Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume19 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 11===

There was no good and evil in war.

The Legitimacy Kingdom and the Information Alliance would have their own reasons for their actions here in the Tunguska District. The mysterious Unit X would also have been desperate to stay alive. The Ghost Changer-equipped Object was like a nightmare for Quenser’s group, but it may have looked like a legendary sword to the Information Alliance who wanted to protect their comrades’ lives however they could.

So there was no point in discussing who was the villain here.

Or at the very least, reflexively declaring the Information Alliance evil wouldn’t be productive.

And in this case, Quenser couldn’t just chalk it all up to a conspiracy of the four world powers. That was the same as insisting everything that had ever gone wrong for him was due to a mysterious curse interfering with all the critical moments in his life.

But there was a villain here.

And Quenser had seen them himself.

They had been within arm’s reach.

They were out here on this battlefield, but not as a bizarre ghost story – as a living, breathing human.

“Elina.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to end this, but we’re the ones who brought this battle to your doorstep, so you have no obligation to accompany me. If you don’t want to die, you can stay here in this warm base, waiting for someone to rescue you.”

“I do hate to say goodbye to this warm stove and more hot cocoa, but I too played a role in this.”

The fear of the battlefield would have soaked into her very bones – the terror of the cold, the bullets, and the eerie ghost’s curse or spirit possession.

But the emotionless genius girl did not hesitate.

“Whatever the actual method is, I was the one who set the stage for it by living here in the Tunguska District. I knew I would have to face some kind of problem like this if I refused to back down on my suppressed paper. But I refused to give up and that led to this war. If not for my selfishness, this plan may have never panned out.”

“…I see.”

Her cold and robotic demeanor made it hard to tell, but she did have emotions.

Intelligence had its pros and its cons. She would have been happier if she had never arrived at that answer.

She may have felt somewhat responsible for this battlefield littered with Legitimacy Kingdom and Information Alliance corpses. But whatever calculations the true genius’s conclusion were based on, that average student could confidently tell her she was wrong. This war was something they had brought to the Tunguska District. None of this was her fault and she shouldn’t feel any of that weight on her shoulders.

But the risk to her would not go away if he left her behind. The corpses covering the base were enough to know the place was not safe.

He sighed and nodded.

“Then I’ll take you with me. …To be honest, I was terrified of having to reenter that frozen forest on my own.”

“I don’t know what you intend to do about that ghost, but I am honored you consider me worthwhile to have around. It tells me I’m not just dead weight.”

They were both ready to go now.

The boy had said from the beginning that they already had the greatest weapon against ''them''. He had said trying to run away would only lead to death, so it was best to not even try.

So now there was just one thing to do: begin to fight.

He pressed his radio’s switch.

He sent out the emergency signal that restrained the prisoners and transmitted their location.

“Found you.”

He glanced down at his mobile device instead of his radio.

He had booted up the military’s highly accurate map app.

“Sladder Honeysuckle!! I have his GPS signal and I’ve detonated his glow-in-the-dark paint and scent capsules. He can’t escape now!!”

“Sladder?” Eliza clearly didn’t understand. “And I thought you said your radio and mobile device weren’t working in the cold.”

“They weren’t actually broken.”

Quenser smiled and looked around while drying his hair with a towel.

The Information Alliance maintenance base would be stocked with all sorts of weapons, from handguns to missiles, but Quenser and Elina couldn’t use weapons like that. He guessed this would come down to throwing Hand Axe plastic explosives.

He searched through all the gear and only took a flashlight that looked more powerful than his own.

“We just couldn’t trust the signal it was showing us. The blizzard screwed with our sense of direction and distance, so we started to doubt what the machine was showing us. We’re 120km from the Legitimacy Kingdom maintenance base. I had my doubts when I checked the display, but looks like it was right. The truth is a funny thing. If I’d thought about it more, I would have realized of course the digital numbers are more accurate. I just wasn’t in a mental state that let me think straight.”

“Because of the ghost?”

“Once you get how it works, it’s kind of silly.” He snorted with laughter while walking toward the door. “We kept talking about the Ghost Changer-equipped Object, but we don’t actually know what the Ghost Changer looks like. Why is that? The Object is 50m tall and we saw it ourselves when it crushed your log cabin. The Ghost Changer is an unconventional weapon since it can be passed between Objects. But if they were adding a huge cannon or lens, it would mess with the Object’s design philosophy. So how did it work?”

