novelraw Chapter 310: John Is the One!
Chapter 310: John Is the One!
"What the heck were these machines doing for the past few days?"
John hissed, his eyes darting across the map. "If this is a hidden, high-priority territory, why didn’t the den evolve into something beyond the western variants?!!"
John instantly shifted his focus, his eyes scanning the entire topography of the hidden twelfth sector. He tried to triangulate the exact location of the sixth den, but in the middle of these astronomical numbers, it was a fool’s errand.
Usually, he could find a den by looking for the highest concentration of units. But in this territory, that logic was invalid. The density was uniform, a solid wall of red across the entire map.
"The machines are all the same here... And here... And over there..."
As he couldn’t pinpoint the den through density alone, he began jumping his map view from one random spot to another, zooming in to check the unit composition and searching for any anomaly.
For an hour, he kept looking, trying to find the source of the swarm, but he failed to find a single lead. It felt as though his map advantage was being actively nullified by the sheer scale of the current machine tide.
And then, he finally broke through the perimeter of the fog, setting foot at the new territory, and arrived at where Cissel was holding out.
"John!"
The moment he smashed through the small pocket of clear air she had carved out of the fog, Cissel let out a shout that was part battle cry and part genuine relief. It was the sound of a person who had been fighting a desperate war finally seeing their reinforcements arrive.
"Stay inside the walls!" John’s command thundered over the roar of the S-1000 thrusters.
Cissel didn’t hesitate. She didn’t ask why, and she didn’t waste a second questioning the order. If John had asked her to jump directly into a lake of fire, she would have done it without a heartbeat of doubt. She pivoted mid-air and vaulted back over the reinforced walls the very next second.
Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!
The moment John was close enough to the main swarm, he finally attacked.
Cissel had done brilliantly well by retreating into the fog and mimicking the pocket defence strategy she had heard Ricky and Elena describe. As long as she stayed shrouded, the machines had a harder time locking onto her position.
However, in her haste to clear a space for her heavy fortifications, she had accidentally dissolved the fog buffer linking her pocket to the rest of the territory. She had created a vacuum that the entire machine army was now rushing to fill.
Unlike Ricky and Elena, who faced manageable waves, Cissel was facing a literal, endless stream.
The moment John drew within range, he unleashed the full, terrifying weight of his arsenal. He didn’t just use his abilities; he rained down dozens of purple grenades in a wide, overlapping arc, saturating the ground in a carpet of high-yield explosions.
In mere minutes, the entire world around the outpost began to shake and tremble. Fierce, constant waves of fire and concussive force tore through the machine ranks, the sound so deafening that Cissel’s ears rang with a sharp, high-pitched whine for several seconds.
John’s area-of-effect abilities didn’t differentiate between friend and foe; they simply attacked and killed everything and everyone in a designated radius. That was why he had ordered her into the bunker of the walls first.
When the sounds of the deadly explosions finally tapered off, Cissel found the courage to step back up onto the battlements. The scene that met her eyes made her breath hitch painfully in her chest.
John hadn’t stopped. He wasn’t even slowing down.
Instead of retreating to the safety of the walls, he was running forward, charging deeper into the bottomless abyss of the machine swarm. Cissel blinked twice and rubbed her eyes, certain she was hallucinating. But the scene was true: John was simply running through the centre of a mechanical apocalypse as if he were taking a casual midday stroll through a park.
She knew these machines weren’t weak. She had bled against them. She had struggled and gasped for air just to maintain her tiny circle of protection. And yet here he was, acting as if the giant D-1000s, the thruster S-1000s, and the metallic wasps were nothing but weak weeds he could crush beneath his boots.
"He is indeed the one," she whispered, her eyes gleaming with a fierce, excited light that bordered on worship. "He is the one who is going to save all of us. He’s the one who will stop the disaster..."
She didn’t know why, but ever since her tense confrontation with Ricky, her mind hadn’t been able to stop playing the disastrous images of the distant future. No matter how many times she had regressed, there had been no stopping the inevitable decay of humanity. Not until she met him.
In her eyes, John wasn’t just a partner; he was the objective. She wasn’t meant to stop the disaster herself; she was destined to find him, stay by his side, and provide whatever aid he needed to do the impossible.
"I need to help," she said, her voice hardening. She clenched the hilts of her daggers and looked at the chaos John was carving through the sea of metal. "I’ll use everything you gave me to clear your path!"
With a cry of defiance, she jumped off the walls. She began taking out every mobile fortress she had left in her inventory, arming them to the teeth with the towers, pulse cannons, and laser cannons John had gifted her. She led the vanguard toward the densest wave, pulling the Wrathers’ cores from her storage device.
Then, she launched an endless, rolling barrage of purple over the heads of the machines. Alongside her, the mobile fortresses roared with the towers and cannons on top, killing machines in heaps.
The moment she saw this, she smiled. All these concentrated attacks aimed at creating a corridor of destruction in front of her, aiming to follow John’s firm steps. And yet, she was destined to slam hard against the bitter wall of reality; she wasn’t John!