Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume4 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 13===

Quenser and Heivia stood near the very top of the Deep Optical’s spherical main body. The filter cloth was bent in a U shape around one of the relatively small cannons. It was supporting them in the place of a rope.

“Shit!! The surface is wet so I keep slipping! If we fall from this height, even the ocean is deadly!!”

“You should be thanking your luck that there’s seawater here to slip on! If the residual heat from a laser firing was still here, we might have been turned into human torches!!”

The two had not simply climbed up the side of the spherical main body.

They did not have the time for that and even if they had attempted it, the magnetic sensors and other sensors would have detected them and they would have been immediately shaken off.

They had taken a simple shortcut.

“I can’t believe you would think to wrap the filter around a cannon on the top in the instant the Deep Optical lost its balance. As always, your ideas use our lives as collateral!!”

“But thanks to that, we could use the Deep Optical righting itself to pull us to the top all at once.”

The princess’s attack had brought the Deep Optical down by 80 degrees. In other words, it had very nearly fallen horizontally to the ocean surface. There had only been just over 20 meters between the ocean surface and the top of the spherical main body. With a weight on the end of the filter, they had been able to throw it that distance.

“Anyway, we need to hurry to the main cannon! When the Deep Optical has had to right itself like that previously it has focused on evasion and disturbance tactics, and does not use its main cannon for a few minutes. But once its automatic scan is over, it will begin the fight anew. If that happens with us here, the radiant heat will roast us!!”

“What exactly are we going to do!? The main cannon is covered in thick armor. Our rifle and explosives can’t damage it!!” shouted Heivia as he headed after Quenser.

Quenser arrived at a portion of the main cannon’s base to the upper right of the Object. He pulled some Hand Axe plastic explosive from his backpack, tore off a small bit, and stuck it on the side of the base. Once he was done, he stabbed an electric fuse into it.

Heivia brought his hand to his forehead.

“That’s nowhere near enough to get through Object armor!!”

“You help too, Heivia!!” shouted back Quenser as he tossed a package of explosive to Heivia. “We don’t have time!! We need to set up 20 more just like what I did here!!”

“God dammit. This isn’t going to do anything!!” swore Heivia as he moved up next to Quenser.

As he continued the work, Quenser said, “Make the explosives small. Don’t make them too big. That would be pointless.”

“What? Don’t we need them to be as big as possible to have even the slightest chance of doing any damage to the armor?”

“I’m not trying to break through the surface.”

They heard a metallic creaking noise.

The Deep Optical’s main cannon was starting to perform minute adjustments to its aim.

“Time’s up, Quenser!! If we don’t get out of here, the heat’ll kill us!!”

“Just 7 more!!”

“We’re gonna get roasted!!”

“3…2…Okay, done!!”

Quenser stood up and immediately started running down the side of the spherical main body. In other words, he ran down a steep slope heading to the sea.

Heivia lost his cool.

“You have got to be kidding me! You don’t have a gentler means of escape!?”

“Hurry!! If that main cannon fires, we’ll be burned more horribly than a newlywed wife’s home cooking!!”

After seeing Quenser run off ahead, Heivia followed suit while half in tears.

The slope of the spherical main body gradually grew steeper and Heivia’s feet eventually got tangled up on each other. He just barely managed to get the footing to take one last step and leap towards the sea.

He jumped from a height of over 30 meters.

He felt weightless for a few seconds, but an unpleasant pressure soon filled his stomach.

He struck the ocean surface in the next instant. Heivia felt a shock more powerful than if he had run full tilt into a sheet of plywood.

He very nearly passed out in the ocean, but a pure white flash of light that seemed to crush his eyes forced back his consciousness.

The Deep Optical had fired its main cannon.

“Cough!! Cough cough!!”

“Heivia, you have your oxygen tank, right!? Don’t panic and use it!!”

Heivia heard Quenser’s advice over the radio, but he could not respond. Quenser then reached a hand over from nearby and brought the mouthpiece to Heivia’s mouth.

Once Heivia had regained oxygen and calm, he wrapped his hands around Quenser’s neck.

“Die!! This is why I never want to go along with your horrible plans!!”

“Stop it, Heivia!! Are you in such a panic you want to cling to a guy!? Our job isn’t over yet! If we do nothing, the Deep Optical will defeat the princess!!”

“But what can we do with those tiny explosives?” asked Heivia as he finally removed his hands from Quenser’s neck.

Quenser pulled out his radio and said, “Remember all the information we gathered on the Object in the Loyauté district? The Deep Optical is a mass of laser technology with unbelievable firepower, but that also means it contains a mass of delicate equipment inside. They have to worry about shocks to the outside and even the G forces created by high-speed movements.”

“And?”

“Just making the armor thick isn’t enough to protect that delicate equipment.”

Quenser moved his thumb repeatedly, and each time an explosive noise reverberated through the water.

The princess aboard the Baby Magnum heard every radio transmission between the two boys and could see the explosions.