“?”

“It’s simple really.”

He threw open the thick metal door.

The -15 degree air was like poison now that they were accustomed to the heated building.

But now that Quenser understood the trick, he saw the view out the door as an open world full of hope. It was now his turn to attack.

“The Ghost Changer is a special grease. The gears, cylinders, joints, the axles for its steamroller-like wheels, and every other movable part on the Object is intentionally allowed to rub together and burn the oil with friction. And the subtle flavors and smells that creates messes with the human brain!!”

They intentionally had the Object damage itself.

Was that why hey had chosen the Retro Gunner instead of a new model? Was the cost of damaging a functioning Object just too great? Or did an old piece of junk enhance the effects? Was it like how a rusty saw was more frightening than a sharp knife?

“Are you saying the Ghost Changer is like a chemical weapon spread by the smoke and steam created when burning it?”

“You wouldn’t need an Object if it was. Since they use that thing’s joints, I bet this is about high pressure physics.”

“You mean how graphite turns to diamond at a pressure of about 50 thousand atmospheres?”

“Objects weight 200 thousand tons, so the pressure on their joints is far greater than the average press. Labs and factories can apparently produce a few million atmospheres using the shockwave of an explosion, but this might be even greater.”

“I see. I have heard some other unusual reports from the world of high pressure physics, such as ferromagnetic iron becoming paramagnetic or germanium’s electrical conductivity increasing a millionfold.”

“It produces phenomena that don’t add up based on our normal understanding of physics. I doubt the Ghost Changer grease would work if you just heated it with fire. I bet the weapon only works if you use the magic of high pressure to bend the rules of property change.”

The two of them soldiered on through the blizzard.

The Information Alliance flashlight was quite bright, so it pierced a good distance through the darkness. If he wasn’t careful to angle it down a bit, it would reflect off the blizzard and dazzle his eyes. The Information Alliance seemed to prefer night vision using IR or microwaves, so he would make better use of the flashlight than them.

“Ugh…”

“What is it, Elina? Did you drink too much hot cocoa, so now you need to pee? If you can’t keep that dam from breaking, try to do it at the base of a thick tree. Any pursuers might mistake it for wild animal markings.”

“Having ''him'' caution me about being indecent was the greatest mistake of my life.”

The 9-year-old was getting ahead of herself and deciding she had already seen the worst her life had to offer. Her voice dropped terrifyingly low, but the cold was still too powerful and she remained clinging to Quenser.

However, the genius girl’s groan had not been the result of pressure building below her stomach after leaving the warm room for the cold outdoors.

“So you were saying the ghost is created with smells and flavors?”

“More accurately, they create an atmosphere where a ghost seems likely. You begin to doubt your common sense, you throw out all your accurate digital data, and you close yourself up in a shell. That makes you the perfect target for any sort of superstition. Your brain starts to misinterpret things, like the rustling leaves sounding like whispering voices or the swaying branches looking like spying people.”

“Misinterpret?”

“You know how the voices you hear over the phone are really the physical voice being recreated using a combination of electric tones, right? Or how cheap meat can seem fancier when injected with fat? People love to label the things they’re experiencing by comparing them to the categories in their head, so our senses are actually pretty inaccurate.”

“But you expect me to believe this works on everyone, regardless of physical constitution and mental structure? What kind of miracle drug is this Ghost Changer? The Island Nation’s Hangonko was theorized to use mustard, but it’s actually just a legend with no real chemical formula. Talk of hallucinogens might sound convincing, but it’s not like they ran a proper clinical trial to make sure it would cause everyone see the exact same ghost. That claim is as absurd as saying zombie powder can damage anyone’s brain enough to turn them into a puppet just because it uses pufferfish.”

“Admittedly, it would be difficult with ordinary flavors and smells.”

He already knew their destination.

The Legitimacy Kingdom and Information Alliance had been removed from the battlefield. Same for the mysterious Unit X. Now that he knew that, he didn’t fear using a flashlight or activating his mobile device’s backlight. He only had to follow the GPS signal through the dark and snowy forest.

“But did you know, Elina, that flavors and smells are sensed using a process called chemoreception? Your body can detect the change in your cells when exposed to certain chemicals. That change just so happens to be greatest on your tongue and in your nose.”

“You mean how the spiciness sensed on the tongue is similar to pain or burning?”

