Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 237: Exploring the Heart of the Wrathers Den
"We finally did it!"
The words were spoken with more exhaustion than triumph. The team had struggled with every fibre of their being for nearly an entire day against the Elite Wrathers and their Sorolith bosses.
After John had reorganised them into specialised strike teams, the efficiency had spiked; they began to kill one battalion every two hours. Yet, as the tenth hour passed, a sense of crushing futility began to set in. It felt as if the purple fog was a bottomless well of nightmare.
The first wave John had lured out was dead, replaced by a second, and then a third. It seemed that every time he tossed a cluster of cores into that unnatural fog, a fresh, gleaming group of scaled horrors emerged to take the place of the fallen.
John’s eyes narrowed as he analysed the situation. At this rate, they would never clear the den or establish total control before the eighth and final wave concluded, a variable he was no longer willing to tolerate. He was fed up with the shifting rules of this weird territory.
"New plan," John barked, his voice raspy from shouting over the thunder of cannons.
Before inviting the next wave from the fog, he ordered his friends to saturate the entire kill zones around the outposts with yellow grenades. Then, as the fight commenced, they integrated the purple grenades into their tactics.
The shift was devastating and deadly. The additional grenade explosions cut their engagement time in half. Finally, after twenty gruelling hours of non-stop combat, the last group of Elite Wrathers and their Sorolith monsters lay in heaps of torn limbs and flesh.
"They are still struggling," John muttered, wiping a thick layer of sweat, dirt, and blood from his face. He was beyond tired, his muscles screamed, and his mental focus was fraying, yet the map painted a dire picture.
Even with the elite Wrathers handled by them, the Bulltors were being hammered by the normal Wrathers and yellow monsters. The combined red and yellow tides were surging against the perimeter outposts.
The yellow monsters from the three dens were a constant pressure, but the sheer, unprecedented volume of this final Wrather wave had turned the battlefield into a meat grinder.
"And the black sky didn’t vanish this time," John noted, looking upward.
When he had killed the Sorolith in his home territory, the black clouds had broken immediately. This time, the sky remained a bruised, oily black. Furthermore, the purple fog hadn’t expanded to swallow the territory as it had before; it remained concentrated, thick and pulsing, around the central den.
John had suspected this. After seeing how the den’s nature had evolved and changed, producing Soroliths as if they were mere elite mobs rather than the final boss, he knew the win condition had shifted. The rules of the previous Wrather trial no longer applied to this escalated nightmare.
"I’m going in," John said, turning to his friends. His eyes were narrowed, reflecting the distant flashes of cannons.
"We have four hours at most before the night falls. While I’m inside, make sure to activate every single Wrathers core you’ve harvested out there." He motioned toward the field of corpses. "And don’t you dare forget to gather the scales and the tails."
"Are these scales that important?" Cissel asked, her ears perking up instantly. She had learned that if John specified a loot item, it usually meant there was great benefit behind it.
John nodded grimly. "Just gather everything. There are thousands of scales on every Sorolith and around a hundred on every Elite Wrather. They’re high-grade armour materials. Don’t leave a single scrap behind."
"Count on us," Elena jumped in, her eyes gleaming with the same greedy spark as Cissel’s.
Ricky simply rolled his eyes and remained silent, leaning heavily on his shield. Luke didn’t even have the energy to comment; he was sprawled on the scorched ground, chest heaving as he fought just to draw air into his lungs.
John left them to their scavenging and stepped into the wall of purple fog. Before moving through the fog, he made sure to replenish his exhausted Mental Points to the max using his MP Absorption ability.
He braced his mind, preparing for something exponentially worse than a Sorolith, perhaps a Hivemind-Wrather hybrid or another fiercer variant. He activated his Frame Recognition ability, prepared to use a barrage of his abilities and sword special effects, while venturing deeper into the fog.
He followed the same internal compass he had used back in his own territory, expecting an ambush at every turn. Yet, strangely, he met no resistance. No claws lunged from the gloom; no lightning crackled in his path, not a single roar heard at all. He kept walking through the silent, swirling purple fog until he reached the epicentre, the place where the Hiveminds massive central base should have been.
But there were no walls here. There were no metallic bunkers or deadly towers. It wasn’t a base made of stone or steel at all.
John stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth slightly agape as the fog parted to reveal the structure at the heart of the den.
"What the heck is that?!!"
The moment John reached the area where the old Hiveminds’ base had stood, the purple fog suddenly thinned out until it vanished entirely. To him, it felt like he was standing in the eye of a colossal storm. In the sudden clarity, he could see the intricate details of the structure looming in front of him.
It was the first time he had ever seen something of this nature. The code structure wasn’t formed of a single colour; instead, he could see every single hue in existence vibrating within the mesh. And that wasn’t all.
"It’s like a gigantic brain..."
After standing there for almost half an hour, walking around the structure and carefully examining it, John finally reached this conclusion.
The codes weren’t aligned in a linear fashion like the standard layout of anything he had inspected before; they were deeply integrated, with pulsing charges passing from one cluster to another in a frantic, chaotic dance.
Seeing this made him recall the biological structure of a brain, neurons and neural links, from his time on Earth.
