Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 292: The Evolved Blue Machine Core

As John handled the first major encounter, he started to pick up pace again, his speed increasing until he was a streak of afterimages.

He never considered stopping to lay outposts or defences; he knew there were far too many enemies for a stationary defence to survive for long. His constant, erratic movement was the only guarantee he had to evade the incoming high-altitude attacks from the Metallic Wasps.

So far, he didn’t have a direct-damage ability that could reach those far-away flying machines, so he relied on his Sandbox illusions. Without the fog to hide them, the giant dragons served a better purpose.

The moment a fifty-meter dragon illusion appeared in the sky, every machine in the vicinity, wasps included, turned their focus toward it. They opened fire with everything they had, adding more layers of crossfire and chaos to the ongoing slaughter, while John slipped through the gaps in their attention.

He kept throwing his abilities everywhere, a relentless storm of devastation and death, while trying his best to keep the Metallic Wasps occupied. High above his head, the wasps were a constant, buzzing threat, a persistent headache that demanded his split-second attention.

Yet, in a twist of irony, they were also his greatest helpers. Their deadly blue fire bombs, intended to incinerate him, instead acted as massive area-of-effect sweepers, turning the ground-level machines into molten slag whenever John baited them to rain down their bombs, or even if they tried to kill his unkillable, illusory dragons.

The explosions rang out in a continuous, deafening roar everywhere he moved. To the mechanical horde, John was a god; they had hit a metaphorical wall. They couldn’t harm him, they couldn’t slow his frantic advance, and despite their attempts to encircle him with tens of thousands of units, they couldn’t entrap him.

"I’m finally here," John panted, his breath coming in sharp hitches after five hours of non-stop, high-velocity combat.

He had finally reached the location of the western den. It was situated across a wide branch of the river on the southern bank, nestled into a natural depression in the earth. Being close to the water provided a tactical landmark that severed the machine army into two. But it was also the heart of the storm.

This was the densest gathering of machines John had seen yet; a literal fountain of metal where the evolved units were spawning and pouring out of the den’s maw in a ceaseless stream.

The sight didn’t give him a scare. At this point, he doubted anything he would see in this world would scare him. John kept cycling through his abilities as if he were reciting a sacred ritual.

Everything the machines tried failed miserably. Even when he took a direct hit from a heavy S-1000 cannon or was caught in the peripheral shockwave of a wasp’s bomb, he emerged from the smoke unscathed, his Encrypted Skin shimmering with a protective light.

He killed his way through the final layers of the den guards, reaching the inner sanctum where the heart of the den resided. It wasn’t the metallic sphere he had seen before; this was a crystalline core so large it looked like a small, multifaceted house.

It pulsed with a deep, oceanic blue, and when John examined it using his Frame Recognition ability, he saw a coding structure so complex it looked like a billion glowing sapphire threads woven into a singular, small universe of its own.

The moment his fingers brushed the cold, crystalline surface, a series of notifications flooded his vision.

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[Ding! The Evolved Blue Machine Den has reached Wave 42!]

[Ding! Options available: Obtain the Blue Machine Core — Destroy the Blue Machine Core — Hack the Blue Machine Core!]

-

"Obtain it!" John said firmly. A surge of relief washed over him. "It seems whenever the core is evolved, I can bypass the standard rules. I can obtain it without needing to wait for the wave fifty threshold."

He had been worried that he would be pinned down for hours waiting for the den to cross the fifty-wave threshold, but the evolution had apparently changed the rules. By acquiring this core, he fulfilled one of his quest goals.

He stood his ground at the centre of the den, launching a non-stop barrage of abilities to keep the spawning machines at bay. One bloodied hand stuck over the giant blue core, while the other hand moved fast, pulling machine wrecks from his inventory and sucking them dry to keep his Mental Points topped off.

-

[Ding! You have obtained 1x Evolved Blue Machine Core!]

[Item: Evolved Blue Machine Core — Unique Grade — Consumable!]

[Description: A core that holds an immense amount of mutation power! Once activated, it will upgrade all mechanical items within a 10-kilometre radius by 1 grade!]

-

"..."

John stared at the floating text, his hands actually freezing for a few seconds in sheer shock. He reread the description three times, the realisation of its astronomical value exploding in his mind like a nuclear detonation.

"Dammit, Mark! Can’t you activate more than just six dens?!" He shouted into the empty air, followed immediately by a loud, manic laugh.

He was the only person in this trial who could truly grasp the weight of such an item. He had seen the terrifying leap in power when he manually upgraded weapons by just one grade. Now, he held a core that could forcibly evolve a grand number of equipment, an entire 10-kilometre radius zone, by another full tier.

"Yet, being a consumable is a headache..." he muttered, his mind already spotting the flaw. He knew that, at best, he would only ever find five of these cores if he hit every evolved den. They were one-time-use trump cards.

"I’ll worry about this point later," he decided. With the core safely tucked into his inventory, he turned on his heel and began his exit sprint.

He set his new goal: the southern territory. But as he ran, he performed a quick check on the other active battlefields across the map. Everything looked stable at Cissel’s front; she was a wall that wouldn’t break easily. However, when his gaze drifted to Ricky and Elena’s territory, his expression darkened.

The situation there was looking increasingly dire. He watched them for several minutes, realising with a grim certainty that they wouldn’t last until he finished obtaining the southern core.

"Fine, I’ll go and help them first," he said, adjusting his trajectory.

He looked over his shoulder at the millions of machines still hunting him, their sensors locked onto his figure like heat-seeking missiles. "It’s a waste to leave all this loot behind. If I’m going south, I’m taking the whole army with me. Let me lead you into the fog, then I’ll clear your storage programs until you’re nothing but empty husks."

He had enough now to lay down a deadly encirclement around Ricky and Elena’s den, the same way he had secured his own home territory. He knew these machines would keep flooding his location regardless of where he went, so he prepared himself for any unexpected situation.

What he didn’t realise was that he was destined to hold yet another pleasant, game-changing surprise by what he was doing.