Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 11===

Quenser and Heivia watched on as the warehouse’s front metal shutter was blown away in an explosion.

“Oh, hell! Hide!!”

Heivia yelled a warning, grabbed Quenser’s arm, and dove between two warehouses.

The Gatling gun on the manned missile hovercraft turned and started firing.

The metal warehouse walls and a forklift crumbled like styrofoam. The two idiots could only lie on the ground and cover the back of their heads with their hands as they waited for the storm of lead to pass. They could not even raise their head.

“What was that!? The Newsmaker guy!?”

“The big boss always sticks around to the end. More importantly, Heivia, can you target the hovercraft’s float? Pop that balloon and he’ll stop. And if we end this charge on the Princess, their proof of the Sixth Branch will fail!”

“You’re kidding, right? It’ll have aramid fibers woven in to make it bulletproof! Besides, I’ll be killed if I raise my head now!!”

“Then what about a missile!?”

“I don’t have any left! How about you throw a bomb!?”

As they argued, fire burst from the thick metal tube on the back of the hovercraft and an explosive sound followed.

A few Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers were attempting to chase after Newsmaker, but that was enough to knock them a few meters back.

“Dammit! He’s getting away!!”

The hovercraft surpassed 100 kph in only a few seconds.

It left the copied weapons factory grounds in no time and made its way out into the seemingly endless marsh. The shrinking dot was clearly moving too fast to catch up to on foot.

When Heivia finally poked his head out from between the warehouses, he gave an irritated shout.

“What the hell are we supposed to do!? That thing’s a hunk of liquid fuel and shells moving at 800 kph. We can’t catch up and the Object is sure to kill him. But if we don’t attack and it reaches the maintenance base zone, it’s all over. The path to the Sixth Branch will open either way. So what are we supposed to do!?”

“…”

Quenser fell silent and looked around the crumbled warehouses.

“Heivia and everyone else, is any of the heavy machinery still working? I want to drag an antiaircraft gun out from one of the warehouses.”

“What good is that!?”

“Remember the electromagnetic pulse weapon we saw in the footage from the group who went in first? We’ll fire that with the antiaircraft gun. With that Elefish in the clouds, we can fry the circuit boards of that manned missile hovercraft! If it stalls, we can capture him without killing him!!”

They all began moving immediately.

The antiaircraft guns were attached to the back of canopy-less midsized trucks, making them look like dangerous tow trucks, but there was no gasoline in those left in the warehouses to rot. 

Heivia drove a different truck up, attached the two vehicles with wires, and towed one out. Quenser and four others worked together to carry the 10cm wide and 90 cm long shell. They only realized afterwards they could have used the truck to carry the shell out too.

They were all in a state of confusion.

“We only have one shot with the Elefish! If we mess up, it’s all over!!”

“Then let’s test fire with a normal shell first. We need to see how this thing fires!!”

Heivia shouted back that suggestion while climbing onto the back of the truck to operate the gun.

That was when a female soldier asked a hesitant question.

“Um, do we even know where Newsmaker is?”

“Oh, goddammit.”

That most basic of facts had slipped their minds.

This swamp continued for one hundred kilometers in every direction. They knew the enemy was traveling from the factory to the maintenance base zone, but they did not know his exact course. They could only pray he had not arrived yet.

And the Elefish electromagnetic pulse meteorological weapon only had an effective range of approximately ten kilometers. That was enough to swallow up an entire city, but it could not cover this vast swamp.

That was not something they could do from the ground, so Quenser brought his radio to his mouth.

“Frolaytia!! Is the satellite surveillance network back up yet!? We need to locate one manned missile hovercraft in particular. What is the electronic simulation division even doing!?”

“Wait… Those intellectuals are finally showing some results. If this works, we might just have our eyes in the sky back.”

That was good news.

If they could use the satellites, the odds were good they could end this without killing Newsmaker.