Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 348: The Grand Loot from Dragons and Demons

The sheer volume of items he had brought back was staggering, thousands of scales and demonic storage devices piled in heaps. However, as the hacking process continued, a more surprising and slightly terrifying phenomenon began to occur.

Slowly, the glowing rocks flickered and faded, turning into dull, grey, ordinary-looking stones. The sight gave everyone a scare, including John himself. It looked as though he was literally devouring the soul of the Mana vein.

"This is truly a peculiar thing to watch," Goven remarked, though he didn’t seem panicked. "The vein isn’t dried up, per se. You aren’t consuming the main vein, John, you are just emptying the surface rocks.

He looked up at John with a squint. John asked him a couple of days ago to mine and refine a few pieces as fast as he could, or else the two girls would make their way through the mine.

"Aren’t humans supposed to be a non-Mana-friendly species? How come you absorbed all the Mana on the surface? That’s a huge amount, even for a Mana-innate talented race!"

"It must be a one-in-a-lifetime evolution, a very rare occurrence without doubt," Goven concluded, finding a plausible excuse as he usually did.

They were sifting through dozens of aerial defence concepts, trying to decide which ones to discard and which to prioritise for manufacturing.

After spending hours hacking the remaining devices and absorbing massive amounts of Mental Points from metal scraps to offset the strain, John was finally ready. He sat before the first successfully hacked Dragon scale.

Before Cissel could jump at her with a counter-claim, John held up a hand to set the rules.

A massive grin broke across Elena’s face. She immediately turned to Ricky and Luke, initiating a frantic round of pre-emptive bartering before John had even pulled out a single item.

John shook his head helplessly. The girls’ obsession with explosives was reaching a dangerous level. Shifting his attention back to the task, he decided to start with the highest grade scale rather than the golden one he had first hacked.

"Interesting..."

"I bet it’ll need more Mana to get these activated," John muttered.

He frowned, contemplating the dilemma. If his ability to activate and deactivate items was now tied to a resource he didn’t naturally produce, and to make it worse, he had a limited amount of it, would his fighting prowess be crippled?

Just as the weight of this problem began to settle on him, more items continued to tumble out of the red scale. First came a handful of stones, then a dozen, then a literal flood. Thousands of refined gemstones, some as large as a Bulltor, spilt out, forming a small, glittering hill.

The sight of the gemstone hill was so dazzling that it momentarily broke the girls’ trance over the explosives. It seemed a universal law that anything shimmering with such ethereal light would draw the ladies’ eyes. But before Elena or Cissel could dive into the pile of radiant stones, the two boys stepped in as a physical barrier.

"Oh, come on!" Elena rolled her eyes, her hands pointing towards the shining bright heaps of gemstones. "Can’t you see we’re just making sure our share is properly accounted for? We wouldn’t want any to... Go missing."

"How about we let John finish activating the different items and distribute everything once he’s done? Otherwise, we’ll be arguing over shiny rocks until the Demons actually break through the mist."

FWOOSH!

The small wing expanded into a massive, aerodynamic floating board. At first glance, it reminded John of a higher version of the Mobile Fortresses they had used in the pocket trial, which usually hovered just a few meters off the ground. But this one felt different, felt more advanced.

All of his friends dropped their bickering instantly, their eyes wide as they stared at the alien vehicle John had just summoned. They crowded around it, running their hands over the surface. The board was made entirely of a golden ore that looked remarkably light yet possessed the structural density of reinforced steel.

Its only requirement was a steady supply of Mana gemstones to keep the wing active. It was large enough to host at least five hundred soldiers of any race, even the bulky Bulltors, and it worked as a direct counterpart to the Demons’ flying ships.

"Let me test something," John muttered. He didn’t want a transport bus; he wanted a predator.

"Fly higher," he commanded.

The wing groaned under the weight of the added steel, but it held. It hovered nearly five hundred meters off the ground, casting a massive shadow over the mine.

He began digging through the remaining loot to see how many of these winged items he had scavenged. They were clearly rare; out of the thousands of items, he only found ten total Sky-Sledges. Recalling how extremely few the red scales he got, he knew he didn’t have enough flying wings to fight freely.

"One for each of you," John said. After testing the deactivation and reactivation cycle, he was delighted to see a familiar system notification. Once the item was bound to him and got activated, the Mana requirement shifted.

He watched with a faint smile as his friends jumped at the new toys like children on a holiday. The sky-sledges responded to their verbal commands and flew with ease.

While John viewed the wings as stable platforms for heavy artillery, Ricky clearly saw them as high-speed interceptors. Out of the team, Ricky ranked second as the slowest after Luke. And that eternal disadvantage seemed to cast shadows over his heart.

He kept the other six in his inventory before turning to the grand loot and starting to go through them, hoping to find something similar to these wings.