Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 94: The D-1000 Weakness!

John stepped closer to the seven D-1000s, preparing to jump and trigger his abilities at any notice of danger. Yet even when he was less than five metres away, none of them turned to attack him. They were single-mindedly focused on the path ahead.

’Let me kill them first, then worry about why they’re acting stupid later.’

He lunged forward and touched the body of the unit in the middle of the formation. His heart clenched hard when his palm softly touched the cold metallic exterior of the D-1000, yet nothing happened!

Before he’d test his luck further, he hurriedly retreated after leaving behind a Logic Bomb, set to explode in ten seconds. He didn’t retreat empty-handed; he stole four Mental Points from that unit.

’They are generous, still they didn’t feel me at all...’

John felt the situation growing weirder by the second. His soft touch on the cold, white metal of the D-1000 hadn’t triggered a single defensive response, or even an awareness of his presence and touch. It was as if he were a ghost that their sensors couldn’t detect.

*Boom!*

The explosion tore through the silence of the fog, destroying the central unit instantly and sending the surrounding six into the air from the shockwave.

Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Fwoosh! 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

’Damn! They all opened fire at their mates!’

John threw his body flat against the cold ground, watching in fascination as the D-1000 units, disoriented by the blast, began blind-firing their laser guns.

The beams sliced through the fog with terrifying speed—but they ended up hitting each other. The units he had attacked were instantly shot down by the friendly fire of their own kin, in addition to a few others.

’Don’t tell me... Are they blind inside the fog?!!’

A dangerous, game-changing realisation hit him. He decided to test this outrageous theory by doing the unthinkable. He moved further into the fog and stepped directly into the projected route of a fresh group of D-1000 units. He tensed his muscles, prepared to spring away the moment their laser muzzles twitched in his direction. And yet...

’Fck! They are blind, hehehe!’

He stood perfectly still, directly in their path, and they simply kept walking. One of them passed so close its shoulder joint nearly brushed his chest, yet it continued its steady, mechanical gait, heading in the direction of his friends, as if he weren’t there.

He couldn’t restrain his inward excitement. These machines were so terrifyingly efficient in the open, but now they were blind ducks inside the fog.

’If so, then let’s switch to the wider one, Wireframe Sight!’

His vision expanded, the world around him dissolving into a skeletal grid of green and grey. Now he could see over one hundred metres in every direction. He spotted clusters of machines scattered through the fog—at least fifty of them—and that was just the limit of his current range!

’Tsk! If my friends could navigate the fog, hunting those bastards would have been a piece of cake.’

He clenched the hilt of his sword for a moment before deciding it was better to store it away. In this special situation, he didn’t need a sword; his hands and his abilities were his most efficient weapons.

’Time to hunt!’

John started a widespread hunting spree, developing a lethal pattern. He would slip behind a D-1000, place his hand on its back, and trigger MP Absorption. Each prolonged touch recharged his Mental Points by the dozens. Before leaving, he would plant his departing gift—a Logic Bomb.

After repeating the process a few times, he became an expert. He learned that he only needed two well-placed bombs to take down a cluster of ten machines. He would set the timers, lie flat on the ground, and watch as the remaining units blindly open fire, killing each other off in a frantic, confused cross-fire of laser pulses.

He had started with a dangerously low twenty-five Mental Points. After an hour of harvesting, his Mental Points were almost full. Every nine minutes or so, he would dart back toward the main path, to not exceed the ten-minute period inside the fog.

’This is enough,’ he finally decided after an hour had passed. He had lost count of how many D-1000 units he had dismantled. He took care of any big gathering of those deadly machines, and any machines close to his friends and the cliff.

The remaining ones were scattered over a huge area, moving at a snail’s pace through the thick fog. They would take at least one hour to regroup and catch up to his friends.

Worried that the cliff-side might be under a different kind of threat, he turned and ran toward his companions, staying mostly within the fog to maintain his advantage, hunting any scattered machines he’d meet.

"You are finally back!"

The sight of John emerging from the grey wall brought a visible wave of relief to everyone except the still-unconscious Ricky. Cissel’s gaze softened for a fleeting moment—a rare crack in her icy mask—before she regained her composure. She gestured toward the edge of the cliff.

"We already cleared part of the slope," she said, moving with John toward the cliff’s edge. He could see that they had managed to clear the fog halfway down to the valley floor. "We stopped because we were afraid of attracting the attention of whatever is down there..."

Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Roar!

Before she could finish her sentence, a cacophony of laser fire and the enraged, guttural roars of Fog Seekers erupted from the basin below, drowning the world in chaos. The four of them crawled to the edge to peer down. Through the thick fog, they saw brilliant flashes of white light passing through the dark valley.

Inside John’s Wireframe Sight, the picture was clear. An army of hundreds of D-1000 units was launching a full-scale assault on the Fog Seekers’ den.

"What do you see?" Cissel asked, her eyes fixed on the flashes. "Are they fighting against each other now?"