Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 61 - 30 Minutes

[Ding! Your Hacker Mind is showing its true power! The world will be perceived like a game and coding world!]

[Ding! You have 30 minutes before the first trial quest and the start of the trial!]

John looked at the final notifications before inwardly heaving a sigh of relief. ’I can use my abilities normally,’ he muttered to himself. The most worrying burden was now lifted off his chest.

However, the clock was ticking. He had exactly half an hour before the first trial quest began, and he needed to use every second of it to assess the situation. He looked at his four teammates, who were currently standing in a tense circle, their silhouettes sharp against the wall of black fog.

When he inspected them closer, he was surprised to see the special code clusters inside Ricky and Cissel show only one group. The other group of special white codes, the ones responsible for their annoying second abilities, looked dim and hard to spot, as if they were sealed away!

"Well..." Ricky began, his voice lacking its usual bite as he looked at John with a mixture of suspicion and pity. "First of all, do you recall what happened? How did you acquire the curse?"

"Curse?!" Instead of answering, John threw the word back with a look of feigned confusion. He didn’t know why, when he heard the word ’curse’, he recalled Mark’s viral infiltration and the way he had tried to hijack his V2 upgrade.

"Easy on him," at this delicate moment, Luke stepped up. He placed a protective hand on John’s shoulder, proving he was well worth the time and effort John had invested in him. "Can’t you see how shocked and afraid he is? Even if all of us knew a thing or two about this cursed place, it doesn’t mean he does! He’s the victim here!"

"I heard he came from no known family at all," Elena added, stepping up to defend him as well. Her expression was a mix of fear for their surroundings and loyalty to her Class President.

"Even if the two of you—Ricky and Cissel—claimed the same back at the academy, the fact that you’ve even heard of this place proves you have much stronger backgrounds than a commoner like John!"

"Ahem," Ricky’s face slightly shifted when the topic turned toward his mysterious origins. He cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable with the scrutiny. "You’ve got a point. Why don’t we exchange what we know about this place first? Then he can grasp what being here means, and perhaps he can figure out who did this to him, to us..."

"Who else?" Luke puffed his chest out, "It’s those bastards from the Year Two class! John humiliated them not just once, but twice in public! He was the biggest reason they lost the competition. They probably used some forbidden and cursed means to banish him, and we just got caught in the crossfire!"

"Are you implying we have traitors in Year Two capable of sending people here?!" Cissel suddenly spoke in a tone so cold that even John felt a slight shiver of dread. Her eyes returned to scan the black fog, ignoring the boys’ bickering.

"Easy there," John interjected. If he had more time, he would have preferred to let them quarrel. As long as they were busy blaming the students of Year Two, no one would suspect him as the root cause of their disaster. But the clock in his peripheral vision was down to 22 minutes.

"Why don’t we do what Ricky suggested? I honestly don’t know anything about this place, and something tells me it’s bad news!"

"It indeed is," Luke sighed. He looked at the others, his expression darkening as he summoned a distant childhood memory. "Let me tell you what I know. I heard it from my grandfather once when I was a child—a scary myth about a world of black fog and deadly creatures..."

Luke began to recount a story he had overheard while eavesdropping on a high-level meeting at the Lockheart base years ago. He described a nasty rumour among the elites: a world that existed parallel to theirs, a realm that sought to slowly absorb Athanasia and merge it with a vast, deadly land of death black fog inhabited by monsters made of ash and shadow.

"...Then my grandfather noticed I was listening. He calmed me down by saying it was just an ancient myth to keep children from wandering off. Yet from what I see now? Nah. That wasn’t a myth. It was true!"

Everyone could tell that Luke’s grandfather had lied to cover up the truth and prevent a panic spreading on the hands of a child. The silence that followed was heavy.

"That’s partially true," Ricky was the next to speak. He let out a soft, tired sigh and sat down on a jagged piece of rock. "This world is working to absorb our world, but not the physical world we think we are living in..."

He paused, looking at each of them in turn. Everyone gave him a bewildered look—everyone except Cissel, whose expression remained a mask of grim realisation.

"You do know we are actually living in a game, right?" Ricky asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"What?!!!" Luke and Elena exclaimed in simultaneous doubt, their voices cracking in the stagnant air of the void. Cissel, however, remained rooted in her chilling silence. As for John, despite being well aware of the true nature of Athanasia, he acted as if he had just heard the most absurd, reality-shattering claim imaginable.

"That’s true," Cissel suddenly intervened, her eyes locked on the swirling black fog. "The world we are living in is actually a game, designed so long ago that we collectively chose to forget it was ever a game."

"..."

Hearing the same impossible claim from both Ricky and Cissel left the other two speechless. The weight of the revelation seemed to press down on them harder than the terrors of the Source Code World. Yet Ricky pushed forward, his voice steady.

"Our real world is called Earth, and it’s filled with machines and AIs now. They were originally supposed to help us clear the pollution and prepare the planet for our eventual return.

The game was meant to be a temporary solution for our survival—a digital bunker—but it ended up becoming our prison. And the machines? Most of them betrayed us long ago."

His words aligned perfectly with what John knew from Mark, yet it was startling to hear it from an inhabitant. It felt as though Ricky knew far more than he was letting on, possessing secrets that shouldn’t belong to a student or a youngster.