Adam went to bed that day with a conflicted heart, unable to think of anything aside from the two accidents that involved his Puppeteer Rune the past two days: Elena's background altering, and the Crawler's building and summoning.
His thoughts followed him to the next day, waking him up earlier than anyone, only to find Sergeant Elena preparing the Crawler for today's work right in front of the Command Center. These were just the two items that kept him sleepless.
"Commander."
"Sergeant."
Elena walked to Adam and saluted, before easing up and looking at a clipboard she had been carrying since yesterday. She then presented all the construction plans she had to Adam. He listened, or at least tried to, before starting to pretend that he was listening, but the lack of caffeine was already overwhelming his thought process.
How he longed for a day off!
"You should rest up today, sir."
But it was then that Elena suddenly spoke his own thoughts, startling him at first, yet he smiled, pointing at his head.
"My thoughts leaking out again?" He asked, knowing that with his summons, he couldn't hide as much as he hoped.
"Not really." Elena shrugged with a distant expression. "Your feelings; usually there is vigor, but today you don't feel like it."
"Heh!" Adam returned a single, dry laugh.
So it was the opposite. It wasn't his thoughts leaking; it was that his thoughts and emotions were as crusty as sun-cured bread. He was in a slump, but there was no time for him to be in a slump. He was also a realist, though, and a slump meant that he had stretched himself too thin. To cure that, he needed entertainment, something he truly enjoyed.
"I'll do miniature building today." He announced to Elena and stood up.
"Good! We need some people to control the rabble down below. The Senator and the Professor were at each other's throats all day yesterday." Elena said, massaging the side of her head as she remembered she would have to run into those two at some point today.
"I'll go talk to them." Adam nodded to her. "I hate politics, but it will be a good change of pace for me."
"Sol be praised!" Elena let out a sigh of relief, slumping her shoulders. "Please, keep them off my back while I work."
"Quite the opposite." Adam smiled and shook his head. "I'll put those two to work if I can, less time for them to think of ways to annoy you."
"Hah! That's actually better." Elena was taken aback by Adam's thinking, but she then remembered something. "Oh, right! There was this surprise we prepared for you."
Already surprised, Adam frowned and looked around. Most of the troops were beginning to gather at this early hour, hardly the time for any surprise.
"What surprise?" He asked.
"It's in the depot. Wrench and I thought of it, and as you went to rest early after the Crawler yesterday, we put it together for you. Thought you could pray over it, too. Give it some blessing from Sol."
Elena's words startled Adam a bit. A surprise was something to expect from the summons, whom he considered alive and unique, but this new spiral into faith and prayers was scaring him off.
He was committed to his followers, but not to a dogmatic point where he was going to lead them through faith like charlatans.
"Listen, Elena. Last night with the Crawler… you do realize it was the Puppeteering Rune doing its magic, right?" He asked, a bit wary of her reaction, but fully knowing he had to make her face reality.
"And?"
She looked at him, waiting for him to get to the point.
"It is not…" He tried to express something, but found it awkward, yet Elena seemed to have figured it out.
"You having doubts, sir? A faith crisis, maybe?" She asked, joining one hand over the other as she faced him.
"I… I am." Adam hesitated, then decided to go straight with it. "I don't think I had faith to begin with. I know the Solarium; church and state are one thing, not separate like they were in our world. Faith and patriotism are synonymous to you, but… I am not sure about myself."
"I believe that you once told Kave that you feel like you are being watched over by something." She said, looking straight into his eyes, who struggled to keep eye contact with hers.
"That was before I even summoned you." He said, realizing that Kave and Elena were doing more than just BDSM when they were together.
"I know." She nodded and continued. "He believes in that now, too, you know."
"Do you want to tell me that Sol Imperius is working through us?" Adam asked.
"Oh, no! I'm not that asshole Flint." Elena laughed, shaking her head. "If this is some version of my world from the Dark Fossil Age, not even Sol Imperius should be born yet. Believing in higher powers is good. God is unlimited, from what I once learned from a Script Monk, but every other thing in the universe is limited, and it is of ultimate respect to acknowledge our own and each other's limits. We are like building blocks; each piece is small but different, and when you put us together, we become greater than what we are individually. That's what to believe in, that is the Solarium, that is Sol Imperius."
"Ah!" Adam looked at her, dazed, learning something utterly new, a feeling that felt right, clicked into place, and fit into his dried-up emotions perfectly. "I see."
"And for all that's worth, your Rune magic brought us together. Magic or whatever, it is the seed for a proto-Solarium. Capitalize on it, consolidate it, but to do so, you must believe in it. The Solarium is the body, Sol Imperius is the soul."
A clearer head, less cloudiness on his thoughts, and a lighter heart than before, Adam nodded. "Amen to that!"
Belief brought assurance, assurance brought relief and peace of mind.
It wouldn't happen overnight, though. If belief were to be easily attained, it would be easily demolished.
