Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 160: The Mutated Fog Monsters!

"Not just that... They are using their bodies to channel lightning to jump-start the old den. They are reviving it! We don’t have much information about what comes out of a revived den, but we should expect something that’s a hybrid, stronger than the Fog Seekers, but slightly weaker than the Fog Wrathers." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

"Something in between? That’s not so bad," Cissel said coldly, her mind already running through different scenarios. "If they aren’t as strong as the Wrathers, our current defences should be able to handle the pressure..."

"No, you don’t get it at all! We are doomed, doomed..." Lanmar’s voice trailed off into a frantic whisper, his massive frame trembling with a terror that seemed out of place for a creature of his size.

"Shut up! Or I swear I’ll let John make you do all the dirty tasks from now on!" Ricky snapped. He had noticed how his earlier shout hadn’t truly reached the Bulltor’s panicked mind. He realised that he had to use the only authority Lanmar truly feared. He used John’s name as a weapon, hoping it might do the trick to jolt the giant back to reality.

Hearing John’s name and that specific threat in the same sentence did indeed silence Lanmar. The prospect of facing John’s cold wrath was apparently more terrifying than the looming threat of the mutating monsters. He swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the horizon, but he stopped his wailing.

"The bad news is once they are finished, the new monsters will follow the loudest noise in the area," Reody said, his voice heavy with a grim realisation. He turned his eyes toward the norther, eastern, and westerns walls.

"And right now, even if John’s sound traps out in the fog worked perfectly to distract the Wrathers, the loudest things for miles are those towers and cannons over our walls!"

"..."

The meaning behind his words was painfully clear to everyone present. Even if the first wave of Wrathers from the northern den were successfully lured away by John’s distant decoys, these new, mutated monsters would be born into a world where the most violent and loudest noise was the frantic defences of their own base. They would come fresh, hungry, and perfectly focused on the source of the explosions, their base.

"We can’t let them threaten our base," Cissel was the first to speak up, her eyes hardening. "Go directly toward the walls nearby! We’ll mount the walls and help fight the moment it erupts!"

"That’s the right decision," Ricky added, reinforcing her command with a nod toward the Bulltors. "John is out there, on his own, facing all those scary monsters and fighting to buy us a victory. The least we can do is hold the line and defend our home until he gets back!"

"I second this," Elena said, her hand reaching for the hilt of her weapon. She moved her gaze toward the pulsating light of the old den. "We once killed the monsters that lived in that shitty den, and we will once again kill anything that dares to crawl out of it today!"

"That’s the way!" Luke shouted, pulling his heavy wooden club from his belt. He waved it in the air with a savage grin, miming the act of crushing skulls. "We killed thousands of your ancestors, you motherfckers, and we’ll kill thousands of you today! Come and get some!"

Watching the humans shout and display such fierce defiance made all the Bulltors exchange silent, bewildered gazes. Aside from the immediate danger radiating from that den, the rare moment of raw bravery the humans showed was no less intense than what the Bulltors or any of the other top-tier races typically exhibited.

A single, nagging question rang inside the giants’ minds at this moment: How could a race with this much fire ever have been classified as a fallen race in the apocalypse?! How did they end up this way?!!

To them, humans were supposed to be a soft, fragile, scared race. Yet here they were, challenging the inevitable with a roar.

As the group headed toward the nearest wall section, at the eastern section of the base, John was monitoring the entire situation through his map.

He was running at a pace that pushed the very limits of his body, heading back toward the base with a frantic anxiety. Behind him, he had left a trap littered with more than one hundred defensive towers, hoping that the sheer volume of fire would be enough to sustain the noise emitter trap against the subsequent waves of Wrathers until he solved the new problem.

However, his gut told him that whatever was happening at the Fog Seekers’ den was the real variable that could end the quest. It was a complication that would take more time and focus to settle than a simple slugfest.

From what he observed through the map, it felt as if the Wrathers were channelling the lightning power directly into the dead den.

Previously, John had assumed the den was simply a central nesting place for the Fog Seekers, the lair where their leader, the Ogolith, resided. But after watching how the Wrathers were manually jump-starting the den, he realised he had drastically underestimated how the den really meant in the pocket trials.

He was frustrated with his own lack of information. "Should I have removed the rocks entirely? Or perhaps there is something buried deep below that I missed when I cleared it?" John was confused about the underlying mechanics, but he decided to grill the Bulltors for every scrap of lore they had once this quest was over.

For now, he was terribly worried about his friends and the Bulltors. The stakes of his system quest were absolute: it would fail the moment a single one of them died.

He kept a closer eye on their icons on his map, calculating a slightly longer, curving path to avoid intercepting any incoming Wrathers from the old den. He feared that after they were done with whatever magic ritual they were doing, they’d head south towards his trap.

As he closely watched his friends, he could see their icons moving toward the eastern wall, and he prayed the base’s defences would hold until he could reach them.