Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 83: The Second Quest: Find the Den!
At night, it was cold and dark as usual, but the atmosphere had shifted. It was calm. John decided they would sleep in shifts, starting with him staying awake. This time, everyone was in a far better mental state than the night before; the fear had been replaced by a sense of routine.
They stayed awake for a couple of hours, chatting and laughing, treating the dark alien world as if it were a night camp back on Athanasia. Even Cissel’s cold exterior seemed to thaw slightly in the warmth of the fire.
The next day, the lottery of straws was held. John picked Ricky and Elena to come with him, leaving behind Cissel and Luke to hold the fort. John adopted a simple, efficient tactic: they would pick a specific direction and move forward, leaving behind a long, narrow path by dropping one core at a time to keep their retreat path clear.
Once they reached a certain distance, John would clear a larger area of slaughter, and they would kill for a couple of hours to replenish their reserves before continuing.
He made sure to venture into the fog himself most of the time, utilising his superior stats to cull the monsters before they could even reach his friends, always returning to the light before his exposure time would be up. This rotation ensured they could explore the world while collecting far more cores than they spent on their tour.
When they returned, they found Cissel and Luke as fine as they had left them. With the expanded territory, the duo hadn’t faced more than three waves in the entire period! On top of that, the monster count per wave had dropped to no more than fifty.
That success fueled their ambition. They worked further to expand the territory, making the best use of the thousands of cores John and the others collected during their long scouting trip.
After the first day, John reached a rough estimate for their schedule. It was best to stay in the fog for eighteen hours, explore as far as they could, then return and rest with their friends for what remained of the daylight.
This routine lasted for an entire ten days straight. During this time, John eventually negated the random selection part entirely to ensure balanced team dynamics; he took Luke and Cissel on one day, and Ricky and Elena on the other.
They stopped expanding their territory starting from day three, reaching a point where Luke and Cissel only met a single wave the entire day long! From that day onward, they stopped spending and kept storing all the cores they gathered.
"We now have a problem," John said on the morning of the eleventh day, his voice grave as he faced the bitter truth. He looked at the once-lush Blue Serpentile trees, which were now looking bare and picked over.
"The fruits left on these trees won’t satisfy us for more than a few days. We’ve hit the limit of this orchard. We need to find a solution, and we need to find it fast."
"Well," Ricky looked out at the long paths they had carved for ten days straight and sighed, his shoulders slumping. "I don’t want to be that person, but it seems our hope to find such trees again is close to zero! We’ve pushed kilometres in four different directions and found nothing but monsters."
"I can try and check for a water source like how I did before," Luke said, raising a hand tentatively. He looked at the earth beneath the blue trees before adding, "Yet not here... The soil here is fertile enough for the Serpentile trees, but there isn’t an obvious water source at all."
"It must be through groundwater," Elena added, looking at the vibrant leaves above. "Deep roots reaching down to hidden aquifers. That won’t help us find a surface water source we can actually drink from."
The group fell into a heavy silence, the weight of their ticking clock pressing down on them.
"I have an idea," Cissel suddenly said, her voice cutting through the gloom. She paused, making sure she had everyone’s attention. "We all saw how densely packed those monsters are in the fog... It’s like their numbers never decreased, no matter how many we killed! We’ve slaughtered thousands every day, but the fog just refills like an endless ocean."
Everyone nodded in sombre agreement. Just in the past ten days, they had killed over twenty thousand of them! And yet, every single time they created their hunting grounds while exploring the fog, they met a huge number of monsters as if the twenty thousand they had already killed were nothing more than a drop in a bucket.
"Your point?" John asked, encouraging her to speak her mind. He knew Cissel didn’t speak without a proper reason.
"I’m still saying it since day one; there must be a den of those monsters nearby. A concentrated hub where they spawn or gather."
"Not this crazy idea of hunting the den again," Ricky said, rolling his eyes in exasperation. "If the number of random monsters roaming around in the fog is this massive, how many do you think we’ll find at the den? It would be suicide. We’d be walking into a meat grinder."
"I’m saying," Cissel said, glaring at Ricky with enough ice to freeze the air before turning fully toward John, "that these monsters need to eat and drink. They are biological entities, John.
Of course, they are hunting us now, but humans aren’t normal dwellers in this world! We’re outsiders. And the machines? They aren’t the type to eat metal or drink oil! I’m saying that there must be another source of food and water for them—a stable source—and where else would that be except close to their den?"
Her words landed as lightning over all of them. The logic was sound, forced through the stress of pure survival. Even Ricky was forced to shut up, his mouth opening and closing as he searched for a rebuttal he couldn’t find.
Just before John could respond to the plan, a sudden series of notifications popped up in front of him, the golden text shimmering against the dark grey backdrop of the world!
[Ding! Quest 2 of your Evolution Trial!]
[Ding! Find water and food source for your team + find and kill the Fog Seeker Ogolith!]
[Quest Description: Your team will run out of the Blue Serpentile Fruit in a few days. Finding a stable food and water source is a must! But this won’t solve the entire problem, as the Fog Seekers won’t stop coming until you are dead! You’ll need to alleviate the pressure on you and your team.]
[Quest Objectives:
** Find a stable food source for your team.
** Find a stable water source for your team.
** Secure both and take total control over them.
** Locate the Fog Seekers’ den, find the leader Fog Ogolith, and kill it!]
[Quest duration: 5 days!]
[Quest rewards: +2 all stats - +20 Mental Point cap - +1% Cyborg Synchronisation - Ping Route Ability – total dominance over the small area you and your team are currently at!]
[Quest failure: Death of your teammates, failure of the Evolution Trial, loss of the ability to upgrade the system further, and loss of access to the Source Code World!]
