Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume15 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 9===

Even when they knew it was the best course of action, abandoning cover and running out into an open area was not good for their hearts. Do not break any branches, do not step in the mud, do not cast a long shadow, do not press up against doors or walls, do not shine your light on mirrors or windows – there was a lot of “etiquette” to something as simple as walking, but actual war did not always allow you to follow the textbook for all of those little things.

The situation was awful.

“Run, Myonri! No one can complain if they’re shot in the back now!!”

“But Jonathan was-…”

“Just run!!”

Trying to rescue someone in this open space would only get them shot too. And this soldier had been shot on his center line such that it probably shattered his spine, so there was nothing they could do. They could only clench their teeth and shake free of their regret.

They ran across the runway-like six-lane road and entered the subway station building on the opposite side. Only after diving behind the closest wall did Heivia take in a large gulp of air.

“Pant, pant! Goddamn them. Did they at least shoot Wraith!?”

“You will be sad to hear I am alive and kicking.”

“Oh, hell. Well that proves that it’s the good people who die first…”

Near the entrance, there was a vending machine from a major online store that was forcing its way into the market, so Heivia blew away its earthquake-resistant bolts with his rifle and knocked it over as a barricade as he seriously spat out those words.

But now it was time for the rioting Faith Organization soldiers to suffer. If they simply pursued, they would have to cross the same road that had exposed Heivia’s group to such danger.

“If they really have cut their mental limiters, they’ll push their way through even if we fire 5.56mm rounds at a rate of 700 a minute. Modern warfare is all about smart tactics, but there’s nothing we can do if a large army is willing to step on their comrades’ corpses and cross a river of blood. I’m sure you know why the directional landmines that scatter small metal balls in a fan shape were developed.”

“Yes, I am aware,” said Wraith. “Keep an eye on the subway tunnels and emergency exits. The drones are not enough to fully grasp the distribution of these aggressively generic enemy soldiers.”

“Th-this is an artificial island floating in the ocean, isn’t it…?” asked Myonri.

“And? Just like with a ship, the lower the center of gravity the better. In marine construction, child-bearing hips and a large ass are more highly valued than giant tits, so they would have wanted the island to be a little thicker for the added weight.”

Wraith snapped her fingers and the young man next to her provided the Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers with a few items the size of baseballs. They were more of the serverless remote grenades.

“Use them more as ‘eyes’ than explosives since a frag grenade can’t pierce that shield of flesh. They can also be used to flood the underground area in case that large army tries to push in from below.”

“That kind of trick isn’t my area of expertise. Hey, someone put together a unit of combat engineers. You help too, Quen-…”

Heivia stopped mid-sentence and clicked his tongue.

He scratched his head in an awkward silence.

“…Never mind. Myonri, you’re skilled with your hands, right? Would you rather stand out front in the path of that hail of bullets, or move to the back and set things up there? Select 10 people you can use and seal off all the entrances. Hurry! This enemy isn’t kind enough to wait until the transformation scene is over!!”

A muffled explosion rang out outside and the shockwave shattered a few of the windows bordering the main road.

Jonathan had been unable to get up as the Faith Organization soldiers had approached to secure their prisoner, so he had mustered his last ounce of strength to pull the pin on a grenade.

Heivia clicked his tongue.

“Damn, it’s already started!!”

“Prepared or not, we have to respond.”

Heivia hid behind the collapsed vending machine and Wraith hid behind a bookstore cart that carried a stack of unsold magazines taller than she was. Both of them aimed their weapons outside.

The explosion seemed to have pushed their excitement over a line. With the roar of a battle scene in a knight movie, Faith Organization soldiers flooded the large street that panoramically filled their vision.

There were people, people, people, and more people.

The thick wall pushed in with such force that it was easy to forget that each gunshot fired toward it was taking a human life. Dark red blood and flesh flew, the soldiers on the front line collapsed, and countless boots trampled their allies’ bodies before they had even stopped breathing.

This was different again from the nightmarish mission led by Piranirie Martini Smoky. Instead of being threatened into it, these people were charging in of their own free will.

“This is just the worst!!!!!!” said Heivia.

“It really is a vision of hell,” agreed Wraith. “I feel silly reminding you of something so basic, but coordinate your magazine changes so the barrage never stops. If the density of bullets thins out, they’ll push in all at once.”

She hatefully spat out the words, but her movements were accurate as could be.

