Athanasia: My Hacker System

John didn’t look up immediately. He was in the middle of a complex task, taking out various pieces of equipment and then retracting them into his inventory.

He was deep in his work mode, scanning the underlying code of his defences, checking to see how the world’s demotion had affected their internal logic. He looked like a man trying to solve a puzzle that only he could see.

"Hey," John replied, his voice neutral as he continued to cycle through a stack of defensive modules.

The flickering light of the aurora above danced off his face, highlighting the intense focus in his eyes, a focus that, for the moment, was entirely dedicated to the machines rather than the person standing right in front of him.

John’s eyes flickered across the translucent strings of data floating before him. He was itching to begin a mass upgrade and evolution of his defences, yet a specific technical worry nagged at the back of his mind.

Many of these structures had already been pushed through evolution cycles using different cores back in the pocket trial.

Now that they had been demoted by the world’s laws, he faced a dilemma: would the system recognise them as new entities that could be enhanced by cores from scratch once more, or would he be forced to use his rare reset cores to scrub their history before they could grow again?

He was so deeply entrenched in his thoughts that he almost missed Cissel’s approach, though as she drew near, he could sense the heavy cloud of anxiety trailing her. He knew exactly what was on her mind.

Ever since that fateful meeting where secrets had been stripped bare, he had been wrestling with the same tension that was currently eating her alive.

Cissel had guessed correctly, at least in part. In the aftermath of her revelation, John had retreated into the cold shell of a leader.

He had processed her existence as a Regressor the way a leader processed a formidable asset on his side, a powerful tool to be integrated into a coherent inner circle designed to serve his grander cause. But there was another side to the equation she hadn’t grasped yet.

"So..." After a few hollow, superficial exchanges, Cissel’s voice wavered. Her heart clenched, feeling as though a cold, invisible hand had reached into her chest and squeezed hard.

She forced herself to stand tall, summoning every ounce of courage she possessed to throw out the question that had been haunting her dreams. "What do you really think about my regression ability? About... Me?"

The silence that followed was deafening. For several long seconds, John didn’t speak, and to Cissel, those moments were the harshest she had ever endured. The aurora above continued its silent, colourful dance, but the world around her felt frozen.

She had never felt this level of stress, not even when facing death in many of her previous regressions. She was terrified of what he might say, yet she knew she couldn’t survive another month of this distance.

"Listen..." John finally began. That first pause made Cissel’s heart drop into her stomach, fearing the worst of her fears to come true. But what he said next made her spirit leap toward the starlit sky.

"As I said before, I truly believe there isn’t a chance you met me in any previous regressions. I have my reasons for saying so, reasons I won’t explain further, but I am absolutely sure of this: this is our first time meeting. And you know what? I’m glad we did."

The transformation was instantaneous. Cissel’s face went from ashen white to a deep, burning crimson in the blink of an eye.

She couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze anymore, her eyes darting toward the grass at her feet as she processed the full weight of his words. The crushing anxiety vanished, replaced by a surge of immense happiness so potent it made her feel lightheaded.

"That means... Our date is still valid?" she asked softly. Her voice was barely a whisper, carried away almost as soon as it left her lips.

"I won’t accept anything less," John replied, his face finally breaking into a bright, genuine smile. He stepped toward her, the cold commander replaced by the close friend she remembered.

"After everything we’ve lived through, we have things that go way deeper than just secrets and past lives. We have a future that we’re going to decide for ourselves, a present that we should properly and fully live."

For a moment, Cissel looked like she wanted nothing more than to throw herself into his arms, to lean her head against his shoulder and let the rest of the world fade into the background.

The intensity of the moment was too much for her to stay still. Instead, she moved with lightning speed, a swift, daring blur. She leaned in, planting a soft, fleeting kiss on his lips. It was a stolen moment of pure happiness in the middle of an alien world.

Before John could even react, she had already pulled away and was running back toward the bonfires with everything she had, never once looking back.

"I’ve sealed the deal! Don’t you dare go back on your word!" her voice trailed back to him, carried by the cool northern wind and underscored by the haunting beauty of the shimmering atmosphere.

John stood there for a long minute, mesmerised and frozen in place. He slowly raised a hand, his fingers tracing the spot on his lips where her warmth had lingered. A warm, wide smile gradually spread across his face, reaching his eyes.

"I never had a girl before," he said to the empty air, watching her silhouette vanish as she joined the others at the celebration. "I never knew it would take literal time travel and throwing myself into the eye of a brutal storm between scary powers just to get one. And yet... For some reason... I feel like she’s worth it."

He shook his head, wondering if this was a final jest from fate or something that had been written in the stars long before he ever touched Athanasia’s grounds. But he didn’t let himself get distracted for long.

He was a man with a kingdom to build and a world to conquer. He turned his attention back to the holographic display of his Shell ability and the piles of cannons around.

"I can’t know for sure without trying," he muttered, his eyes falling on a group of one hundred small cannons. In the pocket trial, they had been towering, threatening pieces of artillery; here, they looked like oversized toys.