Athanasia: My Hacker System

"I never thought I’d find someone else more obsessed with grenades than our ladies!"

John’s voice echoed across the area as he spent the rest of the night and half of the next day activating the mountain of loot. The sheer volume was staggering, and the clear distinction between the two races’ most favourable belongings began to paint a vivid picture of their different combat philosophies.

Out of the two, the Dragons, showed an absolute obsession with anything aerial. They didn’t just depend on their ability to fly; they owned a variety of specialised equipment that tilted heavily towards operating in the sky.

John uncovered hundreds of aerial carriages that functioned as the backbone of their fighting tactics. These came in three distinct tiers: the Claws, the Scales, and the Wings, with distinctive differences in their sizes, abilities, and cargo.

The Claws were the smallest and most agile, designed for rapid deployment. Each was capable of carrying ten Dragons, which translated to roughly one hundred humans, or twenty different types of heavy defensive modules.

Stepping up in size were the Scales, which functioned as mid-range troop carriers, and finally the Wings, which were the massive aerial platforms like the one John had initially activated. The largest wings variants were essentially flying plazas, capable of housing a small army of thousands of humans, or hundreds of defences as John tested the first wing he acquired.

What made him sure they used these to mount their kin and not use these the way John did was how slower they became once he placed his defences upon them. If they were designed to harbour different defensive structures, they wouldn’t have suffered from low speed and even flew on a way lower altitudes.

Aside from transportation, the Dragons were clearly fond of anti-aerial defensive systems. John found out tens of thousands of a new defensive weapon: the Ballistae Tower.

These weren’t the standard, slender towers he and his friends had used back in the pocket trial. These structures stood twenty meters high but were exceptionally broad at the apex. On the flat rooftop of each tower, a clustered battery of twenty different-sized ballistae was mounted, capable of 360-degree rotation.

"These can do well to hunt flying targets," John noted. To test the mechanism, he tossed a large rock into the air and commanded a tower to engage. The response was near-instantaneous; a volley of explosive arrows shredded the rock into dust mid-air.

However, John noticed a significant deviation from his usual tech. The arrows weren’t formed of pure Mana energy. They were physical, separate items stored in specialised heavy quivers next to each ballista.

"We may have a powerful weapon, but it’s limited by its ammunition," Ricky said, grunting as he tried to lift a single arrow. It was a massive projectile, triple the size of Ricky himself, looking more like a heavy siege pike than an arrow. Its weight was easily over few hundreds of kilograms.

"We’ll need Goven to research this and see how he can manufacture more," Luke shrugged. "I bet the Kroger will be excited to dissect something this primitive yet effective."

"We also have plenty of ready stock for now," Elena added, pointing toward a section of the inventory containing tens of thousands of quivers, each packed with hundreds of arrows. While such staggering number of arrows sounded like a lot, John and the others knew it was a finite resource.

In a hectic, large-scale battle against large fleets of flying ships, or against flying enemies like tens of thousands of Dragons, that entire stock could be depleted in a single afternoon of sustained fire, leaving the towers as nothing more than expensive observation posts.

"And we also have the net problem," Cissel said, gesturing toward a different class of tower. This model was at least one hundred meters in height and much slimmer than the ballistae version.

Each was topped with a high-pressure propulsive cannon designed to launch massive metallic nets into the sky. "We have thousands of these, but only about twenty thousand nets at most. We have to figure out how to weave more of these metallic traps."

The Net Towers were clearly designed to capture, not kill. After acquiring Zingy, John’s interest in capturing members of other races had spiked. He was slightly different from the Demons who sought other races to serve and work for them.

He realised that squeezing knowledge from captives was the fastest way to learn the hidden laws of this new world. And yet, he started to understand the logic behind the Demon race mindset and tactics.

"We’ll entrust Goven with the manufacturing," John said, his eyes moving across the new towers and their supplies. "Yet it’s quite weird that there isn’t a single Dragon item that generates attacks using pure energy or Mana."

John was used to his own machine-coded weapons that converted electricity and plasma power into deadly strikes. Even the standard towers from the pocket trial used Mana gemstones to fire concentrated beams of light. However, the Dragon technology was purely mechanical and physical.

There was still a glaring difference between the two military basic ideas. For example, if John wanted to mimic the scary firepower and coverage of a single Ballista Tower, he needed to mount tens of his cannons on top of walls. And putting the aerial field of expertise, he would need to add more aerial cannons to the mix.

"And there isn’t a single item like what we acquired back at the pocket trial," Cissel added, noticing a gap John had missed.

It was a strange discrepancy. While the Dragons had their unique racial gear, they seemingly lacked the universal items that were commonly found in the trials. It suggested that once the Dragons transitioned to the new world, they began to rely solely on their own manufactured skills.

"Aside from the aerial weapons, we have Dragon-designed walls, buildings, and even few thousand sets of heavy plate armour made out of their shed scales," John summed up.

The walls were the most impressive, massive slabs reaching five hundred meters in height, reinforced with an outer layer of Dragon scales that provided incredible resistance to different attacks.

As for the armour sets, they were useless to the humans currently; they were built for the Dragon-kin giants. John planned to leave them for Goven to remodel into something the humans could wear in the future.

Turning his attention to the Demon loot, John found them to be even more generous, though their philosophy was the opposite of the Dragons. While the Dragons focused on dominating the sky, the Demons were obsessed with firing hell from it.

John had hoped to find a single silver flying ship in the loot, but he found none, it seemed the storage devices were for personal gear, not the massive vessels themselves. However, the Demons’ obsession with explosives was legendary.

He acquired hundreds of thousands of Demon grenades in various categories: Incendiary, Corrosive, and Void-Pressure. Seeing the sheer numbers made Elena and Cissel’s eyes glaze over with a terrifying glee. Luke shook his head, and Ricky sighed, knowing the peace of the zone was about to be shattered by grenade testing.