“More or less, yes. But that’s the real issue here. We tend to think that our five senses are sensed using five different organs, but taste can actually be sensed on the skin and in the intestines, just to a much more limited extent. And the same might be possible for smell since it uses the same chemoreception process. There is also research that suggests our skin and blood vessels can just barely sense light.”

“Sensing taste and light through the skin?”

“It could be anywhere really. We think of vision as coming through the eyes, hearing through the ears, smell through the nose, taste through the tongue, and touch through the skin. But if we start to absorb sensory information through parts that don’t fit that mental mapping…well, humans like to manage the things they’re perceiving by applying labels to them. When heating food in the microwave, you think of it in terms of how long you heat it, not how many degrees or watts you use, right? You don’t question it when you heated it ‘long enough’, but the inside is still cold, do you? Most everyone is willing to accept that because they’ve never been burned by microwaves. We can swap out the labels for stimuli we can’t perceive. Same for units and quantities. If you hold a fluffy sweater in one hand and a ball of yarn weighing the same in the other hand but you aren’t told they weigh the same, you will sense the smaller ball of yarn as weighing more. Your knowledge alters what you’re sensing.”

In the military world, it wasn’t uncommon to develop weapons that secretly provided unseen stimuli.

For example, a handheld laser weapon that damaged the human eye from a distance or an acoustic weapon that induced psychological changes through long-term exposure to ultrasound or high pressure. Chemical weapons were the same. The tear gas and vomiting gas used to neutralize rioters could be viewed as weapons using taste and smell. Even stun guns and the like could apply in the sense that they applied an extreme tactile or pain stimulus.

The Information Alliance had taken that a step further.

They had increased the specs until their weapon could summon a “ghost” to the battlefield.

“People can’t fight data inputted through the ‘subconscious perception’ created when their body’s structure is at odds with their mental map of their senses. You should at least be able to imprint them with an idea more effectively than subliminal messaging which may not work at all.”

“They use stimulus signals the human mind can’t classify? That’s cheating worse than using a cryptid.”

“Probably why they call it a ghost.”

“But how does that connect to that man’s conspiracy?” Elina let out a white breath and looked up at Quenser. “Sladder Honeysuckle, I mean. Didn’t you say he was held in a Legitimacy Kingdom special prison? How could he be involved in an Information Alliance secret weapon?”

“…”

Quenser did not answer.

They were approaching the signal.

This would be checkmate if they found Sladder constricted by the belts and giving off this GPS signal, but Quenser doubted mechanical security would work against such a skilled engineer.

The odds were slim.

(Sladder was under constant surveillance just like the other prisoners. He only had freedom after shoving me off the cliff and before I hit my radio’s switch.)

When Quenser had fallen into the ravine, Sladder had looked like a ghost with a melting face, but that didn’t necessarily mean Sladder had seen the same thing when looking at him. Quenser had only heard the man shout “monster”.

It was always possible he had been entirely rational and shoved the boy while hiding a smile.

(He couldn’t have had more than half an hour. That isn’t enough time for specialty work, especially in an old-growth forest without any tools.)

He may not have slipped his restraints until Quenser’s signal reached him. So even if he had escaped, he couldn’t have gone far. Quenser was certain he could find the man by looking for a silhouette covered in glow-in-the-dark paint or following the footsteps that smelled of the tracking scent.

He was right about that.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

The snow right next to Quenser was blown away shortly before he heard a pleasant gunshot.

Quenser immediately picked up the genius girl and rushed behind a nearby tree. That gunshot had not come from a small self-defense handgun. Sladder must have stolen a sniper rifle from a dead soldier.

And that specialized gear had worked against him.

Sladder hadn’t needed to give a warning shot there, so that meant his shot had been blown off course by a crosswind. Sladder Honeysuckle, leader of the Mass Driver Conglomerate, was a master strategist who had set a global conspiracy in motion, but he had never been all that great a shot. At the end of the Break Carrier battle, he had fired a handgun several times at close range and still failed to kill an amateur like Quenser.

Quenser brought his radio to his mouth while hiding behind the tree.

He didn’t know if that sniper rifle was Legitimacy Kingdom or Information Alliance, but surely Sladder had stolen a communicator too. He chose to send an unencrypted signal across all bands.

“Sladder!! I know more or less what it is you’re trying to do here. …Yeah, you were originally planning to defect from the Capitalist Corporations to the Information Alliance, using your precious mass driver tech to get them interested. But we stopped you and you were thrown into a Legitimacy Kingdom prison instead. You’re upset your deal never went through, aren’t you? It’s only natural you would try to join the Information Alliance if you had the chance!!”

