Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 10===

'''Mission Report B-05

'''March 22 – 0000 Hours

'''Legitimacy Kingdom New Caledonia District – Special Political Prison “Château de Rouge” (Remains)



Quenser once more floated in the dark ocean.

He was worried about the container cells, but it seemed they were well sealed. The metal boxes filled with air rocked in the waves like a can or bottle. They did not sink.

“Are you alive? Hey, Mariage!”

“Bhah! Cough cough!!”

She breathed in some seawater and started coughing, but the gentle glasses girl managed to grab onto a wooden panel floating nearby.

“Grab onto me.”

“What!? Wh-why!?”

“Hurry up if you don’t want to die! That thing can search the battlefield using sound. It’s probably targeting you using your heartbeat, but we managed to avoid its attack a few times already. If you think about it rationally, we wouldn’t normally be able to escape laser attacks that can easily shoot down fighters or cruise missiles!!”

“O-oh… Its scan fails when multiple heartbeats overlap.”

“In the ocean, all it needed to do was shoot individually diving frogmen or sink a huge ship.”

“B-but!! Its specs are good enough to accurately analyze acoustic signatures in the middle of all the sounds made in Object battles, right!? Th-then overlapping our heartbeats won’t be enough!!”

“It wasn’t made to select an individual out of a close-packed crowd! It also hasn’t shown any sign of locating us from our voices. Even if it can detect the sounds, its algorithm was made to detect mechanized units, so it eliminates it as background noise!! When you search for recipe sites on a search engine, you don’t find any car sites. This is the same! The Megalodiver is normally at the bottom of the ocean, so it didn’t need to think about anti-personnel combat because a huge group of frogmen would never reach it in the first place. To not waste its time, it doesn’t even have the most basic algorithms for that kind of thing!!”

“Th-that’s all speculation. You have no proof of any of it!”

“You want proof? If it was fully-equipped with anti-personnel functionality, it would have killed us while we discussed this!! So hurry!!”

“E-eeee!?”

Mariage frantically clung to him from the front.

Even so, the ocean was cold in the middle of the night.

Quenser felt as if his organs themselves were shivering and he thought his very life force was being sapped away by the cold.

But the sight before him made him forget even that.

An Object battled an Object.

The damaged Baby Magnum had tried to attack the prison and rescue Mariage while the Megalodiver had tried to kill the “genius monster” who might find a weakness in it. The two of them now clashed on the ocean surface.

The restriction to only laser beams no longer applied. The Baby Magnum switched out its seven main cannons and fired metal shells, plasma, lasers, and other types of attacks. Sometimes its attacks spread out in a fan shape, sometimes they cut off the enemy’s escape route, and sometimes they focused on a single point as the enemy came to a stop.

That magical division between spreading out the fire and concentrating it held something that went beyond skill.

It seemed to be possessed by the divine.

The Megalodiver obtained tremendous propulsion by drawing in massive amounts of seawater and firing it backwards like wings, but it could not fully evade even with that high-speed movement.

In addition to direct attacks, the seven main cannons also fired on the enemy’s predicted evasion routes. No matter where it tried to run, it would be hit.

But…

“What…is that?”

“That’s the enemy we must defeat.”

“But… There’s no way we can!!”

“Even so, we have to!!”

The New Model’s strategy was simple to put in words.

It fired its many secondary cannons straight down at the same moment.

This was of course not meant to target the Baby Magnum. Anything but a main cannon could not do any real damage to the sturdy armor of an Object.

Then what was the Megalodiver targeting?

What did it gain by firing straight down?

That too was simple.

It created a wall.

A colossal pillar of water rose in front of the New Model and that thick wall diverted the princess’s cannon fire.

The angle at which it altered their path was not all that large.

It was just a few degrees or a dozen degrees at most.

[[Image:HO_v08_213.jpg|thumb]]

But the Megalodiver would move hard in the opposite direction. The two actions created a large gap that allowed it to just barely escape the princess’s supposedly unavoidable bombardment. It was a magnificent performance, much like a bullfight.

“We’ve been calling it the Tatami Shield,” said Quenser with a gulp. No matter how many times he saw it, the fearful awe did not fade. “The metal shells are diverted by the water resistance. Lasers are light, so they’re bent on the same principle as a prism. Plasma and electron beams have their path altered by the wall of water absorbing their heat energy. There’s only so much it can absorb, but it’s enough to bend them.”

“The concept is simple enough, but how does it match the timing so perfectly!? Those laser beams are flying at the speed of light and it’s blocking every single one with those walls of water!!”

“Lamenting is easy.”

A large group of transport helicopters and hovercrafts from the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion approached to retrieve Quenser and the other prisoners whose container cells had been thrown into the ocean.

As he watched that, the boy spoke to Mariage.

“But we can’t escape alive unless we find out how. And the same goes for you.”

“…!?”

“Welcome to war. This is the true face of this era, so quit complaining and enjoy it. That’s the only way to survive!!”

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