Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 170: The Enhanced John, His Sword, and Cannons!

*Rumble!*

The sky answered his laughter with a low, menacing growl of thunder, but John didn’t flinch. As he was thinking, talking to himself, and laughing, he developed an efficient harvesting way to activate the core and enhance it.

He adopted an approach to ensure he wouldn’t end up slammed by a lightning bolt again. Every time he reached a corpse, he would first clear the fog using a Fog Seeker core.

Then, he’d extract the deep red Wrather core and throw it instantly twenty meters away to let it get activated by absorbing the fog, then baptised by the lightning at a safe distance. Once the strikes ceased, he’d dash out, grab the now-purple activated and enhanced core, consume it, and move on to the next.

At some point, he cleared enough fog around to stop using his Fog Seeker cores. The entire trap area was now cleared of fog, and all the monster remains were inside it. So, he simply worked and threw the cores he got around, further expanding the area.

He lost himself in the trance of the harvest, moving from body to body. Finally, he placed one purple core in his mouth, but it didn’t dissolve. It remained cold and solid against his tongue.

"I’ve reached my limit." He spat the inert stone out, cracking a wide, triumphant smile. He hurriedly opened his profile to check the numbers, his heart racing with anticipation.

He checked both his current primary stats and his Athanasia sealed stats, taking immense pride in the progress he had achieved in such a short time within this harsh pocket trial world. The numbers were staggering.

[Primary stats:

+ INT: 421.3 + HP: 418.4 + Strength: 428.2 + Defense: 419.6 + Speed: 422.9]

[Secondary Stats (Athanasia Stats – Sealed!):

+ INT: 73 + HP: 64 + Strength: 62 + Defense: 66 + Speed: 69]

[Mental Point (MP): 4057.2/4163.2]

"I can now say thanks for bringing me here," John said, slightly bowing his head to the empty air, a gesture of respect toward the system.

Seeing the huge difference between his old stats and his current ones, especially the four-figure threshold of his Mental Points, gave him a sense of security he hadn’t felt since the trial began. He felt like nothing could stop him from achieving anything he wanted inside this pocket trial.

"And now," he said, putting his personal gains aside to focus on his original objective. He looked at the towers around him and picked the nearest one. "It’s time to see if I can enhance them..."

The process he chose was simple, mimicking how he ingested the cores. He took an activated, enhanced, purple-glowing core and pressed it against the outer body of the tower, hoping it would work. He waited for several seconds, but nothing happened. The core just sat there, cold and unresponsive against the silver metal.

"Tsk, then let me try on the walls!" He didn’t lose hope yet. He withdrew a massive wall segment from his inventory and placed the core against its reinforced metallic surface. Again, the result was a resounding silence. The wall remained just a wall, and the core didn’t vanish.

"Ok... Last try then." John started to feel a heavy sense of disappointment. Yet, he reached into his inventory one last time and pulled out a standard silver-barreled cannon. This time, however, fate was destined to be merciful to him.

The moment the purple core touched the barrel of the cannon, it didn’t just sit there. It began to hum. In a flash of light, the core dissolved into liquid and vanished into the metal.

"Holy moly! It worked!!" John’s eyes went wide as the cannon shuddered in his hands. "But... Why? Why is it just the cannon?!"

As he watched the cannon absorb the power of the activated core, he frantically looked for a reason. The only difference he could find between the cannon and the other two items was his intervention with the cannon. He had hacked into the cannon’s, enforcing edits on its programming, and altering its coding structure to fit his specific needs.

"Perhaps my intervention by editing stuff made the system recognise it as one of my gear. Does this mean that if I can do the same with the walls and towers, I can also enhance them?!"

On the surface, the cannon didn’t show any obvious physical changes. However, when John inspected it using his ability to peer into the green code structure of the weapon, he saw it. A new, faint purple cluster of codes, tinged with a streak of electric blue, was appearing and weaving itself into the cannon’s code structure.

It was just one cluster of purple-blue code, but John was certain that if he continued to feed the cannon more cores, more clusters would appear.

Eventually, the transformation might reach a critical point, changing the entire weapon into something far more terrifying than its original design. The potential for a complete structural evolution of his already fierce cannons was a prospect that made his pulse quicken.

"Tsk! I only have a few Wrathers left here," John muttered, turning around to survey the area. When he checked the remaining corpses he could salvage, he was disappointed to find fewer than two hundred lying around his trap.

