Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 100: Nothing Goes as Planned!

The one hundred D-1000 units were tactically distributed. The vast majority of their force was stretched across the edge of the cliff, pouring concentrated laser fire down on the Ogolith. To prevent a pincer movement, they had positioned a rear guard of ten units a few meters back, facing the emptiness behind.

John motioned for his friends to stay close. This split distribution of the enemy force wasn’t exactly in his initial plans, but the distance between the rear guard and the main firing line was only a few meters. It was manageable. He simply layered his ability in rapid succession, extending the reach, and began to run like a ghost between the two mechanical squads.

As they passed the first line, John’s hands became a blur of motion. He didn’t use his sword. Instead, he reached out and touched the bodies of each machine, planting a Logic Bomb with a thirty-second timer on every single one.

At the same time, he activated MP Absorption on every third unit, replenishing his Mental Points as fast as he could spend them on the bombs. The team watched him, hearts in their throats, as he ran through the enemy lines.

At first, they followed with agonising caution, flinching every time a machine tiltedits head, but as second after second passed without a reaction, they grew confident, moving with the same predatory speed as their leader.

Just as they crossed the last machine in the squad—the entire process taking a mere twenty seconds—they saw John suddenly drop. He threw his body flat on the ground and clamped both hands over his ears. It was a sign: the storm was coming.

They didn’t hesitate. Cissel, Luke, Elena, and Ricky hit the dirt a split second after him. Then, a touch of real, terrifying magic erupted in front of their eyes, a few seconds later.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

John had left exactly one bomb on each D-1000. The result was not a series of small pops, but a singular, cataclysmic eruption. The combined effect of one hundred Logic Bombs detonating simultaneously turned the cliff into an oven. A violent shockwave tore through the air, a fierce gush of wind that threatened to peel the very skin from their backs.

But then, something bypassed John’s calculations. He had accounted for the machines, but he hadn’t accounted for the structural integrity of the cliff itself.

The sheer, concentrated force of the blast was too much for the stone to shoulder. Out of the smoke and fire, a deep, sickening groan echoed through the ground. A massive crack appeared all of a sudden underneath them. John, his eyes wide with the realisation of his mistake, was the fastest to react.

"Run! Run for your lives!"

He didn’t need to explain. A fall from twenty meters onto the rocks and warring armies below would kill any one of them instantly. The cracks were spreading with lightning speed, spider-webbing across the cliff side as if the entire cliff face were preparing to collapse onto the heads of the entangled monsters and machines below—taking the team with it.

John’s shout startled them into motion. They felt the vibrations beneath their boots turn into a violent swaying. Without a second of hesitation, they stood and sprinted away from the edge, chasing John’s back as the ground literally dissolved behind them.

It was a tense thirty seconds. Every time a foot hit the ground, the rock crumbled further, falling away into the abyss. No one turned their head to look. They all knew the stakes; if anyone slowed down for even a second to witness the destruction, they would be claimed by it.

*Rumble!*

The nightmare finally ended after half a minute of desperate sprinting. They reached solid, inland ground just as a fierce gale of wind, choked with dust and debris, swept over them. The noise of the collapse was deafening—a roar of falling stone that sounded like the world was tearing apart.

John was the first to look over his shoulder. The world behind them was gone, replaced by a towering wall of smoke and pulverised rock that obscured the valley below.

"Phew! That was really close!" Luke gasped, collapsing onto his knees at the new edge of the precipice. The cliff had been shaved back by several tens of meters, taking the machines with it.

The team stood at the edge of the smoke, looking down into the thick cloud of dust. Just as John began to wonder how to proceed next with this change, a notification suddenly popped up in his field of vision, totally startling him.

[Ding! Congratulations! You killed Fog Ogolith!]

[Ding! You completed part of the quest!]

John felt the back of his head go numb! The sudden turn of events threatened to derail his entire plan roadmap. His original intent had been a slow war of attrition—keeping the Ogolith alive as a chaotic meat shield to grind down the D-1000 numbers until the behemoth was on its last legs. Only then would he have swooped in to steal the killing blow. Instead, he had literally dropped the mountain on his own plan.

