Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 104: Territory 51 Magic Core

"I counted my breaths inside."

Ricky sighed, his voice growing more certain. "I also felt like I’d last only for a minute or less before I’d get alarming signs, yet I’m sure of it. I lasted for five whole minutes."

Ricky noticed the look on John’s face. John was clearly processing a serious matter related to this revelation. "Don’t tell me... No, no, John, don’t!"

"Don’t what?" John raised his eyes, a small, knowing smile playing on his lips. "I’m just hypothesising something!"

"Then let someone else than me do it!" Ricky even took a few steps away from John, as if he could physically distance himself from the dangerous ideas brewing in John’s head. He had read what went through the mind of his friend. John had thought before that the fog was a deadly, immediate poison to his friends, largely thanks to the system’s dire warnings. But now, it felt like it wasn’t that instantly lethal at all!

’Or...’ John’s mind drifted to the recent notification he received after drinking the Source Water.

’Ingesting things from this world for the first time invokes changes in our adaptability to this world’s natural hazards. And that fog’s codes changed every time I got such a notification... From black to dark grey, from grey to off-white. Does that mean their bodies are adapting as well? Does it mean they can stay longer inside the fog now?’

The look of immense interest on John’s face, combined with his weird silence, made Ricky turn around and run toward the others as if he were running away from a monster! He didn’t want to be part of whatever test John was surely considering in his mind.

"What a soft-boned fellow you are," John couldn’t help but evilly smirk when he saw Ricky’s panicked retreat. In his mind, he had already decided: Ricky would be their primary guinea pig for testing fog resistance tomorrow. After all, he already had a baseline reference!

"Before the night falls, I need to check something first," John said, moving his eyes away from the retreating Ricky and toward the large pile of rocks covering the heart of the old den—the spot where the cliff had collapsed on the behemoth.

Seeing John move toward the rubble and start to slice away smaller stones using his sword, the others realised what he was looking for. They moved in unison to help, while Luke and Elena took turns teasing Ricky about the reason he had come running back from John, looking so terrified.

"Found it!" Luke was the first to locate a massive limb sticking out from under a slab of big rock. "It’s that boss monster. Let’s remove the rocks around it. We’ll need to dig..."

"Stay back," John said. He didn’t like slow solutions, especially when night was this close to befalling them. He didn’t want to spend an hour digging through rubble when they needed to set up the camp.

He simply walked forward and placed one Logic Bomb directly over the exposed portion of the monster’s body, before walking away and gesturing for the others to clear the area.

*Boom!*

The explosion happened exactly as everyone imagined, clearing a massive amount of rock and turning many of the smaller stones into fine rubble. John walked through the settling cloud of dust, his boots crunching on the debris, until he found the object he was looking for.

"It’s like the cores we were gathering, but... It’s huge," Cissel remarked. She watched with intense interest as John reached into the beast and pulled out a big, oval-shaped core. John held it in both hands; it was the size of a large basketball, shining with a faint, rhythmic blue light.

The glow reminded John of something else—the seed he had acquired earlier from the fruit-fog reaction.

"Do you still have the Blue fruit?" he suddenly asked, making everyone look at him in a weird, confused way.

"Don’t tell me you plan to let us live on what’s remained of those before crossing the river to where the real meat is!" Luke shook his head, totally mistaking his friend’s intentions, just like the others. "Listen, big bro, the river is wide, and those huge cattle look tasty. We can go back and cut the huge trees from the old base, build a raft or even a small bridge..."

"I need you to keep as many of these fruits as possible," John said, raising a hand to interrupt Luke’s rambling. He reached into his inventory and pulled out the object he had recovered earlier. "See this?"

"Wow! Why do you always end up with the best stuff all the time?" Elena asked, her eyes darting between the seed and John’s face. The comment was so blunt and tinged with a mix of genuine awe and slight jealousy that it left John speechless for a few seconds.

"This is something that came out of the blue fruits we have," John explained, recounting the strange reaction that occurred when the fruit met the fog. As he spoke, the scepticism on their faces vanished, replaced by a deep, hungry interest in the seed.

"Shall we plant it?" Luke asked, looking toward the nearby river branch. The water was flowing steadily. "We can easily water it to make it grow, but..."

"I know," John sighed. "It may take a long time to grow into a towering tree. We’re talking years, normally. But in a place like this... Who knows? Let’s try it first thing in the morning."

"Oh, found something else!"

Just as John was about to turn away to find a spot for the night’s camp, Cissel called out. She had been poking around the crater left by his logic bomb, and with a grunt of effort, she heaved a rock aside, revealing something new.

"This..."

In the hollowed-out space beneath the rubble, a much larger core was nestled. It was at least five times the size of Ogolith’s core, faint red in colour, with an irregular, crystalline surface

"Was this the one the machines used to push the fog away?!" Cissel asked, her voice echoing in the quiet valley.

The team gathered around, hesitant to touch it. It looked alien, even compared to the monsters they had spent days slaughtering. But the moment John’s fingers brushed the cold surface, a notification flared in his vision, confirming his suspicion.

[Ding! You acquired Territory 51 Magic Core!]

[Ding! It can passively push away the fog for a distance. Activating it will push the fog further away!]

’Activating it?’

John thought, trying to delve deeper into the meaning of activation. However, the response he received was the familiar, frustrating prompt: his system synchronisation level was insufficient to gain any answer, in addition to the loss of one Mental Point.

"What do you think?" Cissel noticed John’s sudden silence and the way his jaw tightened. She pushed for his opinion.

"I believe it’s the one," John said, bending down to try to lift the massive object. It was surprisingly heavy; even with his strength, he couldn’t move it with one hand. "Let me move it first... Wait, what is happening?!"

He had momentarily placed the basketball-sized Ogolith core on a flat rock right next to the Territory 51 Magic Core. As soon as the two were in proximity, the smaller core began to glow with a blinding intensity. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

It didn’t explode; it melted, dissolving like ice meeting boiling water. A thick stream of glowing blue dust particles spiralled into the air, swirling around the big core before being sucked into it.

"John, look!" Elena was the first to notice the changes. She pointed toward the perimeter of their area. "The fog... It’s pushed back!"

The team turned in unison. The wall of off-white fog at a distance wasn’t just drifting; it was being shoved. It felt as if an invisible hand were sweeping the horizon, pushing the fog back with such force that a massive, newly cleared area began to appear in every direction. The valley was expanding.

"There are more trees out there!" Luke pointed toward a ridge on the opposite bank of the river, far beyond where the fog had previously stood. "They look a bit different from the blue fruit trees. Do they perhaps yield different fruit?"

The new trees were taller, with silver-grey bark and leaves that shimmered like polished metal. Everyone looked at the only person who usually had the answers: John. But seeing him shake his head, their expressions slumped into a bit of disappointment.

"At least we have more fruits to turn to seeds," John remarked, trying to keep their focus on the gains. "Let’s explore it tomorrow after we make a raft. It’s faster to build. Unless you want to waste a few days building a proper bridge?"

"No, a raft is fine," Luke sighed, though he was clearly looking at the river as an engineering challenge he’d love to tackle. He looked out at the vast new area. "Still... The fog is so far away from us now! It feels like we’d have to walk for hours just to reach it."

"That’s for the best," Ricky commented. He looked at the distant fog and then threw a mocking, triumphant glance at John. His eyes seemed to say: ’You wanted to use me as a guinea pig, but the world decided otherwise! No more fog, no more tests.’

Little did Ricky know that by giving John that specific look, he had sealed his fate. John watched him with a cold gaze. He decided that even if he had to personally drag Ricky across the cleared land and hurl him into the fog, he would do it.