Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 145: Laying Down the Defensive Walls

Once they reached the starting point, John began a series of movements that looked so weird in her eyes.

He would summon a massive wall segment, let it materialise for a fraction of a second, then instantly recall it back into his inventory. He repeated this dozens of times, twisting his hand, adjusting his footwork, and moving several yards away from the actual foundation line.

"This... This will do it," John whispered after ten minutes of trial and error. He discovered that by canting his shoulder at a specific thirty-degree angle and timing the release with a forward step, he could manipulate the location of the materialisation of his summoned walls from the inventory.

He could drop the walls so they landed perfectly next to one another, edge to edge, without needing to waste a single Mental Point.

His erratic movement and the constant taking out and recalling of the giant wall pieces attracted plenty of bewildered stares from Lanmar and Cissel. John didn’t mind. In fact, he felt a small prickle of satisfaction. At the very least, his lunatic behaviour had finally forced Cissel to stop staring at the horizon and actually look at him.

"I’ll start by anchoring the first defensive tower here," John announced, summoning a tower that served as the corner of the grand wall. He looked over at Cissel, seeking the expertise he knew she was hiding behind that poker face.

"Based on the structural design and the need to place lots of the pulse cannons, how many wall segments should I place next to one another before I deploy the next tower?"

"Twenty-five," she shouted back instantly. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

John nodded and set to work. The rhythm was gruelling but effective. Summon, step, align, release.

"I’ve never seen anything like this," Lanmar said after an hour had passed. He stood back, his jaw wide open.

"Laying down fortifications of this scale is a project that takes all races days, weeks, even, of back-breaking labour! We’d usually be out here with thousands to adjust the alignment, just to set the first mile we’d take an entire day. You’ve finished nearly a fifth of the entire base perimeter in a single hour!"

It wasn’t perfectly smooth at first. John made several frustrating mistakes, placing segments too close together so their ends were placed one in front of the other, or leaving gaps wide enough for anyone to crawl through.

Each time he failed, he had to recall the massive blocks into his inventory and start the sequence over. But after the tenth failed attempt, something clicked. He grasped the perfect way to do it.

From that point on, he moved like a master builder playing with Lego pieces. His only real limitation was his own speed; he had to walk the length of every segment to place the next.

He glanced at Lanmar’s towering frame, realising that if he had a body that size with a stride to match, he could have easily doubled the distance in the same amount of time.

Cissel watched him intently. She recognised that his weird warm-up movements earlier were actually a form of calibration. Even though she couldn’t fully wrap her head around how he was doing it so perfectly, she felt a surge of genuine relief. With his speed, they actually had a chance to finish the walls in two days, or even less.

"Wait," she called out, running forward after another hour of progress. She held up her hand to halt his next summons. "Stop here. This is the place where we need to take out the first gate!"

"Understood," John replied. The gate items were exceptionally rare; he had only found a few after sorting through thousands of storage programs.

He attempted to take out the gate, but missed the alignment by several meters. It took three more tries of placing and then recalling the massive structure—which was significantly heavier than a standard wall—and adjusting his stance before the gate finally slammed into the earth with a satisfying, ground-shaking thud, locking tight with the one-sided walls.

"We can place five towers in a staggered formation behind the gate for secondary fire support, and two more directly on the flanks, just behind the gate," Cissel directed, her eyes alight with the challenge of the build. "Then, we should run a reinforced walkway across the top. You’ll need that space to place the heavy cannons to fortify the entrance."

"Cool," John said, wiping sweat from his brow. He followed her directions precisely, while Lanmar chimed in with observations about the local wind patterns and how they might affect projectile trajectory.

The gate was an imposing sight: two hundred meters in length and thirty meters high, featuring a massive, rolling iron wall that could be raised or lowered at will. It looked formidable, but as John stared at the thick iron wall, a seed of doubt took root. He feared that a moving iron wall—no matter how thick—might just be the most vulnerable point in their entire defence.

After half an hour of gruelling labour at the gate, he had meticulously curved a back wall segment, creating narrow kill zones and funnelling passages that would allow only small groups of his friends or his Bulltors to pass at a time.

It was a deadly bottleneck; he knew with certainty that it would now take an army of thousands, well-equipped and desperate, just to contemplate breaching those gates.

"Let’s continue," John said, his voice energised despite the physical toll.

Pumped up by the tangible success they had achieved so far, he watched the long, glowing line of the fortifications taking shape on his system map. Seeing the progress acted like a shot of adrenaline, and John sprang into a second working spree that was even more efficient than the first.

He moved with a fixed rhythm, summoning, stepping, and anchoring until the thud of the walls became the heartbeat of the construction site.

"This is the second and final gate," Cissel announced as they reached the opposite side of the perimeter.

"We won’t lay down any more gates for now. If we find ourselves needing more exits later, we can always dismantle a few wall segments and swap them out, but for a siege defence, fewer openings are always better."