Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 101: Chasing After the D-1000s

"Dammit! They are vigilant not get chased down by the monsters!"

John was running directly towards the D-1000s at first, his boots kicking up dust and debris from the recent landslide. Any Fog Seeker he met on his path was dispatched with a single stroke of his blade; he didn’t even need to think about it.

The monsters were like empty shells of their former selves. They stood in place, staring vacantly at the wreckage of the cliff, looking distracted and broken. It was clear now that the loss of Ogolith was far more than just losing their boss monster.

Yet, whenever John managed to close the gap between himself and the machines, the reaction was instantaneous. Hundreds of D-1000 units turned and opened fire without a single speck of hesitation! The air was suddenly crisscrossed with the laser shots that turned the ground around him into holes and smoke.

"Luckily, I fought and killed lots of you before," John muttered, throwing himself into a low slide to evade the first wave. As the lasers scorched the air where his head had been a second ago, he didn’t panic. He simply activated his Sandbox ability to hide his presence.

Once vanished from their sight and sensors, the machines paused, struggling to adapt to the sudden disappearance of their target. After a few seconds, they turned around and resumed their hasty retreat.

John stood up within the illusion, using those brief moments of invisibility to analyse the larger picture. "There aren’t just a few groups of them... There are dozens around..."

The first thing he spotted with his Wireframe Sight was the presence of similar retreating squads all over the basin. Each group ranged between one hundred and three hundred D-1000s. Their numbers were increasing steadily as more machines joined from different areas of the vast battlefield.

"And yet, I know your Achilles’ heel," John whispered. He knew he couldn’t dream of closing the distance by relying solely on his Sandbox ability. There were hundreds of meters of open ground between him and the closest retreating group. To burn his Mental Points now would be a waste of his most precious and limited resource. He needed a more practical solution.

The area they were currently traversing was still clear of the fog. But in the far distance, John could see the ominous, towering wall of the grey fog.

"I don’t believe I’m actually craving to reach that fog as fast as possible," he said, shaking his head at the irony. He maintained a safe distance of three hundred meters between himself and the closest of the machine groups.

This was the sweet spot he had found after a few trial-and-error sprints. It was far enough to avoid triggering their automatic close-range defensive sensors, but close enough to keep them in his sight and reach.

With roughly ten minutes of chase before they hit that gigantic dark grey wall, John used the time to mentally memorize the locations and paths of the other machine groups.

The moment the machines touched the edge of the fog, John ignited his speed. He ran faster than he ever had, his lungs burning.

The last hundred meters were a brutal struggle! The machines detected his sudden acceleration and opened fire with everything they had. John had to exert every ounce of experience he had gained from using his Frame Recognition ability, predicting the path of the incoming beams. He twisted, ducked, and leapt, a ghost dancing through a storm of light.

"I’m in!"

He had to repeatedly use his Sandbox ability to cover the final thirty meters of open ground. But the second he passed through the swirling grey of the fog, he felt a surge of relief. He didn’t need the invisibility ability anymore.

John knew they were moving as fast as possible, likely fearing a massive retaliation from the monsters now that their boss was dead. However, he quickly discovered that their primary objective was regrouping. They were trying to gather the scattered squads into one big army.

"They are making the task much easier for me," John smirked. He didn’t wait for the machines to finish grouping. Instead, he changed his initial plan and moved way faster than the machines.

Every time a small squad of D-1000s ran past him to join the larger group, John would touch as many as he could, plant a Logic Bomb with thirty seconds countdown. He did this dozens of times, counting the seconds carefully from the first bomb he planted.

He didn’t need to personally fight the growing army. He was using the running D-1000s as spies to deliver his explosives to the army! He was turning the enemy’s own retreat and regroup strategy against them.

As he was frantically moving to place more of his bombs on different machines and absorbing as many Mental Points as he could to balance the scary expenditure, he suddenly stopped and ducked flat on the ground once the countdown approached thirty seconds.

Then a series of loud and violent explosions hit!

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

He wasn’t near the main group that got attacked by his bombs. And yet, the moment those explosions happened, the machines suffered catastrophic damage.

This wasn’t like how it happened on the cliff. The machines he used to move the bombs didn’t stand next to each other. They scattered among the large group, making the explosions happen at different places.

On top of that, he planted the bombs in the machines passing by him, with seconds in between. So the explosions didn’t happen all at once, but in succession, with a few seconds apart!

All this ended in one result.... The D-1000s opened fire blindly in a 360-degree radius, forcing John to not even dare to raise his head off the ground, even rolling for a considerable distance to avoid the aftershock of the bombs he had just planted on the nearby machines that got hit by the friendly fire and got destroyed.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

As if the machines were fighting a ghost, the different explosions that came next from different directions sowed absolute chaos.