Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 190: The Purple Fog!
[Ding! Warning! You have come in contact with a hostile fog environment!]
[Ding! Your Hacker Mind has successfully negated the primary mental corruption effects!]
[Ding! Caution: As long as you remain inside this zone, you will lose 1 HP per second due to atmospheric erosion!]
John stared at the two notifications, slowly shaking his head as the gravity of the situation sank in. He had never expected the Wrathers’ den to be surrounded by such a specialised, hostile form of fog.
He had encountered threatening fog before, like the grey fog that had infected Ricky’s body, but this was different. This purple mist didn’t bother with infection; it was an entropic field designed to directly damage his body, relentlessly shaving away his health points.
"This means I have a hard limit of up to seven minutes, depending strictly on my current HP pool," John muttered, pausing to run the mental calculus. He stood at the edge of the violet haze, his fingers tapping against the hilt of his blade.
"If I factor in my HP Regeneration passive, I’ll recover approximately thirty HP during that window. That buys me maybe half a minute of breathing room. So, roughly eight minutes. Eight minutes to find and kill a boss inside a five-kilometre radius of blinding death... What a nightmare of a quest!!"
He knew instinctively that the environment inside would be more than just passive damage. If the fog was thick enough to mask Sorolith’s massive presence, it was undoubtedly teeming with guardians. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮
"Ogolith wasn’t alone inside the den; it had hundreds of Fog Seekers acting as a literal meat shield. Given the sheer scale of this northern den, I have to expect the security here to be even tighter."
Despite the daunting math and vague risks, the thought of retreating never crossed John’s mind. He had come for the bonus reward from this quest. However, he wasn’t reckless. Before stepping into the meat grinder, he decided to perform some thorough preparations.
The den was a massive circular zone with a five-kilometre radius. John began to circle the perimeter, methodically clearing safety pockets in the white fog using his stash of Wrathers cores. In these cleared zones, he began to deploy his outposts, the same way he did back south to the yellow monster den.
Because he had to cover such a vast circumference and was starting to run low on materials, he limited each outpost to fifty towers. He reinforced them with five layers of dense walls, creating a chain of fortified fallback points encircling the boss’s lair.
Once the ring of fire was complete, he returned to his starting point in front of the purple fog. He cleared a large area using a few of the yellow monster cores, then took a Wrathers core, wound up, and hurled it directly into the purple mist.
The moment the core breached the violet boundary, it vanished. Even with Frame Recognition active, John’s vision was stone-walled by the densely packed purple codes. It was like looking into a pool of ink. He waited, wanting to see if the core’s fog-clearing effect would work against this corrupted atmosphere.
The answer didn’t come in the form of light, but in a chorus of sound.
*Roar!* *Roar!* *Roar!*
"Damn! It seems I hit something sensitive inside!" John gasped, his hand waving his sword, prepared for whatever was coming out of the purple fog. Out of the impenetrable purple curtain, a literal one hundred massive Wrathers erupted into the cleared area, charging toward the spot where the core had come from, towards him.
Without a second of hesitation, John retreated toward the nearest outpost he had just constructed. One of the primary advantages his towers held over the heavy cannons was their ability to multi-track moving targets without getting fixated on a few of them like the cannons.
The moment the pack of Wrathers chased him into the outpost’s kill zone, a massacre erupted. Bolts of fire tore into the monsters, turning the cleared area into a slaughterhouse.
"Fighting them outside the purple zone is much easier," John noted, delivering a finishing blow to the last straggler. He hadn’t even needed to use his advanced abilities; simple Frame Recognition, slashing his sword, and the towers had done the work. "Even if the core didn’t clear the fog, it served as a perfect lure. Time to attract more."
He spent the next hour repeating this process. He circumnavigated the five-kilometre den, throwing cores into the fog like fishing bait and leading the resulting swarms back to his outposts to finish them all. It was a war of attrition, slowly thinning the herd that guarded the boss.
"It seems the cores have a limit," John observed after completing a full circle. The last few cores he had tossed inside failed to draw out any more defenders, no matter how hard he threw them.
The silence from the purple fog was now absolute. John didn’t rush in immediately; instead, he stood his ground and threw ten more cores in rapid succession, watching for any signs of movement.
Nothing was all he got in return.
"Well, it seems I’ll need to get inside myself then," he sighed. After several minutes of zero response, he knew the lure phase was over. It was time to enter the deadly purple fog and fight whatever was lurking inside head-on.
Bracing himself, John stepped through the thick violet veil. He expected to be met with a barrage of attacks or a small army of elite guards. However, he soon realised that his persistent fishing with the cores had accomplished two things he hadn’t fully anticipated till now.
The first became obvious after only a few meters. While the fog looked blindingly thick when he entered it, the purple code structures were starting to look frayed and thinned out, as if the lightning from the cores had been slowly eroding the fog’s integrity from the inside out.
And then, he noticed the second, and most important change.
