Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume19 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 13===

How much time was actually taken from him?

30 seconds? More than a minute? Quenser’s senses were blown away and his panicked mind lost track of time. In an ordinary life back in a safe country, that might have been an insignificant amount of time, but it was a very long time indeed during a battle with guns aimed at each other. That kind of time was enough to turn things around when outnumbered. The last remaining member of Bad Garage would be able to shoot each member of Quenser’s group one at a time.

Quenser focused on his backpack while trying to grab the boy and turn around to protect the boy with his back, but he wasn’t even sure of that. His eyes and ears weren’t working and his mind was so confused he couldn’t even feel the boy he knew had to be in his arms.

A flat white afterimage sat before his eyes for quite a while.

And eventually…

“Gh…”

He heard a muffled bloody groan.

But it didn’t come from his own mouth.

At close range – truly less than a meter – the man who had thrown the stun grenade from the maintenance hatch was doubled over and unmoving.

Quenser had never seen the young man before.

Putana had immediately readied her combat knife at her hip and then stabbed him in the side.

That special Elite could sense people’s gazes, so had she approached the source of that young man’s gaze even with her traditional senses knocked out?

He could have aimed directly at Quenser, but he must have also glanced over at the others, including Putana.

At first, he stared down at his own wound in disbelief.

Then he silently looked up and smiled at Quenser directly in front of him. He held a switch in his hand. Radios generally didn’t work in the tunnel, but they worked just fine when only a few meters away from the target.

“Happy…new world,” said the smiling young man.

Quenser used a hand to cover the eyes of the boy in his arms.

A dry gunshot rang out.

With the blade still stabbed deep in his side, Putana had pulled the small clasp-like trigger on the knife’s grip to fire a bullet directly into him. The impact knocked him away, forcibly pulling the knife from him. Its serrated back widened the wound further.

The young man collapsed on his side and Quenser kicked some kind of switch away from him.

He did not get back up.

But he did speak through a bloody smile.

“If you…pursued us this far…you must understand this world is built on lies.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a nobody from Deyeria Village. A village destroyed by the earthquake and lava of an Object disaster.”

Quenser had never heard of that.

It had never been mentioned before.

Not the disaster and not the village.

The young man had smiled thinly. Maybe this was why. He had already lost everything he had hoped to protect, so he had nothing left to lose. So he had hoped to cause a disaster in a home country to force everyone to look at the thing they were all trying so hard to ignore.

“It’s your turn to suffer now.”

“This is already over. This wasn’t even a war. The higher ups are starting to realize what the Objects are doing to our planet, so sooner or later they will start to work to prevent it. This won’t turn into a global disaster like you think it will.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. An Object disaster is coming to Rome.”

Quenser glanced over at the reactor. He had removed the detonator, but he was not a bomb squad expert. There was always a chance there was a second or third detonator.

But the young man rejected that idea.

“That was just insurance. Detonating that was our Plan B if things didn’t go as planned. We’d have a hard time claiming one of those 200 thousand ton behemoths did it if we just detonated a reactor, right? So that wasn’t Plan A.”

“What? You’ve still got something else up your sleeve!?”

“Wait, Heivia. He’s already dying. You can’t treat him too roughly.”

Myonri quickly stopped the pissed noble. But she wasn’t particularly worried about this villain’s rights – she just didn’t want him to die before they got more information out of him.

“You can find plenty of mineral springs around Rome. That means there’s a lot of magma spread out across a wide area underground. Rome is an unstable area since it shares the same magma reservoir as Mount Vesuvius.”

But the young man made no attempt to hide it.

Did that mean it was too late to stop it?

“We only needed to gather enough Objects here. Septimontium wasn’t enough since they only follow their rails or separate their reactor for greater mobility. So we needed to create a reason for the other world powers to send in their own Objects.”

“You don’t mean…” Quenser understood now. “The Princess and Oh Ho Ho were the real trigger!?”

Once they arrived on land, the water filling the cup to the brim would overflow. A single extra drop would exceed the surface tension’s limits and ruin everything.

Quenser grabbed his radio and shouted into it.

“This is Quenser! Princess, can you hear me!? Princess, Baby Magnum!! Dammit!?”

The young man smiled thinly from the ground.

He knew radio signals were useless in these thick tunnels. Especially if you hoped to contact the surface.

“Checkmate.”

Something shook. The ground disconcertingly pushed up below their feet.

“Happy…new world. Now we’ve rid the world of its lies. Welcome to a new, more transparent world. No one will ever believe the great scam of the clean wars again.”

“…”

“Drown in the true face of war – an endless world war.”