"Tsk," John hissed, his knuckles whitening as he clenched his hand over the hilt of his sword. "Wait here. I’ll go and scout the situation. Stay alert! Don’t move until I give the signal!"

He didn’t even wait for the others to respond. The world ahead of him was slowly clearing like a developing photograph. John was too impatient to wait for the dust to settle; he needed eyes on the ground now. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

He ran over the irregular surface of what remained of the cliff, his boots crunching on loose shale. He moved with extra care, testing the weight-bearing stability of the remaining rocks to ensure no secondary cracks were waiting to swallow him whole.

"Hmm, not bad," he whispered, peering over the new precipice.

The first look was surprisingly promising. The massive boulders hadn’t just crushed the enemies directly beneath the cliff; the sheer momentum of the rockslide, combined with the explosion shockwave, had sent debris rolling like colossal bowling balls across the valley. The landslide had carved a path of devastation several hundred meters deep into the battlefield.

From his vantage point, he could easily tell that both sides had been shaken to the core. This wasn’t just physical damage; it was a total disruption of the entire battlefield.

The machines had lost their high-ground advantage and over a thousand D-1000 units in the primary blast and subsequent burial. As for the monsters, the loss of the Ogolith—buried under lots of stone—had left them vulnerable and directionless despite their vast numbers.

"They are regrouping," John noted, his Wireframe Sight picking up the movements of the green-coded units. They weren’t moving to engage the monsters. Instead, they were pulling back towards a few rallying points. "They are regrouping far from the monsters... Don’t tell me..."

A realisation hit him like a blow: those machines were trying to run away! The D-1000s, calculating their diminishing odds and the loss of their tactical advantage, in addition to the sudden appearance of a violent explosive weapon that didn’t belong to them, were initiating a strategic withdrawal to report the anomaly and obviously asking for reinforcements.

John’s eyes darted between the tens of thousands of scattered, confused Fog Seekers and the several hundred D-1000s forming many retreating columns. He knew exactly which side he had to prioritise for the next slaughter.

"Listen up!" he shouted, not bothering to lower his voice as he sprinted back to his friends. The dust on his clothes trailed behind him like a cape. "The machines are retreating, and the monsters have lost their leader and are in complete disarray!"

"That’s great..." Luke started, a look of relief washing over his face. He clearly thought John was just providing a status update, a sign that the danger had passed. But John raised a sharp hand to silence him, his expression grimmer than ever.

"I’ll go after the machines," John commanded. "You four go down there and hunt the monsters before they find their footing. Don’t let them regroup."

"What?!!" Luke and Elena shouted in unison, their voices echoing off the remaining rock walls. The idea of John taking on the remaining machine army alone seemed suicidal, while the prospect of the four of them diving into a sea of monsters—even disorganised ones—was equally daunting.

However, Cissel and Ricky remained silent. Cissel nodded, her eyes flashing with admiration and total support for John’s ruthlessness and bravery. Ricky, meanwhile, gave John a slight, knowing nod before turning to handle the two slow friends in John’s stead.

"We can’t let a single machine slip away," Ricky said, his voice cold as he watched John’s fast running back. He felt a rare, sharp tinge of envy at John’s growing power and the diversity of unique abilities that he adopted in his fighting style lately.

"If we let even one get away, it will report our existence to their base. Then next time, God knows how many thousands of those bastards will come for us, or even far worse versions. We’ll be hunted across the entire world and won’t survive."

The silence that followed was heavy as Luke and Elena finally grasped why John had acted with such haste and nervousness.

"On top of that," Cissel chimed in, "the monsters down below may be large in numbers, but they aren’t united. They aren’t the same ferocious beasts we’ve been fighting. They are traumatised by the loss of their boss. It will be easier for the four of us to take them down now than at any other time."

"And to do so," Ricky said, starting to descend the path John had taken earlier toward the valley ground, "we need to act fast. We need to act now!"

The expressions on Luke and Elena’s faces shifted from fear to determination. As Ricky had described, as John had calculated, and as Cissel had anticipated—for them, the hunt became almost effortless. They were the wolves, and the Fog Seekers were the sheep.

As for John, it was a totally different story.