Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 144: John’s Idea to Solve the Mental Points Problem

"What?!" The suggestion caught her so off guard that she turned in a reflex, her eyes wide with exclamation. However, the moment their eyes met, reality crashed back down.

A sudden, fierce tinge of red blossomed across her cheeks, a heat so intense she felt as if her face were really burning. Panicked, she jerked her head away, staring intently at a random, unremarkable cluster of rocks in the distance.

"How do you even plan to get them up there in the first place?!" she demanded, her voice slightly higher than usual as she tried to regain her composure. "Those units are incredibly heavy."

Lanmar scratched his head, considering the problem. "I mean, I can lift the cannons, sure... But climbing a wall while hauling the extremely heavy cannon is a bit tricky, even for me. One slip and we lose a very expensive weapon, and I might get hurt as well..."

"You’ll just have to hold me and carry me up the walls," John stated plainly. He spoke with the confidence of someone who had already mapped out everything in his head. "Once I’m up, I’ll walk to the designated spots and pull the cannons directly out of my storage device. No heavy lifting or ladders are required, and no one will get hurt this way."

"Sure, that works! I can do that easily," Lanmar beamed, his chest swelling with pride. He felt a surge of relief that he had insisted on tagging along; finally, there was a task that required his specific brand of raw strength, totally ignoring how small this task was.

But then, a sobering thought hit him, and his excitement withered on the spot. "But wait... We only have one cannon finished and ready for deployment. What about the rest of the perimeter?"

Cissel seized the opportunity to pivot the conversation back to the base layout, where she felt safe. "If you’re serious about doing it this way, then we need to be organised," she said, her voice stabilising. She knelt on the dusty ground, pulling out the layout for the base.

Her fingers moved through the pages until she reached the right paper detailing the wall’s detailed mapping and design. "We should place them at regular intervals to ensure there are no blind spots. But for that to work, we need a hard number. How many are actually ready, and how many do you intend to deploy today?"

John didn’t answer immediately. Instead, a new concern flashed through his mind—one fueled by the many dangers awaiting them in this world. "Can they track and shoot flying targets?" he asked suddenly. "Or are they hard-coded to only engage ground-based hostiles?"

Cissel didn’t look up from her charts. "That’s a function of the sensors, not the cannons themselves. The barrels will point wherever the brain tells them to. If you add sensors capable of high-angle tracking and lead-target prediction, then sure, they can swat things out of the sky. But is that really a priority? We don’t exactly have a headcount on how many of those winged insects they brought with them."

"Five thousand," Lanmar interrupted, proving his worth as an intelligence asset once again. His expression grew grim. "My people already scouted the Hivemind area. They’ve brought at least five thousand of the flying swarms with them this time."

Cissel went quiet, her eyes tracing the lines of the wall drawings. She tried to project the image onto the vast, empty landscape before them, imagining the sheer volume of fire needed to cover such a massive area. "Then we definitely need them to engage aerial targets. But that brings us back to the main problem..."

"Don’t tell me," John said, rolling his eyes with a weary sigh. "It’s the program again, isn’t it?"

"Exactly," she nodded, "The hardware is nearly identical. A sensor detecting a flying target uses the same basic optics as one detecting a ground target. The difference lies entirely in the software—the algorithms that calculate trajectory, windage, and priority." She paused, a hint of a challenge in her voice.

"But I suppose you’re going to tell me you already have a way to make it happen, right?" She felt a desperate urge to look at him, to see if he was joking or serious, but she forced herself to keep her eyes glued to the blueprints. John sighed inwardly.

Her hot-and-cold behaviour was making the atmosphere increasingly tense, but they didn’t have the luxury of time for a heart-to-heart. He decided to push the awkwardness aside and focus on the mission, for now.

"I can do it," he said simply, his voice firm. He stepped past her, heading toward the area he had picked to lay down the first section of the wall. And Lanmar followed closely on his heels like a loyal shadow. "Let’s move. We have a long stretch of wall to lay down today."

Lanmar looked at the vast perimeter and then back at John, his eyes wide with disbelief. "Wait, you don’t actually expect us to cover the whole area today, do you?!"

John knew that if he activated the walls after deactivating them, he’d easily place them in the right spot without any issue. But that would come at a high cost. Even if he absorbed Mental Points from Lanmar and Cissel, he doubted they could cover even one tenth of the required distance.

Beyond the cost, there was another problem, Cissel. Given Cissel’s erratic behaviour and the cold shoulder she’d been giving him all morning, he highly doubted she would let him get close enough to use his ability on her.

So, he hoped his theory would hold: if he could master the spawn point of the items as they left his inventory, then he could lay down a great section of the wall without even spending a single Mental Point! 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

And even if the walls needed a little nudge to align, Lanmar was there to make it happen.

"What on earth is he doing now?!" Cissel muttered to herself.