Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 250: The Three Important Pieces of Information, and the Three Challenging Problems!

"That’s the right answer!"

Mark clapped, and all of the humans around him did the same, "so it doesn’t matter what their human side can tolerate or not, as it’s pointless. In the end, their human part will perish, and more machine parts will take place.

See, Mr Mirage, in this kind of plan, we usually use only a group of ten humans to activate the portal, ending up turning cyborgs, bringing forth ten thousand D-1000s into the trial. But against you, I decided to take it a step further; three hundred are going to open a portal, turning this den into a machine spawning den..."

Mark paused, looking as if he was struggling to continue speaking, before suddenly bursting out in laughter, "Sorry, so sorry about that, Mr Mirage. I’m just excited to use this method for the first time ever! And against whom? Against the anomaly that slipped through my grasp, a thorn to my side, hahaha!"

John left Mark laughing while taking another peek at the map. The three hundred humans were still frozen in their places. Yet he learnt a lot from Mark’s long talk.

First, he learnt there were lots of cyborgs in this pocket trial, people who were like him, partially. They got tricked in the past, signed a contract, killed and their souls got transferred to the future, then wiped out.

Till this moment, John thought this scheme was limited to Athanasia, an attempt of the machines to overthrow the throne of humans off the game.

The worst he ever thought of was for them to lay down traps, sending lots of strong humans to perish in these forsaken trials. Yet it felt like it was way more complicated than any of his thoughts.

It seemed the main goal wasn’t the game, the past glory the humans lived in; they were targeting the future. They schemed to use the humans to serve their dirty plans, and on top of that, to make sure the humans would never end up owning a single pocket trial ever!

Having such deeply hidden enemies within your ranks, and you know absolutely nothing about what was going on or how to survive the trial, what to do to win it, made the humans’ mission truly impossible. And yet all this made John’s determination deeper.

He had learned before setting foot in this pocket trial a critical detail: Mark was a rogue agent. By his own confession, he had recently broken free from the restraints of the Big Mind that controlled the machines.

John could easily tell that while Mark was a dangerously brilliant fellow, he was currently operating from a position of relative instability. He hadn’t had enough time to root his authority or build up a massive, independent faction among the machine race on Earth.

This meant Mark was likely limited to the machines and cyborgs he had successfully lured to his side or subverted. Mark himself admitted it, admitted that losing the five thousand D-1000 units was a painful price to pay. It was a vital realisation; a strategist like Mark wouldn’t risk a move this loud and this expensive without a guaranteed kill shot.

If he failed here, the losses to his newborn faction would be too staggering for him to shoulder. He was all-in. And that made John’s blood boil with excitement.

On top of that, an opponent like Mark would never favour a war of attrition. He would definitely aim for the kill from the very first strike, using overwhelming force to bypass any chance of a human comeback. John highlighted this in his mind: he couldn’t afford a slow start or a prolonged war.

The last piece of the puzzle was the method itself. Mark was mimicking the nature of a yellow monster den, just as Luke had hypothesised. If the laws of the den held true, it would unleash an initial wave of three hundred machine units. The waves would escalate in intensity until the eleventh wave, when John would step in and shut it down.

However, three glaring problems sat in the front of John’s mind like cracked glass.

First, there weren’t just three hundred cyborgs here. There were three separate dens currently being activated across three different territories. He and his friends were only five people; they couldn’t be in three places at once to suppress the spawns. And the Bulltors were busy handling the Hiveminds, and he doubted their task would be as smooth sailing as everyone expected.

The second problem was the sheer math of the escalation. Starting with three hundred machines in the first wave was a nightmare. By the time the den hit the eleventh wave, the scaling laws of the pocket trial would force them to fight three hundred thousand machine units.

The figure was so staggering that John felt himself suck in a cold breath of air. Even with his outposts, towers, and cannons, those numbers were a hard nut to crack.

The third problem was the Auto Evolve law he had accidentally discovered back in the Hiveminds territory. If an area was left unattended, if no one was there to cull the spawned machines, the den would transform.

It would consume ten percent of the overall wave and evolve by ten levels every single hour. If a den hit the one-hundredth wave, it would undergo an evolution, bringing forth machine units of a completely different, evolved, and far more dangerous nature.

"I can understand how hard it is to grasp all this," Mark said, breaking the silence. He took John’s long pause as a sign of hopelessness and confusion.

"A human like yourself, finding himself dragged into this holy war without even understanding the mere basics... Tsk! I can’t believe you tried to resist serving me. You would have been a great asset in my army, Mr Mirage. What a waste of a good cyborg."

"Speaking as if you’ve already won," John snorted, his voice returning to its sharp, abrasive edge. He forced his face into a mask of mockery, hiding the calculations running in his mind. "Like every other time we’ve met, you lost at my hands. And you will lose again. You’re a repeat failure, Mark."