Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 120: The Giants’ Special Attack!

Before the giant could continue his mocking words, a series of sharp, crystalline cracking sounds erupted, followed by a wave of explosions. Four more giants were sent flying, their shields shattered into sparkling dust and their chests caved in by the explosion force.

"What were you just saying right now?!" John tilted his head, looking at the giant whose words had frozen in the middle of his throat. John’s eyes were cold, with a glowing fierceness. "Sorry, but I have a thing... I can’t hear the words of losers!"

Seeing what John had just accomplished reinvigorated a surge of hope in his friends. The three returned to fiercely and madly attacking the shielded giants, emboldened by John’s success and desperate to repeat it. Luke swung his club with a roar, and Cissel’s daggers became a silver blur, but no matter how hard they tried, they failed.

They didn’t realise that John wasn’t just hitting harder. He had been forced to use a complex combo of his abilities to do the trick. The first thing he had done after the failure of his Logic Bomb was to pivot to the next tools in his arsenal: the fierce duo of Object Lockdown and Code Destruction.

It worked perfectly. The Object Lockdown froze the shield’s coding structure in time, preventing its special effect from reacting to his touch. Simultaneously, the Code Destruction ability negated the shield’s integrity.

The barriers cracked open like eggshells, leaving a gap just wide enough for John to reach inside and plant a Logic Bomb directly onto the giant’s skin. As he did, he used MP Absorption to drain the giants’ Mental Points, replenishing the high consumption cost of his multi-layered attack.

After testing the sequence four times, John knew he had found the definitive way to exterminate these arrogant giants.

"Kill them! Kill the small one first!" the giant leader roared. His eyes burned with rage as he watched five more of his kin fall to John’s deadly touches. Since the start of the battle, the giants had lost twenty-three members to John’s hands alone. The survivors moved as fast as they could, trying to surround and crush the annoying human.

"Not this easily!" John shouted.

Thanks to their massive bodies and the six hours of mental and physical exhaustion they had suffered in the fog tide, the giants were moving far slower than they should have been. To make matters worse for them, John activated his Speed Lock ability. He boosted his friends’ speed while lowering the giants’.

The giants swung massive swords, long spears, and heavy sledgehammers. They whistled through the air, but they hit nothing but shadows. As their speed was compromised, they failed every single time, no matter how much they put into their swings.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

John didn’t stand idle while they struggled. He danced through the gaps in their formation, killing six more of them before the giants finally lost their temper. They realised that their shields were being dismantled by a creature they considered an insect.

"Fck it! Let’s fight them with everything we got!" their leader shouted, his voice cracking with desperation.

Suddenly, John spotted a new change in their white chest gems.

The white code web that had previously fully invaded the giants’ entire bodies suddenly retracted, snapping back toward the central gem before surging out again in two distinct, concentrated streams. In John’s vision, the thin threads didn’t just reappear as a network; they thickened into dense lines of white code that flooded both of their massive arms.

To his friends, the protective translucent shields simply vanished, but the relief was short-lived. The white radiance emanating from the giants’ chest gems intensified to a blinding degree. Their massive forearms began to glow with a matching, hum-inducing light as they levelled their closed fists toward the human group.

"Take cover!" It wasn’t John who shouted this time, but Ricky. "Stand behind me!"

Ricky’s instincts took over. He instantly swapped his old sword for his heavy shield, planting his feet into the ground and bracing his shoulder against the metal to absorb the incoming impact.

Five of the giants had undergone this transformation, while the remaining moved with coordination to stand in front of them, forming a living wall to protect the five from any counter-interference.

John and the others didn’t know exactly what was coming, but as Luke and Cissel huddled behind Ricky’s shield, John pushed his Frame Recognition to its absolute limit.

He focused entirely on the attack trajectories, noticing where they were going to hit. He prepared for something even more lethal than a D-1000’s laser shot.

*Fwoosh!* *Fwoosh!* *Fwoosh!*

The five giants held the charge for several heartbeats, the light in their arms reaching the right threshold before they unleashed a deadly, pulsing white barrage! Four of the giants focused their fire entirely on John, seeing him as the primary threat, while the fifth giant sent two concentrated beams toward the shielded group.

"Dammit!" John hissed. He was half a beat faster than the beams of light only because his Frame Recognition predicted the exact trajectory before they fired. But that wasn’t the end of it!

"Watch out! These things can explode on impact!"

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

Just as he finished his warning, ten fierce explosions rocked the battlefield. The power behind them was easily equal to his own Logic Bombs. Luckily, John hadn’t stood his ground; he had already begun a desperate lateral dash the moment the light shots missed him and touched the ground.

He watched with terror and immense shock as the eight white beams missed him by inches, striking the ground behind and instantly swirling into small, unstable semi-spheres of white energy that detonated a few seconds later.

Even with his successful evasion, the shockwave caught him mid-air. The concussive force sent him tumbling through the air, traversing tens of meters before he managed to slam his sword into the ground to stabilise his landing. He skidded for another five meters, leaving a deep trench in the dirt.

"That was close," he spat, tasting blood in his mouth. He immediately turned his eyes to check on his friends.