His eyes closed in Realspace and opened in Cyberspace, a process that had become so natural to him, stepping back and forth between the two realities without the previous hindrances.
Not much had changed on the technology side, leading Adam to suspect the Code Diving Cocktail was improving, but it still felt better than before, almost therapeutic despite the grim appearance of the machine he had to strap himself to, the Iron Maiden Mk.2, aka the Electric Chair.
Around him, Cyberspace felt less of a battlefield and more of an endless white expanse. It felt somehow peaceful and quiet, unlike anything he had experienced for the past eight months, especially the brutalist monastery building where his physical form was located, probably being watched over by Solana right in front of the Guardian's head.
MESSAGE (Solana) — "I shall establish an uplink to your neural connection, Brother-Commander. Maintain patience while the Calibration rites are performed and the connection is brought into alignment."
"Lovely!" Adam replied, taking a few steps in the white environment before pausing and asking, "No funny business, all right? Don't try to look for something embarrassing in my head to hold it against me."
MESSAGE (Solana) — "It would not function even if I attempted it. You possess no Kernel Node; therefore, so long as your mind remains coherent, you retain sovereign control over all incoming and outgoing cognition. We stand within the presence of a Code Guardian. Its Cryptos-Logos Ward Engine intercepts and nullifies unsanctioned intrusions."
"I was just wondering why this place felt so nice." Adam exhaled and immersed himself in the holy area of Cyberspace, "I remember now that you told me you would fortify our access to Cyberspace after the dragon incident. Was the guardian your plan, then?"
MESSAGE (Solana) — "Affirmative. You are in a Binary Sanctum, a fortress of Sacred Code embedded within Cyberspace."
"Well, I would have loved to participate in such a project, so next time you do something fun, don't forget about little old me," he said.
Solana watched Adam's reply on her screen next to his mortal shell while extending a cord and attaching it to the back of her neck. She then stood very close to the Guardian, dropped to both knees, and rested her forehead against it, before pushing her consciousness into her Kernel Node.
Moments inflated into sublimity, a euphoria of grace and grandeur as Solana emerged into Cyberspace with power beyond the capabilities of mortal kind.
> REPORT — GUARDIAN PROTOCOL DETECTED
> REPORT — AUTHORIZING HIGHER CONSOLE ACCESS FOR OPERATOR ATEN-SOR, SOLANA (SANCTUS SCRIPTORIUM)
> REPORT — RULES DON'T APPLY TO CONNECTED INDIVIDUALS (LIST: CLAY, ADAM…)
Solana opened her eyes to the white expanse within Cyberspace, feeling warm and protected, whole, and content. She felt her avatar, finding it made entirely of flesh, which she secretly preferred to her AugmenTechs from Realspace, a preference she kept unknowable to others.
From this point, she could take control of her Cyberspace surroundings and initiate Adam's trial; however, since she was in the space of a Code Guardian, she needed more authorization.
Code Guardians were powerful Code Entities, anchored to reality through powerful computations laid upon a physical guardian statue. Such statues and monuments have always had what humanity perceived as a "protective aura." These beliefs were illogical. Explaining them to people like Adam would surely result in him utterly ridiculing the idea.
Like many logic-oriented people, Adam operated on a principle of "as long as you understand it, you can believe in it." On the other hand, Solana had seen things that would traumatize people like Adam, even though he is a hardened apocalypse survivor. Those who had a glimpse of the darkness of the void and felt it glimpsing back at them knew that not all things were just logical reality.
That's why Adam was struggling with understanding concepts like the Freeze, the protective aura of the Holy Flame, the power of the Sacred Geometry, etc. He pretended that he understood the Sacred Code and its applications, but his understanding was still mundane at best, limited to Physical Reality.
In fact, Solana firmly understood that the effect of the Freeze and the effect of the Holy Flame had a lot in common, no matter how heretical that idea was. Neither phenomenon could be explained by rational thinking; both are supernatural, and both manifest through belief. One is friendly to the Solarium, a miracle from Sol; the other is unfriendly and disruptive to all SolTech, evil sorcery.
