Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 228: John Decides to Fight at Night Instead of Resting!
Watching the monsters turn into a carpet of red and yellow minced meat under that sustained barrage, he felt a deep sense of satisfaction. This round of upgrades wasn’t just a marginal improvement; it was a giant leap to a whole new level.
By the time five hours had passed, John had stopped hovering over the first test unit. He had seen enough to trust the new gear. The new generator and energy cell were enough to keep up with the crazy output and energy requirement of the super cannon.
During those hours, he worked like a man possessed, converting every salvaged energy cell and generator into its Advanced state.
Once the power grid was prepared, he moved along the perimeter of the walls, upgrading the battery of cannons one by one, leaving the advanced generators and energy cells down behind the walls at regular intervals.
"I can’t believe we even thought of fighting him!!"
Watching John work, witnessing him turn standard artillery into the same deadly, azure-hot dealer of death that had been roaring for five hours straight, left the Twelve and their elite squad members shaken to their core. Lilith heaved a deep, long sigh of relief that they were now on the same side with this little, human monster. And the others nodded in grim, silent agreement.
"I bet his personal fighting strength isn’t actually that impressive," Galnar muttered, still picking at the human’s reputation like a sour loser. When the rest of the Twelve turned to give him a look of hopelessness and exhaustion, he quickly added,
"Don’t forget, the one-item rule in our Blue Sacred challenge exists for a reason! His strength comes from the items and gear he has. That doesn’t make him a strong warrior; it just makes him a well-armed, wealthy human!"
Just as Galnar reached the peak of his denial, John finished the final upgrade on the base’s eastern wall. The collective roaring that followed was continuous, lethal, and deafening as the entire battery synchronised. Then, to the shock of the giants, John didn’t stay behind his walls for a second longer. He jumped off the ramparts and joined the fray directly!
"Lightning Dance!"
The opening attack was the wide-area special effect of his sword, sending arcs of electricity leaping through the front ranks of the monster tide.
But he didn’t stop there. He chained his abilities with terrifying precision: Speed Lock to slow down the agile Wrathers, Object Lockdown to freeze the high count of the incoming yellow monsters, and MP Absorption to keep his Mental Points overflowing and full all the time. He ended the sequence with his most lethal ability: Logic Bomb!
*Boom!* *Boom*!* Boom!*
John moved across the vast battlefield like a god of war. Even when met with a literal tsunami wave of yellow monsters and Wrathers, he met them with a cold, terrifying calmness.
He unleashed a wave of attacks so dense and properly arranged together that he left behind thousands upon thousands of dead monsters in a widening wake wherever he stepped. There was literally nothing that could stop his advance. There was literally nothing that could threaten him.
"What were you saying just now?!" Blakar turned toward Galnar, his voice dripping with amusement. "Is this the weak human you were referring to? You wanted to fight him? You wanted to test your strength against this monster?!! Be my guest, perhaps we’ll get rid of your stupidity once and for all!"
Galnar remained silent. At this point, there was no breath left for excuses. The facts were screaming from the bloody dirt and fierce explosions. John wasn’t just a clever architect or a rich merchant; he was a walking death machine in human flesh.
"This is enough," John said, having single-handedly pushed the frontline back for several kilometres. He came to a halt in the middle of a wide area he had carved out of the swarm. "I’ll lay down an outpost here, and then keep moving forward."
This was the core of his new strategy. After saturating the main base with enough firepower to hold forever, he had decided to venture deeper into the heart of the territory.
He would leapfrog outposts, creating a chain of fortified killing zones to cull the monster density at an accelerated rate. And that wasn’t just a desire to fight monsters blindly; he was moving with a plan in his mind.
He glanced at the sky. Night was drawing near. He knew from his experience with the Wrathers and yellow monsters that during the night, the typical monster wave cycles would stop erupting from the dens.
To most, the night was a time to hide and recover. To John, it was a twelve-hour golden window of opportunity to permanently change the tide of the battle while the enemy’s spawn rate was throttled.
He was physically exhausted, and could imagine the same for all the Bulltors on his side, for his friends and the eleven Bulltors on their side. And yet, there was no time to rest.
He knew if he waited for the next morning, he would be forced to fight against constantly recharging monsters from the four dens. Even if he used his outposts and base to make things steady, it wasn’t enough to take over the territory.
If he had all the time in the world, he would calmly use this chance to gain tons upon tons of these precious cores. After his upgrades with the generators and energy cells, he knew his theory had proved itself.
That meant he wasn’t just limited to the cannons, energy cells, and generators; he could easily expand these miraculous effects to the walls and towers. He could even do it with traps, and even with other useless stuff he gained before.
Anything was possible, yet there was a limit to what he could truly do. This limit was enforced by the number of cores he had. Even if he counted all the cores from this territory, the millions upon millions waiting for him, this was still a hard limit he had to stick with.
So it was better to let him wait and harvest more cores, keeping the current attrition type of war going on for as long as he could. Yet there was a hidden threat that forced him to hasten his plans and not adopt this attrition-type tactic.
There was a growing, nagging feeling he kept having every single time he took a look at the eight hundred Hivemind remnants, a feeling that told him he would be terribly sorry if he didn’t move out and exterminate them as fast as he could. And he couldn’t do that with all these monsters hot on his tail, posing a constant, threatening dagger at his back.
That was why he decided to push through the night.
No one behind him understood his intentions. The Bulltors mistook his sudden actions for a warrior simply wanting to stretch his legs after hours of crafting. His friends at the distant outpost saw the approaching explosions and thought he was rushing a desperate rescue.
Soon enough, both groups would realise how gravely they had underestimated his ambition when they saw him continue to fight, unwavering, through the pitch-black, cold hours of the night.
