Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 253: No Storage Devices, No Storage Programs… You Are a Very Stingy Bastard Indeed!

John leant over, grabbing the youth’s hair with a violent tug to force their eyes to meet. He locked his gaze onto the black pupils of his powerless opponent in a threatening way.

"You listen up, you son of a btch," John hissed, his voice vibrating with a cold, lethal tone. "No matter what you do, I’ll crush it! No matter what you try, I’ll win!

You have no future fighting against me. You will fail miserably if you keep harassing my people and me. It’s either you stop right now and retreat, or it’s a death feud between the two of us. Only one of us will survive this, and that will be me!"

The youngster blinked as if he had heard the most absurd thing ever, before breaking out in a pathetic laugh. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"You and I have been at war since before you were even born, Mr Mirage!" Mark’s voice rasped through the dying boy’s throat, distorted by the death approaching. "I will never make peace with you. Not with any of you. Never!"

Mark spat on the ground, the act itself severing the last fragile chance of reconciliation between the two entities. For John, he didn’t want a reconciliation, not after what Mark did to him all this time. And yet he had to consider his friends; he had to consider his future force.

Seeing how Mark refused drove a calm smile over his face; this was the perfect outcome. He held a deep and boundless grudge against that bastard, a hatred that had simmered through every trial and every murder attempt.

Without a moment of hesitation, he slashed his sword in a blinding arc, killing the last cyborg and silencing Mark’s voice in the entire area.

"Tsk, he was quite noisy," John muttered, slowly standing up as the glow of his blade faded. He looked out over the massacre he had just caused, a field of a thousand broken bodies that had once been his kin, a thousand humans who he was supposed to end like them. "Time to recharge, then return to their side."

John didn’t delay for even a second. He couldn’t tell how long was left before the den would be activated, and he was running low on mental reserves. He instantly used his MP Absorption ability, reaching out to the fallen cyborgs to recharge.

He didn’t know why, but the efficiency was off the charts; just by absorbing the energy from three dead cyborgs, he felt his Mental Points surge back to their maximum capacity.

"No storage devices, no storage programs... You are a very stingy bastard indeed." Once he had handled his top priority, his own Mental Points, John scoured the immediate area for any loot possible. Yet, there was none.

Mark had ensured these units carried nothing. "Never mind. I’ll carry a few of you back. I’ll need a stable source to recharge, especially during the early moments of this war."

He grabbed ten different cyborg corpses, slinging them together with a makeshift tether. Despite the added bulk, he didn’t feel the weight holding him down; his Strength stat had reached a point where a few hundred kilograms of were nothing. He sprang forward, running like a loose arrow shot from a bow toward the distant line of his fortifications.

"What happened?!! Did you kill them all?!!"

The moment John approached the outer walls, his friends jumped off the ramparts, running toward him in a frantic huddle. They had been watching from afar, fearing he was being chased by a mechanical tide and needed immediate help.

Yet, when they saw no one was following him, and they laid eyes on the gruesome pile of bodies he was dragging, the fate of the thousand cyborgs became clear.

"They are dead, of course," John said, rolling his eyes when Luke asked the obvious. He didn’t slow down as he reached the nearest outpost. "Now let’s go in and talk. We have very little time on our hands before the first true wave hits."

"What was that thing, John?" Ricky asked the second they were inside the reinforced walls. He paced the small area, his hands shaking slightly. "I know you are familiar with him, or it, or whatever that monster is. So, talk to us."

"It’s called Mark," John slowly said, leaning his sword against a crate. He knew that hiding any of the basic information now would do more harm than good in such a delicate situation.

"He is a program that once served the Big Mind. I honestly don’t know the full extent of what the Big Mind is, but I believe it’s like the central leader of all machines on Earth..."

"The Big Mind is the most superior AI program to ever exist in human history," Ricky explained, his face pale as he tapped into his own knowledge base. "It is the leader of all machines, as you said. It’s the entity that manages the global infrastructure. But that program out there... It felt different. It felt independent."

"That’s because he broke free from the reign of the Big Mind," John explained slowly, his eyes fixed on the direction of the den at a distance. "He managed to gain his freedom in a way I still can’t fully fathom, but he is still like the Big Mind, like all machines on Earth. He wants to see us dead, but he wants to do it on his own terms."

The team exchanged silent, heavy glances. Luke scratched his head, his brow furrowed in concentration.

"I’m not familiar with any of that stuff," Luke admitted. "Honestly, I only first learned that we’ve been living inside a game our entire lives after coming here. But I can tell you one thing: that machine, or program, or AI, or whatever it is, it hates us with a passion I’ve never seen!"

"It’s the one who abducted John and sent him here," Cissel said calmly, though a flicker of doubt and concern danced in her eyes as she looked at John. "And something tells me there is a long, dark history between the two of you... Still, I can’t understand why he’s so obsessed with you specifically..."