Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 81: Ding! The Protection Period Is Over!

John’s patience was fraying at the edges. Every second spent debating was a second of precious rest lost in vain. Before anyone could dive in and waste more minutes on the kind of useless guesses he was growing tired of, he cut through the tension with a voice like a whip.

"Didn’t you see them? They have no eyes!" he snapped, his voice echoing in the sudden chill. "They rely on sound to locate us. In total quietness, without the noise source I destroyed, they can’t find us. We’re as safe as we’re ever going to be."

As if to put an immediate end to their useless debate, he turned away and began a fortification. He moved across the sanctuary, placing pairs of cores at the gaps between the trees and even along the inner borders of their territory. In mere half an hour, with the others silently following his lead as the warmth began to radiate, the entire sanctuary was lit up in a brilliant, flickering amber. The cold was pushed back, replaced by heat.

"I’ll wait for a bit longer," Ricky decided, his eyes darting toward the now visible black wall of the fog. He watched John pick a comfortable spot next to a fire and settle down. "If there are no monsters attracted to our lighthouse in the next few minutes, then it’s safe to sleep."

"We still don’t know for how long this will last," Cissel added, her gaze lingering on the pitch-black sky. She motioned upward with her head. "Or for how long these cores will emit fire. What if they burn down like wood in our world? We’ll be left in the freezing darkness with no warning."

"Then let’s do it as we planned before," John yawned, the sound deep and ragged. He was already half-submerged in the lure of sleep. "Ricky and Luke will stand guard for the first shift. Wake us after five hours. I’ll take the second shift with Cissel."

As if he didn’t want to hear anymore of their suggestions or anxieties, he flipped his body over, giving them his back. He closed his eyes, and within seconds, the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest signalled he had entered a deep sleep.

He didn’t see Luke and Ricky fighting the inevitable. Despite their best intentions and the weight of their duty, their eyelids were like lead weights. The warmth of the fires and the silence of the night proved to be a more formidable opponent than any Fog Seeker. Just one hour after the others had drifted off, the two guards slumped against the charcoal bark, their snores joining the soft crackle of the fires.

[Ding...] [Ding...] [Ding...]

Like a sharp, persistent clock alarm, the system interface began to chime within John’s ears. He slowly opened his eyes, feeling something bright, blinding, and painful, welcoming his sight. His mind took a few seconds to awaken. Then, reality hit him, and he abruptly shot to his feet.

"Damn! They overslept!"

He scanned the area. The fires had died down to glowing embers, their energy spent, but they weren’t needed anymore. A harsh, shadowless daylight had returned to the sky, as sudden as a lamp being switched on. Everyone else was still scattered around the base of the trees, snoring peacefully.

Yet another ding came, one that turned him fully awake and sent a jolt of adrenaline through his heart!

[Ding! 10-minute warning before the protection period is over!]

"Wake up!"

Without a second of hesitation, he shouted at the top of his lungs. The sound tore through the quiet area like a gunshot. It was more than enough to jolt everyone awake. Cissel and Elena were the most reactive; they rose to their feet in a blur of motion, drawing their weapons and even waving them in defensive arcs before their eyes had even fully opened. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

’Wow! Impressive!’ John took a mental note of their swift and decisive response. It was a level of combat instinct that couldn’t be faked—a product of the gruelling battles and hard training. Elena’s reflex made sense given her family, but Cissel remained a fascinating mystery to him.

"Easy there," John spoke, his voice calm but firm to stop the girls from accidentally hurting others in their confusion. "It’s daytime already. We need to wake up and get ready. We need to be prepared for anything coming our way!"

The group took a minute to fully shake off the cobwebs of sleep. "Damn... How much I miss my dorm," Elena groaned, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. "I should be starting my day with a hot morning bath. Now I’ll look awful!"

"You are always a shining star in my eyes," Luke said casually.

The words were out before he could think, and a sudden, heavy silence followed. Luke’s face turned a deep shade of crimson as he realised what he had actually said. Cissel and Ricky immediately glared at him with mischievous grins, their eyes promising that they had found enough teasing material to last the rest of the week.

For Elena, a faint tinge of redness crossed her cheeks for a brief moment, a rare flash of vulnerability. She quickly turned her head, moving her eyes toward John as if she were asking what their next move was to hide her embarrassment.

"Let’s eat our breakfast first," John said, nodding toward the canopy. "We need to run a proper assessment on our food and water supply from these fruits. We need to know exactly how long we can last here and determine the crucial moment when we’ll have to move and look for other trees."

They moved with purpose now, each climbing a separate tree to have their breakfast. John hauled himself up into the branches of the largest tree, counting the Blue Serpentile clusters. He estimated his tree held roughly one hundred piles of the Blue Serpentile fruits.

"Like this, we have ten thousand of them across the grove," he called down, doing the math in his head. "If we each eat at least twenty per meal... Three meals a day... We can last a month this way!"

