Lost in thought, Adam walked to his two-story house, the one that was recently constructed for him as a lab, workshop, and living quarters.
Adam didn't go fancy with this one, making it all a workplace, but it was Megan who went nuts with the second story, issuing an ultimatum to reserve it as a living area with a proper bed, a couch, some rugs, folding screens, and a few paintings that she somehow managed to salvage. There was also a kitchen area and private bathroom on the upper floor, so it was technically a livable place.
Adam had worked on the infrastructure of the base, digging an underground level with his Bending Rune to make way for pipelines large enough for water, sewer, and power. He even spent some time compacting the ground surface instead of paving it, which led to him restoring the entire charred surface level of the ground, so the place was the most luxurious neighborhood in the area once again, albeit in a different sense.
Adam immediately retreated to his workplace, where he had a full computer setup with six screens, his trusty workbench, which he calls Benchy, and a Fabricator for his personal use. In addition, he had his own Iron Maiden machine, one that was made from bare materials such as the Headset and the cage, but it was fashioned to be a chair with soft binds over the arms and legs.
His redesigned Iron Maiden looked so ominous and uncomfortable that it earned the "Electric Chair" name from Megan, but Adam kept calling it the Iron Maiden MK2.
Another toy that Adam developed was a Hologram Caster, far different from the holo table found in the Command Center, as this one would work anywhere in his Workspace without needing to be fixed to a single cumbersome table. Adam got that idea when he installed a large Hologram Caster in the Boot Camp building for non-simulation Combat Training.
At first, Adam wanted to rely fully on the Iron Maiden, thinking that the Hologram Caster was simply fighting illusions, but he couldn't be more wrong. Turns out it was more lethal than the Iron Maiden… technically, because it technically had Blazer guns fixed at various parts of the room that made the holograms shooting back technically real.
It was all technical, of course, since the Iron Maiden was no different from a torture device with full trauma feedback from a literal battlefield, but as was said, it was all technical… technically.
He was proud of his setup, especially with the corner on the left side of his main computer filled with miniatures, some half-complete, some in pieces, and some just too problematic to fully deal with either for logistical or material reasons.
He took off his peaked cap, ruffled his hair, which he had been shaving short lately, and took off his coat as well. Looking at himself in the reflection of his screen, he had been putting on weight, not in an unhealthy way, since he was malnourished like all other survivors, but he was eating a lot of wolf meat lately, which didn't taste as good as it sounded.
He sat in his chair and first checked his computer, a super machine linked directly to the massive Data Core in his Base Bastion. He logged in and started inspecting all his Systems.
Almost everywhere he looked, all public CCTV was open to him, all his buildings' operations were online and fully controllable, and all he needed was to give commands. This authority had been given to him once he reached the rank of Lieutenant, unlocking many new things.
What overwhelmed him about all this, however, was the sheer scale of growth that his base achieved just in the past month alone. Everything was built so fast that he was sometimes unaware of the sheer scale of things, especially that one time Elena came to him to inspect the nine Iron Maidens they were working on. He had simply said he wanted to expand the troop training operation, thinking she would just go with two.
The very next day, he found himself standing in front of five large construction Crawlers, which he had to call out for being far too comfortable using the resources. However, after getting an earful from Elena, he realized that they weren't thinking small; it was his vision that was lacking.
His eyes were used to video game-scale RTS bases that are compact and easily organized, but the sheer scale of the base that he should have been going for simply wasn't registering in his mind. Still, that was early this month, and as the population kept growing, Adam abused his authority to issue work orders in the Work Guild at the Survivor Base and managed to get Senator Carter on board with the massive expansion plans.
He wasn't simply working his 150 troopers; he was working the almost 1,000 survivors, which led the base to its current scale.
A few problems arose here and there, especially when the Dire Wolves appeared for the first time, and Adam's forces suffered their first casualties.
Seven troopers were killed after a pack of wolves ambushed them in the field, and Adam could feel their links vanishing in his mind in a way he had never realized he could feel before. Adam personally led two squads in search of his fallen, and what he saw made him and his troopers—both Earthlings and Wartopians—go through a shock they weren't ready for.
All seven fallen were Wartopians from the newest batch Adam summoned, and their postmortem state raised many questions from the Earthling side.
Their skin turned ashen, their flesh crumbled to the touch, turning into literal ash, and the color of their clothes and gear faded away.