This meant that back at the base, the main toll of the harvest was yet to come, there were more than three thousand five hundred Wrather corpses currently littering the perimeter of the walls!

"Let me first augment my sword," he decided. While he wanted to hit the forty-core cap on the cannon immediately, his personal safety and offensive capability came first.

Without delay, he moved through the graveyard of giants, gathering forty deep red cores. He activated them one by one, watching the lightning baptism from a safe distance before letting his blade absorb the purple cores. When he was finally done, he inspected using his special vision to check the result.

The change was radical. The sword’s code structure had shifted entirely, now formed of shimmering blue code woven with forty dense, pulsating purple clusters.

In the physical world, the Goblin Long Sword had undergone a visible metamorphosis. Even while in his hand, thin arcs of violet lightning danced along the edge of the blade, crackling softly.

When he gave it a test wave, the air didn’t just whistle; the lightning hummed with faint rumbles of thunder. John raised an eyebrow, feeling the impact of the transformation.

Then, he checked the stats of the weapon, drawing in a sharp, cold breath of air.

[Goblin Long Sword: Level 20]

[Stats: Strength: 457.5 | Durability: 393 | Sharpness: 396.5 | Weight: 507.5]

[Special Effect: Triple Slash Effect!

+ Triple Slash: Consumes 10 Mental Points per activation.

++ Condition: Target’s Defence must be lower than the user’s.

++ Effect: Creates three after-images of the sword, all slashing at the target simultaneously and dealing 900% damage! If the target’s Defence is higher than the user’s, the damage is halved.]

[Special Effect: Lightning Shadow!

+ Lightning Shadow: Passive effect!

With every slash, a shadow of the sword made entirely of lightning follows the strike, delivering an extra 200% damage!]

[Special Effect: Lightning Dance!

+ Lightning Dance: Consumes 100 Mental Points to unleash a barrage of sword attacks made entirely of lightning in a 100-meter radius! Damage is 50% for every successful hit.

++ Duration: 20 Seconds.

++ Warning: Does not differentiate between friends or enemies!]

[Requirements: Strength: 85 | Defense: 55 | HP: 95 | INT: 75 | Mental Power Cap: 300]

[Status: Can be upgraded further. Next upgrade requirements: 500 Iron Codes!]

[Description: A nice sword. It can burn a tree leaf with lightning!]

"This sword..." John held the weapon higher, turning it in the dim light to catch the purple sparks. He looked at it as if he were seeing a legendary artefact for the first time. "Its level jumped by 5, and that’s clearly what’s behind these scary stats."

John realised that with his current Strength and the sword’s base Sharpness and Strength, just a standard swing would inflict more than eight hundred points of raw damage! That was before even touching his special effects.

With the Triple Slash now scaling to 900% and the new passive Lightning Shadow adding a constant 200% kicker, his burst potential was astronomical. Not to mention his first AOE attack, the Lightning Dance!

"Damn! I need a formidable opponent to test this against," he said, his voice hissed. He felt a surge of anticipation and thrill like never before. He was more eager than ever to find those Hivemind folks and devastate their strongest warriors. "But first, I have to settle the situation here. I can’t leave the base vulnerable while I’m out hunting."

John’s previous plans had involved complex kiting manoeuvres and using terrain and traps to slowly whittle down the Hivemind’s superior numbers. But looking at his new stats and the flickering lightning on his blade, and knowing he still had the yellow monster cores to consume back at the base, he felt his confidence swell into something borderline arrogant.

He began to seriously consider discarding those cautious tactics entirely. And if he involved his friends after ingesting what they lacked of these cores, he felt they could crush anyone and everyone without exception!

He was now entertaining a much simpler, more brutal plan: simply walk into their territory, lure their main forces outside their walls, and then kill every last one of them.

John moved around the kill zone one last time, collecting the remaining cores and activating them. After he filled his sword’s upgrade cap, he used his cores on the cannon he tried the core with earlier, then picked two more cannons and evolved them. In the end, he carefully stored fifty activated cores in his inventory.

He wanted to bring them back to his friends to show them the qualitative difference between a raw core and an activated-enhanced one.

With his preparations complete, he decided it was time to return to his friends’ side. He chose the longer route this time, circling around the southern then the western perimeters of his base, collecting all the Wrather cores he found alongside the walls.