Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 284: The Mysterious Northern Machines

A few minutes later, she finally moved. She turned toward Luke, her eyes narrowed, and a look of absolute, iron-clad determination hardened her features. "Can you hold this territory on your own?"

"Alone?! I can’t..." Luke was visibly taken aback, his grip on his club faltering for a split second. The weight of the responsibility hit him like a punch in the face. He had assumed she would take the entire force with her to reinforce John.

"With two hundred and fifty Bulltors," she corrected him, her voice leaving no room for argument. "Can you do it? Can you keep this den contained while I move?"

Luke took a deep breath, his chest expanding as he processed the challenge. After a few moments, the hesitation vanished from his eyes, replaced by a fire Cissel had rarely seen in him.

He firmly waved his massive club, turning toward the gathered Bulltors. He climbed onto a piece of mechanical wreckage, raising his voice so it echoed across the entire group.

"Our leader, the mighty and only John, is being schemed against! He is being flanked by these treacherous machines, the same machines that butchered your kin! These are monsters that shouldn’t even exist in this pocket trial!

I know it’s a lot to ask, but we have to do everything in our power! We will hold this goddamn line! We will not let a single machine tin can pass through us... We’ll kill them all!"

The response was instantaneous. The five hundred Bulltors around him let out a mighty roar that shook the very ground.

Cissel watched the show, momentarily stunned. She hadn’t expected such a speech to come out of the blue, let alone from Luke. She felt a strange surge of pride, impressed by how he could step up as a leader in the middle of the darkest hours they had ever faced.

As she stood there, taken aback, Luke jumped down from the wreckage and walked over to her. He raised a closed fist in the air before pumping it hard against his chest.

"Leave this territory to me and the others. We won’t let you down!"

"We won’t let you down!" As if Luke had suddenly revealed himself to be a long-lost Bulltor descendant, the giants all around mimicked his move, shouting the words in a deafening chorus.

Cissel shook her head in a helpless, slightly amused way. "Fine," she said, her voice softening just a fraction. She paused, looking back at the den before adding, "It’s a good idea to cover the den with a stronger layer of our defences and a carpet of yellow grenades before daylight arrives. If the waves escalate, you’ll need every possible help."

"I’ll do it," Luke nodded firmly. In that moment, he felt like an entirely different person than the one Cissel had known at the start of the adventure.

Without wasting another second, Cissel signalled her share of the Bulltors. She picked two hundred and fifty of the strongest warriors and began to run, leaving the two of the Twelve with Luke to help.

They moved as a dark, silent blur, heading as fast as their legs could carry them directly toward John’s southern coordinates, while spreading yellow fire around to lighten up their path and drive the cold away.

As they entered the thick, oppressive fog, it wasn’t long before they encountered the groups the Bulltors had mentioned. Cissel didn’t launch an immediate attack on the first squad she spotted. She remembered what John had taught her about the machines’ sensor limitations.

Inside this white veil of fog, they were functionally blind. She had narrated stories to the Bulltors about how John exploited this weakness, and she planned to do exactly the same.

The machine units were weird, not like anything she had spotted before. And yet she pushed back her curiosity for now. Refusing to take unnecessary risks or waste time running tests on them, she reached into her storage and pulled out the purple grenades.

She threw hell upon them. A single, well-thrown grenade was enough to incinerate a group of ten thruster S-1000s. Even though they were hovering tens of meters off the ground, they couldn’t escape the wrath and devastation brought forth by the activated Wrather cores.

Once the smoke cleared, she knelt to examine the first pile of wreckage. She felt a deep sense of bafflement. She poked at the advanced portable cannons, versions she had never seen before, and examined the intricate back thrusters and the thick alloys of their bodies.

She didn’t know how they had been smuggled into the trial from the north without getting detected by John or the Bulltors, but the truth was undeniable: "Those machines are terrible news!"

Realising the scale of the threat made her pivot her strategy. If these units were marching in small squads through the fog, a single line of defence wouldn’t be enough.

Instead of continuing her direct sprint toward John, she began to run horizontally across the fog. She started laying out outposts consisting of reinforced walls and towers at key intervals, aiming to kite them down steadily.

At the same time, she took out fifty of the Mobile Fortresses John had provided, using them for the first time in real combat. She filled their internal decks to the brim with a forest of defensive towers, not caring to add a single wall there.

The Bulltors lagged slightly by her side, their massive forms shifting restlessly as they realised their direct combat prowess hadn’t been needed so far.

For the past few hours, Cissel had been a whirlwind of activity, deploying layered while slowly and steadily pushing her way south. Every small machine group they encountered had met a swift, explosive end at the hands of her purple grenades.

Watching the absolute devastation these grenades unleashed, the Bulltors felt a collective pang of regret. They remembered the heaps upon heaps of these cores they had ignored back at the earlier battlefields.

Only now did they truly understand why the humans had been so obsessed with collecting them, even nearly coming to blows over the spoils.