Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 304: Securing Luke’s Machine Den

John heard from the survivors that they lived on the food they carried inside their storage devices before coming here. It wasn’t that much, but it was enough to sustain them long enough as they controlled the rations. On top of that, they found the Blue Serpentile fruits.

John wanted them to taste what this world could truly offer, especially with a skilled chef on their side. However, the numbers were stark: sustaining over three thousand people required an immense amount of meat that he couldn’t support.

He made a mental note to coordinate with Elena; he knew this girl had stored tons of the Terakos meat, raw and grilled. Once he arrived at Luke’s spot, he intended to ask her to dispatch more meat towards here.

"Can’t we come with you?"

Another girl tried her luck, stepping forward with a pleading look that John met with a gaze as cold as the fog itself. He didn’t even grant her a verbal response, simply turning back to his task.

None of these people had ever encountered Cissel; he decided then and there to leave the social management of the camp, of these girls, to her. He was certain that once Cissel arrived, she would find a very direct, very permanent way to put everyone into their proper places.

"I’ll send someone with food later," John said to Thomas, finalising a long series of instructions. The core of his command was simple: Stay inside the fortress and do not leave the safety of the walls under any circumstances.

"I wish we could be of more help," Thomas said, pausing as he looked out over the sea of faces behind him. "Yet it’s clear we’ll only be a burden, exactly as we are now."

"You just started really walking down the right path later than my friends and me," John reassured him, his tone calm but firm.

"Use this time to rest and absorb everything you saw. Assess your powers, analyse the changes in your abilities and attributes, but limit it to friendly sparring. This is the quiet before the final stretch. We are going to clear an area for all of humanity once and for all. And don’t forget..."

"Never trust a machine. I’ve got it," Thomas repeated. It was a warning John had hammered into them dozens of times. "Don’t worry about us. Back on Athanasia, a few of us were powerhouses, A-rank warriors and specialised combatants. It’s just that here, we’ve lost a staggering amount of our baseline power."

"You haven’t seen anything," John sighed. Hearing a man who had retained nearly fifty percent of his original Athanasian power complain made John wonder what Thomas would say if he had lost niniety-nine percent of his strength, like Ricky or Elena.

Leaving them behind was the most logical move. This territory was positioned relatively close to the Hiveminds’ new base, but John wasn’t concerned about a raid from there.

Even after all this time, the Hiveminds were locked in a brutal defensive war of attrition with Lilith. That race was masters of defensive warfare, and they were successfully delaying their inevitable demise by turning every inch into a deathtrap.

Yet for a reason, John was rooting inwardly for them. He still craved to control a few of them, binding them using the magical contracts. He kept entertaining such an idea for so long, since he attacked their territory with Wrathers. And after all this time, he couldn’t help but think more seriously about doing it, especially after what he experienced here with Mark.

John decided his immediate priority was to secure Luke’s territory before turning his full attention to the Hiveminds. Even though he didn’t have even a general idea of where the mysterious northern den was hidden, it was wiser to uproot the thorn on his side, Luke’s machine den, before diving into the final, massive theatre of this trial.

As he ran toward Luke’s territory, he checked the overall situation on his map. The southern threats were officially nullified. The only remaining hot zones were Luke’s, the Hiveminds’, and the cloaked sixth den in the far north.

Luke was clearly struggling. Despite all the time that passed, his den was still churning out standard machine types in astronomical volumes. It had reached a tipping point where it was no longer safe for Luke and Elena to step outside their fortifications to clear the field.

The machines had become an endless ocean; no matter how many thousands they slaughtered, a fresh wave of millions would simply flood the gap.

Their only way to keep fighting in such a delicate situation had been to hunker down behind the walls and utilise the purple and yellow grenades. It was Elena’s idea to switch to a purely defensive, high-explosive attrition strategy, and John could only sigh when he tried to estimate how many cores the two burnt through the past few hours alone.

"It seems I’ll need to wait until I’ve uprooted the machines, secured the Krogers, then trigger a few more Wrather outbreaks," he mused, thinking of their rapidly shrinking reserves of the cores. "And those three thousand humans I left behind... They need to go through exactly what we suffered to truly mature. It’s two birds with one stone."

He estimated he had roughly six hours of travel before reaching Luke. He didn’t adopt high-speed travel. He didn’t enjoy any proper sleep or rest, and so he decided not to further exhaust his already over-the-limit body.

By the time he arrived, night had fully reclaimed the world. Even though the territory was crawling with machines, he didn’t consider destroying the den yet.

The memory of the high-grade loot he harvested from the highest-grade machines made his blood boil with anticipation and desire. He wanted this den to evolve. He wanted it to produce the highest-grade scrap possible.

John didn’t know how life was after clearing the trial pocket. Would there be another chance to harvest these high-grade items? Would they meet monsters regularly and collect more cores?

He lacked any insight into what it would be after finishing the trial. So he decided not to take any risk and gather as much loot as he could before finally heading to the real Source Code World.