They Called Me Trash? Now I'll Hack Their World-Chapter 199: Corrupted!

I let out a shaky breath, letting my sword drop to my side.

"Let’s—"

ROOOOOOOOAR!

A massive roar exploded from outside the cave, so loud it shook the walls, sent stones falling from the ceiling, made my bones vibrate.

Slowly, I turned my head away from Shax’s lifeless body and looked toward the cave mouth.

The dim light from the forest had been completely blotted out by a wall of dark, writhing figures.

They weren’t hounds or wolves we had encountered so far.

They looked like bipedal reptiles, standing hunched over on thick, digitigrade legs.

Their bodies were covered in jagged, obsidian-black scales that seemed to swallow the light, and their arms ended in elongated, scythe-like bone blades that scraped against the stone floor with every step... each drag of those blades a slow, deliberate sound, like a knife being sharpened against stone. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Multiple eyes that were glowing that familiar sickly corruption-green.

Scytheclaws? Words formed in my mind automatically.

I didn’t need to guess how dangerous they were.

My debug vision activated automatically, tagging each one.

And a sea of glowing red numbers materialized in the gloom above their elongated, eyeless snouts.

​[Lv. 21] [Lv. 23] [Lv. 22] [Lv. 26] [Lv. 21]...

I can see eight of them here... And if my guess is correct, there are probably more outside.

My jaw tightened so hard my teeth ground together. "Fuck."

We’re running on fumes, I thought, panic flaring in my chest. Shax and his assassins took almost everything we had. We can’t survive a swarm of high-level mobs right now.

Beside me, I heard Scarlet’s breath caught in her throat.

Her emerald eyes widened as she took in the sheer number of them, not just the count, but the way they moved, the eerie, synchronized stillness of predators that hadn’t yet decided to strike.

Like they were waiting for something. A signal. A command.

Her legs finally gave out, and she dropped onto one knee, bloody claws scraping the dirt as she panted heavily.

"Of course," she rasped, a bitter, exhausted laugh escaping her lips.

"These jackasses had to come now."

Tessa was now backed against the cavern wall, face entirely drained of color.

Her hands were trembling violently as the beasts began a synchronized, clicking hiss, low and rhythmic, like a death rattle stretched into a chorus.

The sound burrowed under my skin in a way that raw volume couldn’t.

It wasn’t loud, it was patient. Each click landing in the silence between heartbeats, unhurried, certain.

Like they already knew how this ended.

​"Tessa!" I barked, snapping her out of her terror. "Give Scarlet potions! Now!"

Tessa blinked, then immediately dropped to her knees beside the demi-human.

"Alright."

She hurriedly swiped her storage ring, pulling out a red health potion and a blue mana vial, uncorking them with shaking thumbs and pressing them into Scarlet’s hands.

"Here! Here, take them!"

Scarlet grabbed them without looking, and drank them in desperate gulps.

I didn’t wasted a moment.

Quickly reached into my own storage ring, pulling out health and mana potions and chugging them down back-to-back.

The liquid burned down my throat, stitching the worst of the internal bleeding and reigniting the spark in my mana core.

[HP: 256/1025 → 623/1025]

[MP: 185/750 → 487/750]

Not enough. Not nearly enough for all of of them, but it was the difference between standing and dying on my knees, so I’d take it.

Suddenly, the lead beast, the one which was the largest of the group opened its mouth and screamed.

The sound was high-pitched, resonating in frequencies that made my head pound and my vision blur.

The other ones answered, their combined cacophony shaking loose more stones from the ceiling.

Then the first wave attacked.

Three of them charged simultaneously, their bone blades scraping rhythmic arcs through the air, moving in disturbing coordination, like they’d done this a thousand times, like they’d been born doing this.

​"Up!" I roared, gripping Oathstorm with both hands.

​Scarlet didn’t hesitate. Fueled by the fresh potions, she sprang off her knee with a feral snarl.

We met the beasts head-on.

The first one lunged at my throat—

I ducked under its strike and brought Oathstorm up in a rising slash.

Thunder crackling wildly as I swung my blade. Which cleaved through the thick, armored neck of the lead beast.

Black blood sprayed from it’s body.

The beast shrieked and collapsed.

