After Adam sent his girlfriend upstairs, he returned to Kahori. Now, with only the two of them, they picked up the conversation where they had left off.
"My condolences," Kahori said to Adam the moment he came down. "May I ask?"
"It's her mother who we think was taken by the Jotnar," Adam said, still bitter about the prospect, since he was rather fond of Megan's mother.
"It is a fate I wouldn't wish upon my worst of enemies," Kahori exclaimed. "One would pick a flower to guide those who departed, but in the dead of winter, the souls linger under the cold gaze of death, reminding us it is closer to us than our own blood and hearts."
Kahori sighed for a second before turning to Adam.
"I hope the rune did its best to convey the meaning," she said.
"Yes." He nodded. "It was beautiful… if not a little bit horrifying."
"Isn't that what death is?" Kahori replied before showing a hint of interest. "You are truly unlike those people you work for; I don't sense the deep-seated hatred from you. Strangely enough, you're almost like Sage Hendrick."
"I would have followed the academic path the same as him if the world hadn't ended up the way it did," Adam replied with a smile, before getting his head back in the game. "Now that I understand what the Jotnar and Neanders are, what can you tell me about the Freeze?"
"It is their greatest weapon; only a True Jotnar can unleash it this way, meaning one is close by," She replied.
"What's a True Jotnar? Is it greater than the one we fought? The hairy Bigfoot type?" Adam asked.
"You must mean the Lesser Jotnar. Unlike the ones you call Neanders, they are in the middle phase between becoming a full Jotnar and departing their origins."
Adam immediately took out a pen and paper before noting this bit of information.
"So, we have Stage 0 of the Jotnar transformation: the human captives who become feral due to Jotnar Sorcery. Then there is Stage 1: we call them Neanders, but they are still Proto-Jotnar, bigger and more resilient than the average man. Those ones still rely on tools but are pretty much primitive. Stage 2 is Lesser Jotnar; we call them Bigfoot. Larger, stronger, not dumb but malevolent and cunningly so."
"That's correct so far."
"Stage 3, the final one, True Jotnar. Can summon a storm that causes the artificial phenomena to halt, affecting thermal and mental energies. I assume they are bigger and stronger." Adam recounted.
"Correct on the last part," Kahori corrected Adam. "First, True Jotnar aren't the final form of Jotnar; there are Greater Jotnar, the ultimate menace. As for the frost storm that causes the Freeze, it indeed disturbs energy, but think of it as the Jotnar's defiance against Fire."
"I don't get it." Adam frowned.
"I think humanity had the same beginning as most of the sentient races we encountered in the Rift: civilizations that began with one great discovery, Fire," Kahori explained.
"That is correct," Adam nodded.
"The Freeze's main aim is to kill that Fire. It is a power of Oblivion and Sorcery. It seeks to weaken knowledge, and what better way than to attack the very spark that led towards civility and modernity."
"Fire!" Adam pointed.
"Indeed." Kahori nodded. "Thermal Energy is basically the soul of every technology, whether Earth's technology, Alfari technology, and, from what I gather, Wartopian technology as well."
"And to utilize that Freeze, you have to literally forsake everything and walk into Oblivion." Adam still frowned and shook his head. "Good God!"
"Mental Energy, as you call it, is no different from fire. While the brain uses smaller amounts of energy, it is still similar to fire and close in principle," Kahori explained.
"Brain electricity, I get it." Adam nodded.
"The Freeze is not enough to disturb our thoughts, though. But stay in it long enough, and your mind will not recover from its fatigue. That's why most taken by the Jotnar succumb to the influence of their sorcery."
"If that's the Freeze that a True Jotnar can bring, what does a Greater Jotnar bring?" Adam asked.
"A Greater Freeze, naturally. Elden Lords would mobilize personally to deal with a Greater Jotnar, even in numbers," she said.
"I can only imagine."
Adam nodded, accepting Kahori's words at face value, and her information was consistent enough to be largely true. Still, one thing in her narrative didn't make sense to him.
"Tell me, Envoy, can the Jotnar—or at least their children—utilize runes?" Adam asked.
Slowly, Kahori nodded.
"To an extent, yes. However, Sages have stated that they use them with a different kind of power that is not mental, perverting their applications to mimic their strange sorceries," she replied.
"The Captive we had used some sort of power that the professor described as 'Fire Tendrils'." Adam said, before asking, "You said the Jotnar don't like fire. Also, we didn't find a rune on the Captive when we subdued him, so it's quite a mystery, don't you think?"
As Adam said so, he revealed that he was doing his own research besides questioning her, and he was very clear about getting all his questions answered.
Kahori wanted to avoid answering that, but Adam, with that focused look in his eyes, would clearly catch her in the act.