And while calmly firing on the soldiers running out into the road like a sensor-controlled machine, Wraith said something without looking over at Heivia.

“…I’m sorry.”

“Is that supposed to be foreshadowing an emotional sacrificial charge or something? If not, then shut your mouth, crazy girl, because your words are meaningless to me. Your sentimentality is as ridiculous as blood-type fortunetelling, so don’t think it takes away my right to hold a grudge!!”

Static reached Heivia’s ears.

Then a voice came over the radio.

“They’ve put together a unit aside from the one crossing the road. They’re circling around to reach the station from the west entrance while you’re focused on the main group!”

“Are you kidding me…!?”

“It’s hardly surprising when they have so many people to work with,” said Wraith. “And lowering the metal shutters isn’t going to stop them at this point. Yes, don’t randomly spread out your forces. No matter what kind of clichéd new truths come to light, the station will still be filled with blood if they break through the front.”

“Then what are we supposed to do!? They’re coming from behind. Are we supposed to just sit here and keep fighting until they shoot us in the ass!?”

“Were you not listening? I said not to ''randomly'' spread out your forces.”

Wraith emphasized the one word while waving a 5-inch monitor in the hand not holding her gun. It was her beloved smartphone.

“Those snake robots can find filming spots without the map data of a server, so I’ve been observing the battlefield from 32 directions to accurately analyze the enemy’s small idiosyncrasies using the high-speed cameras. That’s 10,000 frames a second. And thanks to their battle of attrition using such great numbers, I’ve gathered an incredible amount of data in a very short time. Charge, retreat, diversion, coordination – the big data is boiling in the magic pot. And it’s about time to take a look at the whole.”

“…Is that really going to make a dramatic difference?”

“This is the Information Alliance style and it works for any kind of group sports. That said, the data is useless without enough people to work with. A single director can’t do everything on her own even with the optimal answer in hand. So will you obey me and live, or defy me and die? The choice is yours, my dear sworn enemy.”

Heivia hatefully clicked his tongue and forced out some words while creating a pile of corpses from the Faith Organization troops outside.

“…You can do as many good deeds as you want now. It won’t change a thing.”

“That’s fine. I never said I didn’t want to die. I just said I don’t want to die here.”

They had a plan.

The black-uniformed girl took the overall command role.

“Frank, fire more of those grenades into the air. Five should do it for now. Send them between the troops in the road and those preparing to enter the road to crush and separate them with the blasts.”

“Understood.”

“Once those in the road can neither advance nor withdraw, mow them down with your assault rifles. It’s the same as keeping water pipes clean: the charge can continue because of the constant ‘flow’, but once it stops, the fear of death will come rushing back. The slightest stop is all we need.”

“Are you serious?” complained Heivia. “I thought psychology was as much a superstition as tarot readings.”

“Since you have yet to evolve beyond an ape, I will respectfully answer you. It is human nature to be distracted by detours when the way ahead is blocked. Their secondary candidate is the western entrance. Once the pressure here has been reduced, send out three groups with shoulder-fired missiles. Their secondary unit is a minority, so if we blow up their front line right away, we can stop their momentum.”

The difference in overall numbers was 50 against 500 or even more.

When outnumbered by more than four to one, they should have been overwhelmed regardless of each individual’s strength.

However.

To put it another way…

“We don’t have to look at the overall numbers. We only need to recalculate the localized human density,” proclaimed Wraith while looking down at the smartphone screen inserted into the H-shaped gamepad. “Sports data analysis thoroughly analyzes the idiosyncrasies of the players. Once you have detailed information on how individuals and teams handle offense, you know where to focus your defense. That allows you to reveal everything about the situation. It’s the same in soccer, basketball, baseball, and hockey. This is a simple matter of applying that to war instead.”

Even if the overall difference in Olympia Dome was 50 against 500, that did not necessarily apply to the numbers that clashed at any one time. By judging the timing, using the terrain, and firing bullets and bombs to divide the enemy into groups of ten or fewer, the Legitimacy Kingdom would have the advantage of superior numbers against those individual groups.

Of course, they would never pull that off if they simply fought at random. Shouting that they would overcome the difference in numbers was the same as relying on guts.

This tactic was only possible because they had high-speed cameras thoroughly filming everything from 32 directions, international competition level algorithms analyzing that footage, and soldiers who could follow the enemy arrangement and distribution, move as the information on the screen told them to, and turn that ideal into a reality.

The statistics in the data began to encroach on the real scene before them.

