146. Promotion
Innovation wasn't inherently wrong in the Solarium's lore, but its purpose was often viewed with clear skepticism. After all, the Solarium was in a bitter war with the conscious machines of the Rogue Machina, and this particular enemy always found ways to strike through technologies the Scriptorium hardly understood; thus, most new technologies would eventually get red-waxed with Redaction Seals.
So when Adam Clay viewed his newest innovation to his newly summoned Monks, their reactions were…
"Sol Invictus!"
"Is that… new?"
"And it can scan heresy in people?"
The three Scriptorium units looked at Adam with wide eyes, not understanding how a Bellarium Lieutenant was so adept at making a handheld heresy detector.
"This is beyond amazing! Praised be to Sol!" The elderly and gentle-looking Script Monk commented; his name was Brother Solnar.
"Hahaha! I've been dying to get my hands on something like this! I'll make those Heretechia Inquisitors run out of business," said the large and brutish Warrior Monk, Brother Solbjorn, cracking his knuckles with glee.
"But isn't the design too unconsecrated? The Blessed Circuit Board lacks any protection, no Sacred Geometry, not even etched purification prayer arrays to ward unhallowed circulations," said the last, a female dressed in official clothes with exposed hair and casual Solarium robes rather than nun attire, hence being a Luminare, a scholar of the Luminare Scriptorium, the Solarium's Ministry of Education.
"Sister Soliha is correct, this circuit board is too exposed, Brother Lieutenant. Etching it on your own may beget a disaster." Brother Solnar spoke calmly with a fatherly smile: "It is understandable since this was a world living in the dark ages of fossil power."
Adam listened to all that, resisting the urge to grind his teeth while watching the three curious summons fiddle with his design and tell him of a million ways to make it "symmetrical" and "sanctified".
No wonder SolTech can't handle any fancy user interface, with minds like these driving advancement to inefficiency and stagnation.
Resisting the urge to snap at them, he instead went full-on boss mode.
"I don't care what the design looks like as long as it is efficient. Right now, I want the tech optimized for Rune Scanning. Once again, Runes are friends, not heresy." Adam said before glaring at the three: "Repeat it!"
The three seemed to be swallowing a bitter pill, but unlike Solana, they were easier to fold to the influence of their summoner.
"""Runes are friends, not heresy."""
"Good!" He was pleased with their subservience, finally getting those religious sorts under his wing: "I want you to fit this bulky Esper Detector into the Bio Scanner. Do it with my PCB or the old BCB, just make it fit."
"By your orders, Brother Commander," Solnar replied, bowing politely to Adam.
Adam left the three in the Command Center's Oratory room, which was now housing the tech shrine. He was generally pleased with what he heard from them, but still confused about some matters.
First, he experienced a summoning failure when he was about to summon them, as he had their background in his mind set to some wrong details that contradicted the established lore, though he was doing it on purpose.
All members of the Scriptorium had a trend or tradition where they changed their names to something that contained "Sol-" as a prefix. He wanted to try regular names, but he ended up summoning legendary miniatures instead. He then redid it with different names in mind: Solnar, Solbjorn, and Soliha, just like it was with Solana and Solomon.
Solnar, the elderly monk, was a former noble who enrolled in the Executiva Ordinarium Exam for civil servant positions, but a vision of Sol Imperius set him on the path of light, and he dedicated his everything to the Scriptorium.
Solbjorn was a previous Man-at-Arms in the Legio Bellarium, but as he proved adept at handling rogue machina death bots many times, he was taken by the Scriptorium and trained in the arts of brutalizing rogue mechs both physically and digitally as a Warrior Monk.
Last but not least was Soliha, a scholar who sought to rationalize the technology of the Solarium and how to bridge it to people. Her vision originated from a personal tragedy, caused by the Solarium clergy's excessiveness in being too protective of the Sacred Code and its applications.
Adam carefully designed these three characters and their backgrounds for various purposes: Solnar, the diplomatic monk, who had more patience and tolerance than most, not branding everything as HereTechia when confused; Solbjorn, the hound who could detect and dispatch Sacred Code violations and Malcode presence; and Soliha, the bridge between reason and faith.
Adam was hoping that this small team of Scriptorium units could bridge the gap between Solarium and Earth concepts, now that he was importing technology and culture from a world classified as both Grim and Dark.
If he could play his cards right through those three, not only would they develop his technologies in the direction he needed, but the techno-theological phenomena of the Solarium might actually be tamed and understood to better serve humanity. Examples of this included the miraculous Sacred Code and the warding effect of the Holy Flame that could push back the Freeze.
If those goals were to be achieved in a logical capacity, Adam's Solarium might actually have a chance of restarting human civilization properly.
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It took a full day before the three Scriptorium experts returned to Adam with something. Rather than a device pre-packed and ready for operation, all they had done was prepare the insides of that device: sanctified circuit boards, plans for different modifications, and various optimization options.
