Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 288: The Magnificent Sandbox Ability

John had harboured one lingering worry regarding his Sandbox ability: that the machines wouldn’t even detect his illusions because their sensors were malfunctioning inside the fog.

Unluckily for him, his fears were confirmed. The five dragons appeared, reared back their massive heads, and let out silent roars that shook the air, breathing torrents of illusory purple fire at the machines surrounding them. Yet, the mechanical tide simply marched on, totally missing the five dragons near them.

Because the dragons were illusions, they had no physical mass to collide with, and since the machines were operating on sensors, they didn’t detect the threat near them.

Only the few units that happened to be directly overlapping with the body of the illusion or the purple fire breaths covered them, triggering a reaction. They opened fire at once, but the devastation was nowhere near the grand chain reaction John had envisioned.

However, as John watched the illusions, a small ripple of chaos began to erupt at those five spots. As more machine units marched through the dragons, they eventually got triggered to attack. They detected the dragons and began firing fiercely.

The moment the surrounding machines got fired upon, they simply counter-fired. They responded to the attack by saturating the area with plasma shots. A cascade of stray fire started to expand, hitting neighbouring units, escalating like a snowball. What began as a slow trickle of friendly fire soon grew into a tsunami of self-destruction.

"Ok, I take it back," John evilly smirked, watching the crimson dots on his map begin to flicker and vanish in clusters. After passing through the centre of the fray and using his Encrypted Skin to shrug off the occasional stray shots that veered his way, he let out an evil laugh.

"This method might be slow to start with, but it’s surely effective given enough time. Ok, let me spread it over and over... Sandbox! Sandbox! Sandbox!"

He didn’t stop there. Seeing how effective the chaos became once the machines’ panic firing was triggered, he decided to scale up the illusions to fit the epic proportions of the evolved horde. And yet he decided after some time to enhance his own illusions.

"Make the dragons as big as fifty meters in radius, and a few hundred meters in height!"

Redesigning them this way transformed the dragons into glowing hills appearing high in the sky. As John increased the height of the illusions, the Metallic Wasps circling above were finally drawn into the fray. Triggered by the massive dragons piercing the upper layers of the fog, the aerial machines joined the massacre, using their deadly bombs.

*Rumble!* *Rumble!* *Rumble!*

The moment the wasps started dropping their bombs, the situation changed entirely for the better. John watched from the eye of the storm as fierce and deadly waves of explosions tore apart heaps of ground machines. The bombs created grand waves of blue fire that expanded outward, consuming further units in a chain reaction of cross-fires.

The attacked and surviving ground units trapped in a hellscape of their own making opened fire frantically around. The crossfire became so dense that John was forced to reuse his Encrypted Skin ability over and over again just to keep his body form from being shredded.

"MP Absorption," John grunted. Under the insane pressure on his Mental Points caused by the constant usage of his abilities, he now had to reach into his inventory and recharge once every couple of minutes. "Still, it’s going far better than I even imagined, hahaha!"

He was now running without any hindrance. The path ahead was being cleared not by his own hands, but by the frantic, panicked weaponry of the evolved machines themselves.

By spreading his illusions everywhere he went, leveraging the insane one-kilometre coverage distance of his ability to the max, he was able to deploy lots of kill zones long before he reached them.

As John pushed deeper into the western territories, the situation began to shift back at Cissel’s end. The moment John had disappeared into the fog, the warm, rare smile she had worn vanished instantly.

It was as if a switch had been flipped; the cold mask returned to her face. She began to move along the miles-long line of defences, adding extra touches to the outpost placements and adding new ones whenever a gap appeared.

At several moments during what was left in the night, the pressure became so great that she had to intervene personally, her daggers flashing in the dark to help the Bulltors clear clusters of thruster S-1000s and giant D-1000s that had managed to wedge themselves between the Mobile Fortresses.

The clashes in the central and southern regions were the most heated, threatening to overwhelm the defensive lines through sheer attrition.

Yet, after a few hours of gruelling defence, after three hours from the start of the new day, a sudden and dramatic change occurred.

"Is it just me, or are the machine numbers faltering and thinning?!" Cissel muttered to herself, her eyes fixed on the distance.

She had been paying extra care to the central region, where the fighting was most intense. For hours, the Metallic Wasps had been coming in relentless waves, and the ground had been a literal carpet of moving metal.

But now, the wasps were starting to disappear from the sky, and the ground began to show visible gaps between the thruster S-1000s and the giant D-1000s.

This was the first time such a lull had happened since she arrived at the Western Front. "This must be his doing," she muttered to herself, a small, knowing smirk returning to her lips. She didn’t need to send a scout or wait for news; she knew John was the one behind this sudden disruption.

"If so, then I’ll have to focus all our strength on the southern regions. The situation there is still critical."

Luckily, the one thousand Bulltors led by Blakar were already positioned in the southern area. Since there was no longer a threat coming from the southern territory, thanks to Ricky and Elena’s effective bottlenecks, Blakar had moved his entire force to the western border to link up with Cissel.

She had originally asked them to station themselves around the southern regions of the western border while she handled the centre and north. But with John’s intervention, she no longer had a role to play there.

She performed one last check of the northern fortifications to ensure they were secure. She gathered the Bulltors she led from her territory, then turned and headed south with everyone, toward the area where the last of the heavy action was still raging wild.