Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 223: Laying Down a Base!
The Bulltors watched in stunned silence as their private possessions, piles of weapons, rations, defensive towers, walls, and other stuff materialised out of thin air in front of them.
The questions and the lingering doubts in their hearts vanished instantly. They looked at John not as a fallen human, but as a real, terrifying wizard of the Source Code World.
Yet their shock was just getting started!
After John emptied the staggering contents of the storage devices, he began the process of sorting and cataloguing the loot. His eyes darted across the mountains of items and specialised military gear.
"Damn! You guys are way richer than Lanmar and his gang!" After a few minutes of calculation, he couldn’t help but exclaim out loud.
In front of him, the piles were no longer just messy heaps; they were organised stacks of thousands of units. He saw hundreds of items from every member of them, including walls and defensive towers.
From just the couple hundred Bulltors around, he had matched the total haul he’d gained from Lanmar’s entire group and the five thousand D-1000s back at the mountain base combined.
"Hahaha, we are the Twelve!" one of the Bloodlines descendants barked in a prideful tone. "Our personal guard and we carry the finest gear the Source Code World has to offer. We are all backed up by ancient families and a long line of backers. Nothing that our people brought from the Source Code World is too hard to get for us."
"I can easily tell that," John nodded, his satisfaction growing as he spotted items he had never even seen before. "Okay, we’ll do it this way then... I need you to filter the walls and the defensive towers. Separate them into two distinct piles. If you have any advanced traps, filter them as well. If not, what we have here is already more than enough to take over this territory."
"Understood..." Blakar looked at the massive stacks of dormant towers, his expression clouded with practical concern. "But even if we sort them, we only have a few hundred warriors here. To activate a single defensive tower, we usually need ten of our people to gush their Mana into the tower simultaneously. We shall wait then for our people to come from the base to help..."
"No need," John waved his hand in a dismissive, careless gesture. "I can easily activate all of them on my own. I don’t have Mana like you guys, but my power is a bit... Different. Just do as I say, okay?"
"..."
The Bulltors exchanged silent glances, a fresh wave of doubt and hesitation washing over them. Activating a tower was a feat of collective strength, not a solo endeavour for any of them, not to mention for a fallen human. Yet, with a single, heavy nod from Blakar, they pushed their scepticism aside and began sorting through the large number of items into the requested piles.
Seeing the sheer scale of his new loot forced John to adjust his tactical blueprints on the fly. "I have more than enough here to be modest," he muttered. "Let’s expand the perimeter even further."
While the giants worked on the sorting, John moved to the edge of the cleared zone. He used more Wrathers cores in quick succession, pushing the fog back on three fronts until the cleared territory had expanded fivefold. When the space was secured, he walked toward the towering piles of defensive structures and began the activation process.
To the Bulltors, it looked like a miracle. John simply touched each pyramid-like item, and a surge of light would ripple through the air, bringing the defensive tower to life instantly, making it grow to its fierce height and shape. Each item he activated was sucked into his inventory the next second, readying himself for rapid deployment.
Seeing this made everyone’s eyes go wider! It was known that storage devices had limited capacity for storing activated towers. Or else they wouldn’t have wasted time on deactivating and reactivating them. Yet John didn’t show any sign of stopping! He kept throwing hundreds of towers into his storage device like his device was bottomless or magical!
"Are humans known to have wizards among them?!" Lilith couldn’t restrain her curiosity any longer. She leaned toward Blakar, whispering in a voice that was still loud enough for the others to hear. Her question mirrored the shock in everyone’s heart.
"Honestly... All the information and reports say humans are a useless race with no specific trait, skill, or talent," Blakar sighed, his eyes fixed on John’s hands. "Yet seeing this one makes me wonder if our intel is wrong, or if this human is just a freakish anomaly."
John ignored the chitchat. In front of them, he was performing feats that defied their understanding of the entire apocalypse. He moved as if he were building sandcastles on a beach, working with a speed and precision that made the monumental task look trivial.
Once he finished activating every single piece of the hoard, he stood in the centre of the massive clearing, closing his eyes to determine the optimal layout for the fortifications.
Like always, he started to test how to ideally place the walls and towers, adjusting his steps and posture till he finally found the right pattern.
Then, he began to build.
In front of the stunned eyes of the Twelve and their elite squads, a proper, large, and heavily defended base began to materialise out of the dirt. Even though he had expanded the cleared area five times over, the base he constructed was so efficient that he still had enough walls and towers left in his inventory to build ten more just like it.
He laid down ten thick wall segments next to each other before linking them with a defensive tower. He designed the structure with a singular, massive gate at the rear, the point where he intended to let the incoming Bulltor army from their territory pass through and join the fray.
