Chapter 308: Changes in the Main Base - II

Hans walked back to the Command Center alone.

A vehicle would have gotten him there in two minutes, but the walk gave him time to practice not breaking anything, which he was still getting used to.

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[ Commander Rank Advancement Complete ]

[ Current Rank ]

[ Rank 5 - Regiment Commander ]

[ Current Synchronization ]

[ Tier 1 - 30% → 90% ]

[ Primary Synchronization Axes ]

[ Somatic ]

[ Cognitive ]

[ Perceptual ]

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Thirty percent to ninety in a single promotion.

The last time, the System had needed a whole panel to list what changed in his body, down to his reload speed.

This time, it didn’t lead with any of that.

The old percentages were still in his profile, one layer down, with whatever this promotion added stacked on top of them. He never opened that layer anymore.

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[ Elemental Axis ]

[ Pressure / Kinetic Resonance ]

[ Current Manifestation ]

Short-range pressure impulses

Kinetic reinforcement

Impact damping

Limited force redirection

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At Rank 4, the elemental resonance did what it wanted, and he spent most of his effort keeping it from going off at the wrong time.

And now, it would behave as how he wanted it to.

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[ Commander Personal Equipment Updated ]

[ Commander Equipment ]

Regimental Command Suit

Sealed adaptive armor

Hardened System communications

Integrated sensors and medical monitoring

Command-data integration

[ Personal Storage ]

64 cubic meters

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The suit sat in his storage. He wore it once, the morning after the promotion, and took it off an hour later because the command data it fed him made walking to breakfast feel like running a battle.

It was built for the field, not for walking around the base.

The rifle and pistol were still there too. The System didn’t take them away, but it didn’t upgrade them either. At this point, they were the least dangerous things he carried.

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[ Commander Medical Support Pack Updated ]

First Aid Kits: 6

Suppressant Injections: 6

Maximum Infection Threshold: 90%

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[ Regiment Command Framework Activated ]

[ Delegated Production Authority ]

[ Global Strategy Doctrine ]

[ Strategic Target Registry ]

[ Standing Air Allocation ]

[ Exception-First Command ]

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Rank 4 had taken the thousands of names off his screen and given him Companies and Battalions instead.

At Rank 5, it took the Battalions off, too. The overview now opened with regions, commands and whatever needed his attention, and only showed him formations when he went looking for them.

He didn’t miss the counts. They had filled his screen with far more than he ever needed to see at once.

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[ New Primary Structure Available ]

[ Heavy Manufacturing Complex modifier applied. ]

Strategy Center - 200,000 Gold (-10%) => 180,000 Gold, 950 EU

[ New Naval Unit Available ]

[ Heavy Manufacturing Complex modifier applied. ]

Monarch Fleet Carrier - 300,000 Gold (-10%) => 270,000 Gold

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The Monarch changed what his navy could do. Two were already out in the waters, and Conrad was about to have aircraft wherever his ships went.

The carriers came empty, though. Every aircraft on their decks would still have to come out of an Airfield first.

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[ Unique Commander Asset Unlocked ]

Strategic Airborne Command Post

[ Classification ]

Unique Commander Asset

[ Role ]

Airborne Regimental Headquarters

[ Note ]

Non-reproducible. Currently not deployed. Requires three fixed-wing slots in any Airfield Base.

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The Transport Plane from Rank 4 still sat in the same list, also not deployed.

He had never found a reason to fly it anywhere, and now the System had handed him a second aircraft before he had used the first.

The new aircraft wasn’t the same, though.

The Transport Plane was built to move him and a few people quickly.

The Airborne Command Post was built to carry a whole headquarters staff, so he could run a Regiment from the air instead of coming back to the Command Center every time the map changed.

Three Airfield slots for one aircraft—whatever was inside it, it wasn’t small.

He would find out the rest when he deployed it, the same way he found out about everything else.

The promotion to Rank 5 had changed his body more than any before it.

The first day was the worst.

He shattered a mug by picking it up, then bent a door handle trying to be careful about the mug.

Dianne replaced both without saying a word. By now, it was mostly under control, but everything else was harder to ignore.

He could hear the generators at the edge of the base if he let himself listen.

He could tell which Barracks was running a training cycle from the rhythm of the footsteps inside it, and he didn’t need to look at the Radar to know how many vehicles were moving along the main road at any given moment.

He stopped listening and kept walking.

At the edge of the base, past the last row of structures, the old warehouse still sat in the middle of its cordon. Engineers had already marked the ground around it for demolition.

Hans didn’t look at it for long.

...

The Command Center was busy when he came in. Dianne already had the production picture waiting for him on the main table.

Construction Yards sat across the map, at Main Base, in Grefort, in Saicine, at Silverpeak and at the junction.

With his promotion to Rank 5, Hans didn’t have to approve every single order himself anymore. The System let him hand production off to officers he authorized, as long as he set the limits.

However, he would need the Strategy Center for that. He opened the construction panel and went straight to the top.

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[ Strategy Center ]

[ Construction Queued ]

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After the construction queue for the Strategy Center started, Hans went through the rest quickly.

The Strategy Center needed a lot of power. His grid could handle it for now, but having more never hurt.

He queued three more Power Plants on the construction queue, then moved to the next.

Brandon kept asking for more production at Silverpeak, so Hans tried handing him his own production budget.

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[ Delegated Production Authority ]

[ Target: Battalion Commander Joseph Brandon ]

[ Status: Pending ]

[ Requires: Operational Strategy Center ]

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Hans looked at the requirement, then at the construction queue where the Strategy Center sat at the top.

It was a little over nine days.

"Brandon’s going to have to wait then," he said.

Until then, Hans approved Brandon’s requests the old way. Other requests followed, and most of them he approved without reading past the first line.

The Construction Yards would handle the rest.

When he finished, he pulled the map north.

The Pylow valleys were clear now, and a small Northern Command detachment held the forward position.

"I should give Marianne and the rest their own production authorities too."

Approving every unit request himself was already too much, and it would only get worse as the map grew.

Farther northeast, past the snow, the map ended short of the border, even with the upgraded Radar.

That wouldn’t last. Once a base went up near Pylow, its Radar would reach past the border into Danubia.

...

Back at Tech Center #2, Kordula didn’t take Hans’s advice.

She went to her local Secure Intake instead.

The screening lanes were busier than when she left. The Pylow cases were already moving through them in a fixed order, the same way everything else did, scanned, tagged, logged and routed.

The labels on the racks now read PCL-2, PCL-3 and PCL-4.

Marcus was not there, presumably busy in Tech Center #1.

Kordula sat down at one of the spare terminals. It recognized her faster than the one in the other building had.

The first case slid into the last screening cell at the end of the lane. A moment later, a new line appeared at the top of the source index.

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[ Secure Intake — New Source ]

[ Pylow Cryogenic Laboratories: PCL-2 / PCL-3 / PCL-4 ]

[ Processing... ]

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Kordula leaned back in the chair and watched the number of processed files begin to climb.