Athanasia: My Hacker System

The thousands-strong Demons, previously blinded by the betrayal of their own kin, turned as one. Thousands of glowing red eyes fixed on John and Ricky with the intensity of a dying star.

"Retreat for now," John said, his voice cutting through the roar of the demonic horde with a chilling lack of emotion. "I’ll keep them busy for quite some time before joining you. Don’t look back."

Ricky had already scouted three potential exit routes and mapped the terrain for a high-speed withdrawal the moment they stepped into the fray. When the order came, he didn’t flinch or offer a heroic protest.

He spun on his heel, his swords blurring into the nearby, hastily grouping Demons, as he carved a bloody path through the stragglers at the edge of the encirclement. He sprinted toward the base of the hill with a speed that defied human limits.

For John, however, the situation was the definition of a death trap. He was the centre of a closing circle of dark-red giants.

’Encrypted Skin... Logic Bomb... Lightning Dance... MP Absorption... Code Destruction...’

John didn’t wait for them to close the distance. He unleashed a barrage of his deadliest abilities in a seamless, overlapping sequence. As the first wave of Demons lunged, their blades clashing against his skin, a dull metallic ring echoed across the plains. John suffered zero damage.

John started a barrage of his deadliest attacks, one after another. Even if the Demons wanted to stop him, they couldn’t. The humans proved to be more cunning and lethal than they had even expected.

The Demons were howling in a mix of fury and genuine terror. The humiliation they got on the hands of a fallen race drove their blood to boil. They began to pulse with a dangerous, dark radiance, their stats soaring as they fought him with everything they got.

The sheer force of their combined attacks finally began to tell, pushing John back a few meters at a time through pure physical mass. Yet, despite the pressure, the casualty count tilted in the human’s favour.

John felt the strain. He glanced toward the hill, considering a full tactical retreat. His confusion abilities were losing their edge as the demons regained their discipline, and more of them were beginning to ignore their maddened comrades to focus solely on him.

But before he could commit to the withdrawal, the world seemed to tilt on its axis.

Luke, who had been left without a foe on the hilltop, had grown tired of watching from the sidelines. He had descended the slope like a boulder in a landslide, his massive club resting on his shoulder.

Just as the demons prepared for a final, coordinated lunge at John, Luke’s voice boomed across the battlefield, louder than the cannons of the galleons above.

"The Dragons are coming!"

John frowned, his mind racing through the possibilities. Was Luke trying to bluff? Was he using the earlier illusion as a psychological weapon to break the Demons’ resolve? It seemed like a desperate play for such a critical moment.

The realisation that it wasn’t a bluff hit him a second later.

Out of thin air, as if tearing through the fabric of the sky itself, many winged silhouettes appeared. These weren’t the hollow phantoms of John’s Sandbox ability; these were the real Dragons.

The Dragon girl from earlier had led her kin back into the fray. With a deafening roar that shook the very foundation of the hill, thousands of Dragons descended upon the Demon fleet and the ground forces alike.

The sudden arrival of a third party shattered the Demons’ focus. The rising doubts and the singular hatred they had focused on John vanished, replaced by the instinctual need to survive a war with their strongest rivals.

They scrambled to form a defensive line against the winged assault, but John wasn’t about to let them stabilise.

He lunged into the heart of the restructuring demonic ranks, his blades dancing as he turned their hastily formed ranks into a massacre. The initial chaos he had manufactured was now a full-scale, three-way war.

On the ground, Luke joined Ricky, the two of them operating like a meat grinder. Luke’s club shattered demonic armour with every swing, while Ricky’s daggers found the gaps in the giants’ defences. Above them, Cissel and Elena were a spectacle of destruction.

They leapt from ship to ship with a grace and a ferocity that even the winged Dragons couldn’t match. Every time they touched a silver deck, a large number of massive explosions of purple fire followed, turning the Pirate fleet into a series of floating pyres.

The Dragons fought with ferocity, using their wings, weapons, and breath to tear at the ships, but they were shocked to find themselves being outperformed.

Despite their numbers and draconic, famous might, the two human girls were dealing more damage to the fleet than the entire Dragon aerial force combined. The purple grenades were a nightmare the silver ships had no defence against.

In the eye of the storm, John remained cold and collected. He wasn’t just fighting for survival; he was harvesting. He leaned down over the corpse of a fallen demon commander, his fingers catching a shimmering, dark necklace.

’This is what I wanted the most,’ John thought, his eyes scanning the chaotic battlefield for more. The entire battlefield looked like a treasure trove of storage devices and tons of precious items in his eyes.

"I need to collect as many of these as possible before we pull out," John muttered.

John didn’t let the sudden twist in events cloud his judgment. Even if the Dragons were here to kill the Demons for reasons he didn’t know yet, he knew his stance was vastly different from theirs.

They had their protective zone close by and could simply retreat and escape toward it in case a grander enemy approached. The humans, however, were still deep in a world where every step was a gamble with their lives.

Even if the Demons were taken by surprise, they weren’t that easy to kill.