Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 218: John’s Friends Arrived at the Hiveminds Territory

"Are you sure we are heading in the right direction? We’ve been walking for many hours without seeing a single glimpse of your territory!"

Ricky was complaining for the tenth time since they had crossed the twelve-hour mark of their journey. The group had moved out shortly after breakfast, fueled by a successful morning of clearing the fog from their own territory for good.

Based on Lanmar’s initial estimates, they had expected to reach the Bulltors territory in less than six hours. Yet, they had now walked for more than double that time without arriving at their destination.

"Surely we are on the right track," Lanmar insisted, pointing vaguely toward the swirling white horizon. "This fog is quite tricky; it’s designed to make you lose your sense of direction within the veil. But don’t worry, we aren’t running in circles. My internal compass is... Mostly functional..."

"Watch out!"

*Roar!*

Just as Lanmar began what promised to be another long-winded speech about the nuances of fog navigation, Luke let out a shout of distress. Elena, reacting with the instincts she had honed thanks to her family’s training, was the first to act. She lunged forward, her two sledgehammers trailing lightning as she intercepted a blurred giant shape lunging from the cleared area beyond the fog.

"This..."

The monster didn’t survive her initial assault, though its body had pulsed with a defensive coat of lightning that shielded it for a brief, crackling second. Instead of heaving a sigh of relief as the monster died, Elena’s face froze in terror.

She scanned the shifting silhouettes in the forefront, her heart hammering hard and her mind jumping towards an impossible conclusion. "There are tons of Wrathers here... Way more than what we fought against before."

"It’s not the time to get distracted!" Ricky shouted, stepping into the open area beyond the fog. He raised his heavy shield, the metal groaning as it absorbed the impact of several incoming claws.

"There are also yellow monsters mixed into the tide! Lanmar, what happened to your territory? Was the Wrathers outbreak back at our territory not a localised event?!"

"This..."

The look on Lanmar’s face was priceless. For a moment, the giant completely froze, his eyes darting frantically from left to right. He stared at the endless stream of monsters, aberrations that shouldn’t have been present in this pocket trial in the first place. "That’s... That’s impossible!!!"

He let out a roar of raw pain and disbelief. His mind immediately jumped to the most catastrophic conclusion: he envisioned his kin already entrapped, besieged by an endless sea of gold and red, or perhaps even worse, already erased from the world entirely.

"Hey! It’s not the time to get dazed in the middle of a fight!" Cissel’s harsh, commanding tone acted like a bucket of ice water, jolting Lanmar and the other ten Bulltors awake. She killed a few monsters around, while continuing her shouts,

"I’m sure with John being here, he wouldn’t let any harm befall your people. You’ve seen how he fights, how reliable and dependable he is. We just need to cut a path toward your base and regroup with him and everyone else!"

The mention of John was like a magical spell, one that began to devour the fear and paralysing worry inside Lanmar’s soul.

"Yes, that’s right," Reody added, his shaky tone stabilising with every word he spoke. "With John’s presence, nothing can happen to our people. He’s probably already turned the tide. Let’s get in line! Let’s fight as hard as we can and find a way toward the base!"

Reody’s words acted as a spark, igniting a fire of courage in the rest of the Bulltors. Even though they were standing against a literal tsunami of monsters, the mere thought of their kin waiting at the end of this black tunnel boiled their blood.

They had watched how the humans fought and killed such scary monsters before; they knew that with them present here to help, the impossible became merely difficult.

Together, the fifteen of them initiated a desperate, high-intensity push. They started with incredible vigour and momentum, the Bulltors acting as the chisel and the humans as the brutal hammers. But gradually, the group began to hit the bitter wall of reality: this monster tide was different.

It wasn’t just a normal wave; it was a real tsunami. The sheer density of the monsters meant they were barely moving forward, and for every ten monsters they cut down, twenty more surged from around.

"We can’t go on like this!" Luke shouted after several hours of mad, exhausting fighting. He wiped sweat from his forehead, looking into the depths of the territory. "We’ve been fighting for hours, and we didn’t advance that much! On top of that, I don’t hear a single fighting sound coming from the depths of this shithole!"

"We need to find a fortified place to use as a foothold first!" Elena shouted over the noise of screeching metal and dying roars. Drawing on her military experience, she scanned the chaotic battlefield, her mind cataloguing terrain to find the best route to survive this onslaught without being forced into a humiliating and likely lethal retreat.

"I spotted something at a distance!" Lanmar suddenly called out. He knew that if they didn’t find some sort of solution soon, the sheer weight of the monster tide would grind them down until they were forced to abandon their people to this disaster. "It looks like a cluster of walls, a fortified structure! Let’s head there and fortify ourselves inside."

Lanmar had caught sight of the same triple-walled enclosure where the Hiveminds had originally placed the three Ogolith cores before John took them. Thanks to the towering physique of the Bulltors, he could see over the carpet of monsters more easily than the humans, spotting the silhouette of the outpost through the far distance.

Even with his height, the structure was at least a couple of tens of kilometres away. Given that they had spent the last few hours struggling to cross just a few hundred meters, the idea of traversing kilometres of this monster-dense terrain sounded nearly impossible.