Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume19 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 9===

Ten meters was a tricky height. You might survive if you landed on a soft flower bed, a sheet iron roof, or the thick cushion used for the pole vault, but you didn’t stand much of a chance if you landed on the jagged rocks at the bottom of a ravine.

On instinct, Quenser held young Elina tight in one arm and used the other hand to pull in the elliptical object floating next to him. Then he used his mouth to pull hard on the thick cord.

Nitrogen gas burst out, rapidly inflating the rubber boat. It probably worked similar to a car airbag or a fire extinguisher.

Of course, it didn’t slow them as much as a parachute. The boat dropped quite rapidly while still bent nearly in half with Quenser and Elina contained within. Then it hit the hard ground.

They bounced.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to worry about jagged rocks piercing their bodies. These military boats had been designed to accommodate rough landing operations anywhere from a sandy beach to a rocky coast, so the cushioning of the air within was nothing to sneeze at.

But it was too soon to breathe a sigh of relief. Gravity seized ahold of them again after their bounce. This time, they landed in the dark river running down the center of the V-shaped ravine.

Quenser thought his heart was going to stop when the liquid touched him.

He reflexively curled up, but then he realized he had let go of the girl and she was vanishing into the dark river!

“Pwah!! Elina, where are you!?”

When his head breached the surface, the biting wind grew twice as powerful. His bangs began to freeze starting from the tips. He had never imagined 1-degree water would actually feel warm to him.

And his cries received no response.

The current was even faster than it had looked from above. If he hadn’t grabbed onto the boat with aching and rapidly numbing fingers, he would have been tossed about wildly. There was no way a 9-year-old like Elina Silverbullet could swim while fully clothed here.

Quenser held onto the boat for dear life and turned on his light despite the danger.

He was risking his life with that light, but it barely helped.

Steam was rising from the river even though it was only 1 degree. That was just how deadly the air was.

A dark and gloomy feeling pressed down on him, but then he spotted something. That wasn’t just an illusion brought on by the wavering steam. A small hand stuck straight up out of the dark water a short distance away.

This wasn’t something from a ghost story. It was a living human being still trying desperately to survive.

“…”

She was about 10m away and upstream of him, but if he waited too long, her hand would sink back below the water and probably never resurface. Yet if he let go of the motorboat in these rapids, he would lose his means of getting downstream.

He could choose the girl or the boat.

Quenser Barbotage clenched his teeth and made his choice.

“Argh!!”

He tore away his fingers that were half freezing to the boat and he fought the current.

He couldn’t use his light anymore. Darkness surrounded him once more, hiding the small hand from view.

He ended up relying mostly on intuition.

He trusted the sensation he felt in his fingers, grabbed tight, and pulled up.

“Cough!! Cough, cough!?”

“No, Elina!! Don’t breathe in through your nose!! Gather the air in your mouth and let it warm up before breathing it in. You’ll damage your lungs otherwise!”

To prevent coughing Elina from reflexively delivering a finishing blow to her own body, Quenser forced his wet hand over her small face and warned her. The nose could inhale more air than the mouth and you could not hold the air between your cheeks when breathing through the nose. It went without saying what would happen if you sent this piercing cold air directly to your lungs.

(But what do we do now!? We’ve lost our boat!!)

For now, he focused on staying afloat while they held each other close and let the current carry them. He kept one arm solidly around Elina’s shockingly small hips and used the other hand to shine his unreliable light around.

The light reflected off of something.

It was the abandoned rubber boat. It had been swept downstream, but it must have gotten caught on a sharp rock jutting up from the riverbed.

He reached desperately for it.

Grabbing it must have affected its balance because it resumed moving. It flowed downstream once more.

There was no saving them if they remained in the 1-degree river.

It was difficult with just the one arm, but since Elina was buoyant, she didn’t feel as heavy in the water. He held his light in his mouth and first pushed her small body up into the boat. Then he climbed in after her. If she hadn’t moved to the other side, the boat might have capsized under his weight.

But boarding the boat did not make them safe.

He thought he could actually hear it when he saw Elina’s hair and poncho freezing. He could guess the same was happening to him.

It was 15 below zero out here.

The white hell of Siberia had truly bared its fangs now.

The two of them held each other tight. There was no room for shame here. If they didn’t overcome this cold, their ears, fingers, and whatever else would get frostbitten and fall off. Elina’s fluffy knit clothing was designed to store air to insulate her from the cold, but cold water was its worst nightmare. There was no preventing the wool from soaking up all that water.

They shivered while looking out ahead – downstream.

The motorboat was supposed to let them escape the battlefield at nearly 200km/h, but that felt like a joke now. The V-shaped ravine curved this way and that through the darkness and sharp rocks stuck out of the water all over the place. Quenser was hesitant to start the motor up at all, much less travel at nearly 200km/h. Simply letting the current take them was terrifying enough. The most he could do was shine his unreliable light out ahead and cling to the rear motor unit to operate the rudder.