It was stagnation.

This did not just apply to the Faith Organization soldiers’ charge across the road. The excited energy between them rapidly cooled, their momentum faltered, and the fear of death and the confusion was clearly spreading among them once more. Even though that general “atmosphere” should have been invisible.

“Stop firing for 5 seconds.”

“?”

“We’ll give them a moment of relief before throwing them back into deadly danger. It’s just like getting in a hot bath before being thrown right back out into the midwinter night. That’s the most effective means of shaking them. Resume firing.”

Heivia’s short burst of fire caused a previously-unseen change.

One young soldier out in the road came to a stop, turned around, and tried to run back to the alley from which he had come.

“That woke him up,” coldly said Wraith.

She saw the change, but she did not instruct the soldiers to cease firing.

“All that about their mental limiters was a temporary thing. No matter your beliefs or convictions, forgetting the instinctual fear of death is not a natural state for a living creature. So we just have to control that on/off switch. Once this unwanted look at reality has taken away their purity, they cannot rebuild the resolve to trample their allies’ corpses and cross that river of blood.”

“Thanks for the lecture, but what do we do now!?”

“The minority pushes back against the majority. Instead of that young soldier himself, shoot a few nearby soldiers in the head. Seeing familiar faces destroyed and feeling their blood splattering on him will be more effective. Once the fear of death makes him panic and he starts to scream, the rest will come quickly.”

It was like throwing oil on a fire.

Their coordination clearly crumbled. There were cracks running through that army which had been like a solid wall before. Heivia’s group only had to use sporadic fire to widen those rifts. The enemy was shoving each other to avoid being on the front line and some fistfights were even breaking out.

“They’re just a chaotic crowd now,” cruelly said Wraith. “Finish them off.”

“You’re really scaring me.”

They did not even need to shoot all the remaining soldiers. Simply aiming their assault rifles in that direction produced short shrieks as the soldiers ignored their orders and fled.

“Should we go after them? It’d be a pain if they regrouped and regained their cool.”

“It’s quite the opposite. The calmer people are, the more they remember the fear of death. Give them time, and the fear of death will ensnare their mind like a nightmare. In fact, if we try to deal with them individually, we will lose. Have you forgotten how outnumbered we are? Plus, we only have so much ammo. Data analysis is not all powerful and its effects only show themselves in a limited arena.”

Their goal had always been to blow up the broadcast station that supported the Olympia Dome’s largescale broadcast infrastructure (which could be seen as an EM spying facility that indiscriminately gathered signals from the surrounding area). Using up all their ammunition before arriving there would be meaningless.

Wraith made a casual decision like she was staring at a schedule book.

“We were lucky to rout them like this at all. They didn’t see through our trick. It will take some time for them to prepare for combat once more after abandoning victory of their own volition. Let’s achieve our objective and leave the Olympia Dome before that happens.”

After gathering their dead comrades’ dog tags, Heivia’s group left the subway station and resumed the journey to the broadcast station. Since it was a large facility, the giant boxy building was visible from a distance. They were of course cautious in their approach, but the sense of having cleared the largest hurdle enveloped the Legitimacy Kingdom survivors like a cradle.

However…

“What…is this?”

“?”

Heivia gave Wraith a puzzled look when she uttered a low comment toward her smartphone screen. What was that small LCD screen connected to and what was it displaying?

“There’s…there’s no way they overlooked this!! Did Taratua just decide not to tell us!?”

She seemed to be cursing someone.

And at the same moment, a 50m mass passed by in the sky over their heads.

Their eyes could see it, but their brains refused to accept it.

For one thing, its position made no sense.

It was above all the high-rise buildings in the city. A mass of steel mixed with a heat-resistant reactive substance was positioned at an altitude of more than 200 meters. It was floating. It was flying. If the spherical main body was viewed as the earth, then the 3 Y-shaped wings were attached at the equator. Were those coaxial rotors? The two sets of wings rotated in opposite directions, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, to free the 200,000-ton mass from the bonds of gravity like a helicopter. There was something like an undercarriage, but could that even be used to move it? The equilateral triangle below it was like a helicopter’s skids or an upside-down version of the tripod used to support the bottom of a pot or frying pan on a gas burner. It may have only been meant to let it take off and land.

“An…”

This was no time to just stare in shock.

It had moved into position above Heivia’s group. Which meant…?

“An Object!?”

A moment later, the colossal weapon that had ended the nuclear age began its ''attack''.