Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 140: John Is Acting Weird!

"What’s the plan now?" Cissel asked, seeing John finally stand still for the first time in hours. "Is there anything else left to scavenge?"

"We need lots of wires," John said, turning to her with a sharp glint in his eye. "These machines run on electricity. To link the sensors, motors, and power cells, we need to do it right. Let’s gather every wire we can pull out of these wrecks!"

"Fine!" Cissel rolled her eyes, her irritation growing in direct proportion to how John made these impossible tasks look like simple chores.

They spent the next hour meticulously gathering every scrap of wiring they could find. They stripped the internal parts of the shattered D-1000s, collecting everything from thick, heavy-duty power cables to delicate threads only a few centimetres long.

By the time John finally signalled that they had enough and headed back to the base, Lanmar was hauling a massive, tangled nest of copper and fibre optics.

"Wow! You actually made it bigger!"

Cissel stopped in her tracks as they stood at the edge of the lake, overseeing the size that took shape after working all these hours. She was stunned to see the edits Elena had introduced.

The lake, which was supposed to be a modest reservoir, had expanded into a massive basin at least double the size of their Terakos farm.

The Bulltors had dug without pause, creating a central depth that looked to be over fifty meters deep. And all that was left was for them to expand the depth outwards in a slow, uprising slope

"Why bother with the hassle of refilling the lake every couple of weeks when we can just make it bigger and fill it in one go to fulfil our needs for months?" Elena called out, leaning on a massive shovel and looking immensely proud of her work.

John surveyed the shimmering excavation and gave her a firm thumbs-up.

"We’ll have it finished by tonight!" Elena shouted as John and Cissel retreated to their designated workspace near the pile of salvaged cannons. "Make sure you finish whatever you’re doing by then—I’m hosting a massive barbecue party on the lakeshore!"

"Sure!" Cissel shouted back, had the feeling that Elena would need more than the remaining few hours of the day to complete the task. And in case she did, Cissel had a nagging feeling in her gut, telling her that John wouldn’t be stopping for a party until he had achieved the impossible. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

’Now it’s time to see if my theory holds water,’ John thought.

The moment they reached their working area, he stepped up to a massive plasma cannon. Cissel watched, a flicker of hope warring with her logical mind, as John placed a bloodied hand against the cold metal housing of the weapon. She knew the obstacles, and without liking it, she waited for him to admit defeat and give up the idea entirely.

But John had already begun. He successfully handshaked with the cannon, then he dragged the entire coding lines of the cannon program by executing the source code order using his Shell ability. He found himself staring at thousands of lines of code, each line a puzzle piece in the program that dictated how the cannon worked and fired.

Alien to all this, he decided to read all without skipping a line!

The mental strain was immense. He had to trigger his Shell ability ten times over, spending more than an hour and a half submerged in the depths of the cannon’s running program. For Cissel, watching from the outside, it was agonising.

To her, John was simply standing still, one bloodied hand pressed to metal, staring into nothingness for over ninety minutes. As night began to fall, and the world felt colder, what little hope she had left started to wither.

"Oh, that’s interesting!"

John’s voice sliced through the silence so suddenly that Cissel jumped. His eyes snapped open, wide and bright with a revelation.

"Damn! We didn’t even need all those heavy motors! Cissel, this cannon—it has a high-torque motor system embedded within the base already!"

"What?!" She scrambled over, looking between him and the massive weapon, her mind racing. "That’s impossible! Those are supportive gear; they’re designed to facilitate moving the cannons for anyone controlling them. If you tried, you won’t feel either the colossal weight or the resistance when moving it. Yet, they don’t have independent mobility!"

"No, they do!" he insisted firmly. He jumped up onto the big operator’s platform that allowed a user to manually aim the weapon. He grabbed the steering handles. "See? Even though this thing weighs several tons, I can move the barrel around with almost no effort. I can’t feel any resistance at all!"

She blinked, trying to process what he was saying. "John, that’s not a motor. It’s a passive hydraulic system designed to make manual aiming smooth for a human operator. It doesn’t have a brain to move itself."

"It’s a motor in everything but name!" John interrupted. He was moving fast now, the plan clicking into place. He decided to give her a demo. Unlike the complex explanation she expected, he reached into their salvage pile and grabbed one of the small, nimble limb motors they had harvested earlier.

He tossed it to Cissel along with a handful of wires. "Can you link this one to a small energy cell? Right now?"

"Okay," she said, throwing aside all her doubts. If he were this energised, she would follow the lead and see where all this would end.

The energy cell was far too heavy for her to lug around, so she signalled Lanmar. The latter hurried over and placed the cell beside the cannon, his eyes wide with anticipation. Within a minute, Cissel had the small motor humming with a low thrum.

"Now what?" she asked, holding the vibrating motor as she watched John begin to unscrew the outer protective shell at the base of the cannon. "Do you even know how to handle the internal gears?!"