Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 117: Survive the Fog Tide

[Ding! A disaster is coming!]

[Ding! The Fog Tide is about to hit! Survive the tide and don’t lose any of your team members!]

[Ding! Quest rewards: +1 to all stats; +10 Mental Point cap!]

The morning of the tenth day was destined to be epic. Just as the team was settling into their regular breakfast of seared Terakos meat that Elena had prepared with her usual flair, a sudden, rapid-fire series of notifications flashed across John’s eyes.

"John? What happened?!"

Seeing the look on his face, a shock that made him stop chewing mid-bite, Cissel dropped her skewer, her voice laced with immediate worry. Her sharp tone instantly pulled the attention of everyone else at the fire.

"Hear that?"

Before John could even find a plausible response to Cissel, Elena suddenly stood up. Her eyes were unfocused, her head tilted as if she were straining to hear a faint sound that no one else could. "Do you hear that sound?"

"What sound? Elena, what are you talking about?" Luke looked between John and Elena, his hand already drifting toward the big wooden club. He realised that the two of them had grasped a change that the rest of them hadn’t yet felt. Without waiting for an explanation, Ricky and Cissel followed suit, drawing their weapons and falling into a defensive semi-circle.

"It’s the sound of thunder," Elena whispered, her eyes snapping open to meet John’s. "Is it a thunderstorm? Here?!"

"Might be," John shrugged, though his voice lacked conviction. He was already aware of the Fog Tide’s incoming threat.

"The sky is clear, still," Cissel argued, her eyes scanning the horizon. The sky was a pristine, blue, peaceful and devoid of the heavy, dark clouds one would expect with such lightning and thunder. "There isn’t a single cloud up there. It’s impossible."

"No, look out there!" Luke pointed toward the distant perimeter. "Wasn’t the fog further away just minutes ago? I can’t see the silhouettes of the blue trees anymore!"

Following his finger, the team turned toward the south. The white fog was no longer a static wall; it was a roiling, agitated mass. John quickly closed his eyes, pulling up the map interface for the first time that morning.

’One hundred red dots!’

His heart hammered against his chest. He spotted over a hundred red indicators traversing into Area 11 from the southern border. ’They must have come from this neighbouring area... Let me see who they are!’

He focused his thoughts on that cluster of red, and the map performed its miraculous zoom. It was as if he were suddenly standing in the very centre of their formation, a ghost among the invaders. What he saw there made his breath hitch.

It wasn’t the Fog Seekers. It wasn’t the cold metal of the D-1000 machines.

What he saw was a legion of giants. They possessed sturdy, boulder-like bodies, ten to twelve metres in height alone, with bulging muscles that looked like carved granite. Most strikingly, a shimmering, fist-sized central gem was embedded in the centre of their chests, pulsating with a faint white light.

It was an enemy he had never seen before, never even heard of, even in the old myths of Earth. The realisation left an unmistakable look on his face—one filled with a rare mix of confusion and genuine worry.

Before Cissel could press him for an answer, a loud, booming crack of thunder shook the ground beneath their feet.

"It came from there!" Ricky narrowed his eyes, his entire body tensed and vigilant. He pointed in a direction. "It came from within the fog at that spot..."

He didn’t get to finish. A second thunderstrike roared, then a third, and a fourth. The thunder wasn’t coming from the sky; it came from the fog itself. Before any of them could make head or tail of the phenomenon, the fog began to swirl violently, its colour shifting from white to a murky, suffocating brown. It started drawing closer at a terrifying speed, a literal tide of vomit.

"The magical core!" John suddenly shouted, snapping out of his trance. "It’s the only thing holding the perimeter! We need to feed it with more cores now! We have to keep that fog away, or we’ll be swallowed whole!"

His voice carried an unintentional load of worry that stemmed originally from the new enemies. Luckily, the enemies were still relatively far from their current spot, but unluckily, they were running blindly through the fog after the thunder came.

They were following the winding course of the river, heading north—directly toward the team’s position, on the same riverside as they were.

John could tell from the erratic movement of the red dots on his map that they were terrified. He easily linked the dots in his mind. ’They must have been wandering the fog around their own area, ending up caught in the initial surge of the fog tide and forced into here by the thunder and lightning inside the fog.’

Regardless of the reasons for their arrival, he knew they were about to face a brutal struggle. They were caught between a race no one here had ever heard of and the middle of an ongoing fog tide crisis that seemed to be calling for their blood.

John was sure the system wouldn’t have issued this survival quest without having dirty tricks in play. This fog tide wasn’t as simple as it looked; the sheer displacement was staggering. That was why the first thing he did was command the others to pour a massive amount of cores into the magical core, desperate to maintain their bubble of safety.

"It’s working!" Luke shouted, narrowing his eyes as he watched the perimeter. "The brown fog... It’s getting pushed slightly backwards!"

"Slightly?!!" Ricky cursed, dumping another group of red cores into the magical core’s absorption field. "We’ve given hundreds of cores to this endless pit! How come it’s only pushed slightly backwards?!"

"It’s true," John confirmed. "The pressure of this brown fog is immense. It seems there is something actively trying to close the fog on us, compressing our space. In the worst-case scenario, if the core fails, remember your breathing counts. Be ready for anything once we’re inside that fog!"