It wasn't the chaos of the battlefield that shocked the four women overseeing the battle simulation from the Command Center; it was how Adam's realspace body instantly spasmed as if an electrical current had run through him.
"Hold him still!"
Solana shouted, but Megan and Biscuits were already at Adam's side, making sure that his vitals and life signals weren't in a dire situation.
"Please! Please be alright!" With a shaken voice and tearful eyes, Megan couldn't help but rub the scalp of Adam's head and grip his arm tightly, just as Biscuits was using a leather belt to tie Adam's body to his chair before trying to secure it with a wooden stool from behind.
"It is the best we can do for now," Biscuits said and made sure to inject Adam with an extra dose of Code Diving cocktail now that the duration had almost passed the two-hour threshold.
"Is there nothing we can do?" Megan asked, looking at Elena and Solana, who were both standing over the holo table, watching the battle in silence.
"Unless the Commander chooses to retreat, anything we add to the Iron Maiden will be used by and against the commander at the same time," Elena replied with a frustrated shrug. "He is doing well on his own… for now."
Looking at the holograms in the mock trench battle, the horrible scene of the destroyed Sin Eater that exploded where Adam was supposed to be standing, and the disastrous result of such a kamikaze tactic, the four were half expecting that either Adam would wake up from the simulation or he would still surprise them somehow.
Looking at the fact that this level wasn't unloading, it appeared to be the latter assumption. Elena and Solana stood side by side, watching the holo table with unblinking eyes, focused on the scene of destruction, before spotting some sort of movement. They both leaned ahead, and their piercing gazes tried to make sense of what they saw, almost trying to gaze through this crude hologram imagery and watch the real thing from an isometric view.
Adam was indeed alive, crawling from under the tank, trying his hardest to get to the side from under the tank's tracks.
By sheer dumb luck, he managed to mitigate getting pulverized and bombed by a tank at point-blank range. How he managed to achieve it was simply pure instinct; as soon as he saw the Sin Eater running nonstop through the barbed wire on the trench's upper edge, he neither ran back nor to the side—he ran ahead.
The Sin Eater tank was too big to fit in a trench. In fact, the primary purpose of tanks upon their invention by the British was to get over trenches, not into trenches. With that, the Sin Eater simply fell with its front into the trench, whereas its bottom remained hanging above the trench's edge, but it looked completely decommissioned after its cannon exploded a shell at point-blank range against the trench wall.
Adam's daring maneuver was all he needed to get out of harm's way—mostly—as he took cover beneath the tank attacking him, covering himself desperately with his arms as the thundering cannon fire completely reverberated through his entire being to the point where he felt his actual body jumping in place.
Stunned and disoriented, the shockwave overwhelmed all his sensory receptors; his lungs felt a strange pain as if he had inhaled the entire blast. On a real battlefield, he knew his lungs would have ruptured from the force he had been subjected to, but the simulated effect was still so nasty that for a second there, his mind wandered about the possibility of death.
≪ Your [Sanity] has improved! (IV → V) ≫
≪ Your [Senses] has improved! (IV → V) ≫
Two skill level-ups at the same time were a fortune he couldn't ignore, but he pushed these notifications to the back of his mind and used the little boost they gave him to find his way out from under the belly of the tank.
Seconds later, the whole frame gave way as parts of it snapped and, with a metallic THUD!, it crumbled where he was cowering just now.
Those who were watching from the holo table heaved out sighs of relief as Adam seemed okay, but rather than standing, he appeared to be dragging himself on his ass before resting his back against one side of the trench and staying there for a second.
He seemed uninjured, but the way he was taking a few panicked breaths, he was certainly dealing with a nasty aftereffect of the blast, most likely shell-shocked from the experience, and his Sanity skill was grinding experience like crazy.
Despite all that, his emotions started to burst in an expected reaction, seeing his shoulders shake up and down. Elena knew that some soldiers would fall into either a hysteria of laughing or one of crying following an experience like that, but Adam was experiencing a mix of both.
He was laughing, shaking, and crying all at the same time. Then he leaned forward and screamed his loudest, frustration and fear gurgling from inside him.
He realized a new sensation right then and there, and it was fear. It was so afraid it started to boil inside him, a sharp and hot pain invaded his intestines, and a sensation of helplessness invaded his thoughts. But he could hear the screams of warriors all over the battlefield, and he could hear their weapons blasting on both sides, and in the few precious seconds he was given until two batches of fresh troops arrived from both sides, he had to sort out the emotions inside him.
Bravery wasn't his strong suit, and he hated it in all honesty. Calculated Bravery, on the other hand, was something he was proud to have, and right now, he didn't feel like it either.
But the one truly brave wasn't himself; it was Kave, Megan, Elena, Creed, the Wartopians, and all those who were willing to stand against the Gobzkins and the Krants and the likes—those who fought with shovels while he fought from the safety of his golem.
Unless he could be like them in a way, he wouldn't be able to understand them or lead them right. In a way, this simulation was a blessing, and rather than just pulling the plug and logging out, he had to see it through.
Elena watched Adam as he stood up, legs shaking and arms holding him up, before he stumbled and looked around himself. His Justiciar outfit was still intact, a courtesy from the simulation, and his weapons were far from him. She smiled, knowing that despite the experience, he still chose to stay and fight. If not for an ideal like taking on the Solarium's enemies wherever they may appear, he was doing it for himself and his friend, a reason as good as any.
