Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 263: Cissel and Luke - Part 5

"Well..." Luke turned around, his eyes scanning the staggered rows of towers and enhanced cannons they had meticulously placed. He looked at the overlapping fields of fire from the many outposts, envisioning the kill zone they had created.

He simply shook his head, a newfound confidence grounding his voice. "They will die in a few minutes, tops. Nothing Mark sends on the ground can breathe in that corridor for long."

"That’s right," Cissel nodded, her eyes flashing with a fierce, cold light. "That’s why our presence here isn’t actually needed for the defence. The defences John gave us will handle the heavy lifting. Instead, there is another place we need to be when the machines initiate their attack... And that’s right there."

She kept her dagger pointed toward the den in the distance. Luke stared at the blade, then at the den, losing her meaning for a few seconds as he processed the sheer audacity of the suggestion. When the realisation finally clicked, his jaw dropped.

"That’s... Insane!" He couldn’t help but utter the comment for the tenth time. Yet, despite his words, half an hour later, he found himself staying by her side, ducked low to the ground, moving through the shadows.

They had successfully flanked the enemy position, watching the den from a concealed vantage point hundreds of meters behind the machines’ own outer layer of defences.

"Are you sure we can make it? If they turn back and attack us, we’ll be forced into a fight without the support of our defences."

"This is the tenth time you’ve asked me this," Cissel rolled her eyes in impatience. Ever since she had explained the backdoor raid she had in mind, Luke had been a broken record of nervous inquiries.

The idea was elegantly simple: they had circled the territory to get behind the den’s fortification line. Once the ground units committed to their march toward the outposts, they would leave the den relatively unguarded. At that moment, Cissel and Luke would strike the foundations, lay waste to everything the machines had done so far.

And then the D-1000s and S-1000s started their grand march towards the distant defences, not even taking a look back as she expected. She waited for ten whole minutes, till they were far off the den’s surrounding area, before she acted. "Let’s go!"

Cissel reached into her storage device and took out two volatile cores. She stuck them together, the energy between them humming with unstable power, before hurling them with a powerful overhand throw toward the cluster of walls, cannons, and towers.

*Boom!* *Boom!* *Boom!*

The explosions were magnificent. The defences buckled under the concentrated blast, the pillars of fire taking over the entire area, engulfing everything in deadly flames. Nothing stood intact in front of such deadliness; nothing survived this fire.

"It’s working!" Luke shouted from behind. Emboldened by the sight of the crumbling metal, he followed her lead. He took the Wrathers’ activated cores, stuck them together and threw the purple grenades toward the defences.

As the den was left largely unprotected by the departing main force, and as they were attacking from a far distance from the defences’ reach, the two of them were easily able to dismantle the perimeter.

At some point, Luke started to have some fun, throwing the purple grenade in the air, before smashing them hard with his club, sending them flying in high arcs, throwing them off a large distance, before they landed and exploded.

Pillars of deadly purple fire erupted into the sky, engulfing the defensive structures and totally destroying the walls, the cannons, and the towers.

"I told you it was going to work," Cissel laughed, a rare sound of genuine amusement.

"Those machines think they are smart because they have AIs and sensors, yet they can’t outsmart us. Do you realise we are the ones who created them in the first place? Granted, it was a long time ago, but the creator always knows how to break the creation. Let’s keep attacking; we have at most ten minutes before the next wave erupts from the den."

The two became a whirlwind of destruction, running in circles around the den. They played a deadly golf game with the remaining sentries, destroying most of what the machines had managed to build.

Cissel’s plan was a masterstroke of sabotage. If the machines planned to lay down strong fortifications around the den to protect the spawn point, then Cissel and Luke would keep them walking in an infinite loop of building and rebuilding without actually achieving anything in the end.

Every single time the ground units exhausted partially their storage programs to deploy defensive structures and moved out to attack the outposts, Cissel and Luke would emerge from the distance to lay waste to those defences using the purple grenades.

But they didn’t stop at destruction. Before retreating back into the protection of their outposts, they would scatter the ground with a carpet of yellow grenades.

The resulting yellow fire pits acted as persistent kill zones. The intense fire stood directly in the path of the next incoming machine wave, severely limiting the available space where they could deploy the next set of defences.

If the machines tried to build on top of these active fire pits, the structures would suffer constant damage and collapse before they would even move to lay down another layer, effectively forcing the machines to do the work of destroying their own base. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

By doing this, Cissel ensured that no matter how large the subsequent waves grew, the size of the defences around the den remained manageable.

This bottleneck ensured that the newly arrived ground units would be stuck at the den for the longest possible period of time as they struggled to navigate the fire and debris, and perhaps even destroy a few of them in the process.

In turn, this gave Cissel and Luke the breathing room they needed to handle the flying drones without being swarmed from the ground.

With every wave doubling in size, the time the ground forces needed to be cleared by their outposts grew longer, which only extended the window for the two saboteurs to destroy the den’s defences and lay more yellow fire traps.

Using the long-lasting, twelve-hour feature of the yellow grenades, they kept limiting the machines’ options, forcing them to build scattered, inefficient defences filled with gaps and holes.

"Damn me! I never thought there was someone else aside from John who could pull off miracles like this!!"

The battle had raged with intensity for the entire day. As the heavy darkness fell over the pocket trial, the den followed the absolute, iron-clad rule of this world: it ceased operations at night. The glow of the den dimmed, stopped gushing out of any machines.

"Hahaha! I’m nothing compared to John," Cissel chuckled, leaning the big metallic body of a wall. She wiped a heavy layer of sweat and dirt over her forehead before turning her gaze toward the dark silhouette of the den in the distance.

"But I can play his game. Now, let’s do one last visit to that shithole. We’ll destroy every remaining defence inside the perimeter and cover the entire area with a final, thick layer of yellow fire. Then, and only then, can we rest."

"Hey, wait," Luke suddenly shouted, rose to his feet as he pointed towards a direction, "there, see there... They are Bulltors! They came, hahaha, John sent them at last, hahaha!"

Just as he shouted this, she jolted to her feet and looked in the distance. The world was pitch black, but there, at the horizon, she saw flickering fire dancing while lying cast over giant shadows. The silhouettes were instantly recognised by her and Luke; they were the army of Bulltors, the reinforcements John promised them before leaving.

"At fcking last," all of the tension and fatigue Luke kept struggling against, pushing back, finally snapped, "we can take some rest at last."