Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 196: Fighting Alone for Many Hours!

Weighing between his friends’ well-being and pushing himself a little extra was a simple decision to make. He instantly began the construction process, laying down ten outposts in a defensive ring.

He used almost every single tower he had left in his inventory to ensure the firepower was sufficient to hold back the tide. Because he didn’t have enough gates, he designed an interlocking structure of walls with narrow, zig-zagging paths between the lines.

This allowed him to enter and exit the central area without any problem, while the larger monsters would be funnelled and slowed, eventually killed by the design.

"I’ll start with you," John muttered. Just as he had done with the very first infection, he picked Ricky to be the first patient.

The first thing he did was use Object Lockdown four times in rapid succession, targeting Ricky’s four limbs. The moment Ricky fell to the ground, groaning and cursing with a voice that didn’t sound like his own, John grabbed him by the collar and pulled him backwards. He threw him tens of metres behind the first line of defence, before turning to fight off a surge of monsters that tried to capitalise on his distraction.

John advanced a hundred metres forward, clearing a temporary buffer zone. "That’s enough distance... Lightning Dance!" He instantly triggered his AOE special sword effect, blue arcs of electricity vaporising the nearest line of yellow hybrids.

Before the next group could fill the gap, he retreated fast, dragging the immobilised Ricky inside the heart of one outpost and initiating the extraction process.

"Get away from me, you damn freak!!!"

Just before the extraction would be completed, the Object Lockdown effect expired. Ricky screamed in immense pain, his body severely twitching. He fought like a trapped animal, trying to free himself from John’s iron grip.

Yet John held him down fiercely for a few more agonising seconds, bracing against the kick of a man possessed, until he finally extracted the last shimmering strand of essence.

He decided that next time he would add four extra layers of Object Lockdown by directly touching the limbs, so nothing like this would happen again.

"Thirty?!!"

John was taken aback when he counted the number of notifications that appeared in front of his eyes. His eyebrows rose high, while his mind struggled to find the logic in such a massive jump in concentration. When he had cured the Bulltors, twenty had been the limit.

He didn’t realise at the time that the difference came from his friends’ sheer recklessness. Driven by the madness of the fog, they had ventured deep into the fog even after John had cleared an initial area for them. They had been madly chasing the Wrathers, following them into the purple fog and back out like real madmen!

But thirty wasn’t even the peak of what John would find from his friends. From Elena, he extracted a staggering sixty SCT Fog Essences! That was a number that left him puzzled for a long time, a question that remained without a clear answer even when he tried to pry for an answer after they eventually grew sober.

"Tsk, this was a hell of a task indeed," he sighed, wiping the sweat from his brow.

The last person to undergo the extraction was Cissel. For a reason he couldn’t quite articulate, he felt a sharp pain inside his own heart when he saw her delicate features contort in endless agony.

She let out a low, heartbreaking whimper as the violet codes were stripped away. In the end, he managed to extract thirty-five essences from her and watched with a heavy chest as she finally succumbed to the restorative, deep state of coma.

"Yet those monsters are really noisy," John muttered, standing up and cracking his neck.

Now that he had finished healing his friends, he shifted his full attention back towards the yellow monsters. With the entire team out of commission, the perimeter was buckling. The situation looked dire even with the presence of the outposts and towers; the yellow tide was beginning to pile up against the outer walls, using the corpses of their kin as ramps.

John returned to the front line, and this time, he didn’t hold back at all. He started using his abilities in the same frantic, overlapping way he had against Sorolith. He became a whirlwind of Logic Bombs and Lightning Dance, but he was careful to maintain a balance. He made sure he’d absorb enough Mental Points from the monsters every few minutes to keep his reserves near full.

"It’s the eighth wave," John estimated. The newly arrived monster wave looked to be close to one hundred thousand monsters strong, a golden sea of claws and teeth. Handling all of them alone was a monumental challenge, but he took this chance to see how he would fare against a situation of maximum intensity. It was the ultimate training before he eventually headed out to handle the Hivemind race.

Fighting this single wave took him close to three hours of non-stop combat! Even with all of his deadly abilities, the constant support of the towers, and the frequent use of the purple grenades from time to time, the battle took more out of him than he had intended.

On top of the pressure and dangers, something else kicked in, something he had almost forgotten could affect his fighting form: exhaustion, thirst, and hunger.

"Damn! I thought my body got enhanced enough with the cores to ignore this," he panted heavily, wiping beads of sweat off his forehead with a blood-stained sleeve.

His lungs burned, and his heart was hammering a frantic rhythm. But there was no time to rest; the ninth wave was already appearing on the horizon, coming in hot. He had to get ready to fight an even more gruelling battle next.

Because of his mounting fatigue, his efficiency dropped. It took him five hours this time to clear the ninth wave. By the end of it, he couldn’t even run anymore. Every muscle in his body ached like a thousand needles were being driven into his fibres.

"I’ll take a break then," he wheezed, leaning on his sword for support. He limped toward one of the outposts where he had left his friends to rest. Coincidentally, it was the one which held Cissel.