Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 285: Cissel Joins the Western Battlefield

Once Cissel felt she had laid a sufficient buffer of outposts, Cissel signalled for a full-tilt sprint.

In one hour of hasty travel, she finally arrived at the northern edge of the western border of John’s territory. There, she was welcomed by a scene she could never have expected in her wildest dreams.

"This..."

Cissel and the Bulltors froze in their tracks. Their minds struggled for several long minutes to grasp the sheer scale and chaos of the carnage unfolding in the distance.

Ahead of them, the Metallic Wasps were locked in a fierce, one-sided battle against John’s Mobile Fortresses. Because the evolved fliers couldn’t accurately detect the fortresses through the thick fog, they were firing wildly in every direction. The air was thick with friendly fire as they shredded their own kin, yet they failed to land a single coordinated hit on a fortress.

This was the first time for her to spot this type of machine. And what she saw gave goosebumps to her, realising next to her terror that John was fighting against these unknown and lethal enemies for long hours, alone!

Then, her eyes dropped to the ground units, the same thruster S-1000s she had been hunting in the fog on her travel to here. They were mimicking the frantic behaviour of the wasps, blindly saturating the area with plasma fire.

However, unlike the wasps’ erratic shots, the heavy projectiles from the S-1000s were causing significant collateral damage, the shockwaves rattling the Mobile Fortresses and damaging the defensive tower greatly.

The sheer numbers were terrifying, but their alien nature was far scarier. Cissel took ten whole minutes of silent observation to categorise the general abilities of the new breeds. What she saw made her realise that the thruster S-1000s were docile in comparison to these deadly wasps.

Everything about the Metallic Wasps was engineered for high-velocity slaughter: their vicious, space-collapsing tail shots that could even tear away the fog itself, their insectoid mobility, and those horrific blue fire bombs.

Everything about them told her that this wasn’t an enemy they should be fighting at their current level of power, at least, not out in the open. She even doubted if John would stand a winning chance if he were forced to engage this swarm without the cover of the fog.

And yet, despite the horror, she could sniff John’s fingerprints all over the battlefield.

"He knows about their presence," she muttered, her eyes tracing the specific modifications to the defences. She could easily tell he had adapted by noticing how he had stripped the fortresses of standard cannons and mounted only towers.

"Yet, even with his actions, the fortresses aren’t enough to contain a flood of this magnitude. If not for their panic-firing at shadows, the line would have been swarmed already. One type in the air, another on the ground... It’s like evolved versions of the flying drones and the S-1000s have been unleashed simultaneously."

Her sharp mind and instincts began to link the missing dots. Even if she had missed lots of information, she could already deduce the origin of these mechanical aberrations. The battlefield in front of her was a library of information, and Cissel was reading every line attentively.

Even without knowing the absolute root cause of this evolution, she was certain that a heavy ground army was moving closer to here with every passing hour, a different, far more dangerous breed than the standard D-1000s they had previously farmed for scrap.

Seeing the sheer, suffocating volume of the Metallic Wasps and the thruster S-1000s allowed her to guess the presence of evolved D-1000s easily. The spawning laws of the machine den were fixed; three types of machine units would come out, always followed by a specific ratio.

If the two smaller units were this numerous and this powerful already, she naturally expected a proportionally staggering number of evolved D-1000 juggernauts to appear.

Yet, the theory of the matter didn’t concern her as much as the tactical reality. She could see exactly what John had realised: these machines were only manageable because they were currently in the fog. If they were ever allowed to break out into a territory, if they regained their sensors and target-locking capabilities, they would be literally unstoppable.

She turned her head, scanning the perimeter, and spotted a few outposts at a distance. They were functional but sparse. "It seems he was in a hurry," she muttered.

The realisation hit her like a lightning blow; John was stretched thin, trying to cover a massive front alone. "But fret not, John. I’m here now, and I’ll take responsibility for this area for you."

She turned to the Bulltors stationed behind her. The look of pure horror on their faces spoke volumes. Their giant hands were trembling as they gripped their weapons, watching the black-hole-stings of the wasps collapse the air a few hundred meters away.

"Listen up," Cissel said. She wasn’t Luke; she had no intention of giving a grand, stirring speech.

"We need to strengthen this area. We defend this line no matter what comes our way from the depths of the fog. I’m going to lay out a series of massive outposts. I need you to leave a detachment of your force behind at each spot to safeguard against any machine slipping by the defences. Do you understand?"

Her words landed like heavy stones in a quiet pond. The Bulltors turned to her with widened eyes, their expressions screaming: Are you crazy? You want us to stand in the path of those things?!!

And yet, she ignored their silent protest. She began to lay out outposts from her own stockpile of defences. She adopted a specialised layout she had perfected back at the territory, a concave, semi-circular formation designed to funnel the enemy into a concentrated kill zone.

This kill pocket would maximise the overlapping fire from her towers, making it easier for the defences to exterminate the evolved units one batch at a time, regardless of their numbers.

However, she quickly reached a bottleneck. She was limited by the number of towers remaining in her inventory. She had used a great portion of the towers back at the northern territory and then again during her trek through the fog.

Because of this, she made the hard choice to lay down only a single, dense layer of defence instead of the triple-layered tower walls she had initially envisioned.

During all this, she couldn’t keep building without meeting the new breed of machines. She used her ability to kill any low-hovering wasps and thruster S-1000s, using the fog advantage fully while evading their deadly attacks using her short acceleration ability to escape.

Seeing her fight like that inspired the Bulltors. They crushed their fears and hesitation and finally joined the fray and started killing the machines.

"You are finally here!"

After a few hours of constant, frantic building and fighting, Cissel finally spotted a familiar silhouette blurred by the white fog, approaching at an incredible speed from far away. It was John.

As he skidded to a halt near her new barricade, she felt a wave of relief wash over her heart. He looked healthy, and miraculously, he was without a single visible wound.

"How did you arrive here?!! How did you even know I was under attack from three different directions?!!"

John was visibly shocked, his face a mask of total puzzlement. He had been running through this point, trying to figure out how Cissel could have timed her arrival so perfectly.

The only logical explanation he could find was that Blakar had sent a high-speed messenger to warn her, a level of coordination he hadn’t anticipated from the Bulltor, something he felt truly appreciative of.

"What are you talking about?!!"

Unlike what he expected, Cissel looked just as confused as he was. It was clear she had zero clue about the wider-scale disaster he was facing. And so, amidst the roar of towers and the screeches of dying machine units, the two began to trade their sides of the story. John walked beside her as they spoke, reinforcing her setup with his defences.