The scene from the holo table made all the onlookers fall silent as they realized the same thing Adam did.
This wasn't just the Iron Maiden testing a soldier; it was a harsh indoctrination for one who is supposed to be a trooper, and another who is supposed to be a leader.
Adam could have pulled the plug and left some time ago, but his tenacity demonstrated much to the Wartopians who were watching him, and as worried as she was, Megan couldn't simply stop it on her own.
The two friends she held dearest were now evolving and showing their mettle, capable and powerful each in his own way, and as if the Iron Maiden knew what suited them both best, it kept challenging them in all sorts of ways.
Kave's Simulation was a wild ride of rage, running, and survival. The Dragon spared no effort hunting down the human, ravaging every part of the simulation it could, and Kave wasn't just getting one item per round; he was getting all three of them, now walking around with an upgraded Blazer gun that could punch new trenches with its Terrain Manipulator attachment if needed.
On his belt, he had a few Stimshots and Blazer cells; his combat gear was upgraded, including combat goggles that could ping nearby enemies, a scout drone, and jet boots that would propel him like a rocket into melee fights. Kave was driven by the sheer will to survive and the advantage of his petite size, fitting into places he shouldn't, and springing up like a mole with an automatic gun, mowing down Satanists like a scythe on grass.
As for Adam, it had been a while since he started going back and forth between the trenches, boosting morale with fiery speeches, and executing all cowardly deserters.
He mixed his leadership with a style of both hope and fear, his presence becoming a weight of its own, causing both fervor and discipline.
Even with his execution, the Men-at-Arms would start firing their Blazers almost twice as fast, doubling their effectiveness, making each account for two.
Not long after, the third orbital drop descended, and Adam was fighting on no-man's land, jumping from cover to cover, and evading sniper fire like an expert. His head was so in the game that he even fought and won multiple fights against Satanists just by himself, one of which was a 3v1, where he adopted a new style, wielding a melee weapon in one hand and a gun in the other.
The third drop was an upgrade pack for the Men-at-Arms, increasing their speed by 10%. At first, Adam didn't think much of it, except when he saw his forces starting to stack up, with each wave arriving long before the new enemy wave arrived and assisting the preceding one in taking out the Satanist horde.
The fourth drop was one Adam fought bitterly for and almost lost, as it was stuck between two destroyed tanks. Sniper fire deprived the two teams of acquiring it, which forced him to get more creative and order his men to dig a tunnel beneath the tank and reach for it. After dragging the small crate back to base, it unfolded into a stationary bombard. To operate it, Adam had to allocate some of his troops to its operation, which would come at the cost of his troop spawn number.
Allocating one soldier to operate it would drop the regular spawn from 10 to 9 per wave, but the bombard would be ready every 5 minutes. Having two troopers would reduce the cooldown to 2.5 minutes, but to reduce it to 1.25 minutes, it would need four troopers. But to achieve two rounds per minute, it would require the full squad to be allocated to its firing, completely crippling the trench operation.
Adam had to make a choice, and the best one now was to assign two troopers to bombardment, bringing the efficiency of his frontal assault to a standstill, hoping for one final bombardment in the right place to end the fight once and for all. Suffice it to say, it wasn't as simple as he would have hoped.
He wasn't the only one getting creative, as the Simulation's Sacred Code was also trying to use his tactic from a while earlier, digging a tunnel to bypass the defenses on the northern trench and hit it from behind through a tiny tunnel dug under a foxhole.
It was a tad too late for Adam to notice that his first defense point had been hit, and by the time he tried to reinforce it, another orbital drop arrived near the southern trench, requiring him to be in two places at once. He couldn't abandon a critical defense point for a supply drop, but he could issue an order to stall the enemy as much as possible.
After that, it turned into a scene of a bitter fight where the Satanists seemed to have decided to overwhelm the Northern trench with sheer numbers now that they had made progress, and Adam didn't want to lessen his aggression. The Satanists were crazed enough to pile their own bodies in front of Blazer fire to crawl over them and get to the defenders, and the scary part was that they were making progress; some even showed signs of demonic possession as they had no regard for their lives.
This sort of situation isn't possible unless… Adam couldn't help but let the realization sink in.
"A Demon!" He spoke, gnashing his teeth.
He wasn't alone! Now he realized. He wasn't the only leader on this battlefield; he had a rival, one that could drive its followers into a blood frenzy and had been working against him all this time.
Judging by the theme of battle, the way the Satanists went berserk, and how they let go of their survival instincts, Adam could easily narrow it to a handful of lesser demons that act as commanders. But if it were one who liked to act behind the scenes and revel in Chaos, there was only one type of demon that did that.
"Aeshma!"
He didn't need to look too far around the battlefield; an Aeshma demon loved to hide in their raging mobs, to be part of the crowd, and at the center of mayhem. Adam didn't look with his eyes because he knew he wouldn't catch such a demon by vision alone; normal humans can't.
So for that to be possible, Adam had to resort to his lore knowledge, and the best manual of demon hunting in Wartopia's universe was attributed to one of his personal favorite characters, Judge Titania, who—while a total flamboyant drama queen from a classy noble family—was said to be more accomplished than any Inquisitorium Exorcist at hunting down demons by her Journey across the Galaxy as a Judicial Envoy of the Tribunarium, even sealing them in little battery-like devices to power up her Gravhog, a small hovercraft that takes the shape of an oversized bike, with the most absurd high handlebar ever drawn in comics.
