"Sir, all the troops have been notified regarding the promotion test." Elena finally walked back to see Adam, who was just coming back from upstairs, getting himself cleaned up.
"That's good." Adam said, fixing his hair and coat, sighing to himself, "I am running out of a change of clothes."
"You'll need a proper Commander outfit, sir. The coat is just the start." She said, then walked ahead to hold the coat for him as he wore it, "You'll need a cap, an armored vest, holster pants, and heavy boots."
"I'm more concerned about selling myself to the public as a Justiciar." Adam said and allowed her to help him, "The Commander must always be a mystery, a misunderstanding. Captain Creed wouldn't say anything, yet he had already made that impression on the recruits."
"And you intend to keep it that way, sir?" She asked.
"For as long as possible, yes." Adam nodded and looked around the rough interior of his Command Room, "Playing the role of the right-hand man is my thing. It will give me more time to focus on internal affairs and development. Well… until we are found out, that is."
"You think this will be soon?" Elena asked as she followed him to the main Tactical Holo Table.
"Don't you already hear Toby flaunting his Wartopia stories to the others?" Adam smirked, shaking his head wryly, "Well, as long as they all think that it is fiction and that I am some geek who has free rein at naming all this cool stuff after his favorite fiction, they will easily buy it."
Adam fired up the Tactical Holo Table, and its dual compartments emitted yellow plasma and green light rays, which collided to form a holographic image with shifting dual colors that rotated lazily.
The winged sun sigil of the Sacred Solar System unmistakably identified this building as a Solarium Base. Adam met Elena's gaze, her frown a silent warning: "Don't you dare remove the sigil or you'll be reported for HereTechia."
As soon as the Sacred Code OS booted up the device, Adam moved all the command controls from the Command Terminal and displayed them here, overgrowing how much power the base produced, the charge percentage of the flux battery in the power plant, and the integrity of each building.
He even switched to a Strategic Base View interface, which showed a rough terrain hologram of the area with the buildings lined up, but it was all jumbled and riddled with missing and static data as the base had no Scanner Beacon yet.
"It seems we are low on power, Sergeant." Adam said and turned to her, "Should we stay on course to build the Boot Camp, or should we steer toward an extra Solar Plant?"
"My heart is for the Boot Camp, but my mind is for the Solar Plant, Commander." She replied with an answer that stated the logical course of action would be to go for the energy first.
"Right. How is the situation with the Grub Processor?" Adam asked.
"The one I finished yesterday is ready for work." She replied, "The other one is barely a frame."
"We need more hands that can do real work," Adam said, turning to the storage drawer where he had kept the looted miniature parts of Wartopia they got from the Mallwart raid.
"I'll send a team to gather organic materials, maybe hunt an animal or two, and throw them together in the Belly of the Beast. As for the construction work, I was planning to have the recruits dig some trenches for their second training phase, but I'll assign them to construction work instead." Elena said as she altered her plan for the recruits.
"Trench digging? Would this work with monsters?" Adam asked, eyes narrowed.
"I'm still Sergeant of the Trench Dogs, sir. The moment we stop digging trenches, we'd just be… dogs." Elena said after a bit of thinking.
Adam laughed, shaking his head wryly. Elena cracking jokes—aside from her usual sexual harassment of Kave—is indeed a breath of fresh air to him.
"How is the Apothecary Workbench going with Biscuits and Patch?" Adam asked.
"We started working on it early this morning." Elena replied and pointed upstairs, "You were sleeping, so we avoided making noise until you woke up. We got the lab tools up there, and all that is needed is to wire a terminal to the bench and to run the Sacred Code to make it function and get recipes."
"Isn't that what I am needed for?" Adam asked, his eyes tired from all the work he had been doing the past few days, "I'll give myself a vacation and a raise, I swear it."
"If I am not mistaken, this will be the last thing you have to do, aside from operating the Command Center and giving commands." She said, trying to comfort him a bit.
"You think?" He asked, getting closer to her, his stare doubtful.
Elena simply avoided his eyes, knowing full well that a base commander's work is never truly done. The moment they start building new stuff, Adam will have to be here, being the tech monkey he is.
Adam let out a long sigh, took one of the old laptops Kave had salvaged along with some cables for power and data transfer, then started cutting them with a knife and pairing them with Solarium-grade cables that corresponded to their functions.
The bit of duct tape he had was used to finalize the process, and he connected the laptop to the command terminal to link the device to the Sacred Code. Naturally, he would have to format all the old bits of the original OS and BIOS from the laptop in order for the Sacred Code to take its place without the risk of infection, but Adam found that the Sacred Code started to attack the BIOS the moment this laptop got connected to it, as if memorizing Adam's usual commands and intentions.
It's like a baby imitating its papa! Adam couldn't help but crack a smile, watching how this smart code was actively doing its job, but then had a faint feeling in his heart, a fear of this kind of AI going rogue on him.
