Elena Skarn stood face to face with the newlywed subordinate and their adoptive child. Stares were exchanged, but she did most of the staring, and they avoided her eyes.
"Well…" Elena struggled to find words in her heart, as she was never the politician type, so she went with her instincts, "…I always hated children."
And just like that, she expressed her personal feelings about a matter she never thought she would ever talk about.
Hammerhead and Biscuits didn't know what to say to that, so Elena still had to break the newly formed ice somehow.
"I heard married life is tough." She added, then looked aside, muttering to herself, "For fuck's sake, say something right."
In a last attempt, she decided to look at Sophie, but still nothing good came to mind. She looked at her subordinates once again, anger swelling on her face, trying her best this time.
"You'll train her yourselves, you'll feed her yourselves, and when she dies, you'll bury her yourselves."
There was a lot of facepalming going on as Adam eavesdropped from the other side of the wall. Elena walked into the Command Center and found him looking at her and shaking his head in utter disappointment.
She shrugged, not knowing what needed to be said or done in situations like these. If anything, she was the one who should be disappointed for raising soft subordinates who took in kids.
Either way, this was the last thing they needed to worry about now, as there was an endless amount of work they needed to rush through.
First, Elena called for her two Corporals, Stone and Sharp, a grunt and a marine, respectively. She assigned them the task of assembling a team and going on an independent loot run with the van. Buzz was also ordered to be on the team as the only radio operator around. Stone chose his subordinates, Patch and Jazz, to follow as hands. Finally, Adam gave Kave the shopping list they needed for the completion of the Iron Maiden and a bunch of other projects.
Thankfully, Kave was a local of Springhead, and he had a rough idea where to find most of these items, since they weren't really things that survivors would look out for.
With that, a six-man loot party was formed and launched to operate on its own, with Adam no longer needing to leave the base.
The other surprise to take note of was the fact that Elena had completed her work on the Refinery Rig and printed steel alloy armor plates fitting the size and thickness of his power armor. She handed him the plates, and he simply locked himself in the garage to install them.
Speaking of the garage, it was already completed and ready to be used, but since Captain Creed was occupying it along with his power armor, no one dared to step in or take a look at it until the Paladin himself decided to move out.
Adam also finished his work on the Data Core and installed it before turning his attention to installing the last bit of updates he thought of for the Sacred Code.
He and Elena returned to the Command Terminal and tracked the progress of the Command Center building, which was now at 84%. What they had left was an incomplete Auxiliary Training Module, i.e., the Iron Maiden, and an incomplete Tactical Holo-Table.
"So, how to build a holo-table?" Adam asked Elena with an excited look in his eyes, as he had never had the pleasure of fiddling with sci-fi holograms before.
"We'll need to construct a VID at the bottom, link it with one or several LFGs—I prefer several, but we can start with a central one and calibrate it later. Once all that is done, we will have a holo-table."
Her reply made him look around for a bit.
"I don't understand any of these acronyms you just said," Adam said, trying to wake himself from a daze.
"You never built a hologram before?" She asked, a brow raised, as if it were one of the most basic things ever.
"Just like Blazers, holograms didn't exist in this world," Adam explained.
"Oh… but wait! You already knew so much about Blazers?" She said.
"Well, weapons are the cool kids in any sci-fi story, so, naturally, they are explained in the lore. Holograms, not so much, I'm afraid." He said.
Elena was taken aback that she had to explain something from her world to Adam for the first time, especially something as basic as holograms.
"This is new." She said, somewhat liking the feeling.
"Do you want a couple of minutes to savor it?" Adam asked.
"No, no need." Elena smiled and let it go. "Where do you want me to start explaining?"
"Explain it like I am 10."
"Very well." Elena nodded and went back to the basics, "So a Volumetric Interference Display—this is the table—is needed to emit lights in sync with a Light-Field Generator to form a Spatial Coherence Array."
"You see, I understand every word individually, but when you put them together like that…" Adam struggled for words.
"Alright, you want it simpler?" She asked.
"Explain it like I am 6." He replied.
"We are dealing with Femtosecond-Pulsed Lasers." She tried to dumb it down.
"Explain it like I am 3." He shook his head.
"Goodness!" Elena frowned deeply, trying to break it down even more, "So these Femtosecond Lasers require what is called Precise Beam Steering by Spatial Light Modulators."
"Gogo gaga!"
Elena let out a breath before going back to the physical basics.
"Hologram is light hitting light." She said, crossing her fingers together.
"Wavelength interference, I was that dumb." He replied as if it was obvious.
"Not that hard, eh?" She was finally relieved he understood something.
"But the medium? We can't have some film to capture the light, right?" Adam asked.
"What film?" Elena shrugged as if it were a dumb thing for him to say, "We either use gas or plasma."
"Gas or plasma?" Adam's eyes went wide. "Highly ionized gas as a medium to capture emitted light from the holo-table, right?"
"Yes." Elena nodded.
"What about plasma?" Adam asked with interest, "I once read that Blazer Beams are used to ionize Fluxgel into gas to create plasma."
"That's right." She nodded again, "It will be easier to go for plasma, though, since we have a lot of fluxgel and Blazer cells."
"How to do it?" He asked with the nerdiness of a geek, isekaied into his favorite game's world.
on"We reference the recipes in the workbench terminal, sir." Elena was tired of all his questions and finally told him to do some actual crafting.
Adam was so full of excitement, discovering more science he had never experimented with before.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
A day passed, and news arrived from the loot team that they had encountered resistance at a nearby hospital on the way west, on the path to the town of Omen.
