Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume1 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 10===

The slicing blizzard sent a sharp pain across the skin of his face.

The white filling his vision needlessly increased his unease.

The deep snow seemed to grab hold of his feet like a bottomless bog as Quenser desperately continued to run while holding the rifle in both hands.

He had been on the front lines for 6 months, but this felt to him like the first time he had actually been running on a battlefield.

His objective was to save the princess.

There was no reason he had to fight the Object. In fact, if he did run into it, he would be killed as a piece of trash rather than an enemy. He wished he had some way to approach through a blind spot of the Object and save the princess, but….

(Where?)

The rifle felt as cold as a hunk of ice.

Quenser gritted his teeth and looked around while putting up with the pain in his fingertips.

(Dammit! Where is she!?)

He could have sworn the display had indicated that area, but the Elite girl was nowhere to be found. Had enemy soldiers already taken her away? Or had he misread the map and gone to the wrong spot?

(God dammit! How could I have survived 6 months out here without knowing how to find my position on a map? …How much have I just been relying on others?)

Quenser stuck a cable into the scope area of the rifle. The other end of the cable had a small earphone for one ear. He put it in his right ear and operated the unfamiliar rifle with shaking fingers.

According to Heivia, it had a microphone for finding enemies.

(…)

While focusing on the microphone sticking out near the barrel like a bayonet, Quenser slowly rotated in one spot. While in the process of turning the microphone in every direction, he heard a slight noise through the earphone.

“This way…?”

He had not been properly trained, so he held the rifle as he had seen others do as he headed off in the direction of the noise.

As he approached, the slight noise grew gradually louder.

Eventually, it started to sound like human voices and Quenser frantically hid behind some nearby rocks.

He then stuck only his face out.

He could see human forms on the other side of the white curtain of blowing snow.

He guessed they were about 100 meters away. From that distance, he could not tell what they looked like, but he could see three or four muscular figures surrounding a single short figure. The short figure was on her knees unnaturally with both her hands behind her head.

(The princess! Shit, so she was caught after all…!!)

Quenser brought his head back behind the rocks and then looked around the area.

He could not see the giant form of the Object anywhere.

It may have headed back to hunt down the survivors now that the Elite girl had been captured.

For an instant, Quenser thought it might all be some absurdly huge trap and he would be shot by the low-stability plasma cannons from long distance the instant he made a move. However, he realized that was unlikely. He doubted they would use the Object to set up a trap for him alone and the giant Object would not need to set up a trap to deal with a mere human anyway. It would just slaughter him outright.

He may have been so afraid that his mind’s danger sensor was not working properly.

The Object was simply so frightening that he was taking completely unrealistic possibilities into account.

At any rate, if he calmed down and thought about it…

(The Object isn’t here.)

Quenser noticed the weight of the rifle once more.

He stuck his head out from behind the rocks to check on the situation.

(If I can do something about those four, I can save the princess!!)

A different unpleasant feeling than the fear of the Object now started tightening around his heart.

He had to “do something about” those four.

With that rifle in his hands, “doing something” meant shooting and killing those four humans. Quenser was not skillful enough to suppress them without hitting their vitals and the bullets in that military rifle were powerful enough to rip off a limb if he hit them there. They would die of shock whether he hit their vitals or not.

Could he really kill them?

Could he kill four people to save a single comrade?

(God dammit!)

He wrapped the other hand around his uncontrollably shaking fingers.

He could not keep his teeth from chattering.

(This is the battlefield. Killing is the norm here! By leaving all the fighting to the invincible Object…is this what we’ve been pushing onto her!?)

In a desperate attempt to work up some courage, Quenser pounded on his own thigh with his fist and then forced himself to hold up the rifle. However, he started feeling dizzy when he looked through the scope. He held back the urge to vomit and somehow managed to aim.

He was aiming for the male soldier closest to the Elite girl.

He put the sights right in the middle of the unsuspecting man’s head.

Now he just had to pull the trigger.

However, as if it had frozen solid, his finger on the trigger would not move.

(…This is a human.)

As he forced down the urge to vomit, the image through the sight shook.

(This isn’t one of the human-shaped targets from the training grounds. It’s a real human. This is a soldier just like us who has become dulled by peace after being protected by his Object and only wants to return safely to his country…)

He could not shoot.

Just as he realized that fact, he heard an odd noise through the earphone in his ear.

It was a sound being picked up by the rifle’s microphone.

