Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 221: John Wins the Blue Sacred Challenge!
"We are here!"
The declaration was accompanied by the heavy thud of over two hundred tired Bulltors’ boots hitting the ground. John had led the sprint for ten hours straight without a single moment of pause, his stamina pushed to the brink.
During the run, he frequently pulled out a core and used it to clear a pocket within the suffocating mist. To ensure he wouldn’t delay for even a second, he primarily used the cores of the Wrathers to clear a wide area around.
Seeing him perform this repetitively sparked a wave of silent questioning among the Bulltors following him. To the giants, the fog was a nuisance, but their massive physiques and resistance allowed them to move through it with relative ease. They didn’t feel the need to stand within a cleared spot at all.
However, no one spoke up; they simply watched with a mixture of pity and curiosity, assuming this was some strange requirement to survive the fog thanks to the human’s fragile nature and small physique.
But the moment they breached the final veil of the Hiveminds’ territory, all curiosity vanished, replaced by a sight of pure insanity. The Bulltors stood in a collective daze of amazement. Spread out before them was the territory of their sworn enemies, now completely overrun and controlled by a chaotic, endless sea of different monsters.
"Fck me!" Blakar was the first to find his voice. The massive leader stood paralysed, his eyes wide as he took in the carnage. "It’s real! Everything you said... It’s all real!!!"
He turned toward John, his face an ashen shade of white. The scepticism and doubt that had defined their journey had been incinerated in an instant.
"We haven’t actually seen the Hiveminds yet..." Galnar tried to interject, attempting to add a grain of salt to the unbelievable scene to save what little remained of his pride. However, he was immediately silenced by a barrage of burning, blaming gazes from his own kin.
"You must know when to admit your defeat, Galnar," Blakar said slowly, his voice vibrating with suppressed anger at the useless comment. "Can’t you see? Looking at this... Not a single race in this trial had a chance against this tide. Not even those mechanical bastards, not even the Krogers!"
"I’d bet my life they are running away, exactly as the human said," Lilith chimed in. She turned toward Blakar, her expression mirrored by the rest of the Twelve, aside from Galnar. The unspoken question hung in the air: the conditions of the bet had been met.
"It’s the Blue Sacred challenge, it’s not a game! A deal is a deal." Blakar acknowledged the silent weight of their tradition. He turned back to John, signalling the other Bulltors around to retreat a few steps into the safety of the fog to avoid attracting the attention of the monster tide just meters away.
"According to our race’s most respected Blue Sacred challenge rules... It is your victory, human! State your terms, and the Bloodlines will obediently follow!"
"It’s simple," John said with a shrug. He didn’t waste time on a victory speech. Instead, he reached into his inventory and pulled out a stack of glowing, magical contracts. "You will sign these. All of you. From this moment onwards, you are standing by my side. My authority is absolute. I’m your leader now."
"That’s a deal then," Blakar said, his voice sounding a little dejected.
John could easily read the reason behind the giant’s slumped shoulders. Coming here as the leader of the Twelve, taking full responsibility for ten thousand elite warriors, only to lose the entire pocket trial to a member of a fallen race, wasn’t an easy pill to swallow.
"From this moment on," Blakar continued, his voice regaining some of its formal, strong tone, "your wars are our wars. Your concerns are our concerns. We’ll shoulder the good and the bad together. We won’t let you down."
Blakar pressed his thumb to the golden scroll, letting a single drop of blood fall onto the scroll, letting it shine. The contract flared with a golden light, signalling its activation, then vanished into specks of golden dust in the air.
Once the leader had committed, the others followed suit in a heavy, sombre silence. They lined up, each descendant marking the scrolls without a word, each Bulltor around signing the contract to follow John.
When the last of the Bulltors had finished, Lilith heaved a deep, long sigh, as if a massive burden had finally been lifted from her chest.
"Honestly, it’s still way better to lose to a human than to those motherfckers," she said, nodding toward the Hiveminds territory.
The other Bulltors nodded solemnly. At this moment, their own path toward trial hegemony had been severed. The most they could hope for now was to help John rise to the top and pray that he would treat their people with fairness once he claimed the ultimate reward.
"Give me a minute," John said, showing no hurry to jump into the endless monster tide waiting just beyond the fog wall. "I need to prepare more contracts, enough for the rest of your people back at the base to sign while we do our business here and kill those monsters."
He moved away from the group, clearing a small area of fog with a Fog Seeker core. He sat on the ground, taking out hundreds of magical contract scrolls and beginning a systematic process of painting them with his own blood, starting the hacking process to activate the scrolls. The Bulltors watched him, once again misinterpreting his actions.
"You know, you can just use the blood from the same wound to activate the contracts," Blakar said after watching John for half an hour. He sounded concerned; John kept pricking his thumbs and fingers, seemingly obsessed with using fresh blood for every single sheet.
"I’m not doing this to activate them," John said casually, not looking up from his work. "I salvaged these scrolls from the storage devices of your fallen warriors and the storage programs of the machines you destroyed. I need to do this to turn these contracts into mine so I can use them to bind your entire people later."
"What?!!!"
