Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 176: The Riverbank Outpost

"There is a way," John said, gesturing toward the group of towers and walls he had deployed earlier to kill the yellow monsters. "As we are already here, let’s first focus on placing the cannons properly on top of these walls."

"Do you plan on leaving them here?!!" Luke exclaimed in bewilderment, his voice echoing in the metallic den. Everyone looked at each other in a mixture of doubt and surprise.

"Why not?" John shrugged, his tone casual despite the monumental shift in strategy he was proposing.

"Think about it. Thanks to my voice trap back there, the monsters evaded our base. Yet they were forced to move around our base, getting easily killed by our defences. So why don’t we place another outpost here? It will kill the portion that passes through this side of the river."

"It’s not bad to have them at the base, though," Elena complained, her protective instincts over their home turf kicking in. "Splitting our firepower means if one side fails, the other is halved."

John didn’t listen to her, or rather, he had already factored her concerns into his calculations. He started laying down proper, three-layered walls around the cluster of defensive towers he had already deployed. He left just enough space in the centre for their entire group to stay there comfortably if needed.

Once the perimeter was set, he placed three gates, making sure they wouldn’t overlap with each other, and immediately moved to the walls, placing row after row of cannons on the walls.

By the time he was finished, this new outpost, roughly five kilometres in length and one in width, stood as a thorn in the face of any incoming monster wave.

"By the way," Luke suddenly recalled, scratching his head as he looked at the freshly placed cannons, "back when you moved to destroy the den and took out these towers and walls, I saw scary explosions happening... Orange and purple blooms that dwarfed any shot our defences fired before. Was that your doing?"

"Who else?" John rolled his eyes.

Elena jumped in next, her eyes wide with immense curiosity. "Is it a new weapon you worked on? A new tower?"

"It’s a cannon," John said simply. He reached into his inventory and pulled out one of the four enhanced cannons for them to see. To the naked eye, its outer appearance was identical to every other cannon they had deployed. "Did you all forget? We can add cores to our weapons to enhance them, just like we do with our bodies."

"Yes, but..." Cissel moved her eyes between John’s calm face and the unassuming silver barrel of the cannon, not knowing exactly what to say. They never took their cannons to be part of their gear.

"I tried it out of curiosity," John admitted, and this time, he was telling the truth. "I tried it on the towers and the walls first, but failed. Yet, on the cannons, the cores were absorbed. I don’t know why, but the results are exactly what you watched back in that battle!"

All of them sucked in a cold breath of air, a collective gasp of realisation. Elena jumped forward next, patting the metal casing of the cannon as if it were a priceless treasure or a newfound pet.

"That’s why you retrieved them so fast from the battle," Ricky nodded in understanding, his mind finally catching up to the reason behind John’s actions back then. "Honestly, after seeing how scary those attacks were, I’d also have done the same to avoid losing them to a monster tide."

"Oh, about that," John scratched the back of his head, a rare look of sheepishness crossing his face. "It seems evolving them came at the price of rapidly exhausting their energy cells. They’re power-hungry monsters."

"What?!!" the four of them exclaimed in shock.

Elena looked at the cannon in doubt, her brow furrowing. "But each cell is rated to power these cannons for many hours of continuous fire, not just a few minutes! Let me check the draw-rate..."

"There is no time for that," John interrupted, cutting her off and storing the cannon back into his inventory. "The most important thing right now is to use more cores to clear the fog and eat them before the next battle begins. We need every scrap of power we can get."

Everyone looked at John as he started to walk back toward the base.

"Do you know what to do? The fog is far away from us, and we are heading back to the base." Cissel asked, catching up to his side while the others were still too excited and buzzed from the news to speak.

During their return trek, John stopped every few minutes, stooping to collect the yellow cores and storing them away. As for the Wrathers, the battlefield was oddly clean; there wasn’t a single deep-red corpse around this specific area with a core.

"It’s an easy problem to solve," he shrugged, before casually adding, "We have the fog pushed away right now, thanks to our magical core. If we remove the core, the world will be covered by fog in an instant..."

"What?! You’re going to destroy the magical core?!!" Luke shouted, completely misinterpreting the whole plan. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Elena couldn’t help but chuckle at his denseness. She grabbed Luke by the arm to pull him back, preventing him from delaying John any longer. She leaned in and whispered to him, explaining what John meant.

"Ready?" John looked at everyone, including the Bulltors, as they arrived at the location where the magical core was. During their short walk back, the Bulltors had remained uncharacteristically silent, their eyes darting between the humans with a newfound, heavy respect and genuine fear. John didn’t think too much about it; he had a tight schedule to keep.

"As I explained, once the lightning stops hitting the cores I’m about to throw, you can take them. One core each, until everyone has reached their limit and needs no more. Got it?"