It was the words coming from the mouth of the soldier he was aiming at.

“Hey, let’s test out the durability of the Elite’s special suit. Once the Object returns, we can tie her hands to it with a rope and have it drag her behind it. The test will be whether she’s naked or not by the time we get back to base.”

Quenser’s movements stopped when he heard that.

He then heard a laugh and the words of another soldier.

“No matter how easy it is to slide on snow, wouldn’t that still turn her to mincemeat?”

“Yeah, and what’ll we do if she’s still alive once we get back to our base zone? Are you gonna do a test on the wonderful Elite’s body? I hear the guys from the torture room were complaining because their tools are rusting over from lack of use.”

No, it was not his movements that had stopped.

It was his trembling that had stopped.

As well as the urge to vomit that had produced the trembling.

His heart had cleared.

He switched off the microphone as if shutting out what the soldiers had to say.

Quenser had a new thought.

He had not been able to pull the trigger because he had thought of them as human.

But…

They weren’t, were they?

A great noise exploded out and the rifle bullet had blown one of the laughing soldiers’ heads to pieces before Quenser even realized the noise was due to his finger pulling the trigger. Ignoring the collapsing headless corpse, Quenser shouted out.

“Get down!!”

Had the Elite girl understood what those words meant first or had it been the enemy soldiers around her?

Just as the girl threw her body down into the deep snow, Quenser used quick movements of his finger to fire bullet after bullet in semi-auto mode. With as little training as he had, he doubted he could deal with the recoil of firing on full auto. However, the enemy soldiers did not just stand there and let him shoot them. Almost reflexively, they turned their rifle barrels in the direction of the voice and fired.

Quenser had been only slightly faster.

Quenser only wanted to mow down everything there, so he just moved the barrel from right to left as he fired rather than carefully aiming. By repeatedly pulling the trigger, he sent bullets flying at even intervals which created a hurdle of death at about waist height. Fortunately, he had caught them by surprise. Red blood sprayed into the air and soldiers were mowed down onto the snow.

(…I might actually pull this off…!!)

However, two of the enemy soldiers had immediately gotten down and escaped the spray of bullets. As Quenser stood fully upright due to the recoil of the rifle, he could see one of the surviving soldiers aiming his own rifle while kneeling down. While keeping low to the ground, the princess tackled him. In a close-quarters struggle, the soldier could not fire his rifle. Quenser panicked, but his worry was unwarranted. The princess held a metal skewer for cooking that had been in the same standard-issue survival kit that held bandages and a small fishing pole. She used it to stab the enemy soldier in the side.

The one remaining soldier immediately tried to move away from the princess, but he carelessly raised his body too high. Immediately afterwards, he was struck by one of the bullets from Quenser’s rifle and collapsed onto the snow.

It was over.

Or so Quenser thought.

The soldier who was bleeding from the metal skewer the princess had stabbed in his side pulled his rifle’s trigger as he collapsed to the snow. Most likely, he had not intended to do so, but he happened to hit the trigger for the grenade launcher on the bottom of the rifle. The barrel was pointed in a random direction…which just so happened to be in Quenser’s direction.

The heavy explosive flew through the air in an arc rather than a straight line.

Quenser was unable to decide what to do in the instant he had.

Immediately afterwards, Quenser was sent flying by the blast and an odd pain ran through most of his upper body. The color white filled his vision. At first, he thought it was the sky, but it was actually the snow-covered ground. It took him a while to even realize he was lying on his side.

(…What…happened to me…?)

Just as that question entered his mind, all strength left his body.

He somehow managed to move his hand that had frozen up as if from rigor mortis, but the rifle grip slipped from his fingers. His arm then fell back into the snow.

He finally started feeling a throbbing pain in his gut and chest.

(Shit, what happened? Are they all dead? I didn’t miss any of them, did I? None of them are going to get back up, are they?)

No more shooting occurred.

Had he killed all of them, had they fled, or had they stopped because they considered finishing him off a waste of bullets? Buried in the snow as he was, Quenser could not tell.

(…Kh…)

He tried to look at his wounds, but his body would not move as he wished it to.

Meanwhile, even his mind seemed to be ceasing to function properly.

(What about the princess…?)

He had come all that way to rescue the Elite girl and yet he no longer had the energy left over to see if she was even alive.

His consciousness sank down into darkness.

Even the pain that had risen up seemed to vanish rather than exploding out within him.