Athanasia: My Hacker System

John’s friends lapsed into a respectful silence, letting him work through the mountain of loot.

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.

The rocks that covered the ridge and formed the base of the hill began to change. The vibrant, pulsating blue, green, and white lights that had characterised the Mana mine started to dim.

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.

At some point, the transformation became so terrifying that John had to stop and send for Goven. The Kroger’s leader arrived quickly, examined the fading luminescence. He muttered to himself, poking at the now-inert rock.

"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.

Luckily, the rocks on the surface of any mine are just the manifestation of excess Mana from the veins. They will recharge over time as the Mana vein will keep releasing the excess energy out, but you’ve certainly put a dent in the exposed supply that we could have easily harvested."

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.

Goven initially planned to mine these surface rocks. They weren’t the highest quality gemstones, but they would be faster to refine. And now John just depleted everything.

"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!"

The Kroger was far more interested in the impossibility of John’s work than in the results of the hack itself. John’s friends simply chuckled, telling the puzzled Kroger that their John was quite special," and could do things that defied the nature of humans.

"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.

Even though he was dying to stay and study John’s actions, he had far more pressing matters back at the engineering meeting. He and the other Krogers, along with the Bulltor bright minds, were currently locked in a grand brainstorming session.

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

"Let’s see what they got..."

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.

"Any grenade is mine!" Elena barked immediately.

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

"Anything we find here that can be used for our defences goes to Goven first," he said. The two girls looked at him with piteous, pleading eyes, prompting him to add, "However, we’ll keep fifty percent. We divide it equally. If anyone wants to exchange items, you can do it freely among yourselves."

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.

The deal was simple: for every grenade John handed to the boys, they would trade it back to the girls for ten of any other item they might receive.

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.

He reached for a specific scale, one that was a deep, vibrant red. He had only found a few of this colour on the battlefield.

"Interesting..."

As he accessed the red scale, items began to pour out in the thousands, forming a heap around him. However, they weren’t in their full, activated forms. They appeared as dormant, miniature versions of themselves, strange metallic shapes and small tokens.

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

Before trying to deplete the mine again, he attempted to activate one of the items using his standard method of paying Mental Points. As he feared, the system rejected the attempt. The item remained inert.

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?

Thinking about this made his craving to secure more Mana mines intensified as a high priority.

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 hill of stones shone with intense, bright lights. There were deep blues, emerald greens, and even new golden gemstones among them. Unlike the unrefined ore in the mine, these were processed gemstones.

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.

"Don’t even think about it," Ricky said, crossing his arms and glaring at the two girls. "We already established the rules for the explosives. The gemstones are a different category entirely."

"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."

"As if I’d believe a single word of that," Luke chimed in, crossing his massive arms. He turned to John, who was still fiddling with the item he had grabbed and was ready to activate.

"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."

"I’ll do it," John said, ending the debate before it could escalate into a full-blown headache. "Just stand back and let me do my job properly. There are a lot of weird items in this pile that I don’t recognise..."

FWOOSH!

Just as he was speaking, John picked up a small, curved item that resembled a fossilised wing, the kind he had seen on the backs of the Dragons. The moment he absorbed a spark of Mana and directed it towards the item to activate it, the item didn’t just grow; it exploded in one breath.

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.

"What is that?!!"

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.

John pulled up the item’s description by simply touching it. It was a Draconic Sky-Sledge, designed for high-altitude travel for long durations and across vast distances.

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.

However, John noticed a glaring flaw: it lacked any built-in offensive or defensive structures. It was a transport vessel, not a warship.

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

He didn’t think twice about boarding the wing. Then he began mounting his defences directly onto the golden surface. Walls snapped into place, followed by towers and cannons. Within minutes, he had transformed the sleek transport into a floating fortress bristling with enough firepower to pose a real threat to the Demons’ flying ships.

"Fly higher," he commanded.

He knew he could give verbal commands, though it would limit the wing’s maximum speed. To truly master the wing, someone would need to man the control staff at the forefront, but for a stress test, a vocal prompt was sufficient.

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.

"If someone was actually piloting it, the ceiling would be triple this," John noted with satisfaction. He ordered the wing to descend and de-summoned the defences. "This is going to be a game-changer for the big battles ahead. We won’t be trapped on the ground anymore. Yet we need more of these..."

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.

And yet he did as he promised earlier.

"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.

It now operated primarily on his Mental Points, though Mana gemstones were still needed to power these wings. "Try to see if you can synchronise with them. Test your control."

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.

Ricky, in particular, became obsessed with the flight dynamics. He kept shouting orders, sending his wing screaming into the upper atmosphere before plunging back toward the earth in a rapid dive.

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 sought high mobility, not just a floating fortress. John didn’t mind the different approaches; in a real war, he would need both.

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.