Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume19 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 11===

They needed to reach a depth of at least 60m.

Heivia guided them through subway tunnels decorated with the ruins of a religion predating the cross. They stopped their motorcycle and snowmobile-like one-person vehicles a short distance away from their destination. They of course kept them near the wall so they wouldn’t be in the way if the trains started back up.

“Th-this place feels different from before. These goddess statues aren’t Roman mythology, are they?” 

“These are from before Greek mythology was mixed in. We might be seeing older ruins the deeper we go.”

Myonri and Putana held an intellectual conversation, but the two sweaty idiots didn’t have rich enough minds to observe the ruins and ponder ancient religions.

They were focused on the more immediate problem.

“How did Bad Garage get the reactor down this far? Their truck couldn’t have been small.”

“They probably held a lighter to the ceiling to activate the fire alarm. The tunnels down here are like an ant colony, remember? So there are plenty of ways to keep the trains from passing through a specific section. The trains get stopped all the time, so no one will even question trouble that causes a 5 or 10 minute delay.”

Quenser pulled some Hand Axe from his backpack and molded a ball a little larger than a chicken egg. The Faith Organization had been pursuing them before, but they had no data on what kind of weaponry Bad Garage used. And based on Bad Garage’s actions, it was unlikely they were going to like the answer.

“This is an enclosed tunnel, so I so hope it isn’t gas or a bioweapon.”

“Teacher, couldn’t they have sowed chaos through Rome much more easily if they had toys like that? They need to use an Object component to bring down the home country, but they could have still made things easier for themselves before reaching that point.”

“Good point.”

Quenser recalled how Bad Garage had in fact used cruise missiles and FAE bombs. He doubted they would have kept anything in reserve at that point.

“What’s your guess, Putana?”

“In an enclosed tunnel? A flamethrower scares me the most.”

“Dammit, can’t I at least get a painless death!?”

Quenser and Putana continued their conversation while Heivia and Myonri opened up black plastic items resembling bento boxes. No, after spinning them around like butterfly knives, they transformed into T-shaped submachineguns. Hiding guns below casual clothing wasn’t easy.

Meanwhile, Putana’s weapon of choice was a combat knife with a blade length of more than 40cm. Just as Quenser wondered if she was a close-quarters combat specialist, he noticed two small holes in the grip. It included a gimmick that fired a bullet in the direction the blade was pointing.

After walking a bit further down the underground tunnel full of ancient goddess statues, the brown girl came to a stop.

“I sense some eyes.”

“Kh.”

“But not human ones. They might have mechanical sensors set up.”

This didn’t appear to be a standard security camera. It stood on a tripod near the wall to avoid being hit by a train. It was probably a Bad Garage toy. Putana led them along the opposite wall so they could get past without entering its “field of view” and then they circled behind the tripod and yanked out the cable to silence the sensor so they didn’t have to worry about it if they needed to make a quick getaway. All the goddess statues provided plenty of hiding spots as they advanced.

They were entering Bad Garage territory now.

The tension grew while Heivia and Myonri moved out ahead with their full-auto guns at the ready.

Quenser looked back at the sensor he had disabled himself.

“They must not have all that many people. Sadly, a living guard is a lot cheaper than a high-quality sensor. They’re using money to replace old-fashioned manpower.”

“Convenient fantasies can grow without you realizing it. And then they cloud your vision. ‘Probably’ is fine, but avoid assuming something ‘must be true’. Your own delusion could get you killed.”

They took out a few more sensors on tripods or duct taped to the ceiling as they continued down the dimly-lit tunnel. Without advice from Putana based on her scopophobia, they would have been caught at some point.

And…

“There they are,” said Heivia, coming to a stop and hiding behind a goddess statue by the wall.

About 50m ahead, they could see something else moving across the tunnel: human silhouettes. They doubted this was just some tourists who had gotten lost down here. These silhouettes moved in groups of two, wore night-vision goggles over their eyes, and held weapons equipped with suppressers larger than a 2-liter drink bottle. Their PDWs were more compact than an A4 sheet of paper and they had forcibly attached suppressors larger than the weapons themselves. The PDWs were highly functional and looked somehow futuristic, but at that small size, a large man had to hunch his back when holding it against his shoulder. You couldn’t actually hold one of those in each hand and fire them with arms extended like the star of an action movie.

“(Their ‘eyes’ are missing us. They’re passing right over us.)”

But that didn’t mean they could raise a war cry and charge in guns blazing. They didn’t know how many of them there were, how far along they were on prepping the reactor for detonation, or anything for that matter. Did Bad Garage even value their own lives? In the worst case, they could trigger the explosion as soon as they spotted intruders.

After following Putana’s instructions and waiting for the group of two to leave, Quenser’s group approached a maintenance door on the wall. The subway tunnels were spread out like an ant colony, but there were also connecting corridors and small rooms for workers not found on the subway maps. Finding another way around was easy.

After circling around in a large fan shape, they spotted a few more guards. By observing the distribution of guards, they could find the central point Bad Garage hoped to hide.

The reactor would be there.

