Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 200: The Bomb that John Dropped!

"Are you absolutely sure about this?!!!"

Two days had passed since the final echoes of the quest subsided, and the heavy, deep silence of the comas had finally broken. They didn’t all wake at the same time.

John had spent the better part of the past forty-eight hours slowly explaining the situation to each person as they blinked away the haze of their dreams. He had to be patient, repeating the sequence of events to calm the rising tides of worry and terror.

Surprisingly, his friends handled the news of their infection and the subsequent treatment he performed with more resilience than the giants. Perhaps humans were just more accustomed to the idea of their minds being unreliable more than the Bulltors, or it was thanks to seeing Ricky suffer from this once before.

However, the Bulltors had a far deadlier bomb waiting for them, one that John waited to drop until everyone had finally gathered to eat their first proper breakfast around the tranquil lake inside the base.

"Can you say it one more time?!" Reody asked, his voice trembling slightly. He reached out and patted Lanmar’s massive shoulder, more for his own stability than the leader’s, as he asked John to repeat the bombshell he had just dropped over their heads.

John took a deep breath, his expression unreadable. "As I told you, I went out there and scouted the territory of your people while you were all asleep. They were hit badly. From what I could see, it looks like only a couple of thousand at most are left alive inside your base."

John had carefully considered the best way to present this information. He couldn’t exactly explain that he now possessed a god-view map that tracked every heartbeat in the trial pocket, so he settled on the excuse of a long-range scouting mission.

The Bulltors, blinded by their grief, bought the story instantly. His friends, however, were a different story. Cissel, Ricky, and Elena all gave him a knowing, sharp glance. They had been with him long enough to read he wasn’t telling the whole truth; they knew he was hiding the how, even if the what was true.

"And what else?" Cissel was the first to speak up, her voice cutting through the sounds of the obviously panicked and enraged Bulltors. She ignored the giants’ burgeoning distress, focusing entirely on John. "What else did you scout aside from the Bulltors’ ruins?"

John rolled his eyes internally. He wanted to tell her and the others to at least put up a fake front for the sake of fooling the Bulltors, even if they realised he was omitting the source of his intel.

"The Hivemind race didn’t lose anything at all," John stated flatly. "Their ten thousand strong members are still all alive and intact. Their hive-base hasn’t suffered any damage, their defences are strong and intact, and their people are ready to fight in full power."

"What?!!" Lanmar paused in his mid-rant madness. He spun toward John, his face contorting with a mix of disbelief and fury. "How come we lost almost our entire population without even fighting them?! Before I came here, we were planning to attack their base! We were ready to kill as many of them as we could!"

"That is something even I don’t know the full details of," John said. He was telling half the truth there; the map showed him the present, but not the past events. He saw his friends still glaring at him, their suspicion unabated.

He cleared his throat before adding, "Yet, I can imagine the other half of the machine force, the five thousand D-1000 units we haven’t encountered yet, must have been the primary reason behind all this. They likely coordinated the attack and hit your race while protecting the Hivemind."

"Those damn bastards!" Lanmar roared, the sound echoing off the silver walls of the base. "The machines shouldn’t have been here in the first place! This was supposed to be a trial for the four races! And now they are slaughtering my people? Fuck them! John," he suddenly turned, a fierce, desperate light burning in his eyes, "we need to move out... Right now. We have to rescue my people. Two thousand survivors stand no chance against the full force of the Hiveminds!"

"Easy there," John said, raising a firm hand to cut Lanmar off.

The reason John had kept lots of intel he salvaged from the map hidden until every one of his friends was fully awake and alert was precisely because he anticipated this reaction. He knew the Bulltors would want to charge blindly into a slaughterhouse the moment they heard the news.

"But they are going to die... Every second we sit here eating and resting, more of my kin are erased!" Lanmar roared again, pointing a massive, trembling finger toward the distant horizon of the Bulltor territory’s direction.

"We’ll save them," Ricky chimed in, catching the drift of John’s momentarily hesitation. "But we need to make things right first. We can’t just barge into a two-way clash between the Hivemind and the Bulltors without being prepared, right? That’s just suicide."

"On top of that," Cissel added, her tone turning cold and transactional, "we need to make things clear before we move a muscle. We are going to help you, Lanmar. We are going to risk our lives for your people.

But in exchange, you need to be on our side, all of you, all of the remaining Bulltors, completely. You help us take over this trial and deal with the Hivemind race once and for all."

"What..."

It wasn’t just Lanmar; many of the Bulltors who had been pacing nearby slowly looked at her, feeling a bucket of ice water falling over their heads. They looked at the humans, small, physically fragile beings who had somehow become the masters of the fate of their kin in the trial pocket.

From the side, Reody slowly shook his head. As the strategist of the group, he was the only one who had likely grasped John’s intentions from the very start. He saw the cold logic in John’s eyes and realised that the era of friendly cooperation had ended.

They were now in a phase of cold, hard bifurcation of their future, with hierocracy was meant to be set loud and clear for the future. To prevent any further waste of time or emotional outbursts, Reody stepped forward and took the lead.