Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 162: The Monsters Count Gets Doubled with Every Wave!

Ricky was right. Just as the team was halfway to the northern walls, the last yellow monster in the first wave was obliterated by a concentrated plasma burst. The sudden cessation of the cannon and defensive towers’ fire forced everyone to a sudden stop.

"Phew! I thought there was another trick up their sleeves," Luke sighed, the sound heavy with the release of the suffocating tension he’d been carrying. He wiped a smudge of soot from his forehead, looking almost disappointed that the fight had ended so abruptly. "All that talk for nothing. And all thanks to you..."

He turned his gaze toward Lanmar, ready to rain down his frustration and mockery over the giant for scaring them half to death. However, before he could utter another word, a sudden and fierce tremble shook the world, nearly throwing the humans off their feet.

"What’s going on?!!"

Everyone’s attention snapped back toward the old den. The yellow ball, which had been sitting dormant since the monsters emerged, was suddenly slammed by a thick, blinding pillar of lightning that seemed to descend from the very apex of the black clouds. The strike was so powerful that the air around it distorted with heat.

"Why is the lightning attacking that ball now?!" Luke’s question hissed in the eerie, electrified silence that followed the strike.

Then, as if the yellow ball were answering him, the earth around it began to churn and heave. A second wave of monsters erupted from the dirt, six hundred of them this time, their yellowish, skinless bodies glistening under the dark sky.

"No way!" Cissel hissed, her eyes wide as she counted the yellow monsters fast. "That’s double the first wave! Does this mean every wave we kill will unleash another with double the number?!"

Her words landed like poison in the pit of everyone’s stomach. A terrifying realisation hit the team simultaneously, and miles away, in the fog, John reached the same grim conclusion.

He had momentarily slowed his pace when he saw the first wave being swiftly exterminated, thinking there were no more threats coming from the renovated den. But as he watched the second wave rising from the earth like a malignant harvest, he picked up speed. He ran as fast as his legs would allow, his boots slamming into the mud.

It was exactly as he had feared; the nightmare wouldn’t end by killing the monsters. This was a progressive loop designed to kill them all. The only way to win was by destroying the source, the den itself.

The second wave followed the same path as the first. Once they appeared, they scrambled over the underwater bridge, their movements sluggish but relentless. They slammed heavily against the base’s northern perimeter, and just like their predecessors, they were met with a wall of plasma and deadly attacks. This wave was killed swiftly, decimated just as the team arrived at the northern walls.

*Rumble!*

The ground didn’t even have time to settle before the third earthquake struck.

"A third wave is coming," Luke hissed, his voice trembling. He watched the revived den with a dawning sense of horror. "There are one thousand and two hundred now! It’s doubling again. Like this... If it keeps going like this..."

He turned his eyes toward his friends, seeing the same grim, hollow look reflected on their faces. It didn’t take a genius to run the math. At this rate of exponential growth, they would soon be fighting against hundreds of thousands of monsters. Their defences were elite, but they weren’t infinite. They would eventually be overrun and fail.

"We need to find a solution," Ricky said, turning his gaze away from the slaughter and toward the far bank of the river. "We can’t just play goalie. We need to go there and find a way to stop that damn yellow ball!"

"Hahaha! Told you before! I warned you already!" Out of the blue, Lanmar began to laugh, a high-pitched, hysterical sound that grated on everyone’s nerves.

"We should have run! This time, there is no way out! The moment the monsters appear, they block the underwater bridge path with their sheer mass! Even if we all moved out and killed them, the next wave will appear before we can even touch that yellow ball. We’re trapped in a loop of death!"

"Shut up!" Cissel glared at Lanmar with such frozen intensity that the giant actually flinched. "We are all here risking our lives to survive! So stop acting like a girl and start thinking with us of a way out of this mess!"

Lanmar opened his mouth to retort, to tell her that there was no way out, but he caught the look in her eye and kept his tongue behind his ivory teeth. He knew how close Cissel was to John; she was essentially the second-in-command of their small group. If John grew mad at him because of her report, his life would turn into a living hell, assuming they survived the day. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"Any ideas?" Having poured her frustration over Lanmar, Cissel felt a bit clearer. She turned to the rest of the group, her eyes searching for any spark of a brainstorm. At this point, even a bad idea was better than the paralysis of despair.

"Putting aside the difficulty of the path towards the den," Reody suddenly said, his voice rumbling as he watched the second wave’s remains being cleared by the defences, "we need to check on our weapons. These cannons... Can they sustain such repeated attacks against such rapidly growing numbers?"

His question landed heavily, and John’s friends exchanged a long, silent gaze.

"The cannons run on modular energy cells," Elena said, her voice serious. "They don’t use traditional shells. They create their ammunition by turning raw electricity from the cells into plasma energy. So, as long as the cells have a charge, they can fire."

"But they don’t have infinite charge," Ricky completed her remark. He turned instantly toward Elena. "We need to check on those energy cells and replace them in the windows between the waves. You know how to handle that, right?"