Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 291: The Unexpected Effect of the Latency Injection Ability

"Shall we retreat?!"

Elena yelled, her voice hoarse from the desperate fight she and Ricky were thrown into for long hours. Seeing how intense the machine wave was, even with the help of their deadly purple grenades, many managed to slip away.

"Even if by some miracle we survive this wave, the next one is going to be four million at least. That’s a total overkill! We won’t be able to stop them at that point... We’ll be buried under mountains of scrap metal."

"We’ll keep trying our best until then," Ricky replied, his knuckles white as he clenched the hilts of his twin swords. His eyes were fixed on the north.

"I’m sure John is well aware of what’s going on here. I don’t know what’s holding him back, but I have to believe the situation up there isn’t any more favourable than ours. If he hasn’t come back yet, it’s because he’s fighting something even worse."

"Then..."

"We’ll keep fighting, hold the line, and do our best," Ricky said, putting a firm end to the discussion. He looked at the horizon where the metallic glint of the swarm seemed to stretch into infinity.

"As the night is going to be hard and long, and this battle looks manageable with our current defensive setup, let’s take proper rest. We won’t do John any good by being half-dead when the next wave hits."

Elena let out a long, tired sigh. She wanted to argue, to keep fighting, to keep throwing grenades until her arms gave out or emptied her reserves, but she knew he had a point.

Her vision was starting to blur at the edges, and her reaction times were dipping. They had been fighting like crazy for a long time, and they hadn’t enjoyed a single moment of genuine rest even after the Bulltor reinforcements had arrived.

The Bulltors were still stationed at the two upfront fortresses, acting as the heavy anvil against the machine hammer. To them, this kind of stationary, high-attrition war was the best way to showcase their abilities. They loved the grind of bone against metal.

They kept fighting for a long time, holding the frontlines with sheer physical might, but eventually, even their legendary stamina began to falter. One by one, the squads had to retreat behind the reinforced walls to rest and cycle out with fresher warriors.

By the middle of the day, a strange, tense quiet fell over the inner sanctum of the fortresses. Ricky, Elena, and the five hundred Bulltors were all confined inside the steel shells, resting their bodies but unable to rest their minds, wondering when this mechanical nightmare would finally end.

While the situation grew to this critical extent in the southern territory, John was already far away, fighting his way through the endless, roiling swarm of machines in the west, heading toward the heart of the den.

Everything had been going relatively smoothly until he crossed the fog line and fully entered the territory. The moment his silhouette appeared in the clear air, it was as if a billion circuits closed at once.

Every machine in the vicinity turned toward him in unison. Their sensors identified him instantly as the top-priority target, the anomaly that had to be erased. Every red dot on the map converged on his position.

"Encrypted Skin!"

The first thing John did was secure his safety, the shimmering digital armour layering over his body. Then, he unleashed the offence.

He became a blur of high speed and violent explosions, his voice a rapid-fire litany of commands: "Logic Bomb... One second... Logic Bomb... One second... Lightning Dance... Object Lockdown... Code Destruction... Sandbox... MP Absorption..."

He didn’t hold back at all. He used every ability in his arsenal without a second thought, pushing his fighting prowess to the absolute limit. Because he knew he was going all out, he had already prepared his batteries.

He took a damaged piece of a machine unit from his inventory, gripped it tightly in his left hand, and sucked it dry using two rapid pulses of his absorption ability. The moment the scrap metal was emptied from Mental Points, he threw it away and pulled another one out, never breaking his stride.

He was simply unstoppable! The toughest moments had been the first few minutes after his appearance. The sudden, violent gush of machines had taken even him by surprise, but he handled the surge perfectly well.

With the combination of his abilities, the machines in his path were destroyed, burnt to husks, or sent flying backwards by concussive force.

Some developed decaying holes in their bodies from code corruption, while others were frozen in their tracks, standing idly confused and acting as physical roadblocks that caused the machines rushing from behind to stumble and fall in a chaotic pile-up.

In less than ten minutes, John had carved a trail of carnage through the territory. The machines all around him were either in total disarray or reduced to smoking piles of scrap.

Among his arsenal, the most surprising performance came from the Latency Injection ability. He had initially thought it would merely slow the machines down, a minor debuff to their movement speed. However, the reality was far more shocking.

The machines hit by the ability didn’t just slow down; they stopped, their heads spinning erratically. Then, they turned their weapons around and opened fire at the surrounding units.

"I never thought it would have a confusing effect, not just mental lag!!" John muttered, dodging a stray plasma bolt from a confused thruster S-1000.

He didn’t realise that if he had used this ability on any biological race, they would have simply stood idle, trapped in a mental fog for an entire minute. But because he was using it against machines, their internal programs suffered a catastrophic logic failure.

For sixty seconds, their friend-or-foe protocols were inverted, swapping the friendly and hostile lists. Seeing this unexpected bonus made John reposition the ability in his mind. It went from being a useless filler to one of his most vital tools on this crowded battlefield.