Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 398: The Situation Goes Out of Control!

John looked through the walls, scanning the fourth room down the corridor where Cissel was.

He spotted her immediately; she wasn’t in bed. She was standing surprisingly close to the door. But it wasn’t her position that drove a spike of panic into his heart; it was her body codes. Her body was formed of the normal green and white codes, overlaid with a foreign lattice of dark clusters that looked like a parasite feeding on her from within.

"Move aside!" John roared.

He didn’t wait for permission any more. He dashed toward the closed doors of the infirmary, charging into the corridor. He was met immediately by several medic teachers who had been monitoring the wing. They jumped back in shock as John forced his way past them, his sword already drawn and a deadly look was on his face.

"Get out of my way! Now!"

"You need to get back, student!" one of the teachers shouted, reaching out to intercept him. Another teacher didn’t bother with words; he pressed a button on his wrist, an emergency beacon that flared to life, signalling a high-level security breach within the infirmary, asking for help.

John didn’t care about the alarms. He didn’t care about the teachers or the disciplinary consequences of his actions. He only cared about the fourth room. Seeing the medics refused to move, John didn’t waste time with a debate.

He used his shoulder to plough through them, his sheer momentum tossing them aside with zero patience. He reached the door to the fourth room and kicked it open with a deafening crash.

"You..." Cissel gasped, staring at him as he burst in uninvited. She looked pale, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and something darker. "What are you doing here? I told them... I said no one was allowed to visit me!"

"Who said that? Cissel? Or was it you?"

John’s voice was as cold as a winter grave. Without waiting for a response, he closely examined her using Frame Recognition.

Cissel’s body code structure was a disaster. Instead of the healthy, vibrant green codes and the white clusters, her body was a total mess with the third black clusters invading and spreading like cancer.

The black code clusters that John had only ever seen within the pocket trial were boring deep into her body, weaving themselves around many spots like a parasitic vine. There wasn’t just one or two of these, there were dozens!

The silence that followed his question was deafening.

Before the standoff could escalate further, the doorway was flooded with many people. The frantic alarm triggered by the medic teachers had worked too well. Nikolas was the first to barge into the room, his eyes wide as he assessed the scene: John standing in front of Cissel with a drawn sword and a look of madness.

For a moment there, the ill rumours that spread earlier about what happened between the two didn’t look like lies any more.

"John, snap out of it already!" Nikolas roared, his voice booming in the small room. Behind him, a dozen other teachers, belonging to the Military and Medic Departments, gathered. It looked as if they had utilised a secret network of shortcuts to travel across the department in an instant.

John didn’t even look at them. He kept his blade levelled toward the centre of Cissel’s chest. Yet the next instant, Nikolas flashed and stood in between John’s sword and Cissel.

"You need to step aside, Nikolas," John growled, his grip on his sword tightening. "That person... She isn’t our Cissel! Something else, something foul, is infesting her body. I can feel it. And I am going to purge it out right now!"

"John, calm down!" Nikolas shouted back, though his tone was no longer just authoritative; it was laced with a desperate, agonising worry. In this chaotic situation, Nikolas couldn’t tell if John snapped under the pressure or he was seeing a truth the rest of them were blind to.

John ignored the plea, taking a heavy, deliberate step forward.

"Don’t let him come near me!" Cissel’s voice rang out, shrill and panicked. She shrank back to the bed, pointing a trembling finger at John. She tried to mask it, tried to smooth over the werindess of her voice, but to John’s ears, the deception was pathetic. "He’s crazy! Look at him! He’s going to kill me!"

"Just listen to her!" John roared at Nikolas, his finger pointing accusingly at Cissel. "Listen to the voice! This isn’t even hers!"

At that moment, the Headmaster arrived, flanked by John’s friends. Ricky, Luke, Elena, and Ben pushed through the crowd of teachers, their expressions a mixture of confusion and growing dread. They looked at John with the same uncertainty as the Headmaster, their eyes darting between their most trusted friend and the girl they considered his.

"He is lying," Cissel said, her voice dropping into a soft, melodic tone. She was putting on a masterclass in performance, trying to sound like the normal, vulnerable Cissel they all knew.

To the medic teachers who only knew her as a patient file, it was a convincing act. But to the friends who had bled beside her in the pocket trial, the mask was slipping.

"Who the f*** are you?" Elena was the first to break the silence. She didn’t hesitate, stepping up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with John, her eyes fixed on the girl in the bed with a deadly glare. "What did you do to our friend? This isn’t Cissel’s voice."

"This isn’t her," Luke added, his voice low and dangerous. He gritted his teeth and pulled out his massive club, the heavy weapon thudding against the floor. "Whatever you are, you made a mistake hiding in there. You won’t make it out of this room. We’ll kill you before we let you have her."

Ricky was the last to move. He stepped forward, his eyes never leaving John. "John," he whispered, "do you know what this is? Do you have any clue what happened to her?"