There was no response, so Quenser continued on his own.

“You were the first to notice when we were surrounded by Unit X at the log cabin, but you didn’t warn us and held your tongue to get us captured.”

[[Image:HO_v19_BW7.png|thumb]]

Was Sladder afraid Quenser would trace the signal to locate him if he responded?

“When the Retro Gunner attacked Elina’s cabin, Azureyfear said she captured our ‘scrawny scientist’ when you were trying to head off on your own. You were hoping to slip away in the confusion, meet up with the Information Alliance, and complete your defection, weren’t you?”

Quenser took the splinters of a tree branch that broken underfoot, shoved them into a small piece of Hand Axe, and threw it in a random direction. He detonated it with his radio, spreading flames and smoke around.

The darkness was swept away, revealing their positions to each other.

They were 200m apart.

The silhouette visible through the snowy curtain revealed that Sladder still had the chain around his ankles, but he had removed the belts and handcuffs. That explained how he could use the sniper rifle.

But that also meant he hadn’t had enough time to remove the chain. He had stopped working after noticing Quenser and Elina approaching. Things were not progressing according to plan for him, which Quenser counted as a win.

There was no more point in hiding his position, so static ran through Quenser’s radio.

“What are you hoping to accomplish with this conversation?”

“What happened to Azureyfear?”

“I shot her.”

Quenser clenched his teeth hard enough to cause an odd sound from his back teeth.

200m apart was midrange, putting them just out of handgun range for a professional soldier. That was too far for Quenser’s throwing arm to get a bomb to Sladder.

But what about Sladder?

Quenser could only hope Sladder could not draw on the sniper rifle’s full specs using the multipurpose scope that made use of several sensors and lenses.

“After I used the ghost panic to shove you two into the ravine, it was only us two prisoners left at the top. If I told her how to remove her restraints, I thought for sure she would leap at the opportunity, but it turns out Azureyfear Winchell is the type of prisoner who still finds value in belonging to the Legitimacy Kingdom. She was in my way, so I had to dispose of her. But to be frank, I only won by pure luck.”

Of course he did.

Azureyfear was an expert sniper who was more comfortable wielding an anti-materiel rifle than a tennis racket and she had forced herself to board an Object despite not being a Pilot Elite. She was like a beautiful manifestation of war. Sladder never would have stood a chance in a fair firefight.

Which meant he had not fought fair. He would only need a momentary opening. Some kind of dirty trick that would get her to pause.

“She is obsessed with that brother of hers, so I only had to tell her I could remotely detonate the lithium battery of the mobile device in his breast pocket. Such a silly bluff and she still fell for it. Frankly, I was flabbergasted it bought me two whole seconds.”

“Sladder…”

“Technology is to be used. Anyone who lets it use them has no future. You should know that as a future engineer yourself.”

“You’re not using it; you’re abusing it. You’re a disgrace to the field of engineering.”

Now Quenser had a reason to kill him.

That just left finding a way to do so. Fortunately, he had an idea already.

Elina’s small hand tugged on his coat.

“Is Sladder Honeysuckle really behind this war using the Ghost Changer? But how? I understand why he would want to defect, but how could he have been involved in an Information Alliance secret weapon while in prison?”

“You can make a good guess, can’t you?” said Sladder.

“Your cell had a window. I believe you said the combination of the damp, cracked wall and the sunlight allowed some small flowers to grow,” said Quenser. “And one barred window is all you would need to exchange information and materials with a flying drone. You drew up the plans in your cell, folded up the paper, and handed it over to the Information Alliance drone. And thus the Ghost Changer was born. That’s how the add-on weapon built by the Information Alliance was really a toy created to help you break out of prison. Isn’t that right?”

“Well done.”

Sladder was not remotely shaken.

He was creepier than a vengeful ghost.

“Zero-g life leads to hallucinations. When people are thrown out into the vacuum of space wearing a perfectly sealed spacesuit, they can still panic after thinking they smell the burning grease from a nearby wire.

“So you had already planned for the 37th to be involved?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t be certain it would happen. That was more the result of coincidence than a plan. I had predicted the 37th would be involved to an extent, but I never really cared about Elina Silverbullet. Any battlefield would have worked as long as the Ghost Changer was there.”

