Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 157: The Suspicious Group of Wrathers!

Some of the fast-running Wrathers behind the front line were caught in the aftershocks of the explosions, which triggered the sky’s lightning response and subsequently threw them into that strange, snail-like lethargy.

However, a significant number of the giants managed to bypass the kill zone entirely during the cannons’ reload cycle. Overflooded the defensive towers’ abilities and slammed heavily into the walls!

John braced himself. He knew the walls were thick and heavy, designed to be sturdy, yet against the raw physical power of those giants and their high numbers, he expected the steel to falter and shatter. He was already mentally preparing to accept the destruction of the entire wall section adjacent to the river.

And yet, something different happened!

The moment the Wrathers slammed their massive, clawed bodies into the fortifications, the entire wall structure encircling the base suddenly flashed with an intense, blinding white light! It was as if the force of the impact, concentrated on a single point, was instantaneously distributed across the entire perimeter.

The energy was absorbed and shouldered by the rest of the wall, the structure acting less like a pile of bricks and more like a single, unified organism.

"That’s new!" John exclaimed, his eyes widening. He couldn’t find an immediate explanation for this weird phenomenon, but he intended to grill the others later to see if they had an explanation they had missed to share previously. For now, he heaved a deep sigh of relief.

The walls stood tall and mighty against the successive impacts of the Wrathers, forcing the monsters to divert their momentum. They began to circle around the obstacle, their unified front getting divided into two massive, separate groups.

"This..." Seeing the swarm split under the pressure of the walls made John’s eyes shine. "If the walls can repeat this feat, they can easily divide every wave into two groups... Perhaps I can even make more walls along the way to further divide them..."

A new strategy began to take shape in his mind. He thought of relocating his sound traps for the second wave, placing them on a direct path that would lead the monsters straight into the mid-section of the entire northern walls.

Then he would place a few obstacles along both paths, leading to further segregation of the monsters into smaller groups. This way, the wave of monsters would be forced to split, running alongside the long stretches of his eastern and western walls. This would keep them within the optimal firing arcs of his cannons for the maximum amount of time!

As he watched the current wave, his theory was proven correct. The group that was forced to take the long way around the base suffered the most.

They passed by a larger number of cannons and defensive towers, getting peppered by constant fire and losing significant numbers before they could even clear the base’s footprint. The cannons fired relentlessly, whirring on their mounts as they tracked the deep-red giants, thinning the herd with every passing minute.

"They lost at least one-third of their numbers using this method alone so far," John calculated, his mind spinning with the possibilities of the next wave. "Next time, I’ll place the decoys so they have to run the full length of the base... Wait, what are those monsters doing?!!"

Just when he expected the other group of monsters, the ones that had stayed on the far bank of the river, to be way ahead of the base, he was taken aback. Part of them was still standing at the exact location where the Ogolith den was.

John had been so totally focused on the monsters engaging his base that he had completely missed what was happening on the opposite side of the river. He zoomed his map in, confused.

A group of close to three hundred Wrathers were clustered around the site of the now-vanished den. They weren’t running; they weren’t even looking toward the sound decoys. They were standing still, lowering their heads toward the ground as if they were searching for something hidden in the dirt.

"What are they looking for?!"

Seeing them stuck in that area for several minutes, doing nothing but sniffing or checking the ground, left John utterly confused. He tried to think of a logical explanation, but after watching them for ten full minutes, he reached a dead end. They were fixated on the ground as if the secret to their existence was buried beneath the old den.

"Now I have two groups running across my base, one group stuck for no reason back at the old den, and less than a thousand Wrathers running towards this specific trap ahead of others," John noted the current layout of the first wave.

He had arrived at the heart of his secondary sound emitter zone, looking at the area around, as it would be the upcoming battleground for slaughtering the incoming Wrathers.

"Aside from that weird group lingering at the den, everything is going according to plan so far," he said, shrugging his shoulders. For the moment, he pushed the curiosity about the three hundred loitering Wrathers to the back of his mind.

He had a more immediate task to perform. He shifted his focus to the Wrathers currently sprinting toward his position, closing the gap with every passing minute.

"Time to see the truth," John whispered.

As the lead monsters crossed into the fog, John sprang into action. During the earlier engagement at the base, his cannons had proven to be the primary killers, far outstripping the defensive towers in raw destructive power.

However, he had a hunch. He decided against deploying cannons here. He was still worried about how the sensors would perform, and he had no means to lift them over any wall by himself.

Instead, he wanted to see if the towers, with their high rate of fire and shifting tracking, could hold their own in this fog.

As the monsters plunged into the mist and showed no immediate signs of slowing down or changing direction, thanks to the loud noises coming now from the base, John moved forward. With rapid moves, he manifested twenty defensive towers across the landscape.

He placed them with a plan: five formed a welcome mat at the front of the kill zone, another five were embedded deep within the array of sound emitters, and the final ten were scattered along the southern border of the trap.

To ensure he wouldn’t be caught in an unexpected melee, he picked a spot and activated his Sandbox ability. He was careful not to clear the fog inside his personal zone; he didn’t want to introduce any variables that might inadvertently trigger the monsters’ aggro. Then he stepped into his sanctuary and waited.

*Boom!*

The first sign of the monsters’ arrival wasn’t a visual contact, but a loud banging that erupted from the towers. The towers’ attacks were fundamentally different from the heavy plasma shots of the cannons. While they lacked the deadly impact of the cannon shots, they boasted a significantly broader area with multi-targeting and shifting targets swiftly.

John ignored the technical specs and focused entirely on the first wave of monsters that approached his trap. The tower fire looked almost like tracer rounds, streaks of energy that, upon impact, didn’t create a fiery explosion. Instead, they caused a sudden, violent outburst of concentrated energy that expanded several meters in a split second before vanishing.

They looked weak by comparison, but John noticed the frequency. The towers were firing more than ten shots for every one round from the cannons. They were the perfect killing machines for the Wrathers, provided the lightning didn’t intervene.

And then, it happened. Or rather, it didn’t happen.

"The lightning..." John’s eyes narrowed into slits. "It didn’t rain down to protect them!!"

This was the breakthrough he had been hunting for. In the cleared area around the base, the lightning had been the Wrathers’ guardian, striking half a beat faster than any attack. But here, inside the fog, the sky remained silent. The connection with the black clouds was severed!

"Every hit will be a sure kill!!" John couldn’t restrain a triumphant laugh that echoed through his Sandbox concealed area. "They’re dying! All of them!"

He watched as the last monster in the southern detachment fell, its deep-red flesh falling into different parts at the ground. It didn’t take more than half an hour to kill close to a thousand monsters!

John stepped out of his Sandbox, ready to shout in triumph, but the celebration died in his throat. A weird trembling began to vibrate through the soles of his boots.

"Don’t tell me a second wave is coming this fast!"

John’s mind raced as he tried to reconcile the timing. The system had given him two days for five waves. Mathematically, that should mean a wave roughly every fourteen hours.

Even if he accounted for the system being kind and skipping the night hours, the waves should still be spaced out by ten hours. It was too soon for the second wave to come.

The trembling was eerily similar to the earthquake that preceded the first wave, yet it felt... A bit different. It was weaker.

"The den is cold as ice on the map... So where is the source of this earthquake?!"

He checked the northern red icon again. Nothing. It was dormant. The area was clear. That left him puzzled for a few terrifying seconds, his brain cycling through every possible scenario, before a horrifying realisation hit him. He zoomed in on the three hundred Wrathers at the old den site.

"No way!" John’s face went pale as he watched what was happening there. "What the fck is that?!!!"