Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 141: Scavenging D-1000 Units for Anything of Value!

The rest of the group watched with puzzled expressions as John and Cissel crossed the river back toward the graveyard. Despite their confusion, they kept to their tasks. The Bulltors continued to reshape the earth, carving out a massive basin that would soon be filled with clear water.

Elena, taking the issues of long-term survival and hydration with deadly seriousness, didn’t stick strictly to Cissel’s original plans. With Luke aiding her, she ordered the Bulltors to double the size and triple the depth of the lake.

If they were going to build a stable sanctuary, she wanted to ensure that even in the longest siege, they would never run dry.

Luckily for her, she had literal giants working on the manual labour! While the Bulltors spent the remainder of the day carving out the massive basin for the lake, John and Cissel delved into the mechanical graveyard, their eyes peeled for the subtle glint of intact components.

"These are the sensors we are looking for," Cissel announced after about ten minutes of searching. She reached into the mangled shoulder plating of a fallen D-1000 unit and pulled out a small item, holding it high for John to inspect.

It was roughly the size of a human thumb’s phalanx—small enough to be easily overlooked amidst the jagged scrap, but its distinctive, lustrous black finish, plus a tiny red dot flickering from time to time, made it stand out once you knew what to look for.

"How can you tell if it’s still functional?" John asked, leaning in.

Cissel pointed to the tiny red light that pulsed rhythmically on the side of the sensor. "See that? If the dot is flashing, it means the sensor is working. As you can see, it’s a very small piece of tech, which means it requires delicate working internal pieces to end up showing this light, which means they are working!"

She noticed the slightly sceptical look on John’s face and added, "These modules are incredibly efficient. They don’t require a massive power draw to operate, and they all come with an embedded micro-battery. They can stay active for weeks on a single charge without needing to hook back into a main power grid."

"Got it," John said, taking the small metallic piece and feeling its surprising weight. "If they’re that durable, let’s harvest every single one we can find."

Cissel walked him through the specific location of the sensors. In the standard D-1000 model, these sensors were strategically placed to provide a 360-degree field of awareness—two in the shoulders and three around the waist.

The pair were in luck; the shoulder units were often shielded by the heavy outer pauldrons, leaving a vast number of them intact. However, the waist sensors were another story. Because the midsections of the machines were often the target of many attacks, the yield from the lower torso parts was significantly lower.

The motors presented an even greater challenge. To move the heavy cannons, they needed the high-torque motors that could withstand heavy weight, located deep within the machine’s torso.

These were the muscles that sustained the weight of the D-1000’s own heavy armaments. Because they were buried so deep, they were hard to reach, and the harvest was meagre compared to the sensors.

As nighttime was drawing closer, they had managed to salvage a thousand of these heavy-duty motors, but they had nearly ten times that amount in sensors.

Extracting the motors was gruelling work. They were fused to the primary alloys with hardened mounting brackets. John and Cissel spent hours prying the vibrating, heavy components away from the skeletal remains of the machines, accidentally destroying several in the process when the mounting brackets refused to budge.

"Now what?" Cissel asked. She had followed his madness for most of the day, secretly hoping the sheer difficulty of the task would cause him to abandon the idea. Yet, looking at John now, she could tell he was nowhere near finished.

"As we are on it, let’s gather all the working laser guns," John said. He had noticed they had been stepping over hundreds of them. His friends had likely discarded the idea because of their weight and power requirements, but John saw them as something he could use later in the future defensive plans.

"Go back and bring one of the Bulltors over. We’re going to need the extra hands to haul these back to the base."

"John, fifteen extra laser guns aren’t going to change the fate of a war," she started to object, thinking he planned to fix them in the centre of the base, letting them operate it if the fight went this deep inside the base. But then she stopped.

She recalled his plan for the big guns. If he had a way to automate a massive plasma cannon, he likely had a way to make the smaller guns just as lethal.

She returned shortly with Lanmar, who looked equally curious. He had heard the other humans describing John’s impossible feats and wanted to see for himself how his master intended to pull this off. When they arrived, they found John busy digging into the limbs of the machines instead of the torsos.

’You’re taking the limb motors now?!!’ Cissel thought to herself, while standing in front of John, speechless. These smaller motors couldn’t support the weight of a heavy cannon at all, even if he planned to put as many as he wanted below the cannons. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Yet again, she decided to keep her remarks to herself. If John wanted a mountain of small motors, she would help him get them. Without a word, she joined him, prying the smaller, high-speed motors from the arms and legs of the D-1000s.

Seeing the two of them working with such intense, quiet focus left Lanmar in awe. He fell into a rhythm of silence, carrying the heavy loads of motors, sensors, and small laser guns back across the river to their new base area.

Collecting the smaller motors went much faster. They were less vital to the machine and therefore weren’t as fiercely protected. In just three hours, they had amassed over ten thousand of these nimble motors.