To my right, I caught in my vison—Scarlet ducked under a scythe-claw and buried her hands into a beast’s chest, using her momentum to rip it completely open.

​But they were fast. Too fast.

One of the beasts, with half its face scorched black by my stray lightning, slipped past my guard.

It ignored me entirely, its blind snout locking onto the easiest target in the room... Tessa.

​It lunged, its scythe-claws raised to skewer her.

"NO!" I started to turn...

Tessa screamed but didn’t freeze.

She had her small utility knife in both hands, holding it like a spear.

​As the beast leaped, she pivoted sharply on her heel, letting its massive weight carry it right past her.

In the same fluid motion, she reversed her grip on her knife and drove it directly into the base of the beast’s skull, severing its spinal cord.

The beast spasmed once and collapsed.

She screamed again, shoving at the dead weight desperately, her whole body shaking, her breath coming in ragged, uneven bursts.

But she was upright. Still standing. I filed that away somewhere important and kept moving.

I wanted to help her, but—

ROAR!

I looked up, and my heart sank.

The remaining Renders were coming, spread out now, learning from watching their pack-mates die, but...

More and more dark, scaly bodies were pouring into the cavern drawn by the sounds of combat.

"Fuck, there’s no end to them," I spat, deflecting another heavy strike.

Then I swiped my storage ring again, bypassing the generic vials and pulling out two glass flasks I had brewed myself.

The stamina recovery concoction was thick and gritty, and the mana booster was a volatile, bubbling violet.

​I drank them both without stopping.

The reaction was instantaneous. A violent, unnatural heat rushed through my veins, making my vision pulse.

It felt like I had just injected pure adrenaline straight into my heart.

[ENHANCEMENT_ACTIVE]

stamina_recovery: ACCELERATED

mana_boost: +65%

duration: 45_minutes

I lunged forward, meeting the next wave of the beasts.

Lightning exploded in the cavern.

I did more system edits with Zen’s battle memories, turning into a blur of thunder and steel.

I have to finish this quickly, I mentally calculated, carving through a Level 24 beast.

Even with the booster, chaining edits and thunder skills together is going to drain me dry in minutes.

​I severed an arm. Crushed a skull. Sliced through a torso.

​The beasts were falling, their dark blood pooling on the stone.

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

Notifications were stacking up, I closed them all, there wasn’t time.

But as I ripped Oathstorm out of the chest of another, I noticed something wrong.

The blood wasn’t just pooling. It was boiling.

​A thick, oily black miasma began to ooze from the corpses of the corrupted creatures.

It hissed as it hit the air, spreading rapidly across the cavern floor like a sentient fog—alive in the way poison is alive, purposeful, hungry.

​[System Warning: Highly Concentrated Corrosive Miasma Detected.]

[System Warning: Lethal hazard. Immediate evacuation advised.]

​My eyes widened in horror.

"Fall back!" I roared at the top of my lungs. "Get away from the bodies!"

Tessa and Scarlet heard the panic in my voice. They immediately scrambled backward, retreating deeper into the safe zone of the cavern, away from the creeping black smoke.

I tried to follow them.

Pivoted, pushing mana into my legs to jump back.

​But there were too many corpses around me.

​A dying beast lashed out blindly, its scythe-claw clipping my ankle. I stumbled, losing my footing for just a fraction of a second.

​It was all the miasma needed.

​The thick, black smoke surged upward, wrapping around my legs and chest like a physical weight. It didn’t just burn my skin; it seeped straight through my clothes.

I gasped, and the foul, rotting vapor rushed down my throat, cold and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

​[System Alert: Extreme Corruption penetrating host body...]

My vision swam. Dark veins started appearing on my hands, my arms, spreading faster than the wolf scratch had spread through Scarlet, branching outward like cracks in glass.

This is bad.

The remaining beasts, seeing me stumble, pressed their attack with renewed aggression, circling now, patient in the way predators get when they think the fight is already over.

Not closing in yet, just tightening the ring, cutting off every angle.

One of them tilted its eyeless snout toward me and let out a low, clicking trill, different from the battle cry, quieter, almost conversational.

I raised Oathstorm with shaking hands, lightning flickering weakly along the blade.