John had harboured one lingering worry regarding his Sandbox ability: that the machines wouldn't even detect his illusions because their sensors were malfunctioning inside the fog.
Unluckily for him, his fears were confirmed. The five dragons appeared, reared back their massive heads, and let out silent roars that shook the air, breathing torrents of illusory purple fire at the machines surrounding them. Yet, the mechanical tide simply marched on, totally missing the five dragons near them.
Because the dragons were illusions, they had no physical mass to collide with, and since the machines were operating on sensors, they didn't detect the threat near them.
Only the few units that happened to be directly overlapping with the body of the illusion or the purple fire breaths covered them, triggering a reaction. They opened fire at once, but the devastation was nowhere near the grand chain reaction John had envisioned.