Either way, the methods she developed may have been material for memes for the Wartopia community, but Adam read her lore books religiously and knew that the best way to expose a demon is to do what she calls Blast Fishing.
For that, he needed all the Blazer Cells he could get his hands on, and there were a good number of them lying around, especially with how fast his soldiers were dying and being replenished.
For that, he simply grabbed a cell from each soldier he could reach and overcharged it. The red gel inside the power cell started to glow as it was launched in a perfect arch towards the center of the Satanist horde, hitting one on its bald, branded head, before tumbling down between the crowd and… BOOM!
The first blast blew apart no fewer than seven Satanists straight to pieces, but there were many bodies that absorbed the impact, and those who were injured still stood or leaned on others to keep advancing. However, Adam was now ordering his troops to detonate their blazer cells as well.
One after the other, the soldiers were sacrificing their ammunition for a burst of firepower that was surely capable of inflicting serious damage on the Satanists, but at the expense of their own survival, as detonating Blazer cells would usually be the last resort a trooper should employ, as it reduces their total maximum ammunition capacity. Without ammunition, the last resort would be a bayonet charge, and never in the Solarium's lore did that have any good ending.
As for Adam's tactic, he was relying on brutal sacrifice, gritting his teeth as he calculated enemy movement patterns, trying to find the spot where their defense was most focused. Trying to think like a demon, a nasty being that relishes manipulation and violence. Adam hunted for the area where the cultists were least affected by bloodlust and madness, and the moment he spotted it, he focused his blasts in that direction until he felt the power of his opponent waning, and it finally fell back.
"Hunt the lowly demon!" Adam shouted at the top of his lungs, swinging his saw blade with his right hand and blasting the head of a Satanist that got too close with his blazer in his left, "Make Sol Imperius proud, my gallant men! The time of noble deeds is upon us!"
It wasn't the end as Adam took the lead and jumped into the fray first; his passion in the fight inspired the lifeless puppets around him to throw themselves into the fray. In the heart of the enemy formation, Adam noticed how the Satanists clustered into a defensive blockade, and he was sure that what was hiding behind them was the true presence of the demon.
Demons were indeed powerful in their own right, and in the early years of fighting the Solarium, they would cause great casualties just by stepping onto the battlefield, but that changed for one crucial reason, and it was the same reason Adam was stepping towards the possible location of a demon without backing down.
He threw more Blazer cells that consumed the lines of Satanists with red explosions, and he grinned as a humanoid the size of a Goliath stepped up from their midst.
It was huge, burly even, and had two mean-looking horns in front of its animal-skull-masked face. Around him were two hounds of similar bone-heads, and the three demonic bodies all belonged to the same being as far as Adam knew.
Adam aimed his Blazer, and like him, the other troopers focused on the Demon.
With a screeching voice, the demon gazed with its disturbing red eyes, which appeared from all three heads, then started screaming:
"Lowly mortals! Your souls will be dragged down to the Nine Hells, and I will feast on them!"
"Soulless demon scum, shitstain of Satan, dung-munching sons of Lilith, the whore." Adam replied sharply, locking eyes with the demon's central body, "Yeah, bitch. I do demon racism."
"Gaaah! I will stuff your body with thorns for organs after I feed you the molten fruits of Gehenna."
"Then eat my beam, you son of a bitch!"
Blazer-arms were one of the few things that could actually harm a demon, as Adam proudly aimed his pistol at the demon in front of him, and the demon charged. Ballistics would pass through demons without a problem. Energy weapons like Blazer and Plasma possessed such aptitude, and only with the influx of demons did Blazer-arms overcome normal ballistics in the lore of the Solarium.
Plasma weapons were an insta-kill against demons; Blazers were the watered-down version, but of course, they weren't enough to stop the entirety of the Infernium. Maybe just to give humans a fighting chance.
Adam's squads started firing bolts and beams from their Blazers, blasting and cutting the enemies with extreme prejudice, all having forgotten about the Orbital Drop on the other side of the battlefield.
Adam was the most immersed in the battlefield as he dodged the axe of a Satanist, returning a kick to an awkward leg, causing the Satanist to fall to his knees before the bayonets claimed his life from seven different positions.
≪ You have gained a New Skill! (Blade) ≫
Adam then hacked the arm of another Satanist who tried to jump him and shot another charging Satanist right in the face, before displaying a vicious grin at the demon that was being overwhelmed by Blazer bolts from all directions.
As it retreated with its three bodies, the Aeshma roared at the sky and started flinging bodies at the Troopers, trying to suppress their firepower for enough time to make a safe retreat or to flip the situation, but as Adam looked around, he noticed that the Aeshma's two other bodies were converging and trying to attack him personally. However, he was surrounded by his troopers well enough that he wouldn't be caught easily.
His grin widened, and he locked eyes with the demons, raising his Blazer and going for the kill, only to find that the Aeshma was no longer resisting but rather stood tall and exuded a sinister air.
By the next second, Adam could see a Sin Eater tank charging madly from no-man's-land, throwing itself at him with an unstoppable momentum, its stumpy barrel radiating hellfire.