The focus of this entire battle had been a lie.

All the death and destruction was a great vortex spiraling around Sladder, not Elina. And once you knew the truth, so much clicked into place.

“The Legitimacy Kingdom wanted as much help as they could get to fight back against the mysterious Ghost Changer, but they did not want to kill off their own valuable scientists and engineers,” said Sladder. “It wasn’t hard to predict they would choose to use any foreign prisoners with a PhD.”

“Which is why the Ghost Changer didn’t just attack the Legitimacy Kingdom. Your jailbreak was the primary goal, so if the Information Alliance here interfered with that, you were willing to sacrifice them as well.”

“I may have given them too sweet a prize up front. The Information Alliance decided protecting the Ghost Changer’s secret was more important than securing my intellect. The fools should have known that was only a sideshow before the main event. I swear this world just will not let me research mass drivers in peace.”

“So,” cut in Quenser.

He had seen a radio thrown to the floor and a flare gun buried in the snow, but who was it the soldiers had been trying unsuccessfully to contact?

“The first one to be driven mad by the Ghost Changer was the Retro Gunner’s Pilot Elite, wasn’t it? The truth of this battle was no different from the one in the Hornos District: friendly fire.”

They had seen so many crushed, mutilated, and burned Legitimacy Kingdom corpses.

Normal flames couldn’t do that. Turning a corpse to wax apparently required spending months or even years below the thick snow.

The mincemeat on the rock and organs in the tree had not frozen in the -15 degree weather, so they had concluded something had creeped up disturbingly close by without any of them noticing.

The ghost of the Tunguska District could defy the laws of physics to kill and even steal away the passage of time.

So did that mean no one could explain what had happened there?

“Don’t make me laugh. You can make wax with fat and hydrogenated oil. It can be industrially created. You don’t need to spend months cut off from all oxygen. For example, the human body will absorb the hydrogen from the air and turn to wax when under around a million atmospheres of pressure.”

“Oh,” gasped Elina.

“An Object cannon can do that easily enough. The metal shell fired by a railgun or coilgun will kill you instantly even if it doesn’t directly hit you. The thick wall of air creates a massive amount of pressure, so the corpse isn’t going to be in a pretty state. That carbonized corpse may have been considerably shorter than the poor bastard was in life.”

“B-but we would have noticed if the Retro Gunner had fired!” protested Elina. “The bodies there hadn’t frozen, but a wet towel will freeze solid in less than a minute outside.”

“Elina, I’m sure you run into wild animals living out here in the mountains, but have you ever held a tranquilizer gun?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“The ones that don’t use a needle apply great pressure to the target’s skin with a gas so they will absorb the liquid tranquilizer. And there are plenty of liquids found in nature that don’t freeze even at 15 below. For a close-to-home example, tea seed oil’s freezing point is about 20 below. Now I wish I’d brought that plant guide we found in the Information Alliance maintenance base. I’m sure there are other examples in the conifer trees around here.”

“Wait…high pressure?”

“The Object shell landed near the soldier, hitting them with a shockwave and sending plant sap and juices piercing into their body. Once their body is full of a liquid with a lower freezing point, their corpse and organs won’t freeze even at 15 below. Those Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers were killed and splattered across the area well before we arrived, but the high-pressure injection made their flesh and blood ‘hard to freeze’, so they still hadn’t frozen when we got there. That’s all there was to it. We didn’t find a crater either, but I’m guessing the blizzard had just covered it up. It wasn’t birds of prey that carried the organs into the tree branches, nor was it a ghost. An Object blast splattered them, sending their organs into the air.”

No time had been stolen. The wax corpse and the unfrozen organs could all be explained with the high pressures caused by a railgun.

At the time, Sladder had repeatedly rejected every idea anyone came up with.

He had pretended to be offering his expertise, but he had really been nipping all of Quenser’s ideas in the bud. He kept hinting at the alternative theories behind the Tunguska event, but he had never provided anything solid. Almost like he was intentionally sowing confusion and panic to more easily control the situation.

That led to another answer.

What had caused the other slaughter at the Information Alliance maintenance base zone?

“We never even needed to consider the old Tunguska event legend. They were blown away by railguns and roasted by laser beams when the Retro Gunner went nuts. Friendly fire explains it all.”

“Friendly fire?” parroted the 9-year-old girl in disbelief. “But the Ghost Changer was a special grease that intentionally grinded and burnt out the Object’s joints to create a subtle smell, right? The Object’s cockpit is airtight, so how could the smell reach the pilot!?”

