Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 281: The Metallic Wasps Black Hole Tail Fire

John didn’t stay behind for a second longer. On his map, the red icons for the Metallic Wasps were already screaming toward the territory’s western fog line. He had to act fast.

John ran at his absolute maximum speed as he repeatedly activated his Speed Lock ability without pause. He scooped up a few broken machine parts along the way to use as batteries to keep his Mental Points from bottoming out, while his mind worked fast, laying down one defensive layout after another.

If he had more time, he would have turned the entire fog bank into an impregnable grand fortress filled with lots of kill zones, mirroring what he did at the northern den. But he was pushed against the wall.

His first and foremost priority was to neutralise the incoming Metallic Wasps from the two western territories. If he could swat the fliers first, he would buy himself the precious time needed to prepare for the heavy ground units.

"Luckily for me, my towers can track and engage both ground and flying targets perfectly within the fog," John noted, his breathing steady despite the exertion.

He crossed the entirety of his territory in a single hour. He arrived at the thick wall of white fog right at the northernmost point of the western border, the starting spot of the upcoming fierce battle, a tailored, grand defensive design appearing in his mind.

"Time to turn this fog into hell!"

John’s voice was a low growl. During the past hour, his mind had been a whirlwind of tactical simulations, discarding dozens of defensive layouts as quickly as he could conceive them.

He needed something that combined overwhelming firepower with high mobility, something that could adapt to the different evolved machine units.

In the end, he settled on a singular, aggressive strategy: the mass deployment of his Mobile Fortresses as his main killer weapons, not the standard fixed outposts strategy he had adopted so far.

After his recent round of intensive work in the past few hours, he had successfully enhanced every single one of the mobile cannons he had into the heavy-duty Mobile Fortresses.

He now had slightly over one thousand of these behemoths in his inventory, and he intended to carpet the western and southern fog zones with them, creating a mobile meat grinder that would swallow anything that entered the fog.

As he reached the dense wall of the western fog, he first laid down a series of small, fortified outposts to act as command-and-control centres for the mobile units, and resting spots for him and the Bulltors.

Then, he began to take out the behemoths. He laid down the walls at the edges, filled the internal decks with towers, but purposefully omitted the standard cannons. In the fog, the towers would be the primary dealers of death.

Starting from the northern tip of the western border, John began a mad, high-speed sprint toward the south. For two straight hours, he moved like a phantom, deploying five hundred Mobile Fortresses in a staggered, overlapping, long line. Only when he finished deploying half of his inventory of mobile foretresses did he finally skid to a halt.

"They are here!" 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

He checked the map. The red tide from the western territories had fragmented into three distinct echelons based on their movement speed. The Metallic Wasps were at the absolute forefront, acting as the vanguard. They were followed by the hovering, thruster S-1000s, while the giant D-1000 juggernauts brought up the rear.

John didn’t even bother to try to count them. The map was simply a solid block of crimson; there were far too many to tally. The first group to breach his defensive perimeter was the vanguard of wasps from the adjacent western territory.

They were less than ten minutes away from slamming into his Mobile Fortresses. They came in a staggering formation, a wide horizontal stretch covering tens of kilometres across the central region of the border.

"Time for the truth," John muttered. He was currently positioned at the lower third of the western border. He abandoned his construction tasks and raced back toward the central region, his eyes glued to the map, waiting to see the results of the first contact.

"Hahaha! Even if they evolved, they are still blind in the fog!"

The first clash was a spectacle of one-sided massacre. John couldn’t help but laugh as he watched the Mobile Fortresses’ towers lock onto the metallic wasps. Because of the fog, the wasps weren’t flying at high altitudes; they were skimming low to maintain some sense of ground orientation. This placed them directly within the optimal kill zone of the towers.

As the first volleys of blue energy tore through the fog, the metallic wasps plummeted in charred heaps. Even as they were picked off, they couldn’t triangulate the source of the fire.

As the metallic wasps realised they were being massacred by an invisible foe, they panicked. They began to fire blindly and madly at anything and everything around them.

It was in this moment that John saw the terrifying reality of what these creatures truly were, and what would happen if even a handful of them breached his territory.

The first surprise came from the elongated tail. John had already suspected the stinger was more than a simple needle, given the muzzle-like opening at its tip. As the wasps grew desperate, they arched their tails below their bodies and opened fire.

The shots that erupted from those tails were more devastating than any cannon fire John had ever witnessed. They weren’t standard explosive shells; the projectiles seemed to collapse the very space they occupied upon impact, acting like miniature, short-lived black holes.

The black hole effect took down scores of the wasps’ own kin in the crossfire, but it had a secondary, more dangerous damage: it cleared the fog. The areas where the black hole shots imploded were momentarily stripped of fog, creating pockets of perfect clarity. They acted like cores, yet luckily their area of effect was small, not massively clearing the fog too wide as the cores.