And she probably knew the exact numbers involved better than the two idiots who had set up the explosives.

That level of explosion could not so much as scratch the Object’s armor.

In fact, it was not even enough to blow up your average tank.

(What are they after? I hope that is not all they have. If so, I wasted my time helping them do it!!)

She then heard Quenser continue his explanation over the radio.

“That is why it has devices installed to electronically absorb the shocks. They keep a large gap in the armor and any shocks to the outer layer are sensed with laser vibration detectors. They can then counterbalance the shockwave running through the armor and cushion the inner armor. The shock will transfer through the countless pillars, but the lasers are faster. By cutting off any shocks that exceed the allowable limit, they can protect the delicate equipment.”

“That just means their armor is more of a pain to deal with than just a thick wall, right? That just means the explosions will do even less damage!”

“Not necessarily,” replied Quenser immediately as he continued the seemingly meaningless explosions.

The princess frowned as she zigzagged the Baby Magnum around.

She still could not tell what he was after.

“The laser vibration detectors are meant to detect vibrations coming in from outside, but it is best not to move around too much if you want to up the accuracy. In other words, if you have it reacting to every little vibration, you run the risk of a delayed response to a larger shock you truly need to deal with. To keep the accuracy high, the shocks too small to have any negative effects on the delicate equipment are overlooked.”

As the high heat caused when the lasers passed through ran the risk of disturbing the liquid, it was likely that either a fast-acting coolant was used or the liquid prism itself was divided into cartridges. But what if vibrations came from somewhere the designers never expected?

“The explosives send just a slight shock into the armor. By pumping in small shocks like that repeatedly, we can shift the position of the delicate equipment bit by bit. It may not even amount to a hundredth of a millimeter.”

“What good is something on a level only a craftsman cares about?”

“Plenty. The liquid prism collects the optical energy for the main cannon. The light is bent by intentionally altering the density of the liquid inside the container by electrochemical means. By sending repeated vibrations into it, the intentionally-altered density will become uniform. And that means…”

Each individual shock made it to the prism.

And the result was as follows:

In the next instant, the Deep Optical’s main cannon became wrapped in a brilliant flash of light and disappeared.

At that moment, the energy from 8 carbon dioxide lasers within the Deep Optical’s main cannon was being gathered at the base of the giant main cannon.

Lasers were emitted by exposing excited electrons to external light. The stronger that light, the stronger the emitted laser.

In a way, the Deep Optical’s main cannon was a laser beam weapon that created a massive stimulated emission by pumping in the optical energy of 8 standard main cannon laser beams.

A mere mirror could not be used to gather the energy from all eight.

It required a device called a liquid prism. A special liquid inside a clear container that had its density intentionally altered electrochemically so that the light was bent like a sugar sculpture.

The liquid prism could freely bend the light with changes in the liquid’s density, but without an irregularity to the density in the clear container, it could not function properly.

What would happen if a set shock was continually applied to that clear container containing a liquid with an altered density?

The answer was simple.

The shaking of the container’s contents would even out the density of the liquid that was supposed to be of irregular density.

And without that irregular density, the light would no longer be bent.

The light that was supposed to be bent would pass straight through it.

And this would tear the Deep Optical’s main cannon apart from the inside.

The light of the explosion assaulted Quenser and Heivia’s eyeballs even through their closed eyelids.

“Gwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

Quenser shouted in pain, but he breathed a sigh of relief at the same time. His plan had worked. The Deep Optical’s main cannon had been blown off, and the energy of the explosion had to have done serious damage to the Object as a whole. Even if the entire Object had not been destroyed, it was no match for the princess without its main cannon.

But…

“What…?” muttered Heivia in confusion.

The Deep Optical tilted to the side. The energy from the explosion was pushing it to the side and it was beginning to capsize. Not only had the main cannon been torn apart from the inside, but it had completely melted and the armor of the main body had been torn up near where it had been.

There was no way it could continue fighting.

In fact, it was entirely possible it was too damaged to use its lasers and right itself.

And the Deep Optical did not even try to recover from its tilt.

It simply rotated around.

…Almost as if it was switching to another mode.

“Wha-…!?”

[[Image:HO_v04_15.jpg|thumb]]

Its silhouette changed. The two large parts on the back of the spherical main body opened up and spread out like curved wings. It was still hovering above the surface of the water, but it was no longer using air cushions; it was using nothing but the power of lasers. Lasers were reflected between the ocean’s surface and the bottom of the craft to explosively expand the air. The ends of the portions that had functioned as “legs” up until then opened up and lenses for laser weapons could be seen within.

While staring in blank shock, Heivia shouted, “It transformed!! What the hell!? Are the reactor and cockpit installed like gyroscopes!?”

“Dammit.”

They had thought it was finally over.

They had thought they could return to the maintenance base zone and continue their vacation.

But…

“Does this mean we’ve only now made the Deep Optical get serious about this!?”

They had finally reached a turning point.

The Capitalist Corporations’ Second Generation Object began its counterattack.