Previously, this was mostly Adam's job, with few of the Bellarium units tinkering with circuit boards, and no one other than him and Solana doing the programming or communing with the Code. With those three, or at least Solnar and Solbjorn, the load was mostly lifted, but at the expense of many things going in a direction Adam wasn't predicting.
Adam was mostly surprised that a hardliner like Solana didn't dwell much on the matter of Sacred Geometry in the PCBs they were using, but looking back on it, she was mostly doing programming and cyberspace diving rather than tinkering with hardware. Adam would have asked her personally, but she was now resting after praying for almost two days straight in the Holy Furnace, having been replaced by the other three as soon as they finished their work.
Meanwhile, Adam was done assembling the Rune Scanner, which took him longer than it should have. He was stuck to his screen, running the software that viewed the schematics of the so-called Blessed Circuit Board, studying it carefully, while receiving messages every now and then from the command center regarding the reclamation of the civilian base.
The situation down there was rather better than before, no longer a problem, as the Holy Furnace effect had extended further beyond the civilian base, now pushing towards the forward base and soon to the Dire Wolf dungeon location. Adam wanted to put meat back on the menu as soon as possible, and that didn't seem impossible anymore.
On the other hand, the situation regarding food was getting worse, not in regard to quantity, but because the Alfari spices had run out, with the suppliers seemingly unable to bypass the blockade made by the Children of Jotnar. Since this was the case, the quality of the grub bars went down to basic, becoming the blandest thing in the world and negatively affecting morale. For that, Adam quickly elevated the urgency of finding different food sources to critical.
However, there was another project that he needed done, and he soon found the resources he needed for it.
Outside his base, down in the snow, many bodies lay, all of which were the Children of Jotnar. Adam and his crew walked among them, pointing the Rune Scanner at each, with Adam doing calibration on the fly.
The scanner beacon was operating using different emissions than those used by the scanner beam to detect enemies and friendlies, which were very similar to WiFi emissions. This variant technology, however, was focused on a more sensitive scale, closer to those used in the Iron Maiden to detect mental signals.
Adam had had a lot of fun playing with this, first making sure it worked on attuned items like his Bending Rune cuff, Megan's True Aim bracelet, and Kave's Critical Strike bone knife.
One curious detail they discovered was the existence of a certain frequency between the attuned item and its user, which would grow louder the moment they separated before crossing a certain threshold where the attunement would fade. Adam called it the String Effect, since the connection would snap like a string under stress when pulled beyond its limit. Strangely, this effect didn't have a fixed range and would happen for each rune and user at different distances.
On top of that, the rune would appear like a faint brand on its user on the screen of the Rune Scanner, which was the most important aspect they were after.
After making sure the runes were easier to spot on certain frequencies, Adam tried it on himself this time, asking Megan and Kave to detect the Puppeteer Rune on him.
"That is curious!" Megan exclaimed, looking between the device's screen aimed at Adam and Adam himself repeatedly.
"What's going on?" Adam asked, frowning as he failed to read her expressions.
"It feels like it is moving, but also it is not," Kave replied. "It can appear on different frequencies, but each time, it is in a different place."
"I guess it has some liberty since I am a living host, right?" Adam asked, prompting the two to nod.
"The Force Rune said that every other rune we have is a trace that mirrors an original rune that lives in some world tree." Megan followed up, smiling at the rune on the screen: "Keep kicking, little buddy."
"You make it sound like I'm in my third trimester," Adam grumbled before grabbing the device, saving its data, and uploading it to the base's network.
Now with this device calibrated, Adam immediately went for the bodies of the Children of Jotnar like a vulture, scanning each for Runes before finally stumbling on the first one after over 40 bodies.
The rune was new, something completely unregistered in the database, so Adam decided to capture it by cutting the arm of the Neander it was embedded on.
Following that, Adam discovered over eleven runes of different shapes and functions; some were new, while others were ones he had seen before.
This fortune was enough for him to feel much better about the day, and that was just the nearest pile of corpses to his base. While the bodies needed incineration to prevent disease, the base had no shortage of firepower to burn them a thousand times over. However, they would all be fed to the Holy Furnace very soon as sacrifices. This way, they would both get rid of the corpses in a respectful manner and produce one of the hardest materials in the lore of Wartopia: Solymer Ash.
More to that, the universe seemed to have been watching Adam struggle and push through all manner of hurdles that winter; it finally decided to throw him a bone, thanks to the number of recruits he achieved.
> REPORT — LEGIO BELLARIUM TROOPS COUNT HAS EXCEEDED 330
> REPORT — LIEUTENANT CLAY, ADAM IS ELIGIBLE FOR RANK PROMOTION (CAPTAIN)
> PRAISED BE SOL IMPERIUS
> GLORY TO THE SOLARIUM
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