"That is true." She nodded and explained, "It is not that they bear runes on their bodies; the Jotnar in general have a secret nobody would ever dare attempt. Yet all of us Rune Attuned might actually envy them for it."
"And that is?" Adam asked.
He was mildly curious, but Kahori was rather serious about this. She took a couple of seconds to prepare the optimal answer in her head and present it to Adam.
"Through Sorcery and dark arts, the Jotnar know how to bind runes directly into their own bodies," Kahori revealed something that shifted Adam's expression into an intense stare.
He lowered his voice and got closer to her.
"Excuse me? You said… directly into their bodies?" He asked slowly.
"Yes." She nodded. "Not all of them, as it is quite uncommon, but yes, some have Runes carved right on their skin, bones, flesh, and sometimes their hearts."
Like me? Adam screamed in his head, his three Sages running around trying to put down the fire.
"How… is that even possible?" He asked, shock visible, but for different reasons than what Kahori understood.
"Remember what I said earlier, Vindicator? Sorcery isn't meant to be explained with logic," Kahori said, reminding Adam of the point they established before.
"Damn! This makes no sense at all!" He shook his head before glancing at her. "So if I were to go and cut down every Neander and Bigfoot corpse out there, I may actually find some runes?"
"Correct." Kahori nodded. "How do you think the Gobzkin get their bone weapons blessed with runes?"
Hearing that, Adam immediately thought of Kave's blade and the fragments given to him by Ajax that he turned into an Esper puppet.
Putting all these thoughts in order, Adam decided to conclude his meeting with Kahori for the night. He stood at the door of his residence and watched her leave with Elena.
There was a lot to unpack here, and he had no excuse to sleep on this information; thus, he put on his jacket and headed back to the Command Center after checking on the sleeping Megan. He had corpses to check and more troops to summon.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Until the next morning, Adam remained in a state of focus that didn't end until he almost collapsed while walking around, before being forced to rest.
During that time, he accomplished a few of his goals.
First, he gathered the best gun enthusiasts among the survivors and asked for a design that mixes Solarium manufacturing efficiency with Earth's best experiences with firearms. Sergeant Wright, Ajax, and many other survivors were designing the perfect firearm for Adam as he started working on something else entirely: Corpse Retrieval.
As he returned to base, he had a unit of five soldiers pick up a Hoverbarrow and go outside the base. Their goal was to find and retrieve any bodies close by within the aura of the Holy Furnace, in order to cut them open and look for runes.
The process itself was borderline unethical, as the bodies were those of former humans. However, if it was true and some of them had runes, they would be the most invaluable resource ever.
The soldiers found difficulty bringing back some corpses due to the damage they suffered, and had to cut the limbs off the Bigfeet mutants before loading them up, as they were simply too heavy and too big to carry. After inspection, they realized that the hip of one of the mutants was actually bearing a rune, but the soldiers cut through it with their Blazers, effectively destroying the rune.
It was an honest mistake, and Adam didn't even bother with it; however, with so many bodies lying around, it was very difficult to know where the runes would be without literally cutting them apart—a process the Gobzkin would find easy since they would eat those bodies anyway.
Not desperate enough for cannibalism just yet, Adam turned to his Medics for help.
"You guys have Bio Scanners, right?" Adam asked, addressing Biscuits, who was recently promoted to a Corporal and acting as leader of the Medical Corps.
"Yes, we have a couple that came with their holders during… you know…" She replied, hinting at the summoning, since there were Earthling recruits around.
"Their design is available, right? Can we make more of them?" He asked.
"You'd do that for me, boss man?" Biscuits turned to him, almost in shock that there were Tech Parts to spare.
"No, not for…" Adam was about to reply quickly, but seeing the look on her face, he let out a sigh. "I'll order some for you while I'm at it, but they'll be synced to the data core, and Solana was occupied at the moment. I'm just saying I want one for my own use; how customizable are they?"
"Depending on the kind of scanning you want to do," Biscuits replied, picking up a bulky, flat-screen device with two handles from the side.
She turned on the device, and the screen lit up with something like X-ray imagery when she aimed it at her own leg, displaying bones and muscles, before manipulating the frequency of the scanning beams to focus on different layers of muscle and fibers.
"Damn! Why haven't I played with this before?" Adam grinned as he took the device from Biscuits, who handed it over reluctantly.
"This is one of just two devices we have, sir. Don't go putting your raccoon-like hands all over it," Biscuits said, trying to get it back.
"How… How dare you?" Adam looked at her, comically offended. "I'll have you know, my hands are perfectly normal hands. Great hands! Average in size, still very great hands. Everybody who shakes hands with me compliments my hands."
Even as he replied, his hands were already playing with the interface of the device until he logged into its Sacred Code-based operating system. Biscuits saw that and let out a tired sigh, leaving him to do whatever he wanted until he got his fill and left.
