Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 152: The Fog Wrathers

John’s tone of command told everyone everything they needed to know. Something terrible had just happened. Even Lanmar, who had been mid-sentence imagining a delicious feast, jolted to his feet.

A weird, cold tension flooded his soul as he looked at John’s silhouette, thinking what he possibly could have done wrong to entice his master’s wrath to such an extent.

"W-what is it?!" Lanmar asked, running toward John with a shaky, uncertain stride, looking like a man caught red-handed in a disgraceful act. "John, what’s wrong?"

"Tell me everything you know about the Fog Wrathers!"

John’s eyes shone with a manic brilliance the more he spoke. To those watching, he felt like a bomb with a fuse burned down to the final millimetre, seconds away from a catastrophic detonation.

Yet when Lanmar heard the name, the reaction was instantaneous: the blood vanished from his face as if he had been confronted by a ghost from his darkest nightmares. His massive frame actually trembled.

"No, no... Don’t jinx us," Lanmar stammered, his voice cracking. "Don’t speak about things that shouldn’t even exist here..."

*Rumble!*

Just before he could continue his frantic, terrified words, the ground beneath them shook. It wasn’t a mere tremor; it felt as if an earthquake of a magnitude above 9.0 on the Richter scale had slammed into the entire area at once.

Even the lake they had just finished filling had its calm surface shattered. The water trembled fiercely, creating standing waves that leapt toward the sky as if a giant were about to rise from the depths of the earth itself.

"What the heck is going on?!!"

As soon as the first fierce shockwave subsided, another came in rapid succession.

"What’s happening, John?!!" Luke’s voice was high with distress, his eyes wide and searching. He instinctively looked to the one person who always seemed to unveil the mysteries of this broken world.

Yet John didn’t say a single word. He stood perfectly still, his feet planted wide, counting the shocks. The second was followed by a third, then a fourth. After the fifth earthquake passed, the world was suddenly ushered into a heavy, suffocating silence.

"Damn me!"

Lanmar’s eyes were wide with a grave terror. Without waiting for orders, he bolted toward the nearest wall and scaled it with a desperate speed. The moment he reached the top, he looked out toward the horizon. He rubbed his eyes once, twice, three times, as if he could scrub away the reality of what he was seeing.

"What’s going on up there? Talk to us!" Elena shouted from below. Beside her, Ricky and Cissel kept their glares fixed on John, waiting for the answer they knew only he could provide.

"Fog clouds..." Lanmar whispered, his voice barely audible over the wind that had begun to howl. "The Black Fog Clouds... They’re coming."

Silence fell over the human team. Even John didn’t immediately grasp the weight of what Lanmar had said. However, when they turned their gaze toward the other ten Bulltors, the confusion vanished. Every one of the massive warriors was frozen in place, their faces masks of pure, unadulterated horror.

"How did you know?!"

Lanmar took a minute to compose himself before sliding down the wall. He marched directly toward John, his face contorted in frank, desperate fear. "No one in a pocket trial should even know those freaks exist! It’s impossible! And you... You just asked me about them a single moment before they appeared?!!"

"Let’s skip the formalities," John said, a calm, chilling smile playing on his lips. He didn’t blink in the face of the giant’s rage. "I’m your master, and I’m asking you again: what do you know about the Fog Wrathers? Time is a luxury we don’t have."

Everyone on John’s side leaned in, focusing all five senses on whatever Lanmar was about to say. The air grew colder by the second. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

"The first thing you should know about them," Lanmar said, gritting his teeth so hard it sounded like stones grinding together, "is the fact that they aren’t supposed to be part of any pocket trial. They don’t belong here."

He looked as if he were resisting the urge to grab John by the neck and shake the truth out of him.

"These monsters are part of the great challenges awaiting us after we complete our pocket trials. They are the monsters that appear after an area has been successfully controlled and stabilised for enough time by a race."

"We fought against those skinless monsters and won, didn’t we?" Luke said, his voice tinged with an arrogant bravado that felt brittle. "If we could handle those, surely we can handle these."

Lanmar let out a sudden, jarring laugh. "Hahaha! You are really funny, you know that?" He shook his head, looking at Luke as if he had just heard the funniest joke. "See, my dear friend Luke, those skinless freaks are children’s toys compared to this. These monsters have a specific nickname across the races... They call them the Death Reapers."

"You still haven’t given me a single piece of valuable information," John said, rolling his eyes. He remained unfazed by the impending disaster, his mind already calculating how to fight them, but he lacked facts.

"I need to know the nature of the enemy we are about to fight. Skip the useless talk about their reputation and their nicknames. Give me something I can use!"

"Fine," Lanmar growled, the constraints of the magical contract forcing him to comply with John’s order despite his fear.

"The stories I’ve heard from my people... They say these monsters appear under a shroud of black clouds. As you can see, our world normally has no clouds at all. That’s the first sign. The black clouds are the unmistakable sign of the death reapers’ arrival! Once spotted, we need to run John, we need..."

"Don’t go astray, man! Can’t you just focus and give me real, actionable information for once?!!" John interrupted, his tone sharp with discontent. Every second Lanmar spent on lore was a second lost to prepare themselves.