“(Based on the distribution we’ve seen, there are probably 20 or 30 of them. And no periodic radio-ins. Those tripods had communication cables laid out on the ground, right? Their radios can’t reach in these thick tunnels.)”

“Meaning?”

“We can kill them and the rest won’t notice. Now’s our chance.”

It was time for a war of courage and kindness.

Heivia and Myonri aimed their T-shaped submachineguns from a distance, but they were only there for support if things went wrong. They weren’t equipped with suppressors like Bad Garage was, so a single shot would be loud enough to raise the alarm. Instead, Putana made sure there were no eyes on her, snuck up behind the pair of guards, and used her knife to stab them in the back and slit their throat in the blink of an eye.

That Elite fought in a different way from the Princess and Oh Ho Ho.

“All done, teacher.”

“I’ll help.”

They wrapped the bodies up in a blue tarp found nearby and dragged them over into a transformer work room. They couldn’t fully get the pool of blood off the floor, so they instead covered it up with a new construction tarp. Heivia and Myonri removed the thick suppressors from the enemy weapons and used duct tape to affix them to their own weapons.

“Those aren’t the right size connector. Are you sure that will work?”

“It’s better than nothing. This should help more than holding a pillow over the muzzle.”

They had a lot more options with the guns available to them

This was the enemy’s territory, so the enemy would have the advantage in a direct firefight. But if they used Putana’s ability to sense people’s gazes and only made surprise attacks from the enemy’s blind spots, they could take out Bad Garage before the enemy could even counterattack. Putana’s ability to sense gazes was extremely valuable since it gave a surprise attack a nearly 100% success rate.

“Nope, doesn’t work.”

Quenser had bent over and checked through the corpses’ equipment. The enemy did have radios on them, but as Heivia had predicted, they only produced static. The enemy’s inability to communicate in these deep tunnels was a good thing, but that also made it harder to get a read on Bad Garage’s overall movements.

How close were they to detonating the reactor? How did they intend to detonate it without functioning radios?

“U-um, there’s something…up ahead.”

Jack-of-all-trades Myonri had pulled the short straw yet again.

More than 30m ahead was a junction where several tunnels intersected. This was the only place this deep, so did the tracks converge in a bowl shape? The space was a lot wider open than one would expect for that. It wasn’t a bad spot to leave a 10m ball. None of the trains would hit it while it was there.

The goddess statues and decorative marble columns may have been moved to clear out that wide a space.

Putana pushed her binoculars into Quenser’s hands.

“Teacher.”

“Looks like there’s a digital timer on it. so is it timed? But that might not be the only trigger. They might be able to flip a switch to detonate it right away in an emergency. Either way, the countdown has already begun. That means it’s ready to detonate at any time.”

However.

That was not what Myonri had been talking about.

An oblong piece of metal had come to an emergency stop in that wide-open space. It was a train. It must have been stopped to allow the Septimontiums into the tunnel, but this was not a cargo train. It was an ordinary subway train. That meant it had lots of windows along the side, revealing an array of worried faces.

A quick estimate suggested 100 to 200 passengers.

Armed men slowly circled that large cage full of hostages.

From this side, they could see five teams of two. They could get more accurate if they had Putana check the number of eyes, but there were probably more than just those ten. Myonri tearfully looked down at her submachinegun. That was too many to take out with just two submachineguns. And if a single one of them escaped, they could start slaughtering the hostages or just detonate the reactor.

Quenser found it curious that the guards were only around the train and none were inside the train itself. Was there some reason they didn’t want to be in there? Had they maybe installed bombs on each car’s ceiling to prevent a revolt?

Whatever the case, Heivia summed up the situation nicely.

“Well, this sucks.”

Just then, Quenser grimaced. Then he took a closer look through the binoculars.

“Teacher?”

Putana was unique even among Elites for her ability to sense the number and direction of people’s gazes. That sense was limited to any eyes on her, but she may have been able to tell Quenser wasn’t observing the reactor or the guards.

He was observing the train. There was a small boy among all the hostages looking worriedly out the window. His artificial vision analyzed the lip movements and displayed the words as text.

''“They do exist.”

The boy was clutching something tight.

Had he bought it at a festival stall, or was it part of a costume? Regardless, it was a cheap hero mask. He would be here for the carnival, after all. The child clutched it tight and stared out the window.

The binoculars converted his lips movements into words.

Those words were displayed at the bottom of Quenser’s vision like a movie’s subtitles.

The train had come to a sudden stop. Their lives were at the mercy of an armed group. The Faith Organization military and police showed no sign of coming to rescue them. Work was underway to detonate a bomb large enough to submerge Rome in a sea of lava. No one could have blamed the boy for losing all faith in the world.

Quenser’s group was only here to stop the destruction of Rome.

If they were forced to choose between the reactor and the train, they would have to choose the reactor. That might seem sensible, but this was not their city and they were still the kind of bastards who deserved to be spat on.

And yet.

Even so.

''“Heroes do exist.”

Quenser Barbotage sighed and lowered the binoculars.

He stared straight ahead and spoke to the others.

“You heard the boy. Raise your hand if you wanna be a hero.”

“Of course we’re all going, dammit.”