Adam, however, took the device to his favourite Lunar Engineer, Wrench the Mechanic, who was working on a utility walker craft for the sake of constructing the Great Cannon. He immediately pitched him the idea of using the Bio Scanner along with the Rune Codes to search for Runes on the bodies of the Neanders, who immediately endorsed the idea.
The problem, however, was that they needed to install the same technology used to detect Espers on this small device, and it was by no means simple. Adam had to open up the device and look into its parts to see what they could replace or remove entirely, but the moment he took a look under the hood, he became speechless.
"Wrench, what in Sol's name am I looking at?" He called Wrench back, who was almost returning to his work.
Wrench leaned back, glancing over what Adam was pointing at, and shrugging:
"That's a BCB."
"I know it's a PCB," Adam retorted sharply. "Why the fuck does it look like that?"
"Like what?" Wrench furrowed his brows and looked closer. "Looks right to me."
"It has, like, what? Six layers? And why is it printed in pretty patterns and useless shapes?" Adam asked, almost shouting as he raised the printed circuit board for Wrench to see.
This wasn't one of his own; it was a circuit board that was completely summoned with the Wartopians. In a broader context, most of the summoned machines were made by Adam's hand, with him repurposing or printing circuit boards for them. This one, however, came from the supplies of a medic puppet, something even Adam didn't have in mind while doing the summoning.
Since the Bio-Scanner was its own computer, it had its own motherboard and data core, which is the Solarium's version of System on Chip—basically a CPU, GPU, and RAM all in one package. That would usually require a small circuit board, since all the important parts are already connected, but this wasn't the case here.
The PCB of the bio scanner was as thick as life and etched in the most bizarre way Adam ever saw, all made up of symmetrical shapes, hexagons, circles, and pretty lines that made no sense, with the data core installed in the center.
This was clearly not ideal at all, since a real PCB would care about heat dissipation, size constraints, signal interference, cost efficiency, and all the random physical imperfections a designer must navigate through.
But this pretty magic-circle-like drawing was the epitome of inefficiency, something that felt like scraping metal against a sandy floor to someone as technical as Adam.
"Well…" Wrench squinted, seeing the board Adam was showing him, before saying something that shocked Adam profoundly. "… all Blessed Circuit Boards look like that. Ah, I know this design; a friend of mine in the Cult of Sol would always call this the Flower of Life."
"The what of what?" Adam blinked rapidly, trying to keep up with the madness. "Blessed Circuit Boards, you said? Not Printed?"
"Yes…" Wrench looked at Adam weirdly for a second before saying, "I know you make great working boards, Commander. But this here is the finest work of our Script Monks. Nobody can etch such designs like them, eh? The ones you make are small and thin, but it's okay; size is not everything. I'm sure you'll learn how to make them big one day."
Adam listened to Wrench, resisting the urge to faint from a stroke, before raising his fist and pointing at the Lunar engineers.
"Do you want me to cave your teeth in?" Adam felt like his sanity was slipping, looking between the shocked Wrench and these so-called Blessed Circuit Boards. "How the fuck does this monstrosity even work?"
Wrench almost fainted from shock as well, not believing what he was hearing from Adam.
"Sir, this is plain heresy!" He said, looking around as if an inquisitor would pop out of the shadows. "Blessed Boards like this one are what appease the Sacred Code and ward it from malicious codes and daemons."
"You've got to be kidding me!"
Unable to wrap his head around the matter, Adam took the device and showed the circuit board to others. The Earthlings were almost as shocked as him, but the Wartopians, who were adept technicians, such as Sergeant Elena, Sergeant Wright, and Captain Creed, all repeated what Wrench said, and in Creed's words:
"This is Sacred Geometry, essential to the sanctity of the Sacred Code. Only the Monks and Nuns of the Scriptorium etch these Blessed Boards. It is their specialty."
Adam would consider himself a Wartopian lore master, and most summoning was done according to his knowledge of the lore. But for the first time, something was happening outside his scope of knowledge.
He was well aware that the Solarium technology was a mixed mess of religion and programming, with many technological aspects tied closely to theology. Anything that would affect the operation of the Sacred Code would always be monopolized and managed by the religious authority of the Solarium, the Scriptorium. The lore was very explicit about the technological state of the institution, describing it as a constant cycle of revival and decay, with technologies discovered, misunderstood, and lost every day, leaving gaps for occult and faith to fill, and programming having turned into a full esoteric art practiced by Script Monks and Nuns.
On paper, it was an entertaining fiction; in reality, Adam was losing his grip on sanity just by studying how this machine worked with a circuit board that looked like that.
This wasn't some Jotnar Sorcery; it was science that he was supposed to understand, and to get a perspective on this mess, he needed more of the messy minds that created it: he needed those damned Script Monks.
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