Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 283: Spotting Weird Machine Groups Coming from North

"Hey, Cissel, wake up! Wake up!"

A couple of hours after she had finally surrendered to exhaustion and slept, the territory had been so calm, the silence so heavy and peaceful, that the sudden jolt of sound felt like a lightning blow.

She was startled awake by loud, frantic shouts echoing outside the walls of her small outpost, the structure she had claimed as a temporary bedroom.

Cissel’s eyes snapped open. Before she could even fathom the source of the noise, before her mind could strip away the fog of deep sleep, her instincts took over. Her hands blurred, fingers locking around the hilts of her daggers.

She vaulted from her bedroll, her body moving with a reactive speed born of a thousand life-and-death encounters. She lashed out, her blades whistling through the empty air in a series of defensive arcs, as if parrying a sneak attack from an invisible foe.

"Luke?!! What’s going on?!!"

Moments later, her heart rate began to level out as her mind finally regained its clarity. The place was empty. There was no assassin, no machine unit lunging at her. She heard Luke’s voice shouting her name again from outside, his tone urgent and lacking its usual playful edge.

Cissel growled in sheer annoyance at being woken during her precious few hours of rest, before jumping from the top of the outpost walls and landing with a dull thud on the ground outside.

"There is something big happening!" Luke didn’t seem distressed or nervous about her murderous glare or the way she was still white-knuckling her daggers. Instead, he gestured broadly toward the surrounding Bulltors, the entire five hundred-strong reinforcement group John had sent.

"They said they encountered something bizarre while coming here. A group of weird machines, Cissel. Ones that were marching straight toward John’s place!"

"What?!!!"

The annoyance evaporated instantly. The mention of John’s name acted like a bucket of ice water to her soul. She didn’t care about the broken sleep or the confusion anymore.

"Tell me everything," she commanded, ignoring Luke entirely and turning her gaze toward the Bulltors. She let out a low, dangerous roar that made the nearest warriors stiffen. "Tell me everything down to the tiniest detail. Don’t leave out a single scrap of information."

"Well..." One of the Twelve stepped forward. He stuttered slightly, feeling a sudden, inexplicable chill as he looked into Cissel’s fierce eyes. It felt like he was standing in front of an enemy far more terrifying than the machines.

"When we were moving to reach this position, we ran into a machine group. It was only about ten units, small enough that they didn’t pose any threat to a force of our size, but they were ferocious. They were different. It took all of us quite some time just to destroy those few..."

"Were they big? Did they look like these?!" Cissel didn’t wait for him to finish. She sprinted toward a pile of scrap at the edge of the outpost, dragging out the twisted, blackened body of an S-1000 unit she and Luke had destroyed earlier in the day.

The Bulltor looked at the broken machine and hesitated, shaking his head. "It’s somewhat similar, but totally different," he explained, his voice deep and grim.

"See, these new units were way bigger, much fiercer. And they didn’t carry those small, fixed cannons on their backs like this one. They held a much stronger cannon in their hands, like a soldier would carry a rifle. To be honest, the shots from them were deadly.

If they hadn’t been acting so weirdly inside the fog, unable to see or detect us accurately, we would have suffered a lot of casualties just taking down that ten-unit squad."

"Is that so?" Cissel narrowed her eyes, her mind already analysing the threat. Hand-held cannons meant higher mobility and better tracking, yet she had zero recollection of such units ever being in her memories. "You said they were heading towards John. How can you be so certain?"

"Because we ran into more groups later," the Bulltor added, his expression hardening. "Every single cluster we spotted was moving in a straight line from north to south, then heading east. There is only one territory in that direction that could attract such attention. The one John is occupying, right?"

"That’s indeed true," Cissel’s eyes shone with a fierce, cold light. "I don’t know what these things are, but we need to assume the worst-case scenario. First, we need to ask ourselves: where did they originate from? The Hiveminds’ new base? Their old one? Your territory? Or ours?!"

She pointed toward the various territories mapped out to the north of their current position, her mind spinning through the possibilities of Mark’s new move.

"They didn’t come from the new Hiveminds territory," the Bulltor said, glancing at his comrades. This was clearly a topic they had debated heavily upon during their march, as the others all nodded in solemn agreement.

"We came directly from that sector, remember? We decided, after meeting the first few groups, to start scouting and scanning the fog more aggressively. We pushed further north, and that’s where we met more of them. They were all streaming down from the north, heading south..."

"From which north exactly?" Cissel interrupted him, her daggers pointing in two different directions like compass needles. "From the northeast or the northwest?"

"Neither," the Bulltor commander said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper that sent a sudden chill down Cissel’s spine. "They weren’t hugging the borders of any territory. They were walking in the dead centre of the fog."

"Weird..."

Cissel went silent. She stood as still as a statue for a long moment, her gaze fixed on the distant shifting wall of white mist that bordered their territory. The air around them seemed to thicken with tension.

Not a single soul, neither Luke nor the five hundred giants, dared to open their mouths or ask about anything. They waited with bated breath for her to speak her mind, knowing that whatever she decided would shift the future of their upcoming battle.