Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 276: Ricky and Elena - Part 4

From time to time, Ricky would need to halt his advance to lay down a small outpost. These miniature forts served as tactical anchors where he could personally handle and kill any lingering flying drones.

These aerial mechanical pests were a constant threat; their annoying, high-speed propulsion meant they almost always outpaced Elena’s high speed, relentlessly trying to cut off her zigzagging path of retreat.

Yet, Ricky’s timely interventions, flinging his tentacles or timed explosive grenades that he threw at their direction, helped her escape every disastrous pincer trap, ending up luring tens of thousands of ground and flying units back toward the fog trap.

During which Ricky witnessed how deeply Elena held her grudges. Every time they returned to the fog, she wouldn’t hurry towards the fortress. Instead, she would patiently wait for the flying drones to gather at some point, then rain down hell using the purple grenades.

"Now what?" Elena asked, wiping a smear of grey dust from her forehead.

She looked out from the ramparts at the carnage they brought over the machines. In the past ten hours, they had slaughtered hundreds of thousands of machine units.

The sheer volume of mechanical carcasses had created a literal mountain of scrap in front of their fortress, high enough to raise the ground level by ten meters. The original topography of the ground was gone, replaced by hills of twisted alloy and shattered machine parts.

"We can’t continue using this spot anymore," she noted, her voice raspy. "The pile is getting so high that the towers can barely see over the wreckage to hit the distant targets."

"And the machines you lure from deep parts of the territory are taking their time to arrive here as well," Ricky added, standing beside her just outside the fog line. He squinted toward the horizon, watching the flickering, shimmering silver dots in the far distance.

"There isn’t much left in the nearby area to kill anymore," Elena sighed, rolling her eyes toward the empty plains. "Still, I assume there are tens of thousands left on the other bank of the river, maybe fifty thousand or less."

"Well, a kill is a kill," Ricky shrugged, though his shoulders felt like heavy lead. "But we need to strategise for the next wave. If this wave reached hundreds of thousands, then I believe the next one is going to push close to a million. It’s a real challenge, even for someone like John..."

"Let’s relocate then," Elena suggested. She could tell that, thanks to the natural barrier of the river, the machines were taking much longer than expected to converge on their position.

There were only three underwater bridges where the ground units could cross, slowing their speed down by a huge margin. As for the flying drones, the duo had already wiped them out, leaving only the ground forces to contend with.

"Let’s do it!" Ricky agreed. He knew the logistics of moving a ten-kilometre fortress would take a long time, so he thought of something else. "But let’s be smart. Let’s first place a new fortress at the next kill zone before we even think about dismantling this one. We need a fallback point."

Elena didn’t object. The two began a gruelling run to the east, travelling roughly two hundred kilometres along the border to establish a second fortress.

Just as they finished laying down the towers of the new fortress, they saw the machines still mindlessly following the ghost trails of their predecessors, marching into the kill zone of the first fortress and dying against their towers.

Even if the ground at the first site had been elevated by the mounds of scrap, the machines couldn’t capitalise on the height advantage. Their sensors were still malfunctioning in the fog, leaving them to stumble blindly into the line of fire.

Yet, before the two could even begin to discuss how they would lure the remaining lot of machines, Elena’s sharp eyes spotted a movement in the distance that didn’t match the motions of a machine.

She spotted the Bulltors emerging from the fog.

"At fcking last!" Elena heaved a deep sigh of relief.

Even though the two had performed a tremendous and brilliant job holding the line, they hadn’t enjoyed a single decent moment of rest. They had been forced to eat and drink while sprinting between outposts, fighting off stragglers, or working to lure the next horde.

The physical overload was exhausting, but the mental fatigue, the constant stress of being one mistake away from being overrun and killed, was on another level entirely. Once Ricky spotted the Bulltors, he felt a sudden, massive weight of responsibility finally beginning to lift off his chest.

He controlled his immediate urge to collapse, instead running alongside Elena toward the reinforcements. Elena didn’t look any better; her armour was dented at one side, and her breathing was heavy. They met the Bulltors at a spot near the first fortress.

The giants stood there, frozen in shock. They were amazed when they bypassed a vast, cleared space inside the fog, filled with tons of fortifications. But what truly shook them was what lay beyond that fortress, the insane amount of machine wreckage covering the ground in heaps that looked like small hills.

"We... We came to help you," one of the two members of the Twelve that John had dispatched stepped forward.

He was a giant even among his own kind, with incredibly long black hair that looked as if it had never been cut, flowing down his back like a dark cape. He looked at the direction of the fog, where a mountain of dead machines was, and then at the two dishevelled humans. "Yet, it seems you don’t need any!"

"Great job killing those bastards!" the second member of the Twelve said, raising a massive fist in the air with a boisterous laugh. "But we are here now. You can brief us on the situation, and then you two need to go and get some rest."

"We really, desperately, need it," Elena sighed, her shoulders finally dropping. She scanned the ranks of the Bulltors. "Five hundred isn’t bad. I honestly expected John to send less, given how busy he is."