Entry 15
The day is February 27th, Year 1 Post the Apocalypse, and yeah, no sleep in 4 days.
My name is Adam Clay, and I am officially a junkie.
If you ask me what was in that shot, I couldn't tell you. You'll have to blame Biscuits since she's the one who cooked it. I know it had adrenaline, expired caffeine, and a whole lot of good stuff.
Right now I'm running on body fat, amino acids, spite, and I'm pretty sure there's death metal in the background (we had no music players since D-Day btw).
I figure I've got maybe twenty minutes before the whole thing comes crashing down. The medics warned that after staying awake this long, the crash could be ugly—cardiac arrest wasn't off the table if I pushed myself too hard. Thankfully, I wasn't sprinting through a trench when the timer ran out.
Biscuits and Megan are staying with me, just in case my heart decides to file for early retirement.
Now to the good stuff.
The Harbinger Gunship took off; humanity reached the sky once again, eight months into the apocalypse, but we didn't make it too high, only because we lacked any emergency gear.
To describe the flight, it was bumpy as fuck! They always said not to meet your heroes; turns out it wasn't wrong in the slightest. Strapping our hands to utility cords as the Harbinger took off 120 feet in the air was not fun… AT ALL.
So, we flew that thing into the Rift, and I messaged the team through the LEASH to get things ready.
Yes, you read that right. We have messaging now.
We completed the Sacred Code mission by constructing 10 Scanner Beacons and got the diagrams. They were delivered to Team Ajax along with the supplies, and we had a blast messaging last night; even some Wartopians joined in the fun, much to the dismay of the Script Monks.
As we entered the Rift, navigating the terrain was a breeze. The Rift World had no stable ground and was difficult to traverse, so ground vehicles were not ideal.
As we reached the extraction site, the Harbinger hovered over the submarine, and four power cords were extended down from its winches. The work crew inside the submarine was already halfway through cutting its hull apart, and parts were already dropping as if peeling a banana.
Once it was over, Captain Creed executed the Wolf King, who was kept alive for three days under the menacing, watchful eyes of the Paladin. When that was over, the Seed of Light was extracted, and the forces retreated outside the base.
On our way out, the Rift started collapsing the moment Captain Creed walked out with the Seed of Light; thankfully, no man was left behind, and the Rift disappeared soon after.
As of that moment, we had two main objectives for the battle against the Jotnar:
Summon the Second Paladin. Get the Soviet Nukes ready to cut off the Freeze.
Objective 1 may actually kill me in my current state, so after a night's sleep and hopefully not going into a coma thanks to that stimulant that is still keeping me active, I will do the summoning.
As for Objective 2, well, it was a full project on its own.
Project Red Nukes
One useful thing that buzzkill of an alien told us was that the Jotnar Freeze was some sort of force that traveled with the Jotnar beings. In a way, they carried it around, forming networks they use to bring the Freeze forward.
If you ask me, this was the one thing that set off alarm bells in my head. Why? The answer was clear: Logistics.
There was one difficulty related to the Jotnar in terms of warfare: scouting. How do you deal with their invasion if you can't know what mobilizes them?
It was easy to take the laziest answer that they are incomprehensible and don't follow common logic, but to mobilize a herd of people this big, you'd need to feed them or at least sustain them with something.
The fact that their entire logistics happen inside the Freeze means we must find what is channeling it, and the answer, according to Kahori, was "Winter."
So this turned out like that series: Winter is coming… or, in this case, has come, and it will keep coming year after year. And since it is a season, you can't expect little old me to put a halt to Winter.
But here's the other thing: we managed to find a trace of the Freeze once we extended our scanners' range through a technology upgrade. Well, we weren't exactly detecting the Freeze, but we found that our scans went dark at some points, so we assumed it was the Freeze.
The entire city of Omen north of Brighthaven was overtaken by it, so I assumed that the Rift that spawned the Jotnar was over there. But after deploying the Stingray Drones that we had, things proved rather wild.
The range of the drone was 100 miles from base, and that didn't even reach the other end of the Freeze. We could send drones southwest and find where it ended, right at the Heart of Brighthaven, but that was where the True Jotnar was sighted.
In other words, the Freeze needed the Jotnar to move it, and it is almost like a link, with Jotnar beings acting as nodes.
In a way, that was interesting.
We had in our arsenal the best thing that could deal with the Freeze: the Holy Furnace, but in the Dire Wolf Rift, we had just found the Soviet Submarine and were disassembling it for its nuclear payload.
And the question is: Can Nuclear Weapons replicate the Anti-Freeze effect of the Holy Furnace?
Looking at what we had in that submarine, our resident US Staff Sergeant and Military Nerd, Ajax Wills, confirmed the missiles to be of the Russian P-70 Ametist type, also known as SS-N-7 Starbright by NATO. The bad news was that they were anti-ship missiles; the good news was that since they had nuclear warheads, their area of effect was massive.
Our Script Monks can easily alter the targeting systems of the missiles as long as they don't have dead chickens inside, but what remained was to determine how strong these missiles were.
Since we didn't have any Russian speakers on base, we couldn't really read any of the documents in the submarine, but with just Ajax's word of mouth, one missile would at least cause a 200-kiloton detonation. Again, I have no reference other than the nuke the US of A dropped on Japan during WW2 was 15 kilotons, which would make the ones in the submarine 13 times stronger.
