Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 301: The Dens Evolve the Machines, and Items Inside Their Storage Programs!!

Over the past couple of months, the humans had fought and killed hundreds of Fog Seekers through sheer desperation, leaving the bodies in the fog.

Now, they scrambled back to those old kill sites, digging through the remains to extract the cores. John watched as the survivors ate the cores, following his instructions to the letter.

The ecstasy of using the cores for the first time felt like true magic to the survivors. John watched as more than three thousand humans began to change before his eyes.

In the span of a single hour, they were transforming from a fallen race, a divided group of refugees, into a group that was actually accustomed to the brutality of the pocket trial. Their eyes grew brighter, their movements surer, and for the first time since they had arrived, they were finally playing the game right by the rules.

The time had come for the final push, the moment where these survivors would shed their identity as victims and fully embrace the mechanics of the pocket trial.

To truly live as a dominant race, they had to witness the absolute destruction of the Fog Seekers’ den, a massacre of tens of thousands of the skinless monsters that had haunted their nightmares since the first day.

As John led the march, killing his way towards the den, he was struck by a new sense of perspective. He hadn’t realised how far he had grown stronger since his first terrifying moments in this world.

He vividly recalled the desperate struggle he and his friends had endured in the early days, caught in the chaotic crossfire between D-1000s and Fog Seekers. They had crawled through the mud, calculating every breath and move as if it were their last, terrified of every shadow.

Now? He simply walked toward the heart of the den with a casual stride. He didn’t even slow down. With a few moves, he started to massacre the monsters. He didn’t need a complex strategy. He simply waved his sword and unleashed a barrage of his abilities.

In less than half an hour, without even breaking a sweat, the entire den was silenced. Tens of thousands of Fog Seekers were reduced to twitching mounds of flesh, and their hulking boss, the Ogolith, was killed before it could even let out a proper roar of challenge.

"Tsk! I swear, the others won’t believe it even if they saw it," John muttered, standing motionless amidst the carnage for a few minutes as the silence prevailed over the world. He turned back toward the humans, who were currently wearing expressions of shock so profound they looked like statues.

"Listen up!" John shouted, his voice snapping them back to reality. "Gather the cores from the corpses. Use them to enhance your bodies, your gear, and your weapons exactly the way I showed you. We move out in one hour, at most."

"You heard the Anomaly God Paragon!" Thomas shouted immediately, stepping into his role as John’s enforcer with surprising natural vigour. "Let’s go! We don’t have time to waste! Move it!"

The humans, spurred by the sight of their oppressor’s total annihilation, sprang into action. They descended upon the battlefield not as scavengers, but as a race realising its own potential.

John ignored the frantic activity. He walked over to the massive remains of the Ogolith and extracted its core, feeding it to his magical core as he had done with every previous Ogolith.

Then, he stood nearby and waited.

During the lull, John decided to tap into his inventory to investigate something he had noticed before but didn’t have time to properly examine. While deploying defences in the heat of battle, he had glimpsed items he didn’t recognise, three categories of items that seemed out of place.

He had become intimately familiar with the inventory’s cataloguing rules. For example, his plasma cannons were sorted into three different slots: the standard units looted from early drops, the enhanced versions he had boosted with cores, and the super cannons he had edited into masterpieces of destruction.

However, he now found a fourth type of cannon. And it wasn’t just the cannons; there were new iterations of walls, towers, and lots of items as well.

"Oho, that’s surprising..." John whispered, pulling one of the new cannons outside to properly inspect.

He was astonished to realise these units were a perfect evolutionary midpoint. They were larger, reinforced with superior alloy plating, and possessed far greater bodies than the standard models, yet they lacked the extreme complexity of his special super edits. When he pulled up the item’s description, his eyes shone with a sudden, sharp realisation.

[Enhanced Plasma Cannon – Tier 2]

"Enhanced cannons... Does that mean the machines weren’t the only things that evolved when the den upgraded?" John’s mind raced through the reasons behind this weird phenomenon. "The items they carried, it all levelled up alongside the machine units. Wait, if that’s the case..."

He instantly pivoted his focus to two specific categories: walls and defensive towers. Up until now, he had only possessed two versions of these. There were the common, standard commodities found in the storage devices and programs of every race he met, and then there were the elite, the variants he had claimed from the Hiveminds’ primary base.

Now, he held a third type. When he took out a sample wall segment, he was delighted to see the changes. They were almost on par with the Hiveminds’ special walls.

"Wait... If this rule applied to every den," John’s breath hitched as a hypothesis formed, "does that mean the latest and highest forms of machines I killed in the northern den have even higher, more evolved versions of these items?"

His entire body shook when he thought about this hypothesis. And without any delay, he took out a few of the broken pieces he casually gathered from the highest evolved machine units at the northern den, then started hacking their storage programs. And there he found out that his theory proved right.

"Damn! These are real killers now!!"