Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 186: The Four Hundred Yellow Monsters

As if the black clouds were sentient and mocking Elena’s words, the sky split open.

A fierce, concentrated barrage of lightning descended upon the old den with apocalyptic fury. The ground trembled beneath their feet, the vibration so violent it rattled their teeth, and everyone’s expression shifted from confusion to grim realisation.

"Well..." Cissel moved her eyes toward John, her voice tight. "Last time, it took roughly half an hour for them to fully form from the moment the lightning hit. That means ..."

"It means we have half an hour to get rid of all these monsters first," Ricky completed her thought, his hand tightening on the hilt of his swords. In the distance, the lightning continued to slam fiercely against the four hundred Wrather bodies stationed at the den, acting as channels of high-voltage energy towards the depths of the den.

John didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he pulled up his map, checking the overall situation before making a decision.

The initial wave of ten thousand was effectively broken. Less than two thousand Wrathers remained on the entire territory, with almost a fourth of those currently being chewed up by the first trap towers to the south. It meant there were around one thousand and five hundred Wrathers left in their area. And they needed to kill them in thirty minutes or less.

"I’ll kill them in less than that," John said, his face turning deathly serious.

Up until this point, he had been toying with his upgraded abilities, treating the battlefield like a test ground. He had been testing the limits of Object Lockdown, gauging the shockwave radius of his Logic Bombs, and finding the most efficient combinations for his different abilities. But with the threat of the yellow monsters looming, the time for experimentation was over. He had to fight with everything he had.

The foremost gain he had during this test period was confirming his earlier theory. After using the Code Destruction ability, he could stop the slowly spreading decay effect using Object Lockdown. The only drawback was that he needed to act fast, and he had to use it over lots of areas, spending more than one minute doing so.

Another thing he had discovered was the crucial limitation of his MP Absorption: absorbing Mental Points from dead monsters was a losing game. Instead of harvesting a massive haul of over two thousand points from a living Wrathers, a corpse would only yield four hundred at most.

It seemed the Mental Points dissipated quickly once the spark of life was extinguished. This made him question the nature of Mental Points, but he set this question aside for a later time.

To maximise his fighting prowess, he first used Object Lockdown to cripple small groups of monsters, leaving them frozen and helpless. While they were pinned, he laid down extra Logic Bombs and launched devastating streaks of Lightning Dance to clear the surrounding area.

Then, in the brief moments of peace, he would calmly place his hand on a frozen Wrathers, absorbing its Mental Points to keep his reserves full before the bombs detonated.

Watching him turn completely serious was a breathtaking, almost terrifying sight for his friends. They had thought they had finally seen the bottom of his might during the past hour, yet watching how he devastated the remaining fifteen hundred Wrathers in a mere five minutes shed a new light on his true strength.

"Let’s go," John said, his voice level as he leaned forward to start gathering the cores from the remains. "We still have more than twenty minutes before the mutation is complete. Plus, the initial waves of the yellow monsters are usually small, so the base can handle them without us being physically present."

His friends were still reeling from the sheer shock of his latest performance. They watched him, stunned that he was planning to remain out here in the field long enough for the first few waves of yellow monsters to hit their home base.

"Are you sure this is the right thing to do now?!" Ricky was the first to express the team’s mounting doubts. "Last time, we were pushed to the limit. We had to change the energy cells of nearly a dozen cannons by the seventh."

"That was mostly because the Wrathers had exhausted our defences before the yellow monsters even appeared," John interrupted, cutting through Ricky’s worried words with simple logic. "But this time, we handled the bulk of the Wrather wave ourselves. The base defences are fresh, and can easily handle the first few waves of the monsters while we finish up here."

He didn’t even look up from his work, his hands moving fast as he harvested the valuable cores. Seeing his absolute dedication to the task, the others finally followed suit, stooping to collect the spoils of war.

However, John had made a critical error in his assumptions.

When the yellow monsters had appeared in the previous wave, there was still an ongoing, noisy battle against the Wrathers right outside the base walls. The yellow monsters had been drawn to the immediate sound of conflict, being the loudest in the entire territory. But now, the area around the main base was deathly silent. The only source of significant noise was coming from the direction of his southern sound emitters.

He would realise his mistake the moment the first wave of the yellow monsters emerged from the den.

"Damn!"

Just as he checked his map when the thirty-minute mark passed, John’s eyes widened. Four hundred red dots had appeared, but they weren’t moving toward the main base as he had expected. Instead, they were moving with frightening speed toward the south, towards his southern traps!

If he hadn’t built that small outpost south of the den, those monsters would have moved even deeper, reaching the trap zones. Seeing their trajectory before they were intercepted by the outpost’s defences and killed made him finally link the dots.

"What happened?!" Ricky was the first to vocalise the group’s alarm. At the sound of John’s sharp exclamation, Ricky froze mid-motion, standing up to search John’s face for a sign of what had gone wrong.