Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 14===

There may have been 36 thousand kilometers in between, but the Princess and the Baby Magnum were waiting at the space elevator’s ground base.

The First Generation’s anti-air lasers could not reach that far, but so what?

They only had to make use of some other form of power.

“Ksssshhhh!! What the hell? Ksshh, what’s going on here!?”

Heivia had managed to join Quenser at some point and he grabbed at the other boy’s shoulders. In zero-g, that nearly put them both into a spin.

He quickly used the extravehicular activity unit on his back to steady himself before continuing.

“What did you tell the Princess to do!? Ksshh, what is that down there on the surface!?”

“Static electricity.”

Quenser’s answer was unbelievable.

Heivia seriously doubted rubbing a balloon against your hair down on earth could affect anything out in space.

But the student had more to say.

“Listen, the Princess’s Baby Magnum uses a static electricity propulsion device. Even if it also sprays a repellant, that’s still enough static to keep a 200 thousand tons afloat. With that much power, we can use it.”

“Wait, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“But she’s surrounded by cracked desert as far as the eye can see. The desert is primarily made of quartz, iron sand, and probably small amounts of some other minerals. The quality isn’t good enough to ship it out for industrial use, but that doesn’t matter to us. When sand is floating in the air, the size and weight of the grains affects the covered area. A space with quartz floating around is a lot like a glass fiber duster.”

Did it cover an area of 10km in every direction, or was it of 100km?

Either way, static electricity would accumulate there. Even commercial carpet could store more than 10,000 volts, so how many orders of magnitude higher would a space this vast contain?

“And any container will spill its contents once its capacity is surpassed,” said Quenser. “Just like lightning, it will scatter something very powerful along with the light and sound.”

This was what he had wanted.

“Static. A thick EM wall is released toward the sky!!”

It seemed to cover the surface of the World’s End’s spherical main body. Sparks scattered from it like fireworks.

Or maybe it was more like carelessly sticking a metal spoon in the microwave.

“Wait, what happened to the Princess!?” asked Heivia.

“Not even a nuke can destroy an Object. And Generation Ones in particular were designed with EMPs in mind, so this won’t do any real damage to her.”

That was all Quenser said before changing the subject.

“The light can reach us,” he said. “The lights down there are leaving the earth. You can see the flames of war caused by the Objects, right? Light is a form of EM, so if we can see the light, we know EM waves can reach us!”

But Heivia’s response sounded skeptical.

The threat had not been eliminated.

“Wait, is that all?”

There had been sparks.

That might have brought down the average tank or armored truck.

But.

“Sending those deadly EM waves all the way up here is impressive. You even managed to hit your target. But that thing’s an Object, which, like you just said, not even a nuke can destroy! You can probably aim somewhat well using the elevator’s wire as a guide, but you still can’t specifically target the Object from the ground. How can you possibly break through its armor like this!?”

“Not to worry.” Quenser smiled a little. If he could still smile, it meant everything was still going according to plan. “I thought of all that. Did you forget, Heivia, that the elevator controls this region of space? Now, do you remember how it launches its cars straight up? It caused us a lot of trouble down in the Turkana District’s desert, if you recall.”

The change occurred primarily at a single point.

Something floated by right in front of the World’s End. Maybe it had been in a transportation container caught in the fighting and maybe it had been dumped by the elevator, but that was a spare elevator car slowly rotating through space.

It bumped lightly into the Object’s spherical main body. That was no coincidence since Quenser’s Hand Axe plastic explosive had pushed it there. Either the nuke-resistant Object had ignored it as harmless, or the EM waves had interfered with its sensors.

However, the bus-sized machine had a certain device installed.

“It converts EM waves into electricity.”

Space was filled with a white flash of light brighter than a lightning bolt.

“Gahhh!!”

The explosive light was enough to blind someone, but Quenser could still hear everything clearly. That was probably because he was hearing the others through his helmet’s communicator. He opened his mouth while trusting his voice would reach them in the same way.

He felt pain more in the back of his head than in his eyes.

He felt like he was going to vomit in his helmet if he did not distract himself.

“Gh…ordinary lightbulbs have a vacuum inside so the filament won’t burn, but there are a few exceptions.”

“What is – ksshh – your point!?”

“A flashbulb. By filling the glass ball with oxygen and passing electricity through it, the filament is instantly burned through to create a massive amount of light. Doesn’t that remind you a lot of things here? We’ve strangled it with the very high-density oxygen it sprayed everywhere!!”

“Kssshhh, you did this while we were trapped inside that lightbulb!!!???”

The filament was made into a thin thread so it was easier to burn through, but the Object was much the same. It had more than just the spherical main body. It had cannons, propulsion devices, tanks, and many other components sticking out.

Not to mention that Heivia, Myonri, and the others had worked so hard to fire missiles at it.

The nuke-resistant Object may have just shrugged that off and it may have only created scratches not even a few millimeters deep on its surface, but those slight claw marks created pieces thinner than pencil shavings that stuck out from its surface. Electricity gathered around the ends of those and they burned like a filament.

Once the bright white flash faded away, the Object was flipped over and floating toward empty space.

The damage must have been concentrated on the parts sticking out. The oxygen tanks connected like headphones had been torn through and its two main cannons were bent. The heat in the main body had yet to cool, so its surface was still glowing orange.

None of it had been meaningless.

Quenser had just one thing left to say.

“It’s over.”