Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 161: The Three Hundred Yellow Monsters!

"They are coming!"

For thirty minutes straight, the old den had remained a chaotic area of violence. Thick lightning bolts rained down upon the site of the old den and the three hundred Wrathers clustered there. The lightning strikes were so intense it made the hair on the humans’ arms stand on end. Then, all of a sudden, the lightning stopped.

The silence that followed was even more terrifying than the thunder and lightning. The entire den site began to pulse, glowing with a yellow light that grew brighter and more aggressive with every passing second.

Lanmar’s voice cracked as he shouted the moment the yellow light emerged. "Next, we’ll have a deadly wave of unstoppable monsters! We should run! It’s too late... We should have run while the lightning was still falling!"

"Shut the hell up!" Ricky snapped, his voice tight with an edge of desperation. He was already at his breaking point, and he couldn’t tolerate another second of Lanmar’s panicked blabbering.

Before Ricky could even finish his rebuke, the ground groaned and trembled again. This time, the earthquake was fierce, a violent shudder that felt as though the earth was trying to vomit something up. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the light faded, leaving behind a haunting afterimage.

"What’s that?!"

At the centre of the excavated den sat a glistening yellow sphere, roughly the size of a small house. It looked like a treasured gem, smooth and radiant, defying every expectation the group had.

Even John, watching from a distance through his map interface, was stunned. He had been taking a wide detour through the fog to avoid the incoming three hundred Wrathers, but the sight of the yellow orb forced him to slide to a sudden halt in the ground.

"Where did they go?"

This was the only question echoing in John’s mind. Three hundred massive Wrathers had been standing there just moments ago, and now they were gone.

He thought they might have slipped past his observation while he was momentarily blinded by the yellow flash, but when he performed a thorough scan of the area, even extending the map’s reach to the far banks of the river, he found nothing.

"There isn’t a single red dot on the map aside from the one pulsing inside the den," John muttered to himself, his breath hitching. "There must be a logical reason for their sudden disappearance. They didn’t just vanish; they were consumed, perhaps."

He adjusted his strategy on the fly. "Anyway, I once saw the early Wrathers cross the river at a specific shallow point. There’s almost certainly a second underwater bridge there. I can pass it to get to the other bank fast"

John decided on the spot to change his direction. He wouldn’t head back to the base. Instead, he would take the risk, cross the river, and head straight toward the heart of the anomaly. He had a gut feeling that the best way to save his friends wasn’t by standing on a wall, but by cauterising the disaster at the den before it could fully gestate.

After all, they were currently lucky. The yellow den hadn’t unleashed a secondary wave of monsters yet, but John knew the system’s mercy was a finite resource.

He estimated he had a slightly over ten-hour window before the northern den released its second wave. He had to act now and find a way to destroy that yellow orb before the situation escalated to a point of no return.

As John began a frantic sprint toward the hidden underwater bridge, his friends and the Bulltors stood on the eastern walls, their eyes glued to the opposite riverbank. Suddenly, three hundred new entities began to emerge from the yellow radiance of the old den.

The monsters were tall, seven to eight meters in height, but they lacked the terrifying, raw muscle mass of the Wrathers. Their bodies were skinless and yellowish, moving in the same weird way, on four. Seeing the relatively low number and their less-imposing stature made everyone on the wall heave an inward sigh of relief.

"Are these the scary dudes you kept telling us about?!" Luke shouted, turning a mocking grin toward Lanmar. The giant didn’t respond; his face remained ashen, though his eyes were fixed on the new arrivals.

No matter how many stories had been told, the sheer number of these yellow monsters seemed too low to pose a genuine threat to the base defences that killed the scarier Wrathers.

"Let’s first see if they can channel the lightning or not," Cissel said, her eyes narrowing into slits as she analysed their movement patterns. She turned toward the acting head Bulltor. "Reody, I want you and your kin ready to get us down to the ground the moment we need to engage. Do you understand?"

"Sure, but..." Reody trailed off, his voice filled with a confusion that matched the other Bulltors. "These monsters... They don’t look threatening at all. They move like they are weighed down by the yellow light."

He was right. The yellow monsters moved at a significantly lower speed than the original Wrathers. They began to move across the underwater bridge, heading toward the northern section of the wall where the river branch acted as a natural moat.

The team ran along the walls to intercept them, their eyes glued to the kill zone.

"The lightning didn’t fall!" Elena cried out.

The first shot from a cannon roared through the air, striking the lead yellow monster directly in the chest. Unlike the Wrathers, which were often shielded by a last-second bolt from the sky, this creature took the full force of the plasma shot. It was instantly roasted, its yellowish body collapsing into a heap of smouldering flesh.

"And they aren’t fast enough to evade the incoming attacks!" Elena muttered, her voice gaining strength. "He died with a single shot. They’re soft."

"I believe that before we even reach the northern walls, all these monsters will be dead," Ricky noted. The yellow monsters were being slaughtered by the defensive towers and cannons, unable to bridge the gap between the riverbank and the stone walls.