Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 156: The First Clash!

As John watched them, a pang of frustration hit him. He recalled his sealed Speed stat from Athanasia.

If he had those stats now, he wouldn’t be gasping for air in the fog. He couldn’t help but imagine how trivial this conflict would be if he could just edit his own physical constraints as easily as he did the cannons.

"The first test is to see how the cannons and towers will do against them," he decided, forcing his mind back to the present. He kept his eyes glued to the map, following their tracks while he resumed running. He had to keep moving toward his secondary deployment zone to make up for his agonisingly slow speed compared to theirs.

His entire theory rested on a single, crucial variable that the areas in the Source Code World didn’t have to deal with: the fog. He had seen firsthand how the fog affected the machines and even the Fog Seekers.

Normally, Fog Seekers were pack hunters that swarmed with mindless aggression, but once they were inside the fog, they became disjointed, losing the swarm mindset they displayed in cleared areas.

John was betting on the system not providing a truly impossible quest. There had to be a way out of it. He just needed to approach the problem from a different angle to crack the cheat code.

"This is enough," he gasped. After running for twenty more minutes, his lungs feeling like they were filled with lava, he reached the south-eastern border of his territory. He moved with haste, spreading another thousand noise devices across the terrain and slamming the activation buttons. "Now... Time to see what they’ll do against my base defences!"

He laid out many towers around this area before he began the arduous trek back toward the first group of sound emitters, keeping his map zoomed in on the northern perimeter of his base. The first wave of monsters was now in full sprint, running fast through the landscape.

"Ten minutes," he calculated, checking the distance. "In ten minutes, we’ll see how they handle the base defences during their run."

To ensure the safety of his team, John had ordered everyone, his friends and the eleven Bulltors, to relocate themselves well away from the direct path of the monsters once they located the direction they appeared at. As the den appeared North, they decided to head west by Ricky and Cissel’s guidance.

"Now!"

Before his eyes, the Fog Wrathers finally slammed into the northern defensive line of the base. The five thousand giants were running in a tight, overlapping succession, a phalanx of horror covering several kilometres in width.

Because they were running on both banks of the river, a direct clash with the base was inevitable. Yet their forces were divided thanks to the river, with most of them heading towards the base.

As the first monsters entered the range of the sensors, a series of totally unexpected events occurred in rapid-fire succession.

The first thing that happened was the reaction of the cannons. The moment the Wrathers stepped into the kill zone, the cannons triggered all over the walls. A fierce, deafening wave of plasma and explosive rounds roared out to meet the swarm.

However, just as the projectiles were about to make contact, a massive bolt of lightning slammed down from the black clouds above, striking the lead Wrathers. The lightning didn’t kill them; it formed a shield that vaporised the incoming attacks.

"Tsk! They managed to pass through the first wave of the cannons effortlessly... But wait, what is that?!!"

John focused on his map, his eyes widening. As the Wrathers emerged from the smoke of the first explosions, their movement changed. "Their speed... They are moving like snails now!!"

In front of him, the early wave of Wrathers was emitting dazzling arcs of lightning from their own bodies, as if they were generating the current themselves. But instead of the scary speed they had shown earlier, they were struggling now. They took one slow step at a time, their limbs twitching as if they were infants learning how to walk for the first time.

Then, as he watched, a second wave of plasma shots launched from the cannons and landed squarely on the front line. This time, the lightning didn’t intervene. There was no protective bolt from the sky.

"Oh, is that so?!" John’s eyes gleamed with dawning understanding. He saw the Wrathers get hit by the full force of the cannons. The impact sent several of the giants flying backwards, their deep red flesh smoking.

Yet, when he zoomed in, he saw their bodies were still largely intact. The residual lightning dancing on their skin was acting like a secondary, albeit weaker, armour.

"That’s a really annoying ability..." John muttered. He was in the middle of analysing the damage when something new happened. The Wrathers that had been sent flying backwards didn’t regain their speed upon landing. They remained sluggish, their movements heavy and uncoordinated.

As the seconds ticked by, the lightning shrouding their bodies began to flicker and hiss, eventually vanishing into thin air. At that exact moment, they triggered the third wave of the cannon assault.

This time, the results were destined to be different. Without the lightning shroud to buffer, the plasma rounds tore through the deep-red flesh like paper.

"They... They died!!!"

This time, the threatening roar of the explosions did the job right! Without the celestial lightning to shield, the plasma rounds found their marks with devastating might. The Wrathers’ massive, skinless bodies were shredded in an instant, their large bodies scattered across the scorched earth outside the walls in different-sized pieces.

It was a massacre. Yet, as the smoke cleared and the defences prepared for another volley, a glaring weakness appeared in front of John’s eyes, a flaw in the very code he had implemented.

"The cannons focus only on the targets they locked onto first... That’s weird," he muttered, his brow furrowing as he studied the map with more focus. He noticed that the primary wave of monsters had drawn the absolute focus of every cannon on the northern walls.

While those lead units were being turned into paste, the subsequent lines of Wrathers were effectively ignored by the targeting sensors. Only the defensive towers attacked them freely, slightly putting a stop to their advance.