Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 71: The Feverish Hunt for Cores!

The voice was sharp, laced with intense curiosity. Cissel had been hovering nearby, having decided that sticking to John’s side was the most efficient way to navigate this nightmare. Her instincts had proven correct far sooner than she’d anticipated.

Hearing her exclamation, the other three were drawn in like bees to honey. They crowded around John, their jaws working as they chewed and swallowed their own activated, bright red cores. John didn’t miss the way their eyes darted between his sword and the dwindling piles of cores in their hands.

Without offering a word of explanation—partly because he was still figuring out the mechanics himself and partly because the mystery maintained his authority—John placed a second activated core against the steel. Under the stupefied gazes of his companions, the sphere melted instantly, the crimson light melting into the blade.

[Ding! Your Goblin Long Sword has gained +1 Strength stat!]

’That’s nice!’ John thought. A Strength bonus on the weapon itself was an incredible force multiplier. He didn’t stop there. He worked with a steady pace, feeding core after core to the hungry blade. The metal seemed to hum a higher, more dangerous note with every meal.

Finally, as he reached for the eleventh core and pressed it against the edge, the sphere didn’t melt. It hit the surface with a dull clack and bounced off, rolling into the dirt.

John picked it up, realising he had hit a saturation point and the limit for this specific method. Still, the tally was impressive. In total, his sword had gained three points in Sharpness, five in Strength, and two in Durability. The blade looked better now—sharper, sleeker, with a faint red tracing along when slashing it right and left.

"Fck me! Are you perhaps a reincarnation of a human who died here once before or what?!!" Ricky exploded, the shock finally breaking through his arrogant persona. He looked at John as if he were seeing a ghost, or perhaps a god.

John merely shrugged, giving the sword a few experimental swings. The balance was perfect; the weight felt like an extension of his own arm. "I just accidentally discovered it," he said, his tone casual to hide his own inner excitement.

"I started thinking: if these things can help us regain our lost attributes and powers, why wouldn’t they be able to do the same for our weapons and gear?"

The logic hit them like a blow. The looks on their faces shifted instantly from confusion to a burning, desperate greed. They looked at the few cores they had left, then turned their heads as one toward the wall of black fog. To them, the fog was no longer a source of terror—it was a treasure chest.

"Tell me those monsters are coming now!" Cissel shouted. She was already waving her two daggers, which had each absorbed two cores from her limited stock. "I have two hungry mouths here to feed! I need more of these magical balls, John! Now!"

"Balls? I don’t like the sound of that," John said, slowly shaking his head with a dry wit. "Let’s call them cores, okay?" He took a moment to correct her terminology, seemingly more concerned with the nomenclature than the impending horde.

"Fine! These cores! I need more of these magical cores!" Cissel gritted her teeth, her eyes flashing. She knew John was messing with her, playing the role of the calm instructor while she was vibrating with the need for more power.

"Me too!" Luke chimed in, his grip tightening on his club. "Me third!" Elena added, her hands throwing the sledgehammers and catching them midair as if she was playing.

Ricky didn’t say a word, but the way he was staring into the fog, his sword held in a low, aggressive stance, spoke volumes.

*Roar!*

The black fog answered. It wasn’t just one roar this time, or even ten. A chorus of guttural, overlapping roars erupted from the darkness. The sound was deafening, the sheer volume suggesting a wave larger than anything they had faced yet. But instead of trembling, John’s friends stood their ground. Their eyes burned with a feverish excitement.

"We have twenty-five on the menu," John said, a wide, dangerous smile spreading across his face. Seeing the ground-shaking changes his friends had undergone made him feel a rare surge of pride. "Let’s get ready to give them a warm welcome. We’ll divide the loot once the last monster is dead."

Twenty-five new arrivals, plus the two that had lingered from the previous skirmish, meant a massive haul. They would each gain five cores, with two extras left over for the next round’s pool.

"Dammit! I used all my magical cores already!" Cissel grumbled, though she didn’t sound truly upset. She had been the fastest to burn through her share, consuming six to boost her own body and four to enhance her daggers. She could already feel the difference—the air felt thinner, her muscles more responsive, her blades lighter. She wasn’t the only one feeling the transformation.

"I need more," Luke muttered, feeling the pain of the one core he gave to John, his eyes fixed on the shifting wall of the black fog. His posture had changed; the slouch of exhaustion was replaced by a coiled, predator-like tension.