Their initial encounter was with a group of raiders that tried to ambush the group, but Sharp dropped two of them before they could ambush the van. Once they were discovered, an open firefight erupted, and Stone took out all the remaining raiders with his Heavy Blazer.
As the survivors were interrogated, their base was revealed. Sharp and Stone decided to capture it, and a group of survivors was revealed to have been taken prisoners by the raiders to make them work as porters, builders, and even as entertainment.
Adam contacted the group over the radio and offered them protection until they could stand on their feet. He then told them that if they were to survive for a month, he would take some of them for military training and give them weapons in exchange for one-tenth of their production.
The word "production" startled the leader of the group, but Adam told him that as long as he was not doing unlawful activity, they would be protected.
Unlike the alliance Adam struck with the vast camp of survivors at Professor Hendrick's shelter, this small group of twenty-somethings was completely subjugated.
As the group returned with the loot Adam had requested by the following day, Adam and Elena seemed to have already finished the Tactical Holo-Table in the center of the Command Center.
The table showed no interface since there were no Scanner Beacons installed yet, which was something that would be unlocked after the Command Center was completed.
Moreover, Captain Creed vacated the garage after finishing his work on the power armor and decided to head off again.
The garage wasn't made just for vehicles; it was ridiculously built with structural supports, thick enough to support the weight of a power armor.
There were also traces of some weapons the Paladin was working on. One was clearly a Heavy Blazer since Creed requested an unholy amount of Blazer cells, and the other was a Sawblade, a melee sword with jagged teeth that vibrated at a high frequency, designed for rending unarmored foes.
Adam knew these weapons from the game, Star Paladin III, ones that Captain Creed would craft at his personal Stellar Ark.
Either way, Captain Creed didn't leave the base before attuning his power armor's radio to the Command Center frequency and agreed to feed the base with reports about the status in the surrounding area, as well as a status report, as long as he was in range.
And now that the garage had become vacant, there was no need to keep worrying about non-Solarium vehicles, their fossil fuel heresy, and the need to get superior Solarium vehicles.
What was still left in the Command Center was the training module, as it needed more parts that weren't part of the standard crafting of the base.
Adam managed to acquire some mentions of the Iron Maiden from the lore books he had, then switched to reciting lore lines about the grit and heroism of the Men-at-Arms, doing heroic deeds and showing the might of the Solarium.
The Sacred Code recorded all the entries Adam gave it, showing signs of learning more about the Solarium Men-at-Arms standards.
He then paid a visit to the garage, where Kave was offloading the loot along with Hammerhead.
"Laptops, screens, all sorts of cables, power plugs, GPUs, CPUs, game controllers, VR sets. We also got medical-grade displays, vital signs monitors, lab equipment, a couple of oxygen tanks, and everything that would fill this van."
Kave said, giving Adam a brief inventory report.
Adam was in awe of how Kave found those treasures, including so many gaming parts. It seemed that he had his own spot; granted, some of them were secondhand or partially damaged, but even as scrap, everything here was valuable tech parts.
Adam returned with all these toys, replaced his workbench terminal with a laptop, started making plans for a more powerful Data Core, but still turned his attention to the Iron Maiden as soon as Elena was done with the first Grub Machine.
First, he started making plans on how to accommodate the VR headset inside Iron Maiden's head cavity. After that, he broke a pair of headphones into two earpieces and installed them separately.
Elena added an inner shell part of the Iron Maiden that was designed to hold the user inside with bindings, whereas Adam drilled enough holes in its hull to install the vital signs monitors and connected them to the inner shell, effectively linking whoever enters automatically to the monitors.
Adam pulled another all-nighter working on the head of the Iron Maiden alone, a Blazer welder in hand, poking holes, passing wires, burning his own skin a few times, all while sitting on top of the thing, his legs wrapped around the head like some sort of monkey who figured out electrical engineering.
Finally, he tested all the parts, and everything was functional. He stood proud of his work, stepping over the bodies of Elena, Kave, and Megan, who were all lying on the ground, surrendering to sleep.
He then sat in front of the Command Terminal screen, tested the Sacred Code through the machine whose messy cables started to look like an afro haircut over its head, and with the last trial, Adam pressed Enter to execute the code.
The machine hummed with life as it was now online, and the Command Terminal executed the final codes.
> REPORT — COMMAND CENTER BUILDING PROGRESS COMPLETED
——————————
> NAME — COMMAND CENTER
> STATUS — /FUNCTIONAL/
> POWER — /100%/
——————————
> PRIMARY FUNCTIONS
— CENTRAL OPERATION TERMINAL — /ONLINE/
— BUILDING FRAME — /INTACT/
— TACTICAL HOLO-TABLE — /OPERATIONAL - DISCONNECTED/
— COMMAND DATA CORE — /ONLINE/
— COMM RELAY TOWER — /ONLINE/
— COMMAND VEHICLE GARAGE — /ONLINE/
— COMMAND TECH SHRINE — /ONLINE/
— AUXILIARY TRAINING MODULE — /ONLINE/
> AVAILABLE ADD-ONS
— PROPAGANDA ROOM
— FIELD HOSPITAL
— BASE CANNON
— HEXDOME GENERATOR
——————————
> PRAISED BE SOL IMPERIUS
> GLORY TO THE SOLARIUM
Adam smiled as his aching body and numb brain finally gave up, collapsing on the desk from exhaustion.
What he missed was a final message, not on his screen, but deep in his subconsciousness.
≪ You have gained a New Skill! (Sage) ≫
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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