The bodies didn't shrink back to their original miniature size; however, it was as if the colors they were painted with were all gone. Adam could only feign ignorance about the reason for such a phenomenon, but he let Yuki deal with the spreading rumors, conveniently blaming universal travel for such a phenomenon, calling it a poorly understood effect.
It sparked a short discussion between the members of his camp, and the rumor leaked to the civilian camp soon after, prompting questions from Professor Hendrick, who came running up the hill to ask questions of his own.
By that point, the rumor of a portal existing on the base seemed to have become cemented in the minds of many civilians, with the Professor beat around the bush in almost every meeting he had with Adam, but the latter would always get protective of the information, saying things like "It's Classified" and "If I tell you, I'll have to…" then proceeded with the Colonel Rhodey strangling Baby Thanos move.
Afterward, Adam tried to re-summon those soldiers with different miniatures that were identical to theirs according to his summoning log that Kave kept, but it didn't seem possible to call upon the same character twice, making Adam firmly believe that whatever souls or egos these soldiers had now completely departed, and there was no recalling the dead. He had the ashes of those soldiers gathered in urns, inscribed with their names, and ordered a crypt dug for them, calling it the Hall of Heroes.
What puzzled Adam, however, was the fact that some of the equipment of the slain troopers that had been summoned with them still kept their condition as summoned items, with the ability to reform back into miniature pieces, and as long as they hadn't been badly damaged, they weren't affected by the Graying.
However, since that attack, Adam proceeded very carefully against the Dire Wolves, seeing how they could annihilate an unwary party of his trained soldiers, which led to the creation of a defense matrix and the establishment of a third command post beyond the Civilian Base as a forward defense operation. He established it underground as part of a trench and deployed an array of turrets and patrols that were designed by Elena to counter canine-type monsters.
After the Rift Gate was discovered not far to the southeast, Captain Creed was getting ready to go and clear it, but Adam asked him to wait as the resources they were getting from hunting these Dire Wolves were making their food stocks show positive signs of growth with the addition of the much-missed protein.
It was a blessing in disguise, but a blessing nonetheless. Feeding the population of survivors was getting more difficult lately, and it gave Adam the idea of looking for other Rift Gates with monsters that could be hunted for food, but rather than starting to take shots in the dark, he wanted to go for a well-planned operation, one that was becoming an ambition for him, a mission that wasn't even given by the Sacred Code, not directly anyway.
> MISSION — CONSTRUCT 10 SCANNER BEACONS IN CLOSE PROXIMITY OF YOUR BASES (3/10), BLUEPRINTS FOR THE [ LEASH ] TECHNOLOGY WILL BE AWARDED UPON COMPLETION.
TheLEASHof all things! Adam couldn't help but wonder when he first saw that.
LEASH stood for the Licensed Electronic Access & Security Handset, a type of cuff device issued to important officials and those who could afford it, from Bounty Hunters to Wealthy Citizens, giving them access to a communication network, some utilities, and a permanent tracker for security and surveillance reasons.
This made the mission very enticing to Adam for many reasons, such as the introduction of the Solarium's version of the smartphone, which would make life easier, but rather than simply spamming Scanner Beacons in one place, he wanted to spread them through the nearby regions.
Each beacon can operate in a spherical range with a radius of 2 kilometers, with a potential to get upgraded to a 5-kilometer radius, which made it one of the most important tools Adam could build now that he had the resources, and hence the mission he intended to give to Ajax if all goes well.
He wanted to lay out a plan, but he needed to make the most of this situation, and for that, he needed to dabble in the shenanigans of marketing and influencing the herd.
But that operation could wait until night; his eyes were set on a different project at the moment, and it made him nervous as he started laying out all its pieces on his blank white table under the glare of an intense flashlight.
It was the bone blade that he collected from Ajax's belongings, one that was said to have a Rune. So far, he had managed to examine all the artifacts that were acquired by others, given his position as the big dog around these parts, but he had never worked on a damaged artifact before, one that he could freely open and look into.
So far, Adam had established that there are four kinds of Runes from the ten that he came across: Magic Casting Runes that fall under the jurisdiction of his class, Weapon Runes that focus on making an attack simply meaner, Hunting Runes that are specifically aiming for tracking and hunting, and finally Support Runes that provide strategic enhancements like extra stealth or recovery.
