Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 138: Let’s Use the Cannons!

"I’m not going to sit here and wait for them to destroy the base towers and breach our defences. I’m going to take the towers to them. I’ll locate their grouping grounds, their clusters, and later their hive base.

I’ll take them by surprise, plant a tower, let it shred their local forces, then deactivate it and vanish before they can mount a counter-siege. Then, I’ll hit them again somewhere else."

John looked at his friends, his voice dropping. "You will be the decoy. You’ll stay here and build the most formidable, most obvious target in this territory. Keep their eyes fixated on this spot.

Make them believe this is where our entire strength is concentrated. While they are obsessed with breaking your walls, taking down our towers, I’ll be the assassin in the dark, kiting their numbers and biting them piece by piece until there’s nothing left to threaten us. Then, we move together to finish the job."

The silence that followed was absolute.

The group exchanged glances, the same shadow of doubt reflected in every pair of eyes. They knew John’s capabilities, but the scale of what he was proposing was staggering.

"I know you’re confident in your stealth and other magic tricks," Ricky was the first to break the silence, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "But John... This is easily the craziest thing you’ve ever come up with. You’re talking about playing tag with a hivemind."

"It’s more than crazy, it’s statistically impossible," Lanmar sighed, shaking his head. "First of all, how do you expect to actually find them? This territory is vast and filled with fog. You can’t just stumble upon scattered troops in a landscape this large.

You’ll be wandering blind while they hunt you. And if you wanted to target their forces outside the fog, you’ll be easily spotted from a distance away, putting a big mark on yourself!"

"I will find them, and they won’t see me coming," John calmly said, "You have to trust me on this, ok?"

"..."

Everyone could tell he had a way to do it, one of his secrets. But the plan as a whole was super dangerous, filled with many variables and holes!

"Why don’t you take a few of us with you then?" Lanmar suggested, "We are good fighters, and have known this enemy for a long time. So..."

"They’ll be a liability," John sighed, "plus I need all of you here to keep my friends safe! I can’t be up there fighting them while worrying about the Bulltors on my side. It’s a one-man job, one extra and it’ll be ruined!"

His four friends knew he meant every word he said, and yet that didn’t help make them accept the plan easily. They tried to dissuade him, even took turns to speak with him in the night, hoping he might change his mind.

"I did as you asked," at the morning, Cissel spread new pieces of paper on the ground, "I used two thirds of our towers, leaving the remaining third for you to use as you see fit," she pointed at the grand map of the area they were in, the one John drew to her last night based on his system’s map, "and I scattered lots of traps in various locations as you asked."

"Great job," John was the only satisfied person with her final draft. The plans she made included covering up the entire Terakos farm, alongside a huge area that was far more than enough to host five thousand humans per his quest’s requirements.

She also included a big lake adjacent to the farm, where they needed to dig a small canal that would be closed by blocks of rocks already brought by the Bulltors from the fallen cliff on the other side of the river.

Aside from that, the entire base would be fortified by long, sturdy walls that they gained from the Bulltors and the machines. The walls the machines got were as high as those from the Bulltors, which left no worry for any enemy to jump over them.

"We have five thousand towers," Cissel started, "we’ll distribute two thousand on the walls, and distribute the others inside in a circular fashion. Like this even if the outer walls got breached by any means, we still have lots of towers to support us and keep us safe.

Lanmar taught us how to turn these towers on auto mode. It’ll decrease their firepower greatly, mainly the range and number of enemies they’ll target, but it’ll be enough to stop thousands of these things..."

She started to explain in great detail everything in her drawings, jumping from the defence of the base to the layout of different traps around. John kept nodding and listening, and after two hours, he finally said his opinion.

"This is a great layout for a proper base indeed," he looked around before adding, "yet you are mistaken about neglecting one simple point, a great asset you didn’t include in your plans."

"Which is?" This was the second time she thought she had perfected the layout of the base, and John came up with another edit. Yet this time, it was a worthy upgrade.

"The different weapons we found inside those machines," John pointed to a large pile of different-sized and types of cannons and big guns that were put on a side.

"These weapons can’t be operated by us," Ricky sighed, "they need a huge setting of energy cells and programming to run these..."

"Leave that to me then," John confidently said, "I’ll try and see if I can turn those into usable weapons. If so, then see how to include them in your plans, ok?"

"Ok," even if Cissel knew John was daydreaming of the impossible, she still nodded and agreed to his plans. She knew, like the rest, that the main hurdle wasn’t just about setting these weapons active and supplying them with power.

They had enough energy cells and generators to keep them running all the time. But the main drawback lay in their running programs. The machines would easily interact with the dormant programs inside these cannons, setting them into any mode they’d like. But none here in their eyes could do the same.

So they were left only with the basic running program, which needed someone’s guidance and control to operate, lock on targets, and fire. Unlike the towers, they needed to either manually operate them or totally discard them as a whole.

Seeing how few they had in their little group made Cissel not take John’s words seriously at all! As she went back to her drawings, she silently moved the heavy cannons integration in the layout to the low-priority list. She couldn’t build a strategy on a miracle; she knew it wouldn’t happen.

Yet she, and everyone else in the small camp, was destined to witness another of John’s impossible miracles before the sun set.