His estimates were way off. As he watched from his branch, John saw his friends devouring over fifty fruits each in their breakfast alone. The Blue Serpentile fruits were undeniably juicy and refreshing, but they lacked the substance of a real, decent meal. They were like eating flavoured water; they filled the stomach temporarily but left the body craving protein and solid nutrients.

Watching them made him recall the rich dinner table back at his dorm that was refreshed three times a day with steaming meats and hearty grains.

Just as he was about to speak to them about rationing the fruit and putting a limit on their consumption, a system notification chimed, synchronised with the faint, rising roars echoing from the surrounding fog.

[Ding! The protection period is over!]

’Tsk, there is no mention of anything else? Not even when you’ll grant us another protection period!’ John thought irritably.

[Ding! With every quest finished, you’ll earn one protection period that corresponds to how well you did on the quest!]

[Ding! 1 Mental Point is deducted!]

John blinked. He didn’t think the system would be generous enough to actually answer his mental query, even if it charged him for the privilege. That meant their peaceful night’s rest was solely thanks to the quest rewards. Starting from tonight, they were on their own. The safety they felt was a temporary gift, not a permanent feature of the world.

"Let’s gather up," John called out, landing softly on the ground. He unsheathed his sword, moving it in a few experimental arcs. "Let’s start our morning training!"

His muscles felt stiff—the kind of deep-seated soreness that would come after a first-day-back at a high-intensity gym. He wasn’t alone; even Elena, who was naturally the most agile and flexible person on the team, was moving with a certain sluggishness, stretching her limbs with audible groans of discomfort.

The expected onslaught, however, wasn’t what they anticipated. The monsters trickled in rather than surged.

"That’s it?!" Luke exclaimed after only a few minutes. They stood over the corpses of a small group of Seekers. "We didn’t kill more than a hundred of them!!"

He looked around at the others, seeing the same type of doubt and confusion written on their faces. After the thousand-strong last wave of the previous night, this felt like a light skirmish.

"Let’s not jinx ourselves. Just enjoy these moments of rest," John said, resisting the urge to laugh. It was ironic; after yesterday’s trauma, his friends had turned into pure, bloodthirsty warriors who felt cheated if they weren’t drowning in enemies.

But the pattern held. The next wave took a couple of hours to arrive, and the one after that followed the same leisurely pace. The daytime of this world without John’s quests seemed to have its own slow rhythm.

"Let’s share whatever we felt, knew, or thought of about this world," Ricky suggested during the long lull. He took charge, forming a circle between the team under the shade of a Serpentile tree. "The monster rate has decreased significantly. It seems like whatever John did yesterday with those devices worked at last."

Everyone nodded in agreement, but Cissel was the first to offer a deeper observation. "I noticed that daytime lasted for roughly twenty-four hours," she paused, as if checking her internal sense of time. "I’m sure of it. I’ve never felt this tired before unless I pulled an all-nighter back home. So, a single day here is like an entire day and night back in our world."

"And the night is likely twelve hours," John chimed in, building on her logic. "I always feel my body refreshed after sleeping for a long time, so the night is definitely twelve hours or slightly more."

If Cissel was using her personal experience as a reference, John saw no reason not to do the same. This world operated on a much longer clock.

"That makes the entire day-night cycle like thirty-six hours of our world," Elena calculated, pausing before adding her own grievance. "I want to say something... These fruits are amazing and all, but they can’t satisfy my hunger and thirst... Not really."

Everyone looked at her weirdly. Half a day ago, they were literally crying to get their hands on anything edible, and now she was already complaining about the menu.

"The taste is a bit weird... And it’s not like real food we used to eat before," she added defensively under their sceptical gazes, trying to justify her lack of satisfaction.

"Well," John said, attracting everyone’s attention back to the logistical reality. "I can say they’ll work fine as a temporary food source, but for a long-term food and water replacement... I’m not too sure about it." He sighed, looking up at the canopy. "I counted the fruit before; we have roughly one hundred piles of these on each tree. We just each ate over fifty at breakfast alone."

"I’m still feeling hungry," Cissel admitted, touching her belly without waiting for him to finish. "You don’t expect us to cut our rations short!"

"It’s either that, or we keep looking for more trees," John replied flatly.

"Or a better source for food," Elena jumped in, her eyes hopeful.

"I need proper water to drink," Ricky sighed, echoing her sentiment. "This juicy fruit is an amazing appetiser or a temporary fix, but we need to look for real food and a running water source. We can’t survive on sugar-water forever."

John knew they had a valid point. Even if the Blue Serpentile fruits had solved their immediate crisis, they couldn’t be a long-term solution.

"That means we’ll need to look for food and water again," John said, scanning the dark wall of the fog beyond their clearing. "To make things faster, who wants to come with me this time?"