close to each other. He randomly picked three out of the ten, planted the code bombs with a three-second delay, and stepped back to wait for the fireworks.

*Rumble!* *Rumble!* *Rumble!*

These weren’t just the normal explosions John had grown used to. The moment the Logic Bomb’s destructive codes were triggered, a ball of intense, sapphire-blue light erupted from the three targets.

The spheres expanded slowly at first, swelling to cover ten meters, engulfing the targeted monsters and every other creature within that radius in a shimmering, unstable field of energy.

Then, it felt like the end of the world had landed at those three points.

John hadn’t fully realised that he had just unleashed one of the most devastating attacks of his upgraded Logic Bomb ability. By using the ability on targets within the reach of his Frame Recognition that were already affected by Object Lockdown, he had triggered the massive damage multiplier.

The result was three horrifying explosions that didn’t just shake the ground; they were so fierce that they seemed to tear faint, dark cracks in the very air itself. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The sound of the initial detonations kept ringing for ten whole seconds. Then, the balls of blue light shattered, unleashing devastating, faint-blue shockwaves that rippled across the battlefield.

[-1928] [-723] [-723] [-723]

A massive red number rose on top of the three monsters he had targeted directly. Then, as the secondary shockwaves kicked in, hundreds upon hundreds of monsters were engulfed in the expanding blue ring. Continuous, high red damage numbers floated above their heads every single second they remained within the influence of the blast.

The damage only stopped once the monsters were thrown away from the area of effect by the sheer force of the gale. Then, like a sea tide responding to a lunar pull, the faint blue shockwave receded back to the three targets like iron shavings drawn to a magnet.

The moment the gap was filled with more surging monsters, the shockwave erupted again, catching the new arrivals in the same lethal cycle.