Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 256: Reaching the Bulltors

"It seems Mark wasn’t quite prepared for that move!" John muttered to himself, his breath hitching only slightly despite the fast pace.

He had been running at his absolute highest speed for four hours straight. Starting from the far western edge of the first den’s territory, he had crossed the entire expanse before lunging headlong into the fog.

Based on his calculations and checking the map, the Bulltors were currently marching towards the remaining Hiveminds in the adjacent territory to the east. To reach them, he simply needed to maintain his heading, pierce the veil of the fog, and emerge into the battlezone.

John estimated it would take two more hours at most to arrive at the Bulltors’ location. Zooming in on his map, he could see the Bulltors struggling to walk through a dense field of traps left behind by the Hiveminds.

He could tell these were much simpler, cruder versions of the deadly traps he had once harvested in batches from their primary territory. These were basic pressure traps, triggered only by physical contact, and their explosive yields were significantly weaker.

Still, the caution of the Bulltors was working in John’s favour. They were taking their time to dismantle the perimeter, using a clever, yet slow, tactic. The Bulltors were throwing the cores they had collected earlier to trigger the traps from a distance.

Since the cores were remarkably durable, they didn’t shatter upon the traps’ detonation, allowing the warriors to retrieve them and repeat the process.

It was a tedious, grinding advancement, but it kept the Bulltors away from the Hiveminds force for now. John heaved an inward sigh of relief; if they had charged blindly, trying to extricate them later would be a total mess.

Away from this sector of the map, John’s eyes flickered to the icons representing Ricky and Elena. They were currently walking through the fog, clearing a pocket of space every five minutes to protect themselves, staying stationary for a few seconds to catch their breath before resuming their sprint. As for the black hearts of this brewing storm, the three dens remained eerily silent. No waves had been unleashed yet.

That silence told John a lot about Mark’s current state. It felt as though Mark had been genuinely startled by John’s rapid detection of the plan. The program had intervened personally to try to scare John away, a move that reeked of desperation.

It matched John’s earlier theory: Mark’s faction was new, fragile, and lacked the deep resources of the Big Mind. He didn’t have the numbers or power to activate all three dens instantly without taking a long time to do so. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

"I’m in at last," John whispered as he finally broke through the fog line. It had taken an hour to reach the border of the territory where the Bulltors and the Hiveminds were.

Because the Bulltors were drawing closer to the Hiveminds’ base from the north, and John had emerged from the southwest, he still had roughly an hour of sprinting ahead to bridge the gap.

However, this final stretch was a literal minefield. The ground was saturated with traps that he didn’t have time to neutralise, nor was he interested in gaining them in the first place.

John immediately activated his Frame Recognition ability. He began to weave a complex path between the traps, his body moving in an irregular line that bypassed the densely packed traps. Even if the traps were weak and primitive, they were still in large numbers that slowed down his progress.

He took a mental note of the trap densities. Thanks to their large numbers, he changed his mind; he wanted to hack these later and turn them into his own defensive perimeter once the machine waves were dealt with.

At regular intervals, John would come to a halt. Reaching into his inventory, he would pull out a handful of cores and hurl them with pinpoint accuracy, clearing a huge area of the minefield in a series of intentional detonations.

The moment a zone was cleared, he would instantly deploy a large outpost from his inventory. As he feared the coalition between the two enemies, he made larger outposts, making sure it would take down an army of Soroliths on their own.

He made sure to scatter these outposts strategically to keep any incoming machines occupied and, better, annihilated. He knew the primary variable in this war was the intelligence of his enemies.

These weren’t mindless monsters that would just run toward the loudest noise; they were machines governed by AIs. Even if he and his friends held their spots guarded, the machines could easily circle the defences to reach their objectives unhindered.

What John didn’t realise yet was the extent of the hornet’s nest he had poked. Back on Earth, Mark had watched his thousand-cyborg gambit fail. The program had grown furious at John’s daring attitude, and in that rage, he had shifted his plans. The delay in the den activation wasn’t just due to limited resources; it was because Mark was rewriting the mission parameters for every single unit.

Mark had set one simple command as the top priority for all units: Find John and get rid of him once and for all.

Without knowing it, John had become the highest value target in the entire pocket trial. The machines wouldn’t just defend the dens or try to unite with the Hiveminds; they would flood his location, traversing through different territories and ignoring other targets, just to kill him first.

John was acting on the best information he had, but the battlefield was shifting in ways he never expected. As he began laying down a series of defences, the process took an extra hour longer than he had originally intended.

Detonating the Hiveminds’ traps and replacing them with his own outposts was gruelling, but finally, he managed to close the gap with the Bulltors. They were less than one hundred kilometres away from the Hiveminds base, right on the precipice of a disastrous engagement.

"John?! What are you doing here?! What happened?!!"