Those who pretend that there were two sides of reality—Material vs. Immaterial, Mundane vs. Arcane, or Physical vs. Spiritual—were not mistaken but not fully right either. If Solana were to describe it, there were three sides of reality: the Physical, the Spiritual, and the Higher One.
The Physical reality is the one we can affect directly, where we live, and what is enough for us to prosper and not worry about the other sides. The Spiritual reality is one that can't be affected directly, but can absorb our thoughts, beliefs, and fantasies, to create something much more than just physical, usually associated with miracles and psychic powers. Lastly, the Higher is what is beyond, the edge of what can be known and what will never be known, like the limitations of three-dimensional space and the beginning of higher dimensions where our human existence can be less than whole.
And make no mistake, that side is as real as the rest, and from it come unspeakable horrors, and no man or woman can even imagine how to retaliate, let alone do anything about it.
These three aspects come together as Realspace, Cyberspace, and Hyperspace; the reality we live in, the reality that we can distantly affect and be affected by, and the reality that can affect us without us affecting it, no matter what we try.
The funny thing here was that Adam wasn't struggling with understanding things like Hyperspace and Higher reality; he was still struggling with Cyberspace and Spiritual reality. It was rather natural since most acolytes in the Scriptorium would find it difficult to grasp the depth of what was supernatural, let alone an outsider.
And so, Solana decided to show Adam the real extent of this power he underestimated, to give him a real taste of what he can achieve from this side and reflect on the other side. For that, she needed to experiment with the Code Guardian a bit.
"Blessed be Sol Imperius! Glory to the Sacred Solar System! Iterating the first echoes of the Sacred Code, the sanctity of a guardian, and the holy sanctum," Solana said, then took a deep immaterial breath before aligning her thoughts through her Kernel Node. The white world around her felt merged with her pale white skin and ashen hair. Her steel gray eyes didn't do her humanity justice as she stared without blinking at nothing before reciting like a recorder: "Pitch black nothingness swirling into void eternally."
> NODE FUNCTIONS KEYWORD REQUIRED
"Eternally."
> MY SERVICE SHALL LAST…
"Eternally."
> WHEN I DIE IN SOLFIRE I WILL BE THERE…
"Eternally!"
> MY FLESH TO SOLYMER…
"Eternally!"
> MY SOUL TO THE CODE…
"Eternally!"
> IN HIS STEPS I SHALL WALK…
"Eternally!"
> EYES WATCHFUL, HEART VOID…
"Eternally!"
> REPEAT THREE TIMES
"Eternally, Eternally, Eternally."
> ADMIN FAITH — ACCEPTED
> GUARDIAN CONTROL — GRANTED
> PRAISED BE SOL IMPERIUS
> GLORY TO THE SOLARIUM
With that, Solana gained what was akin to hyperawareness of any and every process running within the Cyberspace domain of the guardian, from Adam's position to every code flow experiencing the "Freeze."
With a thought, she materialized behind Adam effortlessly.
"Brother-Commander!"
Her voice felt more mechanical and distant than before, yet deep power resonated from her and felt prickly to Adam's senses.
"Damn!" He turned, half surprised, half pleased to see her, "You're in admin mode?"
"Through the Guardian, yes. Its code spirit is mighty," she said.
"And that mighty code spirit, how many CPUs did you use to build it exactly?" Adam asked, feeling that his CPU stash seemed to have taken a hit when he wasn't looking.
"Only one." Solana replied, unable to hide the twitch on the side of her lips, which then turned into a grin.
Adam was surely taken aback, doing some rough calculations in his head, before trying to assess the amount of hardware it would take him to build a computer that could maintain an active protected domain within Cyberspace.
"This doesn't make any sense," he said, pointing all around him, "This is hefty computing; we're talking big workstation or server-level computing. Am I missing something?"
Without voicing a reply, Solana simply gave Adam an all-knowing shrug, clearly intending to make him work for that answer. He grimaced with annoyance, but still trusted the Nun to honor her end of the bargain: she was going to teach him the logic behind Sacred Geometry and this obscure SolTech techno-theology, while he undergoes his trial for the Captain Rank.
"What do I need to do?" he asked, watching Solana as she suddenly waved her hand, and their location shifted from where they stood to somewhere else, the edge of the Guardian's Domain.
