Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 273: Ricky and Elena - Part 1

"Ricky, hey, Ricky, look! Look over there... The Bulltors... John really did send them!!"

Elena’s voice was strained, a mix of disbelief and sheer relief cutting through the roar of the battlefield. Since the very first moment Ricky and Elena had reached the southern territory, the two of them had been trapped in a suffocating, tight situation.

The journey itself had been a gruelling marathon. It had taken them eight hours of relentless sprinting to travel from Cissel and Luke’s northern territory down to this godforsaken battlefield.

By the time they arrived, less than two hours had already passed since the start of the first wave. That delay was costly; the den had already ramped up its production cycles, unleashing the eleventh wave just as they crossed the border.

Their arrival was a race against time. They had barely scrambled into position before the next two-hour window closed, preventing the den from unleashing the twenty-first wave.

From that very first moment, the two found themselves staring down a horizon choked with hundreds of thousands of machines. It was a terrifying scene, a sea of shifting ground and flying units that made even the usually overconfident Ricky feel a sudden, cold grasp of dread tightening around his heart.

He felt like he had drawn the short stick this time. This wasn’t a skirmish; it was a tidal wave. And yet, the moment he took a long, panoramic look over the dense formation of the machines, his instincts, honed by watching John’s unorthodox methods, kicked into full gear. He knew exactly what they had to do to survive the next ten minutes, let alone the next ten hours.

"Let’s retreat to the fog!" Ricky shouted over the whine of descending drones.

Elena’s head snapped toward him, her brow furrowing in confusion and desperation. Before she could voice an argument or object to giving up ground, Ricky preempted her. "We’re going to do it John’s way. Come on, this is going to be a bumpy start for us, but it’s our only play."

Elena instantly recalled what he meant. When John had arrived to rescue them back in the Hiveminds territory, the area had been similarly filled to the brim with monsters.

John hadn’t charged headlong into the centre of the horde. Instead, he had carved out a fortress inside the fog, using the white fog as a natural shroud to build his base before clearing the area. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Yet this plan wasn’t just aimed to hide themselves behind the fog; they were going to use the fog itself as a weapon on their side! Luckily for them, this wasn’t a monster tide; it was machines. And machines never operated well inside the fog.

Ricky decided he was going to mimic that strategy, adding his own small edits to exploit the machines’ specific sensory weaknesses.

"That’s enough," Ricky commanded as they worked in a frantic haste to anchor a basic outpost. They had retreated just deep enough into the fog that the territory up front looked blurred, like a dull, grey smear. He stopped Elena before she could add a second layer of walls.

"We don’t know how much time we have before the den unleashes a wave ten levels higher. We can’t build a strong outpost right now. Instead, we’re going to lure them in and deal with whatever comes with what we have now."

"Lure?! What do you mean?!!" Elena was taken aback, her sledgehammers thrown in the air and caught in a natural, nervous way.

Ricky pointed toward a small, cleared patch of land they had just carved out, an area roughly one kilometre in length and half a kilometre in width. Then, he motioned toward the wall of dense fog at a distance and explained the core idea of his gamble.

"The machines are powerful, but they are functionally blind against the fog," he explained, pausing to check the distant hazy territory.

"Their sensors rely on optical clarity, it seems. That’s why we built this base just dozens of meters away from the fog line. We’ll go out there, attack, draw their aggro, and kill a few.

Then, we hastily retreat back into the fog, attracting as many as we can in the process. In the fog, they won’t be able to track our precise coordinates, while our towers will do the rest. I recall John saying that cannons won’t do well in the fog, as they use sensors from these machines.

Yet the towers are a different story. If any machine is brave enough to follow the line of fire into the fog, they’ll be welcomed by our cannons at point-blank range. This way, we reset the clock of the den and expand our footprint inch by inch."

"Fine," Elena grunted, her grip tightening on her two sledgehammers. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the territory at a distance. "Leave those annoying flying drones to me. I’ll bring them down to ground."

"I’ll handle the ground units then," Ricky replied. He had used the precious minutes during the construction of the outpost to brief her on the flying drones’ ins and outs.

Like Cissel, he was intimately familiar with their fight patterns and knew exactly where their weakness was. Yet unlike Luke, Elena didn’t shower Ricky with an endless stream of questions. She was a warrior girl, and all her focus was on how to tear apart the incoming flying drones without getting hit by their laser guns.

The next minute, the two of them darted outside the safety of the fog and ran directly into the immediate area teeming with machines. The first one to draw blood was Elena.

Activating her ability, she became a deadly warrior. With a ferocious, guttural cry, she swung her hammers in wide arcs, the impact shattering the bodies of several D-1000s and denting the heavy plating of a pair of S-1000s.

"That’s enough! Let’s retreat!" Ricky shouted from her flank.

While she attacked, he wasn’t idle; he had unleashed his tentacles, lashing out to absorb the Mental Points from the machines and decaying their bodies on contact.