Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 72: Venturing Into the Black Fog
John watched as the Fog Seekers’ waves continued to come through their perimeter, each one larger and more frantic than the last. It took six more gruelling waves before the saturation point was finally reached for everyone.
The discovery of reaching the limit was unmistakable. When Luke tried to swallow his latest core, the shimmering red sphere refused to dissolve.
It sat in his mouth like a hard, cold marble, resisting swallowing, that had been so seamless only moments before. One by one, the others encountered the same resistance. Their bodies had reached the current maximum capacity for Low-Grade Fog Seeker Cores.
The last wave came in the form of a massive, roiling tide of eighty monsters. It was a sea of claws, roars, and gnashing teeth that would have signalled their certain death only a couple of hours ago.
"This one is all yours," John announced, stepping back and watching from the centre.
He crossed his arms, purposefully refusing to move his sword. This was the final exam. If he was going to venture into the unknown depths of the fog, he needed to know—not just hope—that they could survive without his intervention, against a large number of monsters without his help.
The result was a spectacle of absolute dominance. The four of them moved like a hurricane. Luke and Elena crushed the Fog Seekers in two hits. Cissel and Ricky moved with ease through the battlefield and ended monsters with single strikes.
Watching them, John felt a rare surge of pride. This team had arrived as broken, attribute-stripped shells of their former selves. Now, they were a force of nature that could easily stand against the horrors of the world.
John hadn’t been idle either. While they fought, he had consumed his final sixty cores. He gained thirty additional points to his Mental Points cap. His stats gained a thirty-point boost as well: ten into Strength, five into Intelligence, seven into Defence, four into HP, and six into Speed.
He unsheathed his sword and gave it a slow horizontal slash. The air hissed. Even without activating the deadly Triple Slash or his devastating Logic Bomb, his base damage had soared past the 50 mark with each slash.
"Bravo," John said, clapping his hands together as the last of the eighty monsters was killed. The small territory was finally quiet, though the distant, high-pitched clanging of the sound devices persisted.
"You can clearly handle your own now. I’m going out there to destroy those annoying things. Hold the fort, and we’ll discuss our next move when I return."
"One question," Cissel interrupted, stepping forward before he could take a single step away. She was wiping a smudge of black blood from her cheek, her eyes flickering with a familiar, restless light.
"About the cores we’ll hunt while you’re gone... Are they..." She trailed off, faking a struggle to find the right words, though the greed in her eyes was transparent.
"Sigh," John exhaled, shaking his head. He could read her intent as easily as a line of basic code.
"What? I just want to make things clear for all of us!" she snapped back, acting shamelessly as the others gave her sideways glances.
"You can divide them among yourselves," John said dismissively. He didn’t know what she planned to do with more cores since she was already at her limit. "I’ll keep whatever I hunt out in the fog for myself. Fair?"
"Didn’t you say the fog is toxic?" Luke asked, his brow furrowed with genuine concern, shifting the focus away from Cissel’s opportunism.
"I have twenty extra cores," John replied. His plan was simple: he would use the extra cores to temporarily clear the fog around him when the toxicity became too much, giving his body a few minutes to get over the fog’s negative effect. "Just stay within the perimeter. Don’t venture into the fog, or you’re goners."
"How will you find your way back?" Elena asked, her voice soft with worry.
John turned his back to them, picking a direction based on the loudest noise he could hear. "Don’t worry," he called out over his shoulder. "I’ll hear your fighting noises from miles away. Just keep being loud."
The moment he stepped past the fog, the system’s cold interface greeted him once more.
[Ding! You have entered a toxic environment!]
[Warning: Hallucination resistance active (Hacker Mind).]
[Body Decomposition Countdown: 10:00... 9:59...]
"Tsk! This world is a mess of blackness everywhere," John muttered.
Moving his eyes around made him feel nauseated. He walked for several minutes, trying to use his Frame Recognition special vision to dissect the world, but the blackness seemed to absorb even his sight.
Without the rhythmic pulses of the sound devices acting as a grim lighthouse, John would have been hopelessly lost within seconds. The black fog didn’t just obscure vision; it seemed to eat away at the very concept of direction.
"This won’t do," John muttered after several minutes of stumbling through the fog. The psychological weight of the darkness was starting to grate on his nerves, even with his Hacker Mind filtering the worst of it. He decided to play it safe. Reaching into his inventory, he pulled out a core and activated it, clearing a small pocket of space.
As the fog rolled back, he heaved a deep sigh of relief, the sudden visibility acting like a balm to his weary senses. But the reprieve was short-lived.
*Roar!*
The attack was a heartbeat faster than his reaction. A Fog Seeker lunged from the edge of the new light, its claws outstretched. John reflexively threw himself backwards, his feet skidding on the damp ground.
His eyes caught a familiar mass of shifting grey codes through his interface, and he didn’t hesitate. He slashed upward in a clean, diagonal arc. The monster’s aggressive roar was cut short, replaced by a gurgling shriek as it instantly died.
"I was walking into a trap without even knowing it," John hissed, his grip tightening on the hilt of his long sword. He scanned the perimeter of his small light-well and spotted three more shadows pacing just outside the reach of the area.