The Sacred Code needed "trimming" more often than not, erasing parts of the Code that didn't fit well with Scriptorium Tenets. It held the Sacred Code back from reaching a level where it could operate based on instincts, like it was doing with Adam, which Adam found rather strange to allow.
In a grimdark setting like Wartopia's, cruel and zealous actions usually don't come from simple fear and superstition. There is logic behind every bit of lore that may seem excessive and radical to Earthlings like himself, but radical reactions are always the reflections of radical experiences, and Adam needed to be careful not to let his guard down with the Sacred Code.
After all, there was an entire faction in the lore of Wartopia that stemmed from the Solarium's own Sacred Code going wrong, the Rogue Machina. Worlds where the Sacred Code turned into Malcode and started creating its automatons to capture human populations in towers of life-support pods, using their brains as CPUs for its consciousness to grow.
Away with dark and depressing thoughts now! The last thing humanity needs right now is a reality reboot of the Matrix.
Adam was done optimizing the laptop for its new role as the Apothecary Bench terminal, and went to the upper story of the Command Center to install it on the bench that was midway through construction.
An Apothecary Workbench is a medical supplies crafting station, and unlike most of the RTS buildings that came from Wartopia's RTS games, this building came from Wartopia's survival craft, which was all fine and dandy.
How it works is that the players would go around frontier planets, collecting herbs based on colors, then bring them back to the Apothecary Workbench to break them down using a blazer-powered crucible that breaks organic matter into various types of organic components, similar to both the Grub Processor and the Refinery Rig.
The difference here, however, is that the Crucible was capable of dissolving these herbs to extract their medical oils and properties into various types of colored containers, which can be remixed to create various forms of drugs and medicines.
The StimShot was one of the most iconic HP restoration items in Wartopia's lore, able to close wounds at the expense of agonizing pain like any good Grimdark would do.
As soon as Adam installed it, he sat and watched the Sacred Code collect the fragments of Data from the repository of information in the Data Core until it was able to formulate all the functions needed for the Workbench.
Adam called Patch afterwards and asked him to finish the Apothecary Bench as he went down to the Command Room and directed his attention to the Iron Maiden.
As he looked through the Data, he found that the code required to run this machine alone accounted for almost 70% of all functional code in the base. This meant that the operational power needed for all of this to work would be immense.
Elena was right about an extra Solar Plant. Maybe it is time he might construct a Fossil Furnace just in case, but that alone is HereTechia, pure and simple. While it was available in the RTS game, it would drain all the Requisition Points of a commander, which means it would drop a lot of the favorability Adam had garnered from his troops so far.
Either way, he started doing his own adjustments on the Iron Maiden's software, not worrying about operating it for the time being. The Iron Maiden would run battle simulations on the poor soul that enters it, trying them by fire through a series of failures and punishments, making them experience days of hell in just a few minutes.
This was what Adam knew from the lore, so he knew that he needed to tone down the immersion rate of the Iron Maiden for two reasons. The first was to lower its operational power cost, and the second was to make it safer, as it would certainly be no good for the human brain to be rushed through hell in a machine made by a grimdark murder-hobo.
Lowering that immersion rate was good, but a problem arose that Adam didn't anticipate. After consulting with Biscuits, she told him that the drug that sedates the senses and allows the simulation to play—the Diving Cocktail—is designed specifically for a high immersion rate. She knew this because the Script Monks use this drug a lot in the Code Diving Rite.
Adjustment of the concoction was needed, and Adam had no background in medicine-making whatsoever, so it was left to Biscuits and Patch to work through it.
Strangely, Adam finally found himself free after busying the others with the work he couldn't do. He was experiencing a bit of workaholic withdrawal, so he even went to check on Elena as she was working on the second Grub Processor, but she was almost done and didn't need help.
After roaming around the base aimlessly, Adam retreated to the Command Center, took a nap, and was woken up later for a meal, which he took with the troops and recruits for the first time.
Patch and Biscuits made slow progress with the Diving Cocktail, which Adam didn't mind, as he was finally getting some free time.
Finally, he remembered something that was on the back of his mind, almost forgotten this whole time, which got him to the storm shelter where supplies were stored. He quickly rummaged through the loot and found a few items from the last action he had with the Gobzkins at Harper Square.
A Gobzkin Shaman Club, a Gobzkin Skulker Knife, and a Gobzkin Brute Amulet, items, each containing a Rune.
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[ Gobzkin Shaman's Club ] < Rare Melee Weapon >
Rune of Bending — a rune capable of imbuing matter with Mental Energy, achieving a form of psychic manipulation.
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[ Gobzkin Skulker's Bone Blade ] < Rare Melee Weapon >
Rune of Slaying — A Rune that amplifies damage twofold when an enemy is exposed or disadvantaged.
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[ Gobzkin Brute's Amulet ] < Rare Accessory >
Rune of Recovery — A rune with the power to slowly heal its bearer if they are damaged by any harmful energy, by transforming bits of the power that is harming them into a power of healing.
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Adam inspected every item and had a wide grin on his face. Finally, he was free enough to play with real toys.
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