"We finally did it!"
The words were spoken with more exhaustion than triumph. The team had struggled with every fibre of their being for nearly an entire day against the Elite Wrathers and their Sorolith bosses.
After John had reorganised them into specialised strike teams, the efficiency had spiked; they began to kill one battalion every two hours. Yet, as the tenth hour passed, a sense of crushing futility began to set in. It felt as if the purple fog was a bottomless well of nightmare.
The first wave John had lured out was dead, replaced by a second, and then a third. It seed that every ti he tossed a cluster of cores into that unnatural fog, a fresh, gleaming group of scaled horrors erged to take the place of the fallen.
John’s eyes narrowed as he analysed the situation. At this rate, they would never clear the den or establish total control before the eighth and final wave concluded, a variable he was no longer willing to tolerate. He was fed up with the shifting rules of this weird territory.
"New plan," John barked, his voice raspy from shouting over the thunder of cannons.
Before inviting the next wave from the fog, he ordered his friends to saturate the entire kill zones around the outposts with yellow grenades. Then, as the fight comnced, they integrated the purple grenades into their tactics.
The shift was devastating and deadly. The additional grenade explosions cut their engagent ti in half. Finally, after twenty gruelling hours of non-stop combat, the last group of Elite Wrathers and their Sorolith monsters lay in heaps of torn limbs and flesh.
"They are still struggling," John muttered, wiping a thick layer of sweat, dirt, and blood from his face. He was beyond tired, his muscles scread, and his ntal focus was fraying, yet the map painted a dire picture.
Even with the elite Wrathers handled by them, the Bulltors were being hamred by the normal Wrathers and yellow monsters. The combined red and yellow tides were surging against the periter outposts.
The yellow monsters from the three dens were a constant pressure, but the sheer, unprecedented volu of this final Wrather wave had turned the battlefield into a at grinder.
"And the black sky didn’t vanish this ti," John noted, looking upward.
When he had killed the Sorolith in his ho territory, the black clouds had broken imdiately. This ti, the sky remained a bruised, oily black. Furthermore, the purple fog hadn’t expanded to swallow the territory as it had before; it remained concentrated, thick and pulsing, around the central den.
John had suspected this. After seeing how the den’s nature had evolved and changed, producing Soroliths as if they were re elite mobs rather than the final boss, he knew the win condition had shifted. The rules of the previous Wrather trial no longer applied to this escalated nightmare.
"I’m going in," John said, turning to his friends. His eyes were narrowed, reflecting the distant flashes of cannons.
"We have four hours at most before the night falls. While I’m inside, make sure to activate every single Wrathers core you’ve harvested out there." He motioned toward the field of corpses. "And don’t you dare forget to gather the scales and the tails."
"Are these scales that important?" Cissel asked, her ears perking up instantly. She had learned that if John specified a loot item, it usually ant there was great benefit behind it.
John nodded grimly. "Just gather everything. There are thousands of scales on every Sorolith and around a hundred on every Elite Wrather. They’re high-grade armour materials. Don’t leave a single scrap behind."
"Count on us," Elena jumped in, her eyes gleaming with the sa greedy spark as Cissel’s.
Ricky simply rolled his eyes and remained silent, leaning heavily on his shield. Luke didn’t even have the energy to comnt; he was sprawled on the scorched ground, chest heaving as he fought just to draw air into his lungs.
John left them to their scavenging and stepped into the wall of purple fog. Before moving through the fog, he made sure to replenish his exhausted ntal Points to the max using his MP Absorption ability.
He braced his mind, preparing for sothing exponentially worse than a Sorolith, perhaps a Hivemind-Wrather hybrid or another fiercer variant. He activated his Fra Recognition ability, prepared to use a barrage of his abilities and sword special effects, while venturing deeper into the fog.
He followed the sa internal compass he had used back in his own territory, expecting an ambush at every turn. Yet, strangely, he t no resistance. No claws lunged from the gloom; no lightning crackled in his path, not a single roar heard at all. He kept walking through the silent, swirling purple fog until he reached the epicentre, the place where the Hiveminds massive central base should have been.
But there were no walls here. There were no tallic bunkers or deadly towers. It wasn’t a base made of stone or steel at all.
John stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth slightly agape as the fog parted to reveal the structure at the heart of the den.
"What the heck is that?!!"
The mont John reached the area where the old Hiveminds’ base had stood, the purple fog suddenly thinned out until it vanished entirely. To him, it felt like he was standing in the eye of a colossal storm. In the sudden clarity, he could see the intricate details of the structure looming in front of him.
It was the first ti he had ever seen sothing of this nature. The code structure wasn’t ford of a single colour; instead, he could see every single hue in existence vibrating within the sh. And that wasn’t all.
"It’s like a gigantic brain..."
After standing there for almost half an hour, walking around the structure and carefully examining it, John finally reached this conclusion.
The codes weren’t aligned in a linear fashion like the standard layout of anything he had inspected before; they were deeply integrated, with pulsing charges passing from one cluster to another in a frantic, chaotic dance.
Seeing this made him recall the biological structure of a brain, neurons and neural links, from his ti on Earth.
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