Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 297: The Human Territory

John’s final quest to conclude this pocket trial was multifaceted. He was halfway through the hardest to achieve objectives, but there was one delicate task he hadn’t touched yet: cleansing the human territory of the lurking cyborg traitors.

"Luckily, I’ve fought these cyborgs before and know exactly how to spot them," he thought. He tried to overlay his Wireframe Sight atop the map to see if he could detect the unique code structure of the traitors from this distance, but he failed.

He knew he had to pay the territory a personal visit to complete this goal. Since he was already in the neighbourhood, and things were currently under his and his friends’ control, he decided there was no better time than the present.

After eating his fill and resting for three hours, John performed one last check on the territory. His mobile fortresses were still efficiently killing the machine horde, and the density had plummeted.

Satisfied, he turned south and began a steady trek toward the human territory. As he moved, he slowly examined the map, thoroughly studying the overall situation in the human zone.

Honestly, he was disappointed by what he saw.

"Even after all this time, they still aren’t united..."

John found it hard to fathom why the humans down there remained so fractured. Even accounting for Mark’s interference and the presence of the cyborgs, the lack of cohesion made no sense to him.

"If I were Mark, I would have tried to unify the entire human population under one banner to use them as a tool for my own ends," John mused. The inefficiency of the current situation piqued his curiosity; he wanted to see the reality on the ground even more than he wanted to hunt the remaining cyborgs.

As he walked southward, the heavy night fell. He wasn’t running at full tilt this time; he maintained a normal walking pace. There was no imminent threat demanding a lightning-strike arrival, and the steady pace allowed him to keep a constant eye on the human encampments through his map.

From the information he gathered, the situation was primitive and desperate. The humans were fighting the darkness and the biting cold using the most basic methods available.

They had located some Seprentile trees and managed to hack off a few branches, which they were now using to fuel meagre fire pits. Without proper igniters, they were spark-striking their swords against one another to get the wood to catch fire.

The survivors were divided into over thirty different factions, each claiming a small patch of dirt that was neither close enough for mutual support nor far enough for true independence. Splitting the few thousand remaining humans into so many petty groups left them weak, scattered, and pathetically vulnerable to the Fog Seekers.

Worse yet, they hadn’t even cleared the den in their own territory. They hadn’t pushed back the fog an inch beyond the initial safe zone provided when they first appeared in the trial.

John reached this conclusion after watching their interactions with the Fog Seekers; the humans were struggling to kill the monsters. They left the corpses untouched, not even bothering to harvest the vital cores within. It was a stagnant, backward, dying society, and John was about to walk right into the middle of it.

The humans looked as if they had been marooned on a dying Earth rather than transplanted into a new world of endless potential. John couldn’t fathom why Mark’s cyborgs hadn’t moved to clear the fog or informed the masses about the utility of the cores.

The humans down there were many, yet stagnant in existence, a slow decay that stood in contrast to the rapid evolution he and his friends had undergone.

Yet, as he drew closer, he noticed several details that proved his initial assumptions were slightly off the mark. First, the Fog Seekers here weren’t nearly as relentless as the ones that had greeted him upon his arrival.

These creatures attacked sporadically, perhaps a dozen at a time, with a maximum of two waves per day. It was a neutered version of the trial, a docile mode they had failed to outgrow.

Another observation struck him: many of these humans were actually utilising their special abilities and attributes with a degree of competence. They were strong enough to handle the Fog Seeker threat quite well. However, this strength was wasted.

They lacked the collective vision to work and fight together, to clear the den, lacked the basic survival skills to harvest the cores, and possessed absolutely zero defensive weaponry. They were a scattered race, a fractured mirror of a civilization that had brought its old burdens and petty conflicts into a new reality.

John could see why humanity was considered a fallen race in the grander hierarchy of the trial; their current status was a direct reflection of their inability to advance.

He didn’t even bother to inwardly sigh; the reality was too stark for simple pity. The challenge now was how to approach these volatile, thirty-headed factions and drag them out of the abyss of their own making.

"I believe the easiest and fastest way is using the universal rule," John muttered as he reached the edge of their encampments. "Showcasing power is always better than a thousand words."

He didn’t sneak in. He didn’t ask for a meeting. Instead, he reached into his inventory and began a massive, rapid-fire deployment. He used a cluster of cores to clear a vast swath of the fog in a single, blinding flash.

As the fog retreated, he laid down the foundations of a massive outpost, the metallic structures groaning as they materialised and locked into place. Towers rose like jagged teeth, and super pulse cannons swivelled to cover the perimeter.

He left a thick layer of fog between his spot and everyone else. Then, when he was ready, he took out two activated Wrather cores and threw them into the cleared space, inviting the humans over in a showy way.

*Rumble!*