Athanasia: My Hacker System

Chapter 312: Planning for Post-Trial Life

John realised that using the standard Logic Bombs failed to leave so much as a scratch on the machine behemoths’ bodies.

Those machines were huge for an explosion to affect them, and the reinforced alloy was designed to withstand the blast, making it harder to kill these things.

It wasn’t until he combined the bombs with his Code Destruction ability that he found a breakthrough.

The Code Destruction ability acted as a digital corrosive, peeling away the hardened shells of these behemoths. They didn’t leave behind the usual holes, only shallow gaps in the machine’s sturdy armours. Once the defensive shell was stripped back, the Logic Bombs finally did the trick, detonating within the vulnerable internal structures.

Once he figured out the way, He started killing thousands of these giants while simultaneously wiping out the weaker machine units that tried to swarm him in the process.

His plan was simple but brutal. Even if it took a substantial amount of time to kill each behemoth, he had to ensure he destroyed their source of energy first: the weaker machines. By depriving the gigantic units of their fuel, he would eventually stall their evolution.

As he worked through the swarm, he was startled to find a second, fresh den nestled deep within the territory, one that had been hidden by the sheer bulk of the behemoths. This was the source that kept gushing out the weaker machines to feed the giants.

"That explains it then... That Mark... He is really creative," John whispered, a cold admiration in his voice.

He didn’t hesitate to breach the defences of this secondary den and obtain its core. With a satisfying chime from his system, he was now only one core away from completing his evolution quest requirements.

Two den cores were remaining in the entire pocket trial as a whole. One of them was the core in front of him, which he decided to keep active to gush out more behemoths for harvesting. The second core was in Luke’s territory, which would need more time to evolve to the third stage.

John planned to use these two cores as a farm for now. The imminent threats were removed. What remained of the machines was easy to handle with his defences, not even requiring his or anyone’s presence.

He didn’t realise how long the process had taken him to obtain the fifth core. By the time he secured the fifth core, night had already fallen. The darkness hit the territory with a sudden, bitter cold that seemed to sap the heat from the very ground, forcing him to use his grenades without limit just to maintain a zone of warmth and visibility.

Having severed the source of the behemoths’ energy, John knew the machines wouldn’t pose any threat any further. To secure this territory for good, he spent the entire night targeting the older behemoths he had encountered upon entering the depths of the territory. He spent hours meticulously cracking their shells and detonating the bombs, killing them one mountain of metal at a time.

During this grueling fighting, he tested the effectiveness of his standard defences. To his disappointment, his basic towers and cannons failed to do anything to these behemoths. Their outer layer of alloy was simply too thick, reinforced to absorb thousands of high-calibre shots without sustaining meaningful damage.

"Luckily, they are too huge to move around freely," John mused. Their size was their greatest strength, but also their greatest weakness; they lacked the agility to escape his attacks or fire back.

Even if his standard defences took a long time to kill a single behemoth, they were eventually able to chip away at the giants. However, as he thought back to the higher-tier versions of the defences he had recently acquired, the mountain-sized towers and fortress-grade cannons, he decided to keep them secretive for now.

As the trial neared its conclusion, John was forced to think about the long-term future. He began to consider the necessity of having wild cards hidden and saved for the right moment. This protective instinct had taken root a couple of days ago, right after his encounter with the human survivors in the south.

Seeing how those thousands of humans still clung to the idiotic idea of following Paragons drove a wedge of worry into his heart. The survivors looked for a Paragon to save them, rather than looking at the man standing in front of them.

To protect his interests and his people, he decided to keep his most advanced technology hidden, refusing to expose his true ceiling to anyone, including his friends, anytime soon.

He wasn’t worried about his own safety; he knew that even a multi-million-strong army of machines couldn’t touch a single hair on his head. Yet, he was worried about his friends. He was worried about what he had achieved here.

He recalled Luke’s obsession with reclaiming his family’s honour, a family that had once served a Paragon as a shield and a guardian, only to be backstabbed by another family. He remembered Elena’s constant references to the lessons of her family, who were also bound in service to a different Paragon.

And then there were Cissel and Ricky, the two most mysterious members of the group, with their unique dual abilities and early on, unlocked attributes. John already suspected they were connected to the Paragons.

John was starting to see the grander picture of the world beyond this trial. He was destined to rise through the ranks and lead humanity to its first truly cleared area.

He was the one who would elevate them from their fallen state to a well-respected race, leading them to contend with the other races in this new, apocalyptic world. And he did not intend to give that leadership away.

To him, it wasn’t the useless, arrogant Paragons of old who had led humanity toward salvation. On the contrary, it was those very figures who had pushed the human race over the edge in the first place.

He recalled what Mark had said during their first meeting: everything that had happened to John, and the fall of the world itself, was because the Paragons were too busy fighting among themselves, obsessed with their silly wars and pitiful interests, to bother doing their duty and leading their people.