In a way, this Rune that Ajax called the Force Rune should fall under his classification of Magic Casting Runes, one that did exactly what his Bending Rune did, except with energy like fire, lightning, or Blazer beams. Maybe if he could fix it, he would control the four classical elements, shave his head, and go on a big adventure through the woods fighting oppressive regimes… if there were any left.
Back to the Rune in hand, Adam assembled the bone blade back into shape as much as the pieces Ajax had allowed, with obvious missing pieces here and there, then he started looking for any runic pattern.
Usually, it would be a piece of cake for his [Font of Magic] ability to get a special feel for runes, especially now that he knew that Runes were 3D geometric shapes rather than a 2D script, but he still couldn't find a Rune inside.
It was tragic how rare those Runes were, since his class in particular wasn't very useful without them, and so he disassembled the blade once again into fragments and started to take a serious look under a magnifying lens for any runic patterns on the fragments.
While doing so, he was still looking through each fragment with his [Font of Magic], not giving up yet, and not long after, he found traces of something.
It was like a speck of dust, a tiny dot of ink that was not even a line. Maybe the final trace that he wouldn't find if he wasn't simply being thorough while inspecting each fragment with a tweezer, which prompted him to look into the bigger fragments for such tiny specks, and he soon started uncovering more.
They were faint, sickly, and dying.
"Computer, give me all the shapes of the Runes we have registered so far!"
Just as Adam gave a voice command, the computer behind him reacted on its own, viewing multiple images on the six screens with electronic peeps that let Adam know it finished the task when the peeps stopped.
"Load them into the environment."
As he said so, the Hologram Casters installed in the four corners of the room activated, and as he looked up, he saw ten geometric shapes floating midair, obviously made from holograms.
Despite being intangible illusions, Adam reached up for one and dragged it closer with a hand gesture, then joined his hands together and expanded the size of the hologram he picked by spreading his arms apart, focusing on one of the corners of the geometric shapes where three lines were meeting.
It feels like we are looking at some sort of crystal lattice. The first Sage spoke.
You bet! But still, a lattice is a molecular structure. Even with Font of Magic, our senses aren't so advanced that we can detect some molecular Rune effect. The second Sage argued.
I don't think we should go in that direction, either, but I can't help but wonder how that Elden did it. Lord Kaimu simply gathered energy and pushed a Rune from one object to another, and he was supposed to be of the Warrior class, at least as he claimed. the first thought.
It may have nothing to do with class, maybe a certain level of control over the Force, that power that caused the Phenomenon of Magic, as Ajax called it. The second pondered aloud.
But that still doesn't give us any edge over controlling that power as a sorcerer. Maybe we need our stats to be at 10, perhaps Trick, since it was about control and accuracy. Kaimu's combat style was very agile, and he was fighting small fry enemies well, while barely performing well against the Gobzkin Prince. The first noted, recalling the day of the fight against the Gobzkin horde.
That made sense. If that energy couldn't be called from within or directly from the world, I don't know, but if we look at the amount of energy, control, and power needed, it felt like more than just Trick. It was like we needed all our stats raised. The second concluded.
"That will be easier said than done." Adam leaned back in his chair, now contemplating how to reach that level when most of his time, he was managing the base and painting minis; he would need to be on the front lines to experience such growth.
"Hey!" From upstairs, Megan's voice came as she descended the staircase, wearing her combat fatigues tied around her waist, her ample chest sticking out from her tight-fitting Henley shirt, featuring her strong shoulders and full arms, carrying two bowls of spiced rations, "I want to eat lunch together before my squad is called to patrol."
Damn, look at our sexy lady! The first Sage let out a long whistle.
Lunch and maybe something extra, huh? The second Sage joined in.
'Since you guys are now useless, back to the subconscious, you two.' Adam controlled his thoughts, muting the Sages before calmly receiving the bowl from her.
"Your squad leader is treating you well?" Adam asked, pushing his chair away from the table as she jumped to sit on it.
She stared at him with raised brows before resting her bare feet right against his groin, pressing lightly, "I can handle the Martian bitch."
Adam glanced slightly at where her feet were resting, and it became difficult to resist those urges.
"Is that the proper way a Private asks her Lieutenant for a quickie?" Adam asked.
"If you put it this way, this must be one really bad Private that needs discipline…" Megan said, smirking, "… Lord Justiciar Sir."
"Well… food can wait!"
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