Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 80: Coldness and Darkness
The silence that followed the final slaughter was more unnerving than the roars had been. For twenty-four hours, the soundtrack of their lives had been the rhythmic grinding of bone and the roars of monsters. Now, there was nothing but the heavy, laboured breathing of five exhausted humans.
John sat with his back against the charcoal bark of a Blue Serpentile tree, watching the quest completion screen flicker. He knew the completion of the survival quest triggered a hard-earned grace period.
But he didn’t say a word. He waited, watching the perimeter, letting the time tick by.
"It has been half an hour, and not a single monster appeared!" John finally spoke, his voice raspy. He looked at the others, "Why don’t we start sleeping for a while? The waves have stopped."
"What if an attack came?" Cissel asked immediately, her hand still white-knuckled around the hilt of her daggers. "We can’t all go under at once. Let’s sleep on shifts. Three at a time, each sleeping for five hours while two stay on watch."
"Fine," John began to agree, but then he felt a shift in the atmosphere. The very air seemed to thicken, a new presence descending from above. He tilted his head back, his eyes narrowing as he looked toward the sky. "Wait... Something is happening!"
"Sht! I’ll never believe this cursed world will leave us alone to rest!" Elena shouted at the sky, her voice cracking. She punched the air in a fit of pure, unadulterated desperation. "What now?! What else do you want from us?!"
"It’s night," John whispered after a few minutes of observation.
Until now, the sky had been a constant, featureless expanse of dull light—like a blue paintbrush had been dragged across the firmament without leaving a single cloud or star. It provided a permanent, shadowless twilight.
But now, the blue was bleeding away. The sky dimmed, turning a bruised purple before settling into a deep, oppressive black that matched the fog surrounding their sanctuary.
"I... I have a problem..."
Out of the blue, Elena’s voice came, shaky. She had pulled her knees to her chest, her body racked with faint, rhythmic tremors. "I... I fear the darkness. Total darkness. I can’t... I can’t sleep in it."
Her confession landed heavily. Even Cissel’s cold expression twitched. In a world where they were surrounded by literal monsters, a phobia of the dark seemed almost redundant, yet the primal fear in Elena’s eyes was unmistakable. However, her phobia was quickly eclipsed by a much more immediate and new threat: the temperature.
As the last of the light vanished, the world didn’t just get dark; it turned freezingly cold. The drop was instantaneous, as if the sun—or whatever provided the blue light—had been the only thing keeping the air from absolute zero.
The team huddled closer together, the sound of their teeth gritting against one another echoing in the silence. They could barely see their own hands in front of their faces.
"We can’t sleep like this..." Luke’s voice was shaky, muffled by his own arms as he tried to preserve heat. "We need fire. We need light. Not just for Elena, but for all of us. What if monsters attack? We won’t even see the strike coming."
John’s mind spun with the speed of a high-end processor. He reached into his memory of the item descriptions he had read earlier, as something Luke said resonated with his memories. ’The activated cores,’ he thought, ’The system mentioned they produce energy...’
He didn’t hesitate. He reached into his inventory and pulled out two of the red, glowing activated cores. Taking them out brought little light, attracting everyone’s attention. Yet what he did next totally took them by surprise!
He stood up, his joints protesting the movement, and moved a few steps away from the tree. He didn’t want to accidentally set their food source on fire if this went wrong.
’Please work!’
The world was growing more hostile by the second. The cold was a physical blade, biting through their clothes and sinking into their bones. If they couldn’t generate heat now, they wouldn’t die from monsters; they would die from a frostbite.
John held the two cores in his palms. He recalled seeing survivalists on Earth rubbing stones together to create friction and fire. He pressed the two spheres against one another.
*Sizzle!*
The moment the two made contact, the energy became unstable. A massive, violent spark erupted—a bright red light that looked more like an electrical discharge than a flame. It caught John right in the face, the heat singeing his eyebrows. Startled, he dropped the cores. They hit the soil, and the light vanished instantly.
"What did you do?!!" Ricky and the others scrambled to their feet.
The spark had been short-lived, but it had been enough. For a fleeting second, a flash of light appeared, revealing John’s startled face. More importantly, that single second of heat had felt like a miracle.
"Let me try again," John said, his voice steadier now.
He knelt on the ground, fixing one core firmly into the dirt. He took the second and rolled it toward the first with a deliberate, controlled force. This time, instead of a violent spark, the two cores locked together.
A steady, roaring flame erupted from the point of contact, burning with a deep red hue. It looked like a campfire, but the logs were two activated cores.
"Viola," John said, stepping back into the circle of warmth. The flickering light danced across his face and the wide-eyed, stunned expressions of his friends. "The cores we have... When they touch and stay in contact, they produce fire, light, and warmth."
He looked at them, a dry wit returning to his tone despite the exhaustion. "What? Don’t tell me you didn’t hit two cores together by accident before! You’ve been carrying hundreds of them."
"Not even once," Cissel sighed, her shoulders finally dropping as she moved toward the heat. She held her hands out to the flames, the blue juice on her fingers glowing in the firelight. "Okay. We’ve solved the cold and the darkness. But John... What about the monsters?"
