Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 93: A Chase in the Fog!

After an hour of constant running, the team’s speed started to decline. Elena was gasping for breath, her lungs burning from the exertion and tension. Behind them, the metallic noises of the D-1000 units were getting louder.

"Where the fck are those damn monsters when we need them?!" Luke gritted his teeth, glancing over his shoulder into the grey gloom as if he were waiting for a miracle to happen. Ironically, the very Fog Seekers that had haunted their every step were now the only thing that could have provided a distraction.

"We killed them all," John briefly summed up the situation in four words. There was no irony in his voice, only the cold reality of their success that seemed to backfire at them right now. "Keep moving forward. The cliff is the only place we can escape them."

"Where are you going?!" Cissel suddenly grabbed his arm, her eyes flashing with alarm as she saw him suddenly slowing down, turning towards the fog, and running toward the incoming sounds of the machines.

"There is no time for worrying about me now," John said, shrugging off her hand before giving her a calm look. It wasn’t bravado; it was confidence. "There is nothing that can touch me in this world yet. Lead them forward, and I’ll follow from behind. I need to thin their numbers, or they’ll catch us on the slope."

He didn’t wait for her to argue. He turned around and ran back toward the fog, disappearing into the grey curtain. "Keep a close eye on Ricky, and wait for me on the cliff!" he threw his last words over his shoulder before the fog enveloped him completely.

"Tsk! He always loves to play the role of a hero," Ricky suddenly said, his voice dripping with a nihilistic disdain. He broke out into that same weird, high-pitched laughter that had been chilling their blood. "There is no hope. There is no hope against machines at all... Agh!"

Out of the blue, Cissel dashed forward. With a swift move, she snapped her palm against the back of Ricky’s head, rendering him unconscious on the ground before he could finish his sentence.

"Carry him," she commanded, turning to Luke. Her eyes were glaring in a dangerous way that told Luke there was absolutely no room for negotiations.

Luke inwardly cursed his bad luck. He hadn’t just ended up with Ricky for two days, suffering his madness and persistence to fight more monster waves, only to be chased by crazy machines—now he ended up having to carry the dead weight while running for his life. He hoisted Ricky over his shoulder with a grunt of frustration.

"Please be safe," Cissel whispered, stealing a short glance at the direction where John had vanished before turning her focus back to the path ahead. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

John, meanwhile, was navigating a different kind of battlefield. He knew he was fighting against an enemy he had few means to kill through normal means. The D-1000s were armoured in high-density alloys that resisted sword slashes, and unlike biological entities, they didn’t bleed or tire.

Furthermore, they seemed entirely unaffected by the fog; it didn’t hinder their vision, mobility, or long-term structural integrity.

’My only way to kill them is by using either Code Destruction or Logic Bomb abilities...’

He weighed his options as he moved through the fog. The Code Destruction ability was his best option for sustained combat, as it only consumed two Mental Points and lasted for twenty seconds. Even when considering the use of Object Lockdown as a precursor to freeze the target, the consumption was still lower than the staggering five Mental Points required for each hit of the Logic Bomb.

"But the Logic Bomb is way safer," he muttered to himself, his breath hitching as he checked his profile. "Its kill is guaranteed, not to mention the shockwave it creates is a bonus, which will buy me space, and add an element of chaos..."

He took a glimpse at his Mental Points tally and felt a cold shiver. It was sitting at a low twenty-five points. He was running on a low tank that forced him to rethink using the Logic Bomb ability, but he decided to stick to it.

"I’ll need to take risks if I want to recharge my Mental Points," he decided. He had refrained from using the MP Absorption ability against the Fog Seekers because they didn’t give him much in return, and they simply died by a single slash of his sword. But these machines were different.

He still recalled the system expression about the sound devices he found before; MP rich! Not to mention those machines wouldn’t fall by a single sword attack, giving him enough time and chances to suck them dry of their Mental Points.

He moved his eyes around, activating his Wireframe Sight. In this special vision, it was far easier to distinguish the green code structures of the machines compared to the chaotic, dark grey codes of the fog.

"Let’s test and see," he whispered after a minute of tracking. He had envisioned different scenarios to use his Logic Bomb and MP Absorption abilities, and now it was time to see which tactic would work better.

He had grown used to the movement patterns of these machines. They weren’t exceptionally fast, but they moved with a persistent, inevitable momentum, converging from multiple directions toward the path his friends were treading on.

Low speed and predictable movement were their main glaring weak points. So he intended to use Cissel’s way of fighting and see its results.

John prepared himself for a brutal close-range encounter against a squad of seven D-1000s. They were fifty metres away from him, yet it felt as if they hadn’t noticed him. He circled the seven, approaching them from the rear.

’Weird... I swear the machines back at the orchard noticed me from hundreds of metres away!’

He couldn’t help but notice the difference in their detection range. He was now closer than twenty metres, yet the machines showed no sign of recognizing a threat.

’Are they trying to bait me in? Or is the fog actually interfering with their sensors now that they can’t even notice me when I’m this close to them? Or... Is it a trap to lure me in?’

He hesitated for a brief second, the fear of a trap weighing on him, before deciding to do something crazier.