(Another example of Frolaytia’s ultra optimism. When I get back, I’m warming my fingers on her boobs until they stop trembling.)

As sturdy as the military boat was, a tear from one of the fang-like rocks would still sink it. And just because it had survived last time did not mean it would survive next time. The damage would not go away on its own. Unfortunately, shining his light on the river ahead did not tell him what was lurking below the surface.

(This won’t last long.)

Quenser felt dizzy while he held Elina with his teeth chattering.

He could feel his pulse more than ever before, but that felt more like a last-ditch effort than anything. And if his heartbeat weakened, he doubted it would ever recover. The upper limit would gradually fall until finally reaching a flatline zero.

(We’ll both die if we don’t find some place to dry off and change clothes!! Even if we do make it downstream, we won’t make it to the Legitimacy Kingdom evac point 120km past that!!)

“Wh-what is…that?”

Elina Silverbullet was shivering too, but she pointed her small finger elsewhere. She was looking up at a dark shape in the distance.

“A bridge?”

“Shh!”

Quenser wrapped both arms around her and lay down in the boat.

The Information Alliance probably had the area surrounded while they gradually worked their way inwards, but they would be focusing their inspections and hunting on the known land routes. They wouldn’t be focused on the ravine river, but a bridge where the road met the river was bad news. He didn’t see any searchlights, but he knew they had been driving a truck around with the headlights off and shooting any Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers they found.

The bridge was more than 10m above.

They could be sending something invisible down into the ravine even now. Whether it was IR or microwaves, he, Elina, and the boat would be shredded by a machinegun or grenade launcher the instant they were detected.

It was risky, but they couldn’t turn back either.

He had no plan, but their only option was to let the current carry them. Forcing the motor to fight the rapid current would make a dangerously loud noise. Besides, running away would just get them frozen to death. This was another danger to contend with, but their best bet was still to travel downstream and try to reach the Legitimacy Kingdom maintenance base.

He steeled himself as they approached the concrete bridge spanning the ravine.

Would they make it through or not?

His tension rose to its peak.

“…”

The boat came to an unexpected stop. He looked around in shock to find the boat’s path was blocked by a metal fence placed across the water’s surface.

It was an unusual thing, so the Information Alliance must have done it.

“What now?”

“We can’t keep going! There don’t seem to be any soldiers above us, but the fence might be electrified. Touching it might have triggered a sensor!!”

At least it hadn’t been linked with a naval mine that detonated as soon as they touched the fence. Maybe the Information Alliance hadn’t wanted large fish or trash triggering it on accident.

Fortunately, there was a metal staircase installed on the ravine wall, presumably for bridge inspection and maintenance. On the other hand, that meant there was only the one path up. They had to run up there and vanish into the night before those Information Alliance freaks came to investigate.

He grabbed the fence and pushed his body against it to slide the boat over. Once at the edge of the ravine, he picked up Elina, hopped onto land, and climbed the metal stairs.

Climbing a 10m spiral staircase was a lot like climbing 3 stories.

He needed to clear those stairs before any Information Alliance soldiers showed up. With that and the biting chill, he ran up the stairs without worrying about his clanging footsteps, but he thought his heart was going to stop once he reached the top.

He saw simple structures similar to boxy metal containers, the unique silhouette of a radar facility, and even giant hangars resembling gyms with semicircular roofs. They were so surrounded on all sides that the curtain of snow wasn’t enough to hide it.

This was the Information Alliance maintenance base zone.

They must have been restricting light usage because the entire place was dark.

The bridge across the ravine was crucial to transportation around here, so they could monitor who moved in and out by setting up a checkpoint at that one point. So the Information Alliance had set up their easily-deployed maintenance base around the bridge.

(Well, this sucks.)

They really had hit a dead end now.

An Object maintenance base zone would hold anywhere between 800 and 1000 soldiers. There was no way an amateur battlefield student could sneak his way through there without being spotted. But returning to the ravine wasn’t an option either. If that fence had been electrified, the Information Alliance would send an armed team down to investigate the alarm he had triggered.

They were in a real “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

The tension was enough to distract him from the cold, but then Elina spoke from his arms.

“Umm.”

“What is it? I’m trying to come up with a plan here.”

“It’s not about that. I was wondering what happened here.”

He wasn’t sure what the genius girl meant.

She must have noticed because she clarified for him.

“Like you said before, there are no soldiers up here.”

“Oh.”

“But this is undeniably a military facility. And a large one at that. So isn’t it odd that there’s no one around?”

He had a bad feeling about this.

Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any guards around. And not just because they were using night vision goggles and didn’t need their lights.

The place felt deserted.

The lack of artificial lights could be explained, but could a “small city” of at least 800 people really stay as silent as an old-growth forest in midwinter?

Quenser gulped and took a step away from the stairs and into the Information Alliance maintenance base zone.

His bad feeling had been right on the money.

Countless corpses had been mutilated, burned, and splattered against the walls in ways that couldn’t be explained with bullets.

The base was littered with victims of the ghost.