Now, I wouldn't start counting my chickens before they hatch since nukes don't scale like that, or so Professor Hendrick said, but the best news we had on that subject was the power of the nuclear explosion. According to our nerds, the center of the fireball would reach tens of millions of degrees Celsius for a very brief instant—comparable to the interior of the Sun. This extreme temperature exists only in a relatively small region and lasts for a fraction of a second, but one can imagine where this is going.
If the holy effect of the Holy Furnace is supposedly sourced from the sun, a nuke would be one big sun flash that may (hopefully) disintegrate the Freeze and cut the Jotnar's supply of it.
But that had its own problems, and boy, there were a ton of them.
First, and actually the easiest, was transportation. Second was making sure the Freeze didn't disable the nukes. Third was finding out what we were actually nuking.
As for the best and fastest method of transporting and deploying the nuke, that was a no-brainer since we already had the Star Hangar, and we built a Harbinger Gunship, and if there is anything that can carry a submarine's missile bay and fly around with it, it is a Harbinger Gunship.
"So, what is the Harbinger Gunship?" one may ask, and the answer is peak fucking satisfaction.
It was the reason why I had to leave the Rift World and go back to base.
The Harbinger was not just a gunship or an orbital drop starcraft; it was a gunship x drop ship x bomber x capable fighter craft. If there is anything considered a complete Beast of War on the Solarium, it is the Harbinger, darling of the Armada Bellarium.
The creators of Wartopia designed it as a blocky, large-sized starcraft from the highly-customizable Corvette family, though its Bellarium version was always boxy and ugly since its real-world inspiration was big utilitarian aircraft like Lockheed AC-130 and the Boeing CH-47 Chinook.
Lucky for me, there were many resources hanging around the War Factory which I easily diverted to the Star Hangar, including already assembled ground vehicle frames that were immediately repurposed for the Harbinger.
The best part was that an error was made and we had an extra Battlemaster Tank cannon turret, since I was thinking of requisitioning three tanks, but as I canceled one tank, one turret was already made, and you know what… BAM! Slap that above the Harbinger.
Is it a StarCraft? Is it a Tank? SIKE! It's a Harbinger.
That's how customizable the Corvette class was. We can go too cheap and turn it into a Shuttle Ship; in Wartopia terms, that's a space pickup truck. Or, we can go crazy and slap the fanciest, state-of-the-art modifications and slap a sleek body on top of it and call it the Pegasus Starcraft, the fanciest ride in the galaxy reserved only for the rich and powerful.
We began manufacturing the ship two days ago, just as I got back to base with almost all manpower diverted to it, but speaking about it was one thing, and building it was a whole different thing. Still, it took 63 hours from start to finish, and we made only what we needed.
Every Corvette-class starcraft was composed of five essentials: the hull that holds everything together, the reactor that gives power, the vertical thrusters which double as landing gear, the back and side thrusters used for accelerating and steering, and finally the cockpit that controls everything. Anything else was an optional accessory, including additional thrusters, reactors, utility gear, outer void life support, solar sails, and even weapon systems.
After we took it to the Rift and hauled some nukes back to Mother Earth, we started another agonizing operation of refitting the launch pods and the missiles at the center of the hull, removing any additional weight, and took the blazer systems of the Warwolf down to fit them on its sides.
Meanwhile, the Command Center started looking for the Rift that spawned the True Jotnar, and since we didn't know how far that was, we're making preparations to drive into the Rift with the Harbinger and play nuclear football on the other side.
But as mentioned earlier, this wouldn't work without Project RuneTech and Operation Torchlight.
Project RuneTech
Where do I begin?
So far, we have made big strides in detecting Runes using medical scanners on Proto-Jotnar bodies.
We also know that runes manifest in Cyberspace as 3D shapes and can exist in nature within certain structures.
With the Alfari seeking out Gemstones, the hint we got was Crystalline Lattice, but that was operating on a microscopic scale, and we didn't have the luxury to pick every gemstone and examine them, so we needed to find our own way.
There was another hint that I personally got from Lord Kaimu, and that was how he pushed my Bending Rune from the Gobzkin Club into the Alfari Bracer I now use.
So, in principle, you would need certain energy (my money on Mental) to push a rune from one object to another, so that you can utilize it in any way you see fit.
But why do I need that for the Nuking operation? The answer is two reasons, one of which is optional, but if they could be achieved, then boy oh boy!
The first rune I was thinking about was the Force Rune that channels energy and how it could be used to channel the energy of the Holy Furnace away from the Holy Furnace itself. If we can have our mobile Holy Flame without a Holy Furnace building, then the Freeze would be a much easier problem to handle. The second rune on my mind was the Essence Rune; this is one of the newer major runes we've found out about, and it is the Rune of Change and Transformation, specifically when it comes to energy. When I used that rune from a Neander hip bone (gross, I know), it managed to make fire crackle with sparks slightly as I was intending to transform fire into lightning. So the question came to me: what if we used a Rune mid-blast to turn a Nuclear Fireball into Holy Flames?
That last reason almost got me baptized into Solar Dogma by Brother Solbjorn when I pitched the suggestions to the Monks, but one must admit that it would be a huge undertaking. Only focusing on a way to make a mobile Holy Flame was already the most difficult project to date, as I both had to do it and it was crucial to prevent the Freeze from disabling the Harbinger Gunship and the Nukes.
Turns out it was super easy, barely an inconvenience!
I just had to jump into the Holy Furnace myself and craft a Convergence Cube from Solymer and Runes.
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