“Elina, do you detect a rusty odor?”

“Eh? …N-now that you mention it. But of course I do after all the lives that were lost around here.”

“I see. But that smell isn’t real. There are no corpses or bloodstains here.”

Her shock was understandable, but it was true.

“Our sense of smell is easily influenced by our imagination. The idea of blood smelling rusty is only an imaginary link between the color red and rust. There is iron in blood, but that isn’t the same as rust and there isn’t enough of it to detect a smell anyway. Well, at least it’s a more plausible idea than trying to take a ‘blood-curdling scream’ literally. Besides, how often do you even smell rust in your everyday life? The grease’s scent didn’t actually need to reach the cockpit. As long as the Elite saw it, knew what it was supposed to do, and could imagine it vividly enough, they would ‘smell it’ just like that rusty smell you noticed just now.”

Explaining the weapon to the Pilot Elite operating it had made the problem even worse.

In a way, that was more frightening than the actual chemical substance used for the Ghost Changer. You would need the kind of detailed personal data only found through counseling or profiling and your method would need to be finetuned for the individual, but that would create a verbal weapon that truly left no evidence behind. If Sladder Honeysuckle had focused on assassinating VIPs instead of direct warfare, he might have transformed into a ghost capable of always destroying his target.

“Breaking down the established theory, huh? You sure love doing that. But don’t forget that an Object is full of communications equipment. Sladder, I don’t know whose corpse you stole that gear from, but the Retro Gunner would have picked up your transmissions if you pretended to be Information Alliance. That means you could have pushed the Pilot Elite to their psychological limits by making up some phony report.”

What you could do and what you wanted to do were not the same thing.

That had always been what made this genius suffer so much.

“So what now?” asked Sladder. “Did you think I was going to give up on life and throw myself from the cliff now that you had revealed my trick? The battle only truly begins once the threat has been identified and that is what my sniper rifle is for.”

“There is no escape for you.”

“Quenser Barbotage. I am well aware of your specs.”

“…”

“And you have no means of killing me from a range of 200m. Are you going to stuff explosives in a metal tube to build a mortar? Or are you going to load a plastic explosive on a large bottle rocket? Or perhaps apply a thin layer of explosives to the inside of parabolic antenna to build a directional mine?”

The boy clicked his tongue. He hated to admit it, but that man was the better engineer. Quenser was only a designer in training while Sladder was a top-rate professional.

“You can’t do it. If you were alone, you may have attempted a reckless last-ditch effort, but you can’t bring yourself to attempt a risky adlibbed weapon with that 9-year-old girl with you. None of that has been on the table ever since Elina Silverbullet entered the picture. And when safe and reliable options are all you have left, you are no more than an amateur. …Thus, I can shoot you from a position of safety. And I will if you insist on standing in the way of my mass driver research.”

“Is that so?” Quenser smiled in self-deprecation while pressed against the backside of the tree. Sladder was exactly right on all counts. “I get using the confusion to fake your death and leave the battlefield. With so many mutilated corpses, no one’s going to bother to identify them all. But what are you going to do about the Retro Gunner? If the Pilot Elite is still running wild after seeing the ghost, you could always be killed. Not even your genius plotting can do anything about that. And the odds of it happening seem greater than being struck by lightning while outdoors.”

“Why would I tell you that?”

“So you do have some trick keeping it from attacking you.”

Steal that and they could settle things with the Retro Gunner. Carrying a trump card that kept the Object from attacking would allow the Legitimacy Kingdom to go on the attack without fearing the old First Generation.

That meant Quenser’s top priority was Sladder Honeysuckle who had all the answers.

He had to kill that man to pave the way for everything else.

“By the way, Sladder, didn’t you say you shot Azureyfear Winchell since she was in the way of your jailbreak?”

“I did say that.”

“And you said you used a silly bluff to kill her since she was so much more skilled than you. You said you got that sister to freeze up for just a moment because you lied about detonating the mobile device by Heivia’s chest.”

“Yes, and?”

“Here’s the thing.” Quenser kept his tone light while he held Elina close and pressed his back against the tree. “You seem to be getting a hard-on over how badly you outplayed everyone, but I haven’t encrypted this radio. Every radio on both sides can read this signal. And, Sladder, you seem to think you played a perfect game using both sides to your advantage, but was your control of the board really as flawless as you thought?”