Adam let out a heavy sigh, expelling the heaviness from his heart one breath at a time.
"So, the surprise?" He asked.
"It is in the depot." Elena pointed with her thumb towards the depot building that was made of metal panes to house the Grub Processor and the Fabricator.
The two walked over to the depot across the suburban square from the Command Center, and as they walked inside, Adam saw something lying on the floor.
It was like a pickup truck's cargo bed standing on skids similar to a helicopter's.
"Is that a Hoverbarrow?" Adam's steps halted in front of the construct, and a smile formed on his face.
"It is." Elena replied. "Kave said you have a thing for Hoverbarrows."
"Of course I have a thing for Hoverbarrows, everyone has a thing for Hoverbarrows." Adam laughed and shook his head. "Well, they are useful for transporting things, but in the RTS game, they used to have obscenely high HP and absolute collision physics. You could make blockades with those things. Devs had to cap their training limit."
"Now you're speaking like Kave when he gets excited." Elena shook her head with a wry smile.
"Just the good old days." Adam replied. "How did you make this?"
"It's a simplistic thing, really. A platform with Blazer engine parts beneath it, generating thrust against the ground with lateral emitters for propulsion. You have to install its systems, though."
"That's easy. I would use a smartphone chip for it. Not much effort needed."
"You got it, sir."
Elena nodded to Adam and turned to walk away, ready to join the troops who gathered around the Construction Crawler for Roll Call. Adam turned and called her:
"Elena."
She halted her steps and turned to him.
"Thank you." He said.
She smiled and turned away.
"You're welcome, Adam."
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Adam spent half an hour configuring the electronics of the hoverbarrow, making sure that everything would work on its own, but even though he was still thinking about that prayer thing, he wanted to try something first, to unravel the mystery that kept his mind occupied.
He took note of everything and inspected how Elena and Wrench built this hoverbarrow on their own. Then, when he made sure that all systems were complete, he fired it up.
The Blazer engine started emitting a red light beneath the hoverbarrow as vibrations began to shake the ground. The engine hummed with thrust, and it felt as if it would lift off, and it almost did.
Something didn't fit right. Adam tried to see what could have gone wrong: the circuits, the power, the emitters. It all felt oddly similar to that time yesterday when he had just finished installing the Crawler's systems. He tried a few more test runs, but it was still not perfect. Funny enough, the problem wasn't in the hardware, but rather in the software.
The Sacred Code bit seemed to be working fine at first, but as Adam connected the Hoverbarrow directly to a compiler, he realized that there were some lags from the Base Terminal, which was meant to automate the movement of the Hoverbarrows as required by its systems.
This would mean that the Terminal was spread too thin between too many tasks, and the Data Core, as well as the CPU, were getting a bit overwhelmed. So the problem wasn't in the Hoverbarrow at all.
Adam smiled, feeling like he was back in the days when he used to pull his hair out from coding all day and getting stuck at some line he couldn't resolve without having to retrace a mess of other code lines and commands. Even though the Sacred Code was a miracle in and of itself, it wasn't smart enough to point out problems and how to solve them like advanced compiling softwares.
But this feeling—this uncertainty in his heart—came to him once again. Adam returned to the Hoverbarrow and stood before it, resting his hands over it and speaking:
Well, I can either say Arise like every time, or I can pray a nice prayer like yesterday. He remembered how he prayed with Elena yesterday, and the memory made his skin crawl with embarrassment, so he looked around carefully and prayed:
"Sol Imperius, nice morning this is. Thank you for the hand with the Crawler yesterday. If it were you, you'd be hearing a lot from me more often. So… work your will and… Arise, I guess."
While not as grand as his prayer from yesterday, it was enough to stir the rune within him, and he reached it in a way that felt much easier than ever before. With a small bit of his mental energy spent, he found light glowing from the hoverbarrow's corners and its engine humming with strong, steady vibrations.
Adam stood dazed for a second, feeling the hoverbarrow rising to optimal height and holding steady. He reviewed the terminal he had linked directly to the hoverbarrow, and he saw what had happened.
A miracle? A rune? A spell?
Whatever it was, it bypassed all the limitations ingrained within the systems and breathed life into the machine. Adam looked at it, utterly defeated by a problem he couldn't fathom solving without expanding the base's data core.
It didn't operate within reason; it operated within its own rules, and now he had more stuff to figure out.
"Hallelu…Sol."
Or he could say it was a miracle and call it a day.
Adam hopped onto the back of the Hoverbarrow, stretched his legs, and rested his back against its rail. He added some commands to the terminal beside him, and the Hoverbarrow started moving with the thrust from its lateral emitters, finally gaining speed as it moved through the base.
Heading towards the survivors' base on what seemed like the back of a pickup truck flying with a mind of its own, Adam spread his arms and enjoyed his moment of peace.
"I'M FLYING!"
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Check Patreon for more content, Discord for spoilers and chat. [CLICK HERE](https://bio.link/donovel)