Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 150: Calibrating the Cannons

"Now!" John’s voice boomed from high above, breaking their chitchat. "Listen up! The cannons need to register your biometric signatures—your voices and your physical features. I need you all to go outside the walls. One by one, you’re going to move and speak loudly when I give the signal."

"Why didn’t you just let us do that down here before you went up?" Luke called out, sounding confused. Regardless, he and the others began running through the massive gate to the area outside. John had chosen the starting point near the main gate for this very reason.

"The sensors are modified for long-range targeting!" John shouted back. "They need to register your profiles from this specific height and distance. If I calibrate them at ground level, the parallax error will be too high, and the system might mistake you for a breaching enemy in the heat of battle!"

The memory of the fierce, deadly silver explosions from John’s earlier tests flashed through everyone’s minds. The sheer destructive power they had witnessed was enough to make their hearts drop to their feet.

No one argued. Even Lanmar climbed down from the wall and moved to join the line outside, following John’s orders with uncharacteristic submissiveness.

Over the next few hours, the process was tedious but vital. John directed each person to come forward, walk, run, speak in a normal tone, and then shout at the top of their lungs. Then he reviews the cannon’s code lines, seeing how they recorded the data, building a profile of friendly targets.

To ensure zero margin for error, John memorised the specific code lines generated for these profiles and repeated the process a hundred times, ensuring the code lines were consistent across every cannon.

"That’s enough," John finally called out, his voice hoarse.

After confirming that the identical code lines were being generated for every cannon for everyone, he decided it would be much faster to simply write the batch scripts himself rather than manually calibrating every single one of the thousands of units.

They had spent more than three hours just to lay out the first hundred cannons. At this rate, they’d be here for weeks.

"Are you sure about this?" Ricky’s voice echoed from the base of the wall, tinted with worry. "We don’t mind the repetition! We can keep running drills for every single cannon if that’s what it takes to be safe!"

"No need!" John shouted back, his voice strained from the dry air and hours of yelling. He didn’t stop his frantic editing on the Shell interface.

"If I had the luxury of time, I’d have every one of you run a marathon in front of every cannon. But we’ve already burned four days just preparing the foundation of this base. I can’t afford to waste another second. We need to finalise our base fast and be safe rather than sorry. Who knows that the Hivemind are planning now!"

Hearing his logic and genuine worries made everyone realise they were already racing against the Hivemind. The talk of John and Lanmar from yesterday still echoed in their minds, and so they decided to trust him and stop here.

As for John, he decided on a compromise: a rigorous double-check of the code every five hundred cannons. He spent an hour on each batch, and another on confirming there was no change at all in the code lines for cannons after large, enforced edits. By the time nighttime approached, the transformation of the landscape was completed.

The outer walls were now bristling with thousands of heavy cannons, their barrels gleaming like silver teeth in the darkness. Inside the perimeter, the maze had been fully established—a winding death trap of stone and metal, with the deadly cannons and defensive towers spread everywhere.

Finally, he had even surrounded the inner sanctuary—the zone containing the shimmering lake and the Terakos farm—with a third layer of fortified walls, towers, and cannons.

Then John led others to memorise the right route by heart for almost two hours straight. At the end of the day, it was no longer a camp; it was a fortress within a fortress.

"Phew! That is going to be one hell of a task," Elena said, blowing a strand of hair out of her face after John finished explaining the final step.

He had asked her to move their entire stockpile of energy cells to the inner side of the walls. From there, they would need to link wires they prepared earlier and with the cannons and energy cells. This ensured the power supply remained secured behind their defences.

"But why wait till tomorrow to do it?" Elena asked, her eyes darting between the massive crates of energy cells and the eleven Bulltors standing nearby. She pointed to the flickering campfires they had prepared all around.

"The night is already here, but we can easily light up the darkness and push back the cold with these. We have the manpower and the light, and the initial preparations are completed and ready. Let’s finish this now."

"Sure, why not?" Lanmar said, his massive chest heaving as he looked at his capable mates. "We didn’t do much today except yell at machines and move in circles for cannons’ calibrations. My legs are restless. Let’s move, boys! Let’s get this job done so we can sleep in a real fortress!"

Seeing Elena lead the group of Bulltors toward the distant, darkened walls, Luke decided to tag along to help manage the wiring process. Before they departed, John emptied nearly his entire inventory, transferring hundreds of energy cells into Elena’s and Luke’s storage devices, which they planned to use if what they had prepared earlier didn’t suffice.

"Will you activate the cannons tomorrow, then?" Cissel asked.

She watched John as he sat down heavily against one of the large, durable tents he’d recovered from the Bulltors’ supplies. He had finally stopped moving, his eyes closed as he leaned his head back against the metallic fabric.

"I have nothing else left to do," John said, his voice dropping to a tired yawn. The sheer mental and physical stress of the past ninety-six hours was finally hitting him like a physical weight. "I’ve already set everything. Every cannon is programmed to go fully operational the moment it is linked to a proper power source."

"Oh, that means..." Cissel trailed off, her eyes moving toward the dark horizon.

In the distance, flickering points of light began to dance—fires that Elena and Luke were spreading along the wall’s base to provide visibility and warmth as they worked through the night. "We’ll have a fully operational base the moment they are done."

"I’d say they’ll take all night to finish," Ricky remarked, shifting uncomfortably. He found himself in an awkward position, sitting beside John and Cissel, who seemed to have grown significantly closer over the last few days of shared crisis. The air between them was different now—less tense, more anchored.

"No, they might finish in five or six hours at most," Cissel corrected him. "Both Elena and Luke have plenty of experience dealing with energy cells and standard pulse cannons. With the Bulltors handling the lifting of the wires and placing energy cells, it’s a piece of cake for them." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Speaking of the cells," Ricky said, noticing that John had already succumbed to the darkness behind his eyelids, seemingly ready to pass out right there on the dirt. "Do you think those cells will keep the cannons running for more than a few hours?"

"Well... It’s hard to tell," Cissel sighed, "we have tons of them here; luckily, the machines brought lots of energy cells with them. But in real frantic battles like the ones we had against the monsters, I can’t tell if they can sustain us for hours or not! But without any fight, they can sustain themselves for days even if they are randomly attacked from time to time!"

"Then we need to prepare what we have left for replacing the existing ones, just in case..." Ricky started talking about technical stuff that was hard for John to follow.

After half an hour, John was far too exhausted to follow their conversation anymore. Their voices blurred together into a hum that pushed his mind to sleep even further. As the flickering lights of the work crew moved further into the distance, John finally succumbed to a deep, dreamless sleep.

He slept with the heavy, peaceful ignorance of a man who believed his work was done. But the pocket trial was far from finished with him. The next morning, he was destined to wake up to a true, unmitigated horror.