“?”

“So.”

This was war.

Had Sladder really thought Quenser’s actions here were entirely meaningless?

“What do you think is going to happen to you if the very-much-alive Big Bro Heivia and your own sister Louisiana hear all this and track you down using your GPS signal?”

Sladder Honeysuckle unnaturally crumpled to the ground before Quenser even heard the gunshot.

It took a moment before the sound of bursting explosives arrived from the side.

This kind of dirty war really was more Heivia’s thing. Sladder had missed while using a sniper rifle packed full of sensors, but Heivia had accurately shot right through his target’s thigh during a snowy night. He would only have been able to see silhouettes through the snow, but he could identify his target from the sniper rifle Sladder himself had said he had.

The mass driver engineer’s strong will could be seen in how he refused to let go of the sniper rifle even now.

But then his hand and the sniper rifle’s grip were destroyed by another shot.

He curled up in agony on the snow while someone else trudged toward him. It was Louisiana holding her small self-defense handgun.

“You absolute disgrace!! Using your tech for the public good is the bare minimum required of a genius to avoid being labeled an eccentric. But you sold it off for your personal gain, so you don’t even deserve to live!!”

“Heivia, restrain her! We can’t kill him yet! He still has a countermeasure against the Retro Gunner!!”

While Sladder had tried to build a mass driver for his own purposes, Louisiana had constructed her space elevator to protect everyone on the earth.

Quenser didn’t need to hide any longer.

He was still on the lookout for mines or bombs buried in the snow, but he doubted Sladder would have stuck with the sniper rifle then. Sladder was a strategist. If he had plenty of mines around him, he would have rolled around in pain after the initial shot to the leg, luring Heivia in to step on one of the mines.

He didn’t need any help to stop the bleeding.

At 15 below, his bloody wound would freeze on its own.

Quenser, Heivia, Louisiana, and Elina – the survivors of the ghost panic – surrounded him and he weakly looked up at them with a bullet hole in his hand and leg.

“There is an antidote.”

“I thought as much. The sense of smell is said to be 20 thousand times more powerful than taste, but it’s also very delicate since mixing different compounds easily changes their nature entirely. Perfume and artificial fragrances would be the best examples of that. …You couldn’t let yourself be affected by the ghost while out here, but you weren’t wearing a gasmask or a hazmat suit to cover all your skin. That meant you must have another chemical compound that negates its effects.”

For the Retro Gunner, it might be even simpler. The Elite was only imaging the smell due to their knowledge of the Ghost Changer, so tearing down that mental image would be enough to bring them back under control.

Quenser crouched down and stuck his hand in the neck of Sladder’s prisoner uniform. He tore something away. The man had worn it around his neck like a good-luck charm, but it actually contained a mixture of a few herbal leaves and flower petals.

Hadn’t he said some small flowers grew in his prison cell?

The human nose couldn’t detect it, but it wasn’t meant to be smelled with the nose.

“A sachet, huh? Pretty romantic, but it doesn’t suit you at all.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. All engineers should be romantics. Even if no one else understands them.”

Quenser could never agree with that.

Maybe this man was the ultimate form of a designer, but he had gone in a different direction than the boy was interested in.

“What will you do with me now?”

“I don’t know and frankly I don’t care what happens to you,” said Quenser, slowly straightening his knees to stand up. Almost like he had lost interest in Sladder. “So I’m going to make a bet with you. And I promise you, I will accept either outcome.”

“?”

“If.”

Quenser brought his usual radio to his mouth. But who was he talking to? His plan to use an unencrypted signal to share information with Heivia and Louisiana had already paid off.

But Quenser was definitely speaking to someone other than Sladder.

“If ''you'' really are dead, then no one will deliver a killing blow to Sladder. But if ''you'' aren’t quite dead, then I’d say you have a right to revenge. So it’s your choice. I will leave this all up to fate.”

Sladder seemed to finally understand what this was about.

Quenser and Heivia turned their backs on the villain. Louisiana proved to be surprisingly kindhearted since she gently covered Elina’s eyes. She looked back toward her brother just once, but her duty as a researcher must have won out. She tore her gaze from him and followed the potatoes with Elina.

And Quenser, Heivia, and Louisiana spoke in unison.

“My money is on Azureyfear being alive.”

Wherever she had heard them from, an anti-materiel rifle fired in the distance and a life was snuffed out faster than the speed of sound.