Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 282: The Thruster S-1000 Machine Army Joins the Fray!

The second surprise John found in the metallic wasps’ attack was their offensive payload addition.

The old flying drones had used back-mounted laser guns to peck at targets, but these wasps operated like real bombers. They dropped small, pulsating pods that exploded with a fierce intensity, erupting into pillars of blue fire that engulfed everything within a hundred-meter radius in mere seconds.

The attacks were cruel, efficient, and deadly. The pillars of fire rose high into the fog, incinerating more of the wasps in their own chaotic attacks. John’s smile faded as he watched the devastation.

"I can’t let a single one of those things cross into my territory, or meet any of my friends or the Bulltors," he whispered, his hand instinctively clenching the hilt of his sword. He felt the cold weight of the threat; if just one wasp escaped the fog and reached the Bulltors’ camp or his friends, the destruction would be absolute.

Luckily, his Mobile Fortresses were engaging from hundreds of meters away, keeping them safe from the deadly fire pillars. As for the tail shots, the panicked wasps were mostly aiming at high-altitude ghosts, making the black hole implosions largely miss the towers and the fortresses themselves.

Seeing how effectively his fortresses fought, yet how volatile the enemy was, John felt a craving for more firepower. The central fog region currently had roughly two hundred Mobile Fortresses operational, but the density of the metallic wasp red dots suggested that wasn’t nearly enough.

"I’ll add a couple hundred more here to reinforce the centre, then I’m heading south to lock down that front," he decided. He wasn’t going to take any risks. He would turn the entire western border into a solid wall of kill zones until not a single wasp remained in the sky.

Luckily, the terrifying evolution had only manifested at two of the five currently active dens. More fortunately still, those two were situated specifically to the west of his territory.

This meant John didn’t need to apply this tight defensive strategy all over the other borders. He just needed to fortify the western border, adding extra contingencies to the north and south just in case the machines tried a wide flanking manoeuvre.

He took roughly half an hour to sprint back to the central region. Once there, he began landing more Mobile Fortresses exactly as he’d planned. To ensure things wouldn’t spiral out of control, he spent another hour placing additional outposts and filling them to the brim with high-output towers.

He even retreated inward by a few dozen kilometres, clearing pockets of fog using the Wrather cores. In these cleared kill zones, he laid down further outposts, deploying super cannons, laser cannons, high-altitude air traps, and sophisticated sensory grids.

After he felt satisfied with the density of defences at the central region, he resumed his southward run. Armed with his recent data on the Metallic Wasps’ behaviour, he replicated the tiered defence at the southern reaches of the western border.

He laid down multiple layers of defences, sensory nets, traps, and different weapons to ensure not a single one of those deadly wasps could slip through his grasp.

Knowing that the incoming swarm from the south-western territory might try to cut across the southern border to bypass the western wall, John decided to play it safe. He began extending his works along that front as well.

Halfway through this construction, the early batches of the southern metallic wasps arrived. They were treated to the same reception as their northern kin: a blind, confusing baptism of deadly attacks from an enemy they couldn’t see.

A second, a similar large wave of ground forces drew closer four hours after the first contact with the wasps. To John’s grim surprise, the first wave hadn’t been entirely killed yet; their huge numbers were effectively providing a challenge for his defences.

On the map, he could see the following echelon of thruster S-1000s closing in; they would link up with the aerial vanguard in less than an hour.

John had only covered half of the southern border when he stopped. The fight against the metallic wasps was holding, but he needed a more robust safeguard against the heavy ground units that would inevitably follow.

He decided to stop his southward expansion, turn back, and begin laying down a completely different form of fortification designed for heavy, ground warfare type attrition.

The Mobile Fortresses were deadly, but they were currently overflooded, their towers were tied dealing with tens of thousands of flying targets. If the ground units connected to the ongoing fray, the Mobile Fortresses wouldn’t suffice, and many would be lost. On top of that, lots of metallic wasps would escape, and the situation would grow worse.

To counter such a result, John began to lay out zigzagging outpost formations. These were armed with everything he got, even adding a few Mobile Fortresses in the mix.

As a final touch, he scattered tens of thousands of yellow fire grenades around the cleared areas surrounding these outposts, creating a literal minefield for any approaching ground army.

This meticulous setup took much longer than simply dropping fortresses. By the time he worked his way back to the lower third of the western border, the thruster S-1000s finally joined the bloody battle.

They didn’t just target the central region like the metallic wasps; they stretched across the entire western border in a line that spanned for hundreds of kilometres, stretching their numbers thin. On the map, it looked like a literal red flood was washing over the world, an overwhelming crimson wave intent on taking over everything in its path.

Yet, that massive scale played right into John’s setup. The idle fortresses at the northern extremities of the western border, which had been waiting for targets for hours now, finally roared to life.

As the thruster S-1000s entered their firing range and got hit, they panicked. Just like the metallic wasps, they began blindly opening fire in every direction, their stray shots obliterating their own kin and doing the work of John’s defences for him.

However, the process wasn’t without cost. Stray plasma bolts began to rain down on his own fortresses, damaging several towers for the first time ever. The shots from the new cannons carried by these thruster-units acted in the exact opposite way to the wasps’ tail-shots. Instead of imploding, they exploded in a manner that reminded John of his own Logic Bomb shockwave effect.

The projectiles would impact, the explosion would stretch outward in a visible ripple, then retreat for a fraction of a second before exploding fiercely. Each blast covered a radius of several hundred meters, and the structural damage it caused to his fortifications was severe.

Seeing the sheer destructive power of the thruster S-1000s and the damage it caused made John suck in a cold breath of air. "I can’t let any of those motherfckers get out of the fog," he hissed, his hand clenching his sword hilt so hard the leather groaned. He began a frantic re-evaluation of the defensive tactics he had used so far.

The defensive lines had looked sufficient an hour ago, but the raw firepower of the thruster-units changed the situation abruptly. He decided on the fly to deploy even larger outposts, throw more traps, and use every remaining Mobile Fortress in his inventory to bolster the primary line.

Time was his greatest enemy. He didn’t have enough of it to go back and re-strengthen the southern borders. He had to push faster, moving northward to reach the most insecure point of his defence: the northern section of the western border, where the density of his defences was thinnest.

But just before he could breach the central region in his return sprint, his advance came to a sudden halt. He checked his map to follow the progress of the ongoing fights by habit. And there, amidst the sea of crimson dots swarming his defences, a cluster of green dots suddenly flickered into his vision.

He furrowed his brows, leaning in to zoom that part of the map. His heart hammered hard as the icons turned to real silhouettes, watching them from a hundred metres above.

"C... Cissel?!! What the hell is she doing there?!!!"

The green dots were moving with suicidal bravery. John watched as the couple of hundred Bulltors, led by Cissel, were diving headfirst into the heart of the evolved machine swarm without slowing down at all.