Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 274: Ricky and Elena - Part 2
Ricky cleared a wide circle around them in seconds. However, the moment he spotted the entire machine army in the surrounding area, which turned towards them and began a grand charge, he knew their narrow window was closing.
The two ran without looking back, their boots thumping against the damp earth as they headed directly towards the safety of their outpost. They scrambled up the walls, lungs burning, while Elena felt a gnawing nervousness like never before.
"Will it work?" she softly whispered to herself, her grip tightening on her sledgehammers.
The answer came to her in the next heartbeat. Behind them, the vanguard of the machine army surged forward. Hundreds of units ventured into the thick, white veil of the fog, fanning out across a large area in an aggressive search, their sensors pulsing with a singular directive: find the two humans and kill them.
Yet, what welcomed them was a pure, impenetrable layer of white fog. Before this moment, none of John’s friends had ever truly witnessed the weird phenomenon he had spoken about so casually. He described the tale of his brutal fight against the D-1000s in the fog like it was a fairy tale. But at this moment, the two were destined to witness a real miracle.
The grand army of machines suddenly halted. It was as if a master switch had been flipped; they lost track of the two targets who were mere tens of metres away. The machines stood like frozen statues, their servos whining as they rotated their heads aimlessly, unable to locate where to go or what to attack.
Seeing the sudden shift was shocking! And before either of the two could snap out of their daze, the defensive towers behind their walls roared to life. Bright flashes illuminated the fog as the towers fired intensely, tearing through the stationary machines without pause.
"It’s working! Hahaha! It’s working!" Elena shouted, her laughter ringing out over the sound of tower fire. Even the terrifying flying drones were hovering uselessly in the air, unable to advance except aimlessly through the fog, unable to find a target lock to fire their laser shots at.
"Don’t get distracted," Ricky finally snapped, shaking his head as if waking himself from a dream. He spoke with a sharpness that suggested he was shouting the words to himself just as much as to Elena. "There are more of them coming through the fog line. Let’s help the towers and clear the flying drones first."
Ricky had made it clear before they even began their attack: the flying drones were a real nuisance. They needed to be erased from the sky first. Then, dealing with the ground units would be easy.
As he saw the ground fight was being handled perfectly by the towers, with the occasional stray unit that accidentally stumbled toward the base being obliterated by the heavy cannons, Ricky shifted his focus upward.
The two of them adopted a high-mobility style, the same style that Cissel suggested and Luke executed. Ricky was the owner of this idea, as he described it as the best approach ever to handle the drones. Yet unlike Cissel and Luke, they didn’t need anyone to act as bait.
The drones were flying blindly, and their altitude was getting lower over time. They launched themselves from the ramparts, jumping high into the air and shattering any hovering drone within reach before using the falling wreckage as a platform to jump to another, and then another.
The opening gambit for the two was mercilessly exhausting at first, yet it ended brilliantly. After an hour of frantic ground fights and aerial demolition, having fought and destroyed for at least ten thousand units, the machines stopped breaking into the fog. It was as if they had successfully cleared a massive buffer zone adjacent to the fog line.
When the two eventually ventured out to scout the edge of the territory, they found a large, eerily empty stretch of land where not a single active machine remained. The silence was heavy, broken only by their heavy breaths.
"What shall we do now?" Elena whispered, her chest heaving. "Shall we expand the cleared area around the outpost and link it with the territory like how John did it, or..."
"We’ll do it our way," Ricky said, his eyes cold as he clenched both sword hilts. "We’ll expand this outpost further and turn it into a real fortress. Then we go back out there and draw the attention of more machines, leading them right back into our little killing zone."
"But... How do we keep them coming if they lose us in the fog?"
"We’ll use the grenades we have," Ricky said, referring to a different type of grenades than the blue, purple, and yellow explosives Elena had in mind.
He reached into his storage device and pulled out a handful of specialised grenades, the ones John had looted during the very first machine massacre at the Ogolith den, the ones he used before when they were overwhelmed by the Wrathers’ last wave.
"Oh, you mean those," Elena paused, a spark of inspiration lighting up her eyes. "Since we’re hunkering down, why don’t we renovate the outpost while we’re at it?"
"What do you mean?!" Ricky asked, confused. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢
As Elena explained her idea, drawing inspiration from how John had managed the night-fights against the monsters back in the Hiveminds territory, he began to nod in quick agreement.
She wanted to not just depend on the machines to come closer to them to attack, but to scatter a dense pack of yellow fire traps between the outpost and the fog line, killing and kiting down the machines coming from a distance.
To do it more efficiently, they needed to give machines enough space to wander inside the fog in large numbers. They needed to renovate the outpost location.
"Let’s do it then," Ricky said, turning back toward the wall fog. "The towers’ range is slightly over five hundred metres, so we can retreat the fortress walls to be exactly one kilometre away from the fog line.