There, he saw a shimmering barrier of light, and what was behind it was an endless, barren landscape, the type he was used to when entering a Cyberspace environment without loading a level. It appeared like a reflection of the real world, just a bleak earth, a sunless sky, and an empty ocean that stretched for miles, unending.
"This barrier protects the domain of our base in Cyberspace, effectively warding off the effects of the Freeze from our most critical processes. This happens in both physical reality and spiritual reality, meaning that while the Freeze can affect energy, it may also affect the Sacred Code, thus causing latency and lag." Solana explained.
"Thinking about it, the Freeze name is so right on the money." Adam commented with a laugh.
"I understand that reference." Solana nodded, then opened an area through the barrier for Adam to walk through, "You will now proceed into the domain afflicted by the Freeze. Upon your arrival, I shall initiate the Captain-Rank Trial. The Sacred Code may respond according to established patterns and generate a Mission Protocol requiring you to confront the Freeze from within Cyberspace itself. Should that occur, I will use the occasion to demonstrate the effects of Sacred Geometry and related disciplines upon the machinations of the Sacred Code."
"This sounds like fun!" Adam said, finally excited by the situation, "I prepared new runes from the ones we harvested. Wanna know something fun?"
"What is it?" Solana asked as she made sure all the preparations for the simulation were perfect.
"My Puppeteer Rune doesn't count as an Attuned Rune, meaning I can have four runes in total. So, aside from Bending, I have the "Slaying" and the "Tracking" runes as bone fragments in my pockets I am currently attuned to."
"You do know that you can't use these runes inside Cyberspace." Solana reminded him.
"I know, but they can still have an effect if the Sacred Code wills it, which it will most definitely use as mechanics, right?" he said.
"It is true." Solana replied, somewhat wondering what may go wrong with this plan, before thinking it wasn't such a big deal in the end.
> INITIALIZING SIMULATION…
Adam took a step through the doorway she made through the barrier and officially exited the protected domain, now standing in the wild and dangerous Cyberspace.
Before his eyes, the barren wasteland started taking form as arrays upon arrays of trenches appeared in the distance, as if an invisible knife was carving lines through the land.
From the sky, whistling meteors descended at an unfathomable speed, blasting into the ground with clouds of dust and smoke blocking the view.
These meteors were all made of metal, and as he looked away from the assault of dust, he heard multiple mechanical sounds coming together to form bunkers and fortifications. Then, a few dozen boots started stomping the ground right as the dust cleared.
Adam opened his eyes and saw that all these meteors were actually drop pods, bringing buildings and troops from orbit, in the traditional Solarium fashion.
"Damn!"
He whistled and looked up in the gloomy sky, spotting arrays of red lights and strange shapes, barely visible beyond the clouds. Without a doubt, it was a Stellar Ark, one large enough to perform a total wipe-out bombardment of all lifeforms on any planet's surface, if the Supreme Council of the Solarium were to ever deem it a lost cause.
"What mighty vessel is that?" Even Solana, who had set the stage, stood beside Adam and was awestruck by the sight.
"Probably one of the Seven Trumpets." Adam replied, then scanned the sky once again, the ark no longer visible due to the increased thickness of the gloomy clouds, "What's my mission?"
His question woke Solana from her daze, prompting her to immediately complete the process she was handling.
> REPORT — LEGIO BELLARIUM OFFICER RANK UP TRIAL LEVEL DESIGNATED
> TASK — CLAY, ADAM PROMOTION FROM RANK CO-1 (LIEUTENANT) TO CO-2 (CAPTAIN)
> DIRECTIVE — DEFEAT THE SIMULATION
> MISSION — DOOMSDAY EXTRACTION
> ENEMY — ROGUE MACHINA
"Holy shit balls!" Adam's voice trembled in fright the moment he saw the mission and enemy types.
This wasn't some simple war mission; it was a survival mission of the scariest possible level.
Doomsday Extraction means that the world was a type of mission in Wartopia's RTS games; in short, a timer is set before the Stellar Ark in orbit spills doom to the world, and the mission is to extract a target of interest from the ground before the timer runs out.
An Apocalypsis Decree has been issued on a Machina-infested battlefield, and Adam was now leading a full company through yet another battle.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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