Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 171: The Scary Humans!

"John is back!"

The shout echoed across the blood-soaked plains, though it was nearly drowned out by the chaos of war. John had spent five gruelling hours circling the perimeter of his base walls, a journey that was less a travel and more a harvest of the cores.

By the time he finally reached the northern front, he found his friends exactly where he expected them: on the ground, submerged in a sea of yellow monsters.

They were currently engaged with the tenth wave, a terrifying, staggering legion of over one hundred and fifty thousand monsters. The escalation had reached a tipping point where the landscape itself seemed to be composed of nothing but the writhing, skinless bodies of the yellow swarm.

The previous wave had taken the team more than two hours of non-stop combat to clear, and they had already been grinding against this tenth wave for over an hour.

However, the struggle that John had witnessed earlier was gone. His friends, now armed with their enhanced stats and the power of the ingested cores, moved like gods of calamity through the monster tide. They were unstoppable, killing hundreds with every passing minute.

Luke was a vision of overbearing might. He waved his huge wooden club, which had undergone a visible mutation; a faint layer of deep red metal now covered the heavy weapon, pulsating with a threatening heartbeat-like glow. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

With every overhead smash or horizontal swing, he didn’t just hit a monster; he threw it away. The seven-meter-tall yellow monsters were sent flying hundreds of meters backwards, their massive bodies acting as deadly cannonballs that crushed every other monster in their path of flight. He left behind literal trenches in the battlefield, filled with broken bones and pulverised yellow flesh.

Elena, despite not unlocking any attribute yet, was perhaps the fiercest of the group. She had become a whirlwind of deadly, rapid-fire attacks. She would sprint at a speed that blurred in the air, jumping dozens of meters into the sky while hurling her twin sledgehammers with bone-shattering force.

Each hammer would find the skull of a monster, killing it instantly on impact. Before she even touched the ground, she would snatch the returning weapons mid-air and re-throw them with a violent twist of her body. She threw herself into the densest pockets of the monster tide, functioning more like a machine gun than a girl.

Ricky, meanwhile, had become a nightmare incarnate. He moved through the yellow tide with his two swords held low, his twelve manifested tentacles lashing out in every direction like the limbs of a prehistoric kraken.

The tentacles would latch onto any monster within reach, sucking them dry of Mental Points in a matter of seconds and leaving behind nothing but shrivelled, husk-like corpses, covered with gruesome-looking wounds.

His swordsmanship had evolved into something scary. His old sword landed with thunderous, booming impacts, unleashing fierce shockwaves that covered a twenty-meter radius, smashing the bodies of any monster within the blast zone.

As for the sword he had received from John, it was a harvester of souls. A single horizontal slash wouldn’t just kill the target; it unleashed a secondary wave of red light, a terrifying bleeding effect that surged thirty meters forward, decapitating everything in its path.

Cissel was a phantom of death, looking more like a horrifying vampire than ever. She moved with a lethal speed that made her look as if she were dancing through a ballroom rather than a slaughterhouse.

Everywhere her feet touched the ground, she left a trail of severed limbs and fountains of gore. Her explosive short-distance speed allowed her to flash across the battlefield, creating flickering after-images as she struck.

Her daggers were already lethal enough to end a monster in a single heartbeat, but when she activated her second ability, she became a true nightmare. Any monster she touched felt their very life force drained away as she vamped their Mental Points, though they rarely lived long enough for the drain to matter.

Aside from the four humans, every single Bulltor without exception was now eyeing all this with disbelief. They stood in stunned, heavy silence, watching these fallen humans.

To the giants, the humans looked like bloodthirsty warmongers, possessed by a battle-madness that allowed them to fight for hours without pausing for a single second of rest.

Then, John arrived to settle the score.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

As he drew close enough for his friends and the Bulltors to spot him, John decided that a quiet entrance simply wouldn’t do. He wanted to announce his presence with a move that would carve itself into their memories.

Without breaking his stride, he instantly burned one hundred Mental Points. In a heartbeat, he unleashed the Lightning Dance.

The world seemed to fracture. As John stood in the centre of the monster tide, a simple, fluid sword slash transformed into a literal tsunami of electrical sword shadows. Every shadow was composed of violet-blue lightning, flickering with such impossible speed that it looked like it was thundering from a storm, not a human.

For the next twenty seconds, John stood perfectly motionless, his eyes calm and cold. The monsters around him, driven by their mindless nature, tried to take a bite out of him. They didn’t even make it halfway.

The moment a monster stepped within the hundred-meter radius of the effect, they were shredded by a dozen lightning sword slashes before they could even blink.

He stood there like a true god of death, doing nothing but watching the carnage unfold around him. When the twenty seconds finally expired and the humming electricity faded, a perfect circle of clear ground surrounded him, a hundred-meter radius lined with nothing but smoking heaps of corpses.

"Screw it! This isn’t the trial pocket I’ve known anymore!!"

On the walls, Lanmar’s jaw had dropped open for a long minute. He finally found his voice, gritting his ivory teeth as he cursed and shouted at the black sky.

"These aren’t humans! Humans are supposed to be a fallen race! Weak! Pathetic! These people are damn barbaric! They could walk into the territory of the Dragon race and pick a fight for fun! Screw this! I’m done trying to understand them!"