Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 262: Cissel and Luke - Part 4

"Get ready," Cissel shouted, her body tensing like a coiled spring. "I’m going out now. I’ll attract their attention outside the walls to force them into a low-altitude dive. You stay in the shadow of the towers, wait for your opening, and make sure to hit them hard! Don’t miss a single bastard of them."

Her shout was followed immediately by a massive leap off the high walls. Seeing her plunge into the open kill zone without a shred of hesitation crushed the last remaining thread of doubt and fear inside Luke’s heart. He watched, breathless, as she became the focal point of the mechanical swarm’s wrath.

Cissel landed gracefully, rolling several times across the soil to minimise the impact of the fall. The moment she stabilised, she snapped her head upward. Her gamble had worked; the high-altitude sensors of the fifty drones had pivoted as one, locking onto the only mobile life sign in the area.

*Fwoosh!* *Fwoosh!* *Fwoosh!*

The next moments were a blur of high-intensity violence. Searing crimson laser shots rained down over her head, stitching the ground with scorched scars. Yet, Cissel was a phantom.

She accelerated, her silhouette blurring as she dashed away at the last possible second. She moved in a frantic, unpredictable zigzag, evading the light-speed volleys as if she had spent her entire life dancing between raindrops.

"This never gets old, hehehe," she snorted to herself. For a fleeting second, the adrenaline made her feel as though she had been transported back years ago, to a time of different wars and different stakes.

As she maintained her evasive sprint, the flying drones’ firing patterns began to stagnate in a certain area. It happened exactly as she had predicted: once the drones locked onto a coordinate, their primitive sensors kept them firing at that spot even after she had dashed away from the area.

However, they were still frustratingly out of reach, hovering fifty meters above the ground. She couldn’t touch them from down here, and that was when a cold pang of worry hit her.

She turned her head toward the ramparts, inwardly wondering if Luke was finally going to overcome his shackles and act, or if he would succumb to his anxiety and remain paralysed in the shadows.

"Fck you all! Stay away from my friends, you bastards!"

The fierce shout erupted from the top of the walls just as the flying drones began their banking turn. Then, something truly unbelievable happened.

Luke didn’t just jump; he launched himself. Mimicking Cissel’s leap, he dove off the fortifications. Because the flying drones had descended to a lower altitude to tighten their firing spread, they were now close to the apex of the walls. Luke didn’t fall to the dirt; he found his footing with a bone-jarring thud directly on top of the flying drone’s back.

"Die, you btches!"

He didn’t stop to find his balance. He instantly swung his massive club, the reinforced metal whistling through the air before smashing through the drone’s metallic body. The heavy alloys Cissel spoke of weren’t there; instead, thin plates of armour that shattered under his club.

The machine let out a mechanical scream of grinding gears, rotating wildly on its axis as it lost altitude. Before it could fall down and crash, Luke sprinted across its bucking back, leapt high into the air, and landed squarely on top of the next flying drone, acting like an agile monkey with a big wooden stick in its hand.

"Damn! He is good!" Cissel’s eyes shone with a fierce light, while a smile found its way on her face. She watched Luke repeat the process a third time, leaping from one falling wreck to the next like a mountain goat made of muscle and rage. "It’s time for me to take care of the rest!"

Inspired by his ferocious performance, Cissel triggered her own shot distance acceleration ability. She jumped, her body propelled upward by a gale of wind.

As she expected, she topped out at about twenty meters, nowhere near the flying drones’ current height, but it was enough. She whipped her arms forward, hurling her two daggers with as much strength as she could.

The blades penetrated the drones’ outer shells like it was made out of thin paper. The machines unleashed thick bellows of black smoke, stalling mid-air before falling hard to the ground. They crashed into the dirt, dead before they even hit.

"Another round!" Cissel shouted. She sprinted toward the wreckage, retrieved her daggers in a fluid motion, and repeated the aerial assassination again and again.

Coupled with Luke’s unbelievable acrobatics, the two managed to destroy the fifty flying drones in less than ten minutes. They were relentless, never giving the machines a single second to fly back to high altitude and recalibrate their targeting sensors.

"Great job," Cissel said, her voice filled with genuine, unmasked praise as they stood amidst the smoking debris. "That fighting style is perfect. Let’s keep that same energy for the next wave."

"But... There isn’t a next wave until we get rid of the other units, right?" Luke was panting heavily, his chest heaving as he stared at his hands and moved his eyes around the wreckage in disbelief.

He was responsible for smashing forty of the fifty flying drones, while Cissel had handled the rest. Once the flying drones had been grounded and disabled, the cannons and towers on the outposts had made short work of the remaining.

"They will come," Cissel said confidently, her eyes fixed on the distant den. "They’ll finish laying down their defences, and then they’ll come for us. So, we need to do something different."

"What?!" Luke asked, wiping sweat from his brow. He had assumed they would simply retreat to the top of the walls and welcome the D-1000s and S-1000s with the super-cannons John had provided.

Cissel had a much more aggressive idea in mind.

"There are two hundred and fifty of them out there," Cissel said, pointing her daggers toward the den. "They’re busy building walls right now. Once they’re done, they’ll march here. Tell me, Luke, do you honestly think that such a small number can pose any real threat to our large number of defences?"