Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 92: Ricky’s Infection!

"Run!" John’s shout sliced through the air, putting a dead stop to any useless debate. This wasn’t the time for throwing observations or panicked remarks.

As he gave the order, he didn’t stop moving for even a fraction of a second. To the others, he looked as if he was dancing—a blur of movement, evading the scorching white beams of two D-1000s simultaneously.

Out of all his abilities, the specific combination of Object Lockdown and Code Destruction was the only thing leaving visible scars in these mechanical monstrosities.

He realised that while their physical armour was nearly impenetrable, their code structure was vulnerable to his code-destroying abilities, with Logic Bomb being the deadliest in his arsenal.

’Logic Bomb... Five seconds... Logic Bomb... Five seconds... Logic Bomb... Five seconds!’

The D-1000 he was fighting against suddenly buckled, falling to the ground with a ragged, many holes in its metallic body. John didn’t spare it a second glance; he left the touch of a Logic Bomb on its beehive-like body before spiralling on himself, to touch the other two nearby.

Because he could trace the attack lines of the laser guns before they fired, he kept dancing in an impossible, erratic way for a few seconds that felt like hours to him.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

The sound was deafening. Unlike the roars of a dying Fog Seeker, these explosions were metallic and sharp, sending shrapnel whistling through the clearing, without the machines issuing a single groan or moan.

"What the heck was that?!!" Luke turned to exclaim in shock, shielding his eyes from the glare. Three of the five machines that had been an insurmountable wall of death just minutes ago were now twisted, burning wreckage. And John wasn’t finished.

*Boom!* *Boom!*

The final two were obliterated in quick succession, the shockwaves sending lots of metallic scraps around, and signaling alleviating the immediate danger on the team.

"What happened?!" John approached the group, his chest heaving as he stared directly at Ricky. "And why are you this silent? If you knew about the reinforced movable plating behind their necks, why didn’t you say it before and alarm us? We almost lost our heads!"

John was totally enraged by Ricky’s attitude. He hadn’t missed the weird silence or the way Ricky had watched them struggle without shouting to warn them beforehand, like how Luke did.

But all he got in return for his fury was a weirder, unsettling smirk that played across Ricky’s lips. It wasn’t the look of a friend; it was the look of a spectator watching a play.

"Leave him," Luke sighed, his shoulders slumped. He looked exhausted and terrified. "He isn’t himself since yesterday, John. I tried to warn you about this last night, didn’t I?"

John moved his eyes between the two, starting to look at John’s code structure with focus. But before he could thoroughly examine the code structure of his friend, a weird, metallic noise erupted from the fog not far from them, distracting him. It sounded like steel was crunching against steel.

"What the heck is coming this time?!!" Elena shouted in distress. She moved closer to Luke, her sledgehammers trembling in her hands. As for Cissel and John, the two exchanged a quick, meaningful glance.

"There are more coming," Ricky suddenly said. His voice was hollow before he exploded into a fit of weird laughter. "We are going to die anyway, we are doomed no matter what we try. Hahaha!"

"Shut up," John snapped. He stepped forward and slapped Ricky across the face, the sound echoing sharply. He grabbed Ricky by the collar, hauling him up. "I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you’ll drag you’re a*s and follow us right now."

Ricky remained silent, yet his eyes looked at John with a chilling emptiness of any emotion, as if he were telling him there was no point in struggling against the inevitable. John didn’t know the full extent of the infection, but being this close, he couldn’t help but see the truth.

’Dark grey codes?!!!’ John froze. Inside Ricky’s body, where the green and white codes should have been, there was a swirling mass of the fog codes—a tiny cluster of dark grey code.

But there was no time to process the horrifying discovery. He turned to Cissel and Elena, his voice firm and commanding. "We’re going towards the den! Right now!"

"What?!! You found the den already?!!!" Luke exclaimed in bewilderment, but John merely glared back at him.

"Is this what matters the most to you now?!!" John inwardly sighed. "Keep an eye on Ricky. He isn’t in his normal mind."

"I tried to tell you that last night," Luke said, moving to stand by Ricky’s side. Ricky gave him a look full of pure disdain and took several steps away, refusing the help. "He’s been acting weird since we started hunting monsters for cores." 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Too late for that," John said, his Wireframe Sight picking up dozens of green codes approaching from different directions. "Sh*t! There are more of these things coming at us! Run as if your lives depend on it!"

The team broke into a sprint, heading toward the path leading to the cliff.

"Those things... They were prototypes I learned about long ago," Cissel shouted over the wind, her focus split between the uneven ground and the memories she was digging up. Even if John knew she was coating the truth with a cover of an obvious lie, he let him continue without interruption.

"They are taught as part of ancient Earth history in certain... restricted archives. The D-series, the Destroyers. They were supposed to be the replacement for frontline soldiers in the early stages of the Great Automation... But that was centuries ago! I don’t know what they are doing here, or how they are still functional!"

John couldn’t tell what was true, what was false, or what Cissel was still hiding. But he could tell that both she and Ricky possessed a depth of knowledge that didn’t fit their status as simple students.

’Dammit, Ricky! You picked the wrong timing to venture into the fog and got infected with its codes,’ John inwardly cursed, stealing a look at the totally different person, Ricky, ’if you warned me beforehand, I wouldn’t have gotten distracted by the sudden appearance of that protective shield!’

John knew the main reason behind his first attack’s failure was thanks to the sudden appearance of that platinum plate. He thought it was some sort of attack, and his hand reflexively moved to target it, instead of the weak spot it shielded.

’Next time I’ll try to use the Code Destruction ability directly on the right spot of that protective plate shielding the nape below it,’ John decided. Then, a thought struck him. ’The Fog Seekers had a cluster of special codes at the back of their necks as well. Is that a coincidence?’

The similarity was too high to be accidental. Were the monsters just biological versions of these machines? Or were the machines modelled after the monsters? There was no way to tell yet, so he pushed the thought aside, focusing on the mechanical hunters that seemed to be replacing the Fog Seekers within the fog.

"But how did they find us?" Suddenly, Cissel threw a question that everyone missed: "The world is too big to just accidentally pump into us, and there are too many of them for this to be a mere coincidence!"

"It’s because of the sound devices I destroyed on our first day here," John calmly said, not stopping moving his eyes right and left, "they must have been made and placed by the machines! And once destroyed, it wasn’t that hard to locate us!"

His answer made perfect sense, and he knew, thanks to his first quest details, that this was the fact. As the team had no other questions for now, everyone returned to focus on running as fast as they could, while John shifted his attention back to the fog world around them.

After some time, he noticed something; the D-1000s moved through the fog for a long time, chasing them, without getting affected by the deadly fog world.

They didn’t stumble, they didn’t hallucinate, and their metal didn’t show the signs of decomposition that the system kept warning him of every time he ventured into the fog. He glanced back at Ricky, easily spotting the alien cluster of codes now, then heavily sighed.