She approached the terminal and typed.
> MESSAGE (ELENA) — "The Demon is rushing towards the supply drop as you sit doing nothing. Hurry up, Commander!"
Even Solana had to give Elena a weird look with her eyes, but Elena simply shrugged it off, mumbling that the enemies of Sol Imperius don't rest, so neither should his warriors. It sounded off character for the two to be on the opposite ends of this line, but Elena was probably trolling Solana, a habit that Adam and Kave must have rubbed off on her.
In the simulation, Adam saw the message and moved his body back right as his soldiers came from his side and covered him before the Satanists arrived. Adam still went ahead and had the Satanist tunnel collapse with a well-placed bomb before holding a trooper with a radio pack and telling him to face the wall of the trench.
Adam picked up the handset and contacted his Bombardment.
"Status!"
> BOMBARDMENT READY!
Adam had limited choices on what he knew he could bombard. First, he could go on the offensive and blow up another defense line at the southern trench, opening the road straight to the enemy base to make a full assault, or he could pursue the demon and try to prevent it from acquiring the supply drop.
Then Adam looked over the trenches and between the two bases before gritting his teeth and deciding what to do. He waited for a few seconds before he asked:
"Has the demon reached the Supply Drop?"
> MESSAGE (ELENA) — "Negative! But it will take less than 30 seconds."
"Good!" Adam immediately set the coordinates of the bombardment to target the supply drop and set it to a time that he estimated that the demon would be in contact with it.
Around 20 seconds later…
> AN ENEMY HAS BEEN SLAIN!
Adam couldn't help but finally smile, calm the shiver going through his mind, and set his troops to go all out now that the enemy commander was down, even if temporarily. Immediately, he traveled through no-man's-land, taking cover to cover, fighting minimally with any Satanist that got in his way until he reached his best front all the way to the south.
"LET'S GO! SOLDIERS OF SOL IMPERIUS!" He shouted at the soldiers, bolstering their morale with his presence. "ONE LAST PUSH AND WE WILL BE VICTORIOUS!"
Surrounded by a squad of men, Adam pushed forward on their lead and breached the enemy trenches, shooting and killing, joining up with an advanced squad that was under fire from the turret. The heavy suppression fire was causing them casualties, and it brought Adam's force to a halt. However, right before he could contemplate a plan on how to beat a machine slugger gun positioned at the end of a straight tunnel, an echoing whistle came from the sky as a new supply drop landed.
This time, it was almost at the place where the previous one landed, right beside the southern trench, and Adam could guess the exact place it landed in just by feeling the tremors of the ground.
One idea struck his mind, and he immediately called his men.
"FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD! CHARGE TO THE SUPPLY DROP! AVE IMPERATOR!"
Leading fifteen men into no-man's-land, four of whom were melee troopers with shields and spades, the group was provided cover by the portable shields as sniper fire from the enemy's base started raining on them. Five soldiers fell in an instant, and one of the melee troopers got his shield split with a hellfire bolt.
After that, Adam moved from cover to cover, taking the broken tanks and allowing a Battlemaster Tank to pass before he moved behind it and secured the supply crate. He then had his men cover him on the way back as they dragged it into the trench. Once there, he only had four men guarding him, and an enemy squad was advancing against them, but Adam was already pulling something from the crate, and the moment he took it into the light, he stared without blinking for a few seconds.
"Oh!"
That was his only reaction, as well as the reaction of everyone watching him from the Command Center. An "Oh" with an obvious expression of exclamation.
"No, no, it can't be…" (Elena)
"It is a Solwoken's weapon; it doesn't come in mortal human hand size." (Solana)
"But then again, it is the only thing that looks like that." (Megan)
Adam himself had the same line of thinking going through his mind, but looking at the trench in front of him and the situation that he was getting outnumbered right now, he simply shrugged and put away his pistol and sawblade.
"I want a clear line of sight to the base and cover. Shields, on me!"
All he needed was his last remaining melee troopers with shields and light cover fire to allow them to emerge from the corner they were cowering in.
The Satanic squad on the other side was in full force, and they immediately started blasting against the shields once they emerged from cover. With cover fire enough to make a second of opportunity, Adam emerged from behind cover, the pistol he just acquired from the supply drop aimed ahead at nothing in particular. All that Adam needed to be sure of was that the enemy's base was this way.
"The Antimatter Beam Pistol, courtesy of Solwoken Cyrus, Blade of Sol."
And he squeezed the trigger once.
On the holographic display watched by the doubtful onlookers, the entire section of the trench that started from the spot where Adam was standing all the way to the defense point at the enemy's base southern entrance was all enveloped by a flash of light, then suddenly dimmed as if part of that hologram lost its function. A few seconds later, a new image of the area was cast, and there was no doubt that the pistol Adam just fired was "His Terrible Fury".
> YOU HAVE SLAIN AN ENEMY!
Adam watched as the pistol turned to ash in his hand, as did the entire section of the trench and everything that once inhabited it, including and not limited to one unfortunate demon that seemed to have spawned and was coming back for a rematch.
Adam picked up his weapons and looked behind him as more of his reinforcements seemed to have arrived.
"Advance as one!" Adam finally made a hearty roar. "FOR THE SOLARIUM!"
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A/n: How do you guys like the new cover?