"Do you think what Lanmar said earlier is true?" Luke finally asked, his voice low as he watched John work.
John didn’t look up imdiately. He was deep into codes of a cannon. After the lunch break, he returned to the cannons with a singular focus. The more he hacked and edited the code lines, the more natural it felt.
"What if it is true?" John asked back, his tone surprisingly detached. To him, since he ca here, he had overstepped the realm of being surprised by anything easily.
With his friends by his side and the strong base he was building, he felt a level of security that bordered on overconfidence. He didn’t see a reason to worry about a broken cycle when they could easily crush any danger thrown at them.
"Don’t act so confident," Lanmar interrupted, having overheard the talk. He stepped closer, his massive shadow falling across John’s workspace. "If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this new world, it’s that it doesn’t like soone being lucky. It always tries to challenge you, testing your limits at every turn. It’s a living hell, John."
"And?" John asked, his mind never stopping, editing the codes. He finished a complex string of edits, watched the new lines of code getting enforced, and stored the cannon in his inventory before imdiately pulling up the next one.
"These Fog Seekers aren’t just random monsters for show," Lanmar’s tone grew deadly serious, his usual jovial nature replaced by a grim anxiety.
"The system designed them to test us, to keep us under constant pressure. For example, when I said we’d need three Ogolith cores to clear the local fog, that was just the beginning. You actually need fifty cores to clear the fog from the entire pocket trial.
If we don’t hit that number, the trial will never end. We’ll be trapped in this cycle forever. Fog doesn’t exist in the true Source Code World areas! These creatures have a purpose, and by consuming that core, you might have stalled the entire progression of this world."
John’s hands finally paused. The number fifty echoed in his mind. If the trial’s conclusion was tied to such a massive requirent, his accidental depletion of their only core was a much more significant setback than he had initially realised.
"And if you managed to find a way to bypass these challenges—as you’ve done here," Lanmar continued, leaning in, "then the world will treat it as if your power level is far above the current difficulty setting. You do know what that ans, right?"
John, despite his brilliance with coding, was still slow to grasp the nuances of military terms and experience. He blinked, missing the point entirely. But the others didn’t.
"It ans the trial world will retaliate," Elena said, her voice tight with realisation. "It ans we should expect a far fiercer challenge next ti. If we’ve cheated the standard challenge setting, the world will send sothing even worse to restore the balance."
Lanmar nodded solemnly. "Exactly. The pocket trial doesn’t like being outsmarted."
"Let’s worry about that when the ti cos, then," John said, attempting to shrug off the tension. He was determined to stay focused on the imdiate task. "For now, let’s continue fortifying our base.
I need you all to stop overthinking and start picking locations for these cannons inside our territory. We’re going to need them placed on high walls as a secondary line of defence. Think of a layout that strengthens our core, not just the periter."
He threw the task at them on a whim, partly to keep them busy and partly to stop the spread of worry. He knew Lanmar had good intentions, but the core was gone—absorbed into the magical core, and it had already been consud, lost forever. It was a bell that couldn’t be unrung.
John decided that once they began expanding their territory, they would simply harvest Ogolith cores from every new area they conquered, slowly building their treasury until they hit that fifty requirent.
He returned his attention to the cannons. He had realised sothing crazy during his latest code dive. The targeting logic for the sensors was a binary value: it either targeted ground units or aerial units, but it couldn’t efficiently do both simultaneously.
Looking at his vast inventory—thousands of cannons and over ten thousand small motors and sensors—he decided to lean into the surplus. He began designing two distinct types of artillery.
One was optimised for low-angle, high-impact ground defence, and the other was a high-velocity, rapid-tracking anti-air killer. He planned to pair them together as a single unit all along the walls, ensuring no enemy, regardless of their nature, would have an opening.
Four hours later, his friends returned, their faces lit with a new kind of excitent. They handed over a tablet containing the final edits to the base layout. John was about halfway through his cannon modifications and was the only one capable of deploying the walls and cannons, so he took a mont to review their work. He was imdiately impressed.
"We noticed we had way more wall segnts than we actually needed for a simple internal remodelling," Ricky said, his chest swelling with pride at John’s reaction. "So we thought—why just build a fence? We decided to turn the entire area between the outer walls and the internal farm and lake into a massive, multi-layered maze."
"This is brilliant!" John exclaid, tracing the complex paths on the map. If a ground enemy managed to breach the outer walls, they wouldn’t find an open field; they would find themselves trapped in a labyrinth of carefully designed kill boxes.
"You’ve also created these wide plazas in between the maze sections," John noted, pointing to the open squares. "It ensures we have places to rest and regroup while the enemy is still wandering the corridors. It’s simply brilliant, guys. Truly."
"Even if the tactical advantage is clear, we’re still going to need to morise these paths ourselves, right?" Lanmar said, rolling his eyes as he traced the dizzying lines of the proposed maze.
To him, the layout felt less like a sophisticated trap for enemies and more like a gruelling test of his own mory. "And besides that, this thing is massive! It’s swallowed up a huge portion of our internal base area!"
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