"Why aren’t they showing up faster? Come on, I have two swords to feed!" Ricky was restless as others.

Ricky had completely abandoned the defensive strategy. He had distributed his cores evenly across his two swords, including the one he had borrowed from John. Influenced by Cissel’s whirlwind fighting style, he had traded his shield for a second blade.

The math was simple: two swords meant twice the damage, and twice the damage meant more kills. In the upcoming battle, the dual-wielding approach would allow him to dismantle the Fog Seekers with noticeable speed.

Yet after killing the next wave, the team’s enthusiasm didn’t fade; it escalated!

"Easy there," John said, letting out a short, dry laugh. "Let’s take our time to grow stronger."

But his words fell on deaf ears. No matter how many monsters they felled, no matter how many cores they harvested, his friends were no longer capable of patience. They were addicted to the sensation of the heat the core brought when they ate, the growth that accompanied them after consuming a new batch of cores.

The black fog seemed to respond to their bloodlust. The batches of Fog Seekers began to escalate with regularity. Every wave brought five more than the last. They fought through waves of thirty, thirty-five, forty, and forty-five, culminating in a massive tide of fifty monsters that nearly overwhelmed the perimeter.

By the end of those five waves, the tally was staggering. Each person had claimed forty cores for themselves.

Luke was the first to hit a plateau with his gear. He fed ten cores into his club until the wood seemed to pulse with a dull red light with every strike it gave to the monsters, then he consumed the remaining thirty himself.

The results were monstrous. Luke could now engage two Fog Seekers simultaneously, weaving between them and ending each creature with two brutal, well-placed blows. He moved with a heavy, unstoppable momentum that made the monsters look like paper dolls.

Elena took a different path, focusing on her weapons and gears. She used ten cores each on her sledgehammers and ten on her armour, reinforcing them until it shimmered with a protective, faint red hue that appeared when getting hit.

The remaining ten she used for her own attributes. However, despite her upgrades, her raw damage output still paled in comparison to Luke’s. Her base attributes had been the lowest in the group, and even with the cores, she was struggling to bridge the gap. After all, she was the sole person who hadn’t unlocked her attributes yet.

A similar trend emerged with Ricky and Cissel. They had become significantly more formidable, capable of taking down a Seeker in four precise strikes. They were efficient, lethal, and faster than they had ever been since they came here. But compared to the juggernaut that Luke had become, they looked like amateurs.

As for John, he had reached the saturation point of his Goblin Long Sword long ago. With his weapon unable to take more, he funnelled all forty of his cores into his own stats.

He expanded his Mental Points cap by twenty, giving him more reassurance in using his abilities in the future. He gained twenty stat points: five into Speed, seven into Strength, three into HP, four into Intelligence, and one into Defence.

The result was a transformation that transcended the others. His basic sword slash damage was now calculated at over forty points per hit. And he knew he wasn’t done yet—there were still sixty cores left in the future harvest waiting to be consumed before he’d hit a plateau. Even as Luke showed great progress, John was starting to look more like a monster than the things they were hunting.

This surge in power had a noticeable effect on their environment. Each core used to push the fog expanded the territory. Initially, they had carved out small, room-like extensions into the black fog, but as they regained their former strength, fighting in those cramped quarters became an annoyance.

Ricky had finally suggested they focus on the centre to expand it. They worked in unison, using a burst of cores to shove the black fog back in every direction. The central area doubled in size, creating a massive, open killing field for the team. John watched the perimeter expand, knowing this was only the beginning.

’Now I can leave them behind without worrying about their safety,’ John thought.

He watched them for a moment. They were no longer just a team; they were competitors. They had started a game, racing to see who could kill the most monsters to claim the extra corpses that were usually reserved for the next round’s distribution. Seeing them fight with such ferocity, John couldn’t help but smile inwardly.

The weight of responsibility that had been crushing him since the very start was finally lifting. His biggest worry—the survival of his friends—had been addressed by the very monsters that sought to kill them. He was finally free to venture deep into the black fog and hunt down those high-pitched noise devices that were orchestrating this chaos.

’But first, I’ll wait,’ moving his eyes among his friends, he decided. ’Let them fill their quota first. Once they hit their limit and can’t consume any more cores, that’s when I’ll move.’

He knew that the moment those devices were destroyed, the massive waves of Fog Seekers would cease.