Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 278: The Mysterious Red Tide
"That’s... New!!"
The exclamation hung in the cold night air, barely audible over the nearby symphony of destruction. As darkness swallowed the pocket trial world, the tight and deadly encirclement John had placed around the den was still roaring with life.
Even as the night fell, the defences still roared with continuous and deadly attacks that instantly destroyed every machine unit that dared to appear. John watched the perimeter calmly, assessing the effectiveness of his new layout.
He knew the den wouldn’t trigger any entirely new waves for the entire night, but the waiting quota of the last massive wave still had to be fulfilled. So he expected the defences to keep working till midnight or so.
During the past several hours, John hadn’t allowed himself a moment of rest. He had been working non-stop on hacking the machine’s storage programs and enhancing the six new weapon types he’d salvaged, plus the regular types like the energy cells, the generators, and the cannons.
He was itching to try and edit the defensive towers and walls that formed the cornerstone of his entire defensive setups so far, yet there was no time for such extravagant tests.
He kept working even when the night fell. Whenever the mental exhaustion began to creep in, he would force himself to check the map, eating and drinking to keep his stamina from bottoming out.
From checking the map, he could tell the overall situation on different fronts looked stable. Cissel and Luke were doing just fine, their defensive lines holding firm.
The Bulltors he’d dispatched to them had taken a bit longer than he had initially thought, a delay he couldn’t quite put his finger on, as the travel time should have been half of what they actually spent. However, he didn’t linger on the anomaly.
He watched the map as Cissel and Luke guided the newly arrived Bulltors toward their meticulously prepared nests of fortifications. Satisfied they were secure, the two finally allowed themselves a well-earned moment of rest, especially when no machine units were roaming their territory.
On the other side of the trial, Ricky and Elena were performing remarkably similar to his own setup, though perhaps under slightly more dangerous conditions. Their southern territory was a chaotic hive of activity, filled with endless machine units even under the cover of night.
Fortunately, spending time with him had paid off; they had spent the last several hours focusing their efforts on hunting the flying drones, effectively clearing the aerial threat. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦
John wasn’t surprised to see this, as he already expected Cissel and Ricky to be the most well accustomed among his friends with the various types of machines.
All that remained for Ricky and Elena to contend with were the ground forces, a seemingly huge number indeed, but he trusted the two were up to the task and would clear their territory before the next day arrived.
Like Cissel and Luke, the southern duo had eventually retreated to their metallic tents to sleep and rest. Yet unlike Cissel and Luke, Ricky and Elena had lots of machines roaming in their territory.
So the Bulltors sent to them took charge of the ongoing battle while his two friends had their well-earned sleep. They had done brilliantly well, exceeding John’s expectations. For a brief moment, everything looked to be under his and his friends’ absolute control.
John sat back, weighing his next move. He was torn between two paths: should he wait here for his defences to finish off the last machine before hacking the den core and closing it for good, or should he leave the automated farm running and head out to repeat this encirclement strategy around the other two active dens?
Initially, he had planned to head toward Ricky and Elena first, helping the Bulltors there clear the massive backlog of the machine den before moving north to help Cissel and Luke. But he’d had a change of heart.
Cissel’s territory was already clean of machines, meaning he wouldn’t have to waste a single second fighting and clearing his path to the den. He could set up her encirclement in half an hour, then dedicate the remaining night and early morning hours to clearing the mechanical tide in Ricky’s zone.
Just as he was finalising this plan and making the decision to swap targets, he performed a habitual check of the map. In an instant, the air seemed to leave his lungs. A shocking, violent change erupted across the map.
In front of his eyes, the entire southern portion of the pocket trial map was suddenly dyed a deep, bleeding red.
The crimson dots didn’t just appear; they exploded into existence, starting from the territory north of the human base, extending into the territory below Cissel’s, and swarming the area where Ricky and Elena were currently sleeping.
This all came without warning, out of the blue. He kept checking the map frequently and never saw any change in the two western territories, ever before.
Seeing such a massive concentration of red dots surging out from the two western territories made John’s brow furrow into a deep frown. He had already suspected that Mark would lay down two dens in those territories.
And yet, he had never seen a single human icon walking toward those territories before, nor had his map indicated any red dots in those zones until this very second.
"Something is off..." John narrowed his eyes, his mind racing, trying to find out the root of the problem. He recalled instances where his map had missed certain things, just like he couldn’t see the Hiveminds’ graveyard in the northern territory on his map. "It seems he is using a method I don’t know to interfere with my map’s refresh rate..."
He guessed that Mark had found a way to ghost the movement of his units, hiding them from his map. Then, his thoughts shifted to the process of the den activation itself. How had the dens been activated without him noticing the movement of three hundred humans heading towards these territories?
