Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 98: The Fog Seekers Or the D-1000s, That’s the Question!
Ricky was finally awake. He was sitting up, rubbing his temples, his eyes clear for the first time in days.
"Ricky, you are alive, man!" Luke, out of the goodness of his heart, completely forgot the hellish two days he had experienced at the hands of the possessed Ricky. He jumped forward, pulling the dazed youngster into a rough hug.
Ricky looked as if he didn’t recall a single second of the past forty-eight hours. He blinked, staring at the surrounding rocky groove as if it were an alien planet. The deafening noises of the fierce battle raging all around—the roars of monsters and the high-pitched whine of laser fire—startled him, making his shoulders hunch instinctively.
John left the task of explaining the gaps in Ricky’s memory to Luke and Elena. He had far more pressing matters to attend to; his mind was already swirling with different scenarios of how to use his new ability to cause the most serious damage and win this war.
As for Cissel, she looked visibly relieved to see the old Ricky back, but her relief was fleeting. Her full attention quickly shifted back to the real mystery standing not far from her: John.
Even though she clearly had a thousand questions—about the extraction, the explosions, and the bizarre disappearance of the giant—she stayed silent. As John had suspected, she was too smart to pry while the world was on fire.
Instead, she watched him with a look of pure amusement, as if she were in a trance, fascinated by his growing list of bizarre abilities and his unconventional ways of fighting.
’Let me try this,’ John thought, contemplating for a few minutes. He needed to test the limits of his new power. ’Sandbox... Sandbox... Sandbox... Sandbox...’
Instead of activating the ability just once, he layered it. He did it eight times in rapid succession, draining his Mental Points in a burst. He carefully selected the target zones, chaining the areas together to form a larger grid. By placing three Sandbox squares next to each other in a series, he created an invisibility zone of fifteen metres around the Ogolith.
He timed his intervention perfectly. The moment the Ogolith finished crushing the previous squad of D-1000s, it lunged toward a much larger group of three hundred machines. Before the far machines could lock on it, John dropped the veil.
"It vanished again!" Cissel commented in awe, as if she were watching a front-row seat at a high-level magic show. Her words immediately snapped the boys out of their conversation.
"What are you speaking about?" Ricky asked, his voice still raspy. He hadn’t seen the Ogolith yet, so he didn’t grasp the impact of the blind spot John created. "And how come those machines are here? Wait... Aren’t they the old D-1000 models?!"
"I told you already," Luke said, rolling his eyes as he helped Ricky to his feet. "The machines attacked us at the orchard base, and we ran to end up hiding inside the monsters’ den. Now the machines are fighting against them, and we’re caught in the middle!"
"Fascinating!" Ricky’s eyes gleamed with a sudden, sharp realisation as he looked at the distant wrecks. "Their point of weakness is well-protected... That’s a significant upgrade from the old reports about them!"
"That’s not good news at all!" Cissel sighed, her hand resting on the hilt of her daggers. "We can’t kill them effectively. Only John here can do that explosive trick and take them down one by one, but he’s just one person."
"Explosive trick? Don’t tell me it’s the same one from the academy..."
"It’s not the right time for any of that, guys!" John lowly barked, rolling his eyes at their chatter. He kept his gaze fixed on the behemoth. "We need to do our part. That behemoth won’t last long under all those laser shots, even with me helping him!"
John was right. Despite the invisibility frames he was dropping, the Ogolith was taking massive damage whenever it moved between the zones. After only a short duration of the start of this battle, hundreds of D-1000s had successfully focused their fire on the giant’s limbs.
One of its massive rear legs was already shattered, hanging at an unnatural angle. If not for John’s timely intervention, the second leg would have been rendered useless as well, leaving it a sitting duck for the machines to kill at their leisure.
"What behemoth... Oh, forget it. That behemoth... It makes sense indeed!" Ricky gasped as the giant moved outside the area of illusion, and he finally saw the ten-meter terror.
He watched as the Ogolith tore through a line of D-1000s, its massive claws shredding the sturdy white alloy shells like they were made of thin paper, before it stepped back into John’s blind zone.
"There are tens of thousands of monsters here," Ricky said, his mind fully regaining its former edge. He began analysing the layout of the valley. "It may be to our advantage to let the machines kill that behemoth and the rest of the monsters first. We can’t handle this many ourselves. We wait for the victor to be weakened, then we move."
"Wrong," Cissel interrupted him sharply. She didn’t even look at Ricky; she kept her eyes on John, as if she could unveil his secrets by staring. "We already fought against more than five thousand earlier today. We killed them all. But the machines, they are a different story."
"What?!!" Luke and Ricky shouted in unison, staring at the three of them in disbelief. "Don’t tell me you gained all of their cores..."
"Surely we did," Elena said, even sticking her tongue out to tease the duo. She hadn’t forgotten how Luke had boasted the night before about out-gathering them. The look of pure shock on Luke’s face was the first bit of humour they’d had in hours.
"Gather up," John suddenly said, his voice dropping into a low, commanding tone. The duration of his Sandbox was ending, and the battlefield was about to become even more volatile.
He turned away from the groove’s edge, his eyes glowing with the reflected light of the laser fire. "It’s time to start our role in this war. Let’s discuss our plan to win this and kill everyone—monsters and machines—right here!"
