Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 303: Opening the Human Survivors Eyes over the Reality of the Apocalypse

"I can leave you all now, safe and sound, inside this territory."

John’s voice was steady as he looked over the exhausted but awestruck column of survivors. It had been over a day and a half since he had led the humans out of their cradle.

During this, the few thousand humans were destined to experience a journey that entirely shook their lives to the core, fundamentally reshaping everything they thought they knew about the truth of this world.

Even when John had described the nature of the trial in words, seeing the reality in the flesh was something else entirely. The shock had begun the moment they crossed from the southern into the northern territories.

They arrived several hours after John accelerated on his own, and went towards the territory ahead of everyone to clear it. They arrived just as the night ended and a new day arrived.

John had already secured the metal scrap from the highly advanced machine units, tucked safely away in his inventory. While he waited for the humans to catch up, he hadn’t stayed idle; he had spent the hours harvesting more machine remnants of the massive battlefield.

After an entire day of slaughter, his mobile fortresses had effectively purged the machines from this territory. What remained was a world of silence and lots of mountains of twisted, smoking scrap metal.

When the humans finally crossed the edge of the territory and got out of the fog, they were immensely shaken by the sight. And then, their eyes locked onto the mobile metallic behemoths bristling with mountain-sized towers and lined with huge defensive walls.

To the survivors, it felt like a serene yet terrifying sight, something ripped directly from the pages of a high-concept science fiction novel. Many of them recognised the basic silhouette of a pulse cannon, but none had ever seen such nightmare-inducing mobile fortresses or the colossal towers anchored to their decks.

And yet, as John knew, this was simply the tip of the iceberg. Then it came down to the grand battlefield that spoke volumes about how terrifying this battle was.

The further they followed him, the more they saw things that defied their understanding of the world, went way beyond their wildest imagination. When they passed through the fog into the adjacent territory, they were met with the ongoing roar of war.

John’s defences and the Bulltors were still engaged with lots of machines. There, the humans received the second immense shock of their lives: they saw advanced machine units moving and fighting in a way that drove their skulls numb. Even if they saw these machines dead back at the previous territory, seeing them fighting was a whole different story.

However, the crowning jewel moment of disbelief was the sight of the giants.

For a long, long time, humans back on Earth had debated the topic of being the only intelligent race in the universe or not. Seeing the Bulltors proved once and for all which theories were right and which were wrong. To add to the weight of the revelation, these giants were following the orders of John with absolute discipline.

Seeing this caused any remaining speck of doubt to be excruciatingly purged in a baptism of belief. They no longer questioned John; they didn’t even see him as a particularly strong human anymore. In their eyes, he was a living god, a true and real Paragon walking among them in the flesh.

John eventually led them into one of the massive fortresses that Ricky and Elena had erected in the fog of the northern border. It was a secure base, a steel island in a sea of fog, a very safe haven for all of them.

"Stay here," he commanded. "I need to head toward the centre of the territory to handle the core. Don’t leave the perimeter."

He headed out alone. After waiting for more than a day, the den had already undergone the upgrade he had anticipated. As he stood before the pulsing blue light of the core, he felt a twinge of greed.

"I should have left it alone for a while longer," he lamented, his fingers tracing the edge of his sword.

But he quickly suppressed the thought. He preferred safety over taking unnecessary risks. He couldn’t predict how long it would take to locate the hidden sixth den, and he was certain that specific den would have evolved to a stage at least equal to the highest upgraded machine den he had met so far, if not growing far beyond it.

"And there is still Luke’s den," he consoled himself, his eyes scanning the map. "I bet the machines there are close to evolving to that stage. On top of that, it’s closer to the north than this territory, so it’s safer to leave it for quite a bit longer."

He decided on a new plan: he would travel to Luke’s territory and lay down a massive, impenetrable layer of fortifications. He would essentially cage the den, allowing it to mature like a fine wine until it was ready for a high-yield harvest.

In case something catastrophic happened, the fortifications would provide a buffer, allowing him to intervene before the machines could break out. With a distance of exactly one territory between Luke’s position and the northern edge of the pocket trial, John was confident this was the most efficient move.

He left his newly evolved defences at the western border to handle any future trouble and stored a lot of scrap metal before returning to the humans at the northern border. From there, he led the survivors further north, toward the very first territory he had hacked a machine den.

The territory was reinforced with enough outposts to make it functionally impenetrable to standard roaming units. To house the refugees, John had constructed a massive, sprawling fortress, capable of sheltering the survivors without them feeling like they were sardines in a tin.

As he prepared to depart, he began providing them with a significant portion of his stored meat.