Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 209: The Hiveminds Don’t Know!
John’s eyes shone with a fierce light as he snapped his head toward the sky. There, crawling across the horizon like an ink stain on silk, was the unmistakable omen of the impending disaster: the Black Sky.
’Wait a minute... I can use the lightning to enhance my cores here...’
He came to an abrupt stop, his mind racing through the potential gains. He looked up at the gathering storm and then down at his inventory. When he had killed Sorolith and the Black Sky had vanished from his own territory, he had been left with more than fifty thousand unenhanced Wrathers cores.
’Nah, it’s too risky,’ he muttered, shaking his head and forcing himself to move again. ’The second that lightning hits the cores, the Hiveminds would spot my location instantly. It’s better to leave now than to be greedy and regret it later.’
He hadn’t spent hours meticulously ghosting through their territory just to expose himself for a move he didn’t strictly need right now. Besides, he knew a different, even greater loot was currently being prepared for him.
Based on his conversations with Lanmar and Reody, it was clear that the other races, the Hiveminds included, couldn’t use the cores to enhance their abilities, stats, and weapons like how he and his friends did.
Aside from using them to clear the fog, there was no other known use for these cores. This meant that once the Hiveminds slaughtered the incoming waves, they would leave behind a battlefield littered with lots of cores for him to harvest.
The thought made his smile widen. He finally tucked the magical core safely into his inventory. The moment it vanished, a sudden gush of fog surged back into the territory. And then, John crossed the border without looking back.
Inside his inventory, he now carried the centrepiece of his next move: the head of a truly vicious Hivemind beast he had found from the burial pits. It was a massive specimen, the body having been nearly twenty metres in length, covered in sharp scales. He had been disappointed to find that the scales themselves were useless; they didn’t trigger any system notifications.
The creature was a chimeric blend of a prehistoric dinosaur and a regal lion, featuring three serpentine tails that ended in venomous needles. Yet like the scales, the tails and needles were useless.
Once his trophy was secured, John turned his full attention to the map, watching the carnage unfold from a safe distance. He headed directly toward the Bulltors territory, but his eyes remained glued to the flickering icons of the Hivemind’s eastern front.
Just as it had happened in his own territory, the black clouds arrived first, followed by a series of devastating earthquakes. John counted eight distinct tremors before he left the Hiveminds territory. The Hiveminds were about to face a Wrathers tide significantly stronger and more chaotic than anything John and his friends had dealt with.
"Perhaps it’s because there are three Fog Seeker dens in their territory," John mused, his eyes tracking the red and yellow spots on the map. He continued to wonder why the Hiveminds were facing a threat level so much higher than his own, yet he didn’t feel a single flicker of remorse or empathy.
As he watched their reaction through the map, he was genuinely surprised. It appeared as though the Hiveminds, despite their supposed vast intelligence and knowledge, had no idea what was actually coming for them. Instead of hunkering down or laying more defences, they were spreading out.
Their units were scattering across the plains in a disorganised frenzy, as if they were desperately searching for the source of the earthquakes, trying to understand why the sky had turned black, or why the fog was aggressively reclaiming their land.
Seeing the confusion and rising panic in their ranks told John everything he needed to know about the value of the intel Lanmar and Reody had provided.
Back then, he had the advantage of knowing the timeline and the mechanics thanks to the Bulltors. He could now see the glaring, lethal difference between welcoming the Wrathers with a prepared strategy and walking into the storm blind.
"I recall the Wrathers’ first wave appeared roughly three to four hours after the black clouds first covered the sky," John thought to himself as he marched toward the Bulltors territory. He estimated he would arrive at the Bulltors’ border just as night began to fall, the absolute worst time to initiate a Sacred Challenge if they decided to start the ritual immediately.
The distance between the two territories was vast, requiring at least ten hours of steady travel. John was a risk-taker, but he wasn’t a fool; he didn’t want to risk a night fight, especially while being limited by the one-item rule. If the challenge barred him from using cores to create fire, he’d be fighting in total cold and darkness.
He decided to find a secure location to settle in for the night. Staying too close to the Hiveminds’ border was risky, given the escalating chaos. So he planned to push further west, heading deep into the fog between the Bulltors’ lands and the adjacent southern territory.
As he walked, he shifted his map’s focus to the Bulltors’ base. As he had expected, the giants were confined strictly within their massive walls. They didn’t dare step a single foot outside into the encroaching fog.
Their collective effort was diverted toward a desperate medical triage, trying to cure the two thousand injured survivors while maintaining a high-alert guard on their base.
Seeing this made John heave a sigh of relief. The last thing he needed was to bump into a stray Bulltors patrolling unit while he was trying to rest. However, as he set up his camp, he realised he likely wouldn’t be getting much sleep tonight. The show at the Hiveminds territory was just getting started.
Just as he had predicted, exactly four hours after the black clouds appeared, the first Wrathers wave manifested. The Wrathers’ den erupted in the exact location where the Hiveminds had originally built their eastern defences around.
However, because the Hiveminds had scattered their forces to investigate the earthquakes, they weren’t there to greet the monsters. The initial impact was terrifying and deadly.
