Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 210: The Hiveminds’ Dire Situation!

Watching the Hivemind units remain paralysed by shock for the entirety of that first wave made John laugh inwardly.

This first wave was double the strength of what his own territory had faced: ten thousand Wrathers surged out of the den. It took the Hiveminds ten gruelling hours to kill them, and the cost was high; hundreds of their kin were torn apart in the confusion.

Every move they made confirmed to John that they knew nothing about this nightmare, literally. They attacked the Wrathers the same way they would have attacked standard Fog Seekers: a head-on, brute-force collision.

That tactical error was responsible for the majority of the deaths in the first two hours. It wasn’t until they finally retreated behind their base walls that the death toll began to shrink.

But as John knew all too well, the Wrathers were just the appetiser. The real storm was the yellow monsters, with their ever-growing numbers with each new wave. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"Damn! They don’t know how to handle these monsters at all!!"

John had found a suitable spot in the fog and quickly cleared the fog away. He set up a tight defensive parameter, using many defensive towers and even deploying a few of the traps he had just gained from the Hiveminds to ensure he wasn’t disturbed during his sleep.

Now, he was leisurely lying back in his protected space, watching the carnage unfold on his map as if he were sitting in a front-row seat at a cinema.

Unlike the great fight John and his friends put against the Wrathers back in his own territory, the Hiveminds seemed to lack even a basic conceptual grasp of the crisis unfolding around them.

By the third hour after the initial Wrathers tide, the situation devolved from a nightmare into a catastrophe. Three distinct yellow monster tides erupted from different directions, as if the two monsters were coordinating a pincer attack.

The first surges materialised from the north and south, followed shortly by an outbreak from the western region. The Hiveminds’ overall situation looked quite dire: by withdrawing their combatants behind the base walls, they had effectively surrendered the rest of their territory to the Wrathers and yellow monsters.

To make matters worse, the strong defensive perimeter they had spent long hours building was centred exactly where the Wrathers’ den appeared. This meant that as the Elite Wrathers and the behemoth Sorolith spawned inside those defences, tearing them apart, and engulfing everything in the purple fog.

Losing those fortifications was a catastrophic blow, and John was more aware of the long-term effects than the Hiveminds’ collective consciousness was. With those defensive structures levelled, the Hiveminds lost their distant and secure noise source, the only hope they had to divert the monsters away from their main base.

Now, the Hiveminds base was the only noise beacon left in a sea of monsters, acting as the sole centre of attraction for both the Wrathers and the relentless yellow tides.

Furthermore, aside from the minefields of buried traps like the ones John had spent many hours looting, the Hiveminds had surprisingly few layers of defence around their base walls. The remaining traps did their work initially; their high-yield detonations cleared the bulk of the first Wrathers wave.

However, against the ferocious, tiered progression of the yellow monster waves, the traps were merely a temporary fix. They cleared the early, smaller in number waves with ease, but as the heavier waves landed, they hit the base walls with brutal, unfiltered force.

"Don’t tell me this is all you can do?!!" John muttered to himself. He had stayed awake for the majority of the night, his eyes fixed on the golden and red icons flickering across his map. While the monster tides didn’t respawn during the night hours, the remnants of the massive yellow waves and the lingering Wrathers provided a night-long massacre.

It was amusing to watch the different Hivemind mechanical beasts and insects suffer. Yet, through the carnage, John identified the Hiveminds strongest asset: the insectoid breeds. These weren’t just mobile and fast; they were capable of escaping to high altitudes where the ground-based yellow monsters had difficulty reaching them. More importantly, they were walking weapon platforms.

John zoomed in on several units, spotting miniaturised laser guns, resembling the laser guns used by the D-1000 units, installed along the carapaces of the giant wasps and beetles.

They fired from a safe distance, raining thermal needles down on the yellow carpet below. If not for these aerial units, the Hiveminds wouldn’t have survived the night clash, let alone had a chance to endure the subsequent waves.

Yet the cost of their ignorance was too immense to ignore. By the end of the first thirty-six hours, the Hiveminds had lost at least two thousand units, a death toll equal to their entire campaign against the Bulltors.

It proved to John the importance of knowledge, admitting the hidden role of the Bulltors back when he and his friends didn’t realise it. Even at the late hour when he finally allowed himself a few hours of sleep, the Hiveminds showed no intention of Sallying out to destroy the three yellow monster dens.

"They are still fighting a desperate, losing battle," John noted the next morning.

He woke up to find the Hiveminds still hunkered down, firing desperately from their base walls and defences, without daring to leave the safety of their walls. He could hardly believe his eyes: they had allowed the three yellow monster dens to escalate beyond the fifteenth wave.

Now, the entire northwestern territory was literally covered by a yellow carpet of shifting, hungry monsters. The density of the monsters was so high that the ground itself was no longer visible on the map.

"It seems I’ll need to express my thanks properly to Lanmar and Reody when I get back," John said, reaching into his inventory and retrieving a food storage capsule. There was a piece of the cooked meat Elena had insisted he’d take enough before leaving. He ate his breakfast while watching the red icons of Hivemind units blink out one by one.

He spent a few minutes collecting the traps he had deployed around his camp the night before, alongside the walls and towers.

"It’s time to say hi to these Bulltors and initiate that Blue Sacred thing."

He began walking with steady steps toward the Bulltors’ borders. Far behind him, the Hiveminds were losing many of their numbers with every passing hour.