Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 107: Cutting Branches Using Explosions!

"Who said anything about cutting the trees themselves?" John pointed upward, his finger tracing the sprawling canopy of a Blue Serpentile tree. "We’ll cut those branches. They are thick, long, and numerous enough that we can gather what we need without killing the mother trees themselves."

Luke moved his eyes between the trunks—which were several meters thick and looked as hard as iron—and the branches, which were roughly half a meter in diameter. He nodded, the doability of this plan sinking in.

"Ah, those. Yeah, we can do that for sure. They’re manageable. But how are we supposed to bind them together? We don’t exactly have a hardware store out here."

"I have ropes," Elena said suddenly. With a touch on her storage device, she brought out several large, heavy-duty rope bundles. Noticing the bewildered and slightly suspicious gazes of the others, she cleared her throat, a faint blush creeping onto her cheeks.

"We always need to be prepared for any type of fighting situation. That’s the first thing I learned back in my family."

"Using ropes for fighting?" Ricky commented, voicing the scepticism everyone else had.

Elena nodded with a touch of weird pride, her chin tilting up. "Who knows? We might face enemy soldiers and need to capture them alive. In addition to that, ropes are essential for laying down tripwire traps and remotely activating grenades from a safe distance..."

"You even have grenades?!" Luke exclaimed, his eyes widening in genuine surprise.

Elena nodded solemnly, but then she gestured toward the towering blue Serpentile trees, referring to the seeds they had created earlier. "Even if the academy prohibited me from owning any lethal military-grade weapons, we have the next best candidate now: my precious fruit grenades."

"Anyway," John interrupted, inwardly sighing at the chaotic way her brain categorised weaponry. "Let’s split up and use our weapons to cut the branches. Be careful not to fall with them. It’s a long drop."

They spent the next five hours in gruelling labour. At first, they didn’t know how to properly cut the branches. They tried to use their swords as makeshift axes and their daggers as small saws, but the wood of the Blue Serpentile tree was incredibly resilient. Their progress was agonisingly slow.

So...

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

"Told you! We should have used John’s explosive tricks from the start!" Luke puffed his chest out, watching as a dozen massive branches tumbled to the ground, severed by localised blasts of John’s Logic Bomb ability.

Luke was technically the owner of this explosive harvesting idea, but John had initially rejected it, fearing for the safety of the trees. Then John had forced them to spend an hour putting out small fires and ensuring the mother trees remained safe, which had wasted some time.

By the time the night was a few hours away, they had managed to cut dozens of large, sturdy branches.

"Now, we need to move them to our new base," Luke said, leaning over to lift one end of a branch. He let out an involuntary grunt as he realised the weight. The wood was far heavier than he had imagined.

There was no magical trick to escape the manual labour this time. At first, the team tried to each hold one branch and drag it behind, but they quickly saw that they would collapse from exhaustion before they reached the river. Not to mention, they’d take days to move all of these branches back.

After some trial and error, they decided to roll several of them at the same time, taking advantage of their nearly perfect cylindrical shape. It worked, but it was still back-breaking work.

The journey that had taken three hours to complete in the morning took the rest of the day to reverse. By the time they reached the den, the team was spent. To make matters worse, they had to go to sleep on empty stomachs; every single one of them had used up their entire stack of fruit in the fog to create the seeds.

John decided to take the first watch. He had several things weighing on his mind that required the quiet of the night to process. As was her recent habit, Cissel silently volunteered to join him on the high branch.

"Do you have a glass bottle in your storage device by any chance? A big one?"

Just as the others drifted off into a heavy, exhausted sleep, John turned to Cissel and asked the question.

"I have one here," Cissel said, reaching into her storage device and producing a clear glass bottle the size of a closed fist. She looked at John in quiet anticipation. "But what for? We have the whole river for water now."

John didn’t answer immediately. He placed a hand over the bottle while touching his wrist in a facade move, while actually opening his system menu. He selected his inventory and withdrew the substance he had extracted from Ricky’s body.

He hadn’t had enough time to examine it before, but he knew for sure it was some liquid. As he poured the substance into the bottle and secured the cap, both he and Cissel leaned in to examine it with equal interest.

"What is it?" Cissel asked, her curiosity clearly piqued.

The bottle was now filled with a dark, heavy grey liquid. It shimmered with an oily sheen, looking very much like mercury but significantly darker and more viscous. It seemed to swallow the ambient light around it.

"It’s the thing I extracted from Ricky’s body when the fog infected him," John said calmly. He recalled the system notifications when he extracted it, which he could potentially refine into fog-resistance potions.

’Yet I’ll need more of this, not just a single bottle...’ he thought to himself, his eyes narrowing as he watched the liquid swirl. ’Shall I depend on my luck and their future recklessness? Will I have to wait for them to overstay their limits in the fog to harvest more of this?’