Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 224: Starting the Battle to Take Over the Hiveminds’ Territory
"This... This could be a great base for a big army," one of the Twelve whispered. "You’ve done in minutes what would have taken thousands of us a week of hard labour. And you did it entirely on your own! You didn’t even break a sweat!!"
The Bulltor was just like the others, completely awestruck. Yet John didn’t intend to stop at mere walls. He began pulling out his cannons, rows upon rows of them, and mounting them on the ramparts with ease. He didn’t forget to add an edit to all the cannons program, one that worked on the general Bulltor race to avoid firing over his newly gained forces.
"As I expected, I’m still running a bit short on the cannons," he noted, looking at the gaps in his grand design. With a base this large, his existing stock wasn’t enough to cover the entire base walls with cannons.
He didn’t just fortify the part of the walls facing the Hiveminds territory; he wanted to place the cannons all around the base, the same as he did with the towers. He knew the moment this area got linked with the territory up front, the monsters would swarm and surround it from all directions.
He checked his inventory again, pulling up the thousands of cannons he’d salvaged from the D-1000 units back in the Bulltor territory, plus the motors and sensors. "It was a good move to collect everything before coming here. Now I just need a few hours to enhance these with some proper code..."
John knew he would need tons of Mental Points to execute a project of this magnitude, but thanks to his new companions, he knew he wouldn’t run dry of his hard currency. But first, he decided to start the ball rolling, decided to start the fight, then he’d work to perfect the defences.
"Get ready!" John’s voice boomed over the ramparts, cutting through the distant roars of the monsters.
"I’m clearing the fog up front. The moment the veil drops, the monsters are going to flood this sector. If you want to have some fun, get down there and kill. But remember, you can always retreat behind these walls to rest when you’re tired. This is our safe ground now!"
He stood on the section of the walls facing the Hiveminds’ territory, looking like a dark speck against the massive walls. With a fluid motion, he hurled dozens of Wrathers cores into the distance, spacing them out in a wide arc.
As the cores pushed the fog away, a massive, sudden stretch of land was revealed, creating a clear corridor between his newly constructed base and the infested Hiveminds lands.
*Roar!* *Roar!* *Roar!*
The sound was like a tsunami wave. The moment the new space appeared, the space was filled by a gushing tide of red and yellow. Thousands of monsters, previously hidden by the fog, surged forward in an instantaneous, mindless rush!
Seeing the sheer scale of the threat made the Bulltors visibly shaken; even the elite Twelve had never faced a monster tide of this density before. It looked like the very ground was moving toward them.
But the next moment, John’s defences began their own roar.
The pulse cannons began firing in volleys. Streaks of white light tore through the air, detonating in the centre of the monster ranks. In a matter of seconds, hundreds of yellow monsters were killed, and the Wrathers activated their lightning protection; then they started to die in batches afterwards.
"This will do," John muttered, satisfied. He turned his gaze toward the distant coordinates on his map where his friends were still encircled and fighting hard. "I’ll finish the remaining cannon modifications, then I’m moving toward your spot. I’ll leapfrog more bases around, to kite down the monsters and pull you all to safety!"
He didn’t waste time standing on the walls to enjoy the fireworks. He leapt down where rows of salvaged D-1000 cannons were lined up like silent soldiers. He moved among them, while starting to work over their programs using Shell ability, adding and modifying the sensors and motors as he did before.
To ensure the cannons wouldn’t fire at the Bulltors in the heat of battle, he had previously asked Blakar to stand still, move, run, speak, and shout, while one of the cannons on the walls mapped the Bulltor’s actions and parameters into code lines.
This time, however, he didn’t just write a bypass for a single person. He wrote a racial exclusion code that covered every member of the Bulltor race using Blakar data.
When he ran the diagnostic test, the cannon targeting passed over the giants without firing. He wasn’t worried anymore about the Bulltors; in this pocket trial, not a single Bulltor was an enemy anymore.
To speed things up, John copied the entire optimised code program of the activated cannon he modified and tested, and stored it within his Shell’s storage space. Now, whenever he approached a raw cannon, he didn’t have to rewrite the changes line by line. He simply executed a "Replace All" command with a single thought.
From time to time, he would bark a command at a nearby Bulltor to come and place a hand on his shoulder for five seconds, to absorb and recharge his depleted Mental Points.
At this point, no one questioned him anymore. In the eyes of the Bulltors, this human was a wizard who manipulated the world with the flick of a finger, performing feats that shattered their comprehension of the apocalypse.
Once he finished working on the cannons, John turned his attention to the energy cells he had harvested from the wreckage. His haul was staggering, a mountain of large batteries salvaged from the fallen machines. But he wasn’t planning on just slotting them into the cannons one by one.
"It’s time to test if my hypothesis is right," he whispered to himself.
He took a moment to monitor the tactical situation. The battles around his new base and the distant outpost where his friends were stationed were both going smoothly.
The defences were holding, the Bulltors were fighting with newfound vigour, and his friends were too strong to be threatened by anything except hunger, thirst, and fatigue. However, the monsters showed absolutely no signs of wavering or getting pushed back. John knew exactly why.
Without finding the yellow dens and hacking the golden core at their centre, the yellow monsters would continue to flood the lands in an endless, spiking curve. The current firepower was quite enough, but he knew it wouldn’t suffice for the higher waves.
Not to mention, he was fighting an entire territory filled to the brim with monsters. To put an end to the tide fast, he needed to up the stakes. He needed far deadlier, evolved cannons to mass-kill the monsters.
But the evolved cannons meant a massive energy drain. As he looked at the pile of energy cells, he began to think of something he once hypothesised before. And if his thoughts were correct, then he was about to crack a way to solve the energy problem once and for all.
