Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 229: John Isn’t Stopping!

"Those humans... They are insane!!"

The exclamation rippled through the Bulltor ranks like a wave. As the daylight finally dipped and faded away, while the oppressive chill and darkness of the pocket trial’s night began to settle, every Bulltor present, from the Twelve to the normal Bulltors, assumed the command would be to retreat.

They expected to pull back behind the walls John had erected, letting the hum of the defensive towers and the thunder of the cannons take over the heavy lifting while they recovered their strength, ate and slept for the night.

Instead, they watched in stunned silence as John didn’t even break his stride. He continued his forward march, his blade a flash of lightning in the deepening gloom.

Almost an hour before total nightfall, the full strength of the Bulltor race had arrived from their territory. The reinforcements were a sight to behold; even the two thousand wounded warriors, bandaged and limping, had refused to stay behind. They had demanded to march to the Hiveminds territory to witness the fate of their sworn enemies with their own eyes.

What welcomed them was a scene of a large-scale slaughter. The landscape was a mess of weird, different types of monsters and the endless, deafening roar of John’s artillery. Their arrival provided John with a massive tactical advantage. He didn’t let them sit idle for a second, immediately deploying squads to garrison the various outposts he had deployed across the terrain.

John followed a relentless rhythm in the past hours: he would walk and fight for thirty minutes, carving a path through the swarm, then stop just long enough to deploy a fresh cluster of defences to hold the ground he had gained.

He repeated this cycle tirelessly until the main army arrived. Only then did he pause to organise the newly joined forces into a coherent perimeter before continuing his inexorable advance.

At a certain point, he adjusted his trajectory, turning west to head toward his friends. As the night turned pitch black, the Bulltors tagging along slowed down, their instincts screaming at them to find cover from the nocturnal predators; cold and darkness.

Sensing their hesitation, John reached into his inventory and pulled out a handful of activated Wrather cores. With a flick of his wrist, he let two cores touch, triggering a volatile reaction, before hurling them into the distance.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

The grenades detonated with spectacular violence, killing clusters of monsters while the concussive force pushed the darkness and the biting cold away. The Bulltors stood in a daze, staring at the lethal pillars of orange fire that John began spreading across the battlefield like candy.

These fire pillars were intense but short-lived, dying down after roughly ten minutes. However, the giants soon noticed that John wasn’t just using the Wrathers cores; he was deploying a second type of ordnance they had previously overlooked: the yellow grenades.

Once the initial orange pillars flickered out, a different kind of fire took over. These were low, circular pools of golden flame, roughly ten meters in radius, that burned with a steady, supernatural heat. Unlike the Wrathers’ explosive cores, these golden circles lasted the entire night.

John seemed to have an infinite supply of yellow cores, and he was far from stingy, sowing them across the ground until the wasteland looked like a vast carpet of glowing fire circles.

They didn’t just provide light and heat; they were also lethal to any monster around! In the matter of an hour, John already spread enough of these to turn a huge area of the territory into a real death trap!

The Twelve recalled the deadly traps they once had and handed them over to John, and yet these traps were one-time usage, not like these circles of fire.

They moved their eyes around, finding it hard to believe that using this method, the human conquered darkness and cold and managed to kill tons of monsters without even lifting a single sword.

They all exchanged silent glances, taking note of these valuable cores, and deciding they would collect enough of them after the end of the battle.

By now, John’s destination was clear. In the distance, a familiar, booming voice rose above the sounds of combat. Lanmar’s loud, boisterous shouting was distinctive enough for the Twelve to recognise instantly.

A few of the Twelve looked ready to complain about inviting a known troublemaker back into their official roster, but they quickly swallowed their words.

They recalled the fierce, murderous look John had given them earlier when they had spoken ill of the giant. Instead, they kept their frustrations internal, venting their irritation by smashing every monster that dared to pass through the gaps between the fire circles.

Finally, the two groups converged. The tension in John’s shoulders visibly bled away the moment he saw Cissel, Luke, Elena, and Ricky standing firm within their outpost. He listened to their side of the story, which confirmed his earlier suspicions: they had been lured into the Hiveminds territory by Lanmar’s guiding mistake. But thanks to their combat prowess, they kept themselves from being overwhelmed.

Just as the Bulltors thought John was finally going to call for a rest to celebrate the reunion, the five humans moved as one. Without a word or a command, they lunged back into the fray to continue the assault! 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Blakar couldn’t help but let out a shocked exclamation. "Don’t they ever stop?!"

Lanmar, standing nearby, simply smiled, a wide, knowing grin. "You haven’t seen anything yet," he chuckled.

Reody sighed, leaning on his shield. "You weren’t there when these humans fought against these Wrathers and yellow monsters back at their base, Blakar. You didn’t see them transforming to real demons back there."

"What did they do?! Did they use something different than now?!" Lilith’s eyes sparked with a sudden interest. She leaned in, hoping for a tale of hidden power or some sort of grand weapon John didn’t use yet.

As Reody began to explain how John cracked their storage devices, cracked the D-1000s storage programs, how he simply activated the towers and walls without the need to use any help, and the role of the cores in enhancing the gear, his friends’ strengths, her excitement died down into a newfound excitement about the cores.