Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 220: John’s Greatest Achievement Is His Friends!
As the smaller group fought their way toward the outpost, John was moving across the wasteland at a pace that forced even the elite Bulltors to strain their muscles to keep up.
His eyes remained fixated on the map, following the steps of his friends. He was following every development of the battle at the Hiveminds border, his heart rate finally slowing as he watched the green dots on his map reach the abandoned walls.
"Smart fellows indeed," John commented quietly.
The Bulltors running alongside him exchanged silent, uneasy glances. Throughout the journey, John had been a fountain of unpredictable and weird comments. He had started the march with frustrated, envenomed curses directed at Lanmar, but as time passed, his tone had shifted into something almost optimistic.
"Is everything alright?" Blakar asked, noticing the way John’s shoulders had finally lost their tension.
"It’s getting better out there," John replied, not breaking his stride. "My friends and the eleven Bulltors stumbled into the Hiveminds territory and ended up caught in the very trap I laid for those mechanical bastards. But they’ve found a foothold. They’re building a fort. They might actually be able to win this on their own without me having to bail them out."
"Are you sure?!" Blakar asked. He still struggled to comprehend how this human could perceive the movements of a battle occurring leagues away through a fog that blinded even the sharpest Bulltor scouts. He had heard the legends of the Source Code World, stories of Apostles and Foretellers, but seeing such a thing in a human was quite surprising.
"I don’t plan on abandoning them," John said, sensing Blakar’s underlying doubt. "But for now, let me see how our common enemy is doing. Last I checked, the Hivemind remnants were fleeing toward the southern territory adjacent to theirs."
"They are really abandoning their territory for real?! They aren’t scheming something?!!" Lilith asked from the side, her face pale with shock. "That race is vicious! The Hiveminds don’t retreat; they restrategise. They can’t be easily pushed away from their bases. They must be planning a counter-strike... A dirty scheme."
"It doesn’t matter," John said carelessly, his gaze returning to the horizon. "Anywhere they go, I can invite the same plague. I can follow them with the Wrathers until there’s nowhere left to hide. Besides, there’s less than eight hundred of them left anyway."
"What?!!!"
The word erupted from the Bulltors in a chorus of bewilderment. John once said they had a thousand, and now they had fewer. And for a reason, it felt like they didn’t take his words seriously before, as they saw him as a lunatic human back then. They slowed their pace, staring at John as if he had just claimed to have swallowed the sun.
"Are you sure that’s all that’s left? Only eight hundred?" one of the Twelve asked, his voice cracking.
John nodded slowly, his expression grim. "The disaster I mentioned wasn’t a metaphor. Their army was killed mostly by the monsters before they could make it out of their territory."
"That’s unbelievable! I can’t believe it!" Galnar snarled, still feeling the stinging bitterness of his earlier defeat. He spat on the ground, his eyes burning with resentment.
"We fought those mechanical Hivemind Beasts and Insects in a brutal battle! We lost thousands of our brothers just to hold the line! And you’re telling me you wiped out their entire army on your own? That a single human broke the Hiveminds whom we failed to crush?!" 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶
"Want me to remind you of my power?" John chuckled, the sound carrying an amusing edge. He could read the stubborn, naive defiance in Galnar’s eyes as easily as an open book.
The giant looked ready to retort, his chest swelling with a bruised ego, but a series of cold, warning glares from Blakar and the rest of the Twelve instantly silenced him.
Even in his resentment, Galnar wasn’t foolish enough to ignore the collective weight of his kin’s caution, not to mention how deadly John looked when he used his AOE attack hours ago.
The elite vanguard of Bulltors had begun this journey with a mountain of doubt. To them, John was an anomaly, a human who spoke with the arrogance of a god and claimed the impossible. Yet, as the miles disappeared beneath their heavy strides, the scepticism that had defined their hearts began to erode.
This wasn’t the posture of a pretender. They watched the genuine, flickering shadow of worry on his face when he looked toward his friends direction; they witnessed his unsettling ability to track movements leagues away.
His wild claims about the Hiveminds’ collapse were beginning to sound less like the ramblings of a lunatic and more like a tactical report. The closer they drew to the border, the more the Bulltors began to accept a terrifying new reality: John was telling the truth.
John, however, was preoccupied with checking different places in the map. He kept toggling his focus between the desperate flight of the Hiveminds and the frantic fortification efforts of his friends.
The Hivemind survivors had finally breached the border into the adjacent southern territory. Their numbers were catastrophically small. By John’s latest check, fewer than eight hundred units remained of the once-mighty army of thousands.
The retreat through the monster tide had been a meat-grinder; by the time they crossed the boundary of their territory, their count had plummeted to roughly seven hundred and fifty. Worse still, he could easily tell that more than two-thirds of those remaining were heavily wounded.
John knew that, realistically speaking, they had reached the end of their trial. Their attempt at dominance was over. Yet, as he watched the flickering red dots, a wild thought flashed through his mind, one so amusingly bold he couldn’t ignore it.
’What if I managed to force a few of them to sign a contract with me?’ He entertained the thought, turning it over while running. The more he twisted the idea in his mind, the more tempted he became. The Hiveminds were a race characterised by its nastiness and infamous vice, but they were also a repository of forbidden knowledge.
They understood the mechanics of the apocalypse and the nature of the pocket trials better than almost any other race in existence. If he could subvert even a handful of their units to his side, he wouldn’t just be gaining soldiers; he would be striking a vein of pure information gold.
Knowledge was the only true currency that mattered in this apocalyptic world. John had already seen the dividends paid by the insights Lanmar and Reody provided. If he could add the infamous sub-routines and loophole-exploiting methods of the Hiveminds to his arsenal, he could begin to mimic their most effective tricks.
As he watched the few mechanical survivors begin the pathetic task of scratching out a temporary base in the southern territory, John shifted his full attention back to his friends. They had reached the triple-walled outpost, and the transformation they were enacting was nothing short of perfect.
They were working with a feverish energy. Clusters of pulse cannons were being hauled to the top of the ramparts, joined by tens of defensive towers that began to hum with deadly attacks. John noted with a mental smirk that there seemed to be a fundamental obsession between the Bulltors and those defensive towers.
Despite the raw, brutal efficiency of his human-engineered cannons, thousands of which sat in his base, the giants were only ever interested in the towers. It was a cultural quirk of their martial philosophy.
The same could be said for his friends, though their preference leaned toward the cannons they were mostly familiar with. Once the cannons and towers were erected, the landscape of the outpost shifted entirely in their favor.
The group didn’t just hunker down; they began to clear a wide perimeter around their outpost. Using the range of the newly mounted cannons and newly erected towers as a protective umbrella, they pushed the monster tides back.
They didn’t stop at the original walls, either. John watched as they began erecting a second layer of defences, using the walls Luke had carried. By the time they were done, they had increased their habitable, defensible space tenfold.
Seeing this progress brought a genuine, satisfying smile to John’s face. He recalled the faces of his friends when they had first arrived in this pocket trial, uncertain, frightened, and reliant on him for every breath.
Now, the difference was stark. They had grown. They had matured into combat-hardened survivors who could analyse a crisis and execute a solution.
Watching them operate with such remarkable performance in his absence made him realise that his greatest achievement wasn’t the slaughter of the Hiveminds or the subjugation of the Bulltors.
’It seems that without even intending to, I’ve succeeded in transforming them into the unshakable pillars of my future force,’ John mused, a swell of pride warming his chest.
