Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 187: A Change in the Yellow Monsters’ Direction!

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.

"It seems by killing the Wrathers in this wave so efficiently, the yellow monsters picked up the trail of the sound trap I laid to the south," John explained, his voice a mix of frustration and amusement. He didn’t know whether he should laugh or cry about the situation.

He had designed the sound emitters specifically to draw the mindless aggression of the monsters, but after the evolution he experienced, he had intended them to be a backup measure for stragglers.

Now, because he had cleared the northern battlefield too quickly, he had inadvertently created a vacuum of noise that drove the yellow monsters towards his southern traps. He was the main instigator behind this tactical shift, and now he had to deal with the consequences.

"That... That’s bad!" Luke’s eyes went wide. His imagination immediately conjured a terrifying image of a grand yellow tide flooding the sound emitter trap. If they destroyed the emitters now, the group would lose their ability to lure future Wrather waves away from the base’s main walls. "What shall we do now?!!"

"It’s not that bad," Elena countered, her mind moving with the same newfound speed as her body. She was the first to grasp the silver lining that Luke had missed. "Did you forget? We already built a three-layered outpost close to their den. I bet the towers and cannons there are already tearing into that first wave!"

*Rumble!*

As if providing a punctuated exclamation point to her theory, the old den flared with light. A fierce surge of lightning clashed against the ground near the den, followed by the muffled thumping of heavy cannon and tower fire.

The sound was distant but unmistakable. Everyone turned their eyes toward the den, watching the flashes of blue and gold light that signalled the defences were engaging with the monsters.

Cissel took a step forward, her hand on the hilt of her blade, asking the question that was on everyone’s mind. "Shall we go now and help? If they swarm the outpost, even those walls won’t hold forever."

"Not right away," John shrugged, his eyes scanning his map. "There is a geographical bottleneck to consider. To the south, there is an underwater bridge, much like the one close to our main base. The monsters will eventually funnel through it to reach the noise. It slows them down, but it also clusters them."

John stopped mid-sentence. The collective look on his friends’ faces, one of mounting suspicion and crossed arms, forced him to pause. "What?" he asked, though he could already feel the lecture coming.

"You plan to go there alone, leaving us here behind once again to do the cleaning, right?" Cissel asked, her voice hovering between a challenge and an accusation. Luke and Ricky nodded in solemn support of her statement.

They had spent the entire trial catching up to him, and the idea of being sidelined while he took on the monster wave didn’t sit well, especially after they grew strong recently.

"Who said I’ll go there alone?" John raised an eyebrow, shifting his attention towards a different direction.

"I’ll be taking the Bulltors with me. We need to strengthen the other bank of the river, just as we did here. We also need all of these cores to be collected right now. After the end of the yellow monster waves, we’re going to start the process of upgrading many cannons to the upgraded state."

"The energy consumption problem isn’t fixed yet!" Elena interrupted him, shaking her head vigorously. "The energy cells we have are in the tens of thousands, sure, but they are all the same grade. If we upgrade the cannons but use the same fuel, they’ll get exhausted in minutes. We can’t sustain a siege that way."

"Well..." John acknowledged, knowing this was a hard nut to crack, but he already thought of a way to overcome it. "The cannons we’ll be upgrading won’t be used to defend our current base or any outpost in our territory."

He left the statement hanging, but the implication hit them like a blow. A heavy silence followed as they grasped his meaning. He wasn’t thinking about defence anymore; he was thinking about using them in the upcoming offence.

He was waiting for the end of the Wrather tide to start the invasion of other races’ territories. Their thoughts immediately jumped to the Hivemind race, the cold and ruthless antagonists of this trial. They weren’t entirely wrong, but John’s plan was even more expansive.

"Either way," John concluded, ending the debate with the air of a commander. "I’ll leave you here to collect every core on this field. Once you’re done, make sure to push the fog back using the cores, activating them. Then follow my trail south!"

"We have thousands of these cores here," Luke pointed out, looking at the carpet of red remains. "I doubt we can activate all of them without covering the entire territory!"

"Not to that degree," John chuckled. "Just clear the fog in a focused line forward, then expand the clearance east and west. Once that’s done, head south and clear the fog around the base’s blind spots, then join me at the other riverbank."

John’s strategy for the fog was born of necessity. From what he could gather from Lanmar’s map, the fog in the Bulltor and Hivemind territories was already largely cleared, likely due to their own magical cores or similar stuff. But other territories remained shrouded.

He knew that to execute his final plan, he would eventually need to take the magical core with him. He couldn’t risk leaving his own territory to be reclaimed by the fog, so these thousands of active cores, and much more to collect in later waves, would serve as his permanent fog-repellent anchors.

He was working against an invisible clock. He was still oblivious to the exact status of the war between the Bulltors and the Hivemind, and he intended to be ready to leave the moment his current quest was fulfilled to properly assess that.

John departed the northern front, moving back to the base with a speed that left a trail of dust in the air. He gathered the Bulltors, who looked both relieved to be moving and terrified to be following him, and began the trek toward the southern underwater bridge. The distance would take the heavy-footed Bulltors at least an hour to cross; for John, with his newly enhanced speed stats, it was less than half that.

"Stay on the path I clear!" he shouted back to Lanmar, Reody, and others.

During his run, John periodically threw a core into the thick white mist, the resulting lightning strikes clearing a tunnel of visibility that acted as a guided highway for the giants following behind.

When he arrived at the southern underwater bridge, he didn’t rest. He immediately began laying down two massive outposts, larger and more reinforced than the one near the den, placing them at each terminus of the underwater bridge. By the time the Bulltors arrived, the walls were already up.

Under John’s direction, the Bulltors began the gruelling work of hauling and mounting hundreds of cannons onto the ramparts. They worked through the arrival of the second, third, and fourth waves of yellow monsters. Each wave was met with a wall of fire that turned the riverbank into a graveyard.

By the time the sixth wave of yellow monsters arrived, John and the Bulltors had completed a series of these interconnected outposts along the riverbank. He fought at the front lines, testing his Encrypted Skin ability against the monsters, fighting casually and freely, biding his time until his friends finally arrived to take over the defence.

Finally, as the tenth wave began to thin, John started to run towards the den. Once the eleventh wave erupted, he moved and hacked the golden core, putting an end to the second yellow monster tide, and securing another piece for the pocket trial ownership item he wanted to code.