Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 1===

“Pant, pant.”

Short, frantic breaths continued without end.

The city was buried in rubble. None of the buildings retained their roofs and the ones with all four walls were rare. Some had not even kept their box-like shape, so only a wall or two stood up like a monolith commemorating the failures of mankind. Those walls of what used to be reinforced concrete filled the wasteland.

And that was where Quenser and some other Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers were running for their lives.

They were completely out of breath and they were panting like thirsty dogs.

“Pant, pant, pant!! Pant, pant, pant, pant, pant, pant, pant, pant!!”

Behind them, dust from the collapsed building materials rose like a cumulonimbus cloud. But they knew that obvious “gazes” were piercing them from beyond that obscuring curtain. And they knew they were being pursued by the possessors of those abnormal and clearly inhuman “glowing eyes”.

A continuous metallic sound followed them.

None of them knew what exactly was pursuing them. Everyone who had been dragged back into the dust had died.

There had been no exceptions.

“Dammit…”

Quenser desperately ran while sticking his tongue out like a starving dog. Without stopping, he chucked some Hand Axe plastic explosive behind him and used his radio to detonate it.

There was an earsplitting explosion, but the dust did not clear up. And whatever was beyond it did not stop their advance.

“Dammit!! What the hell is this!? They’re clearly eating people…no, are they actually laying their eggs in them!?”

Quenser trembled in fear and his legs nearly gave out, but someone tugged on his arm. The handsome, black-haired man then shouted in his ear.

“Don’t stop running!! If we escape to the landing zone, the chopper will pick us up!!”

The sound of rotors beating the air passed by over their heads.

It was a Legitimacy Kingdom transport helicopter. The side cargo door was wide open and a ground support Gatling gun known as the Crocodile was sticking out.

His awful friend Heivia yelled angrily over the radio.

“Keep your heads down as you run!! I’ll be shooting from up here, but don’t you dare stop. If you’re late, we’re leaving you behind!!”

A solid block of sound burst out with no noticeable gap between individual shots. The variable gear switched over to the highest setting which sent 7.62mm bullets into the many forms beyond the dust at a rate of 8000 a minute.

Orange sparks covered everything.

But the bizarre silhouettes that looked like insects or armor did not stop moving.

They gained ground on Quenser’s group running along the surface.

The great noise and light was enough for the humans to instinctually shrink back. When fired from above, the Crocodile had a similar effect to a lightning strike or a stun grenade. Quenser cowered a little even though he knew this was covering fire from an ally, but the handsome man grabbed his arm and pulled. He almost seemed to drag Quenser along as he ran.

An unnatural stream of fluorescent pink smoke rose up ahead.	

It was about two hundred meters away. That smoke grenade signified the landing zone. The escape helicopter was already waiting to leave. In fact, it was floating a few dozen centimeters above the ground. The pilot was getting ahead of himself from fear.

They were going to be left behind.

That fear pushed Quenser onward. He swung both arms up as he ran.

“Wait! Please wait!!”

As he shouted, the soldiers right behind him were overtaken by the dust and swallowed up. He could not look back anymore. Quenser and the handsome man ran with all their might. They climbed over waist-height rubble and ran smoothly forward. Finally, they arrived at the landing zone.

The dust was right behind them.

But the helicopter started to take off as if the pilot could not stand it any longer.

Quenser and the handsome man grabbed onto the landing gear and dangled from the metal rods. The helicopter quickly ascended and they were carried into the empty sky with no lifeline. The gray dust seemed to graze the bottom of their military boots as it filled the landing zone.

“Did we…make it?”

The handsome man crawled up first before reaching down and pulling Quenser onboard. Several other helicopters rose from the city of rubble. Heivia was leaning out nearby, still firing his Crocodile Gatling gun.

A voice arrived over the radio.

“Wing Master to all helicopters. Twenty seconds until the heat-treated missile strike. If you don’t want to be thrown from your helicopters, close the cargo door or fasten in with a harness! Brace for impact! They’re about to blow!!”

An ominous wriggling seemed to compress space itself more than destroy the target.

The gray-filled surface was painted over with a different color: a blazing orange. The explosive flames covered an area of four square kilometers.

A crosswind tossed Quenser and the handsome man’s helicopter around like a paper airplane. The handsome man was just about thrown from the open cargo door, but Quenser somehow managed to grab his arm.

“Is it…over?” blankly muttered the handsome man as he leaned out of the helicopter.

The great explosion had eliminated all trace of the dust.

Some blackened masses had been scattered everywhere. That was what remained of “them”, the creatures beyond the gray curtain. Heivia fired the Gatling gun down on them, but they showed no sign of running away. Those were nothing but corpses.

After seeing that, Quenser finally wiped the sweat from his chin with the back of his hand.

And a smile found its way to his lips.

But…

“Wait…a second,” muttered the handsome man.

His head was pointed in the wrong direction. Everyone else was looking down at the outcome on the surface, but he alone was looking in the exact opposite direction: straight up.

A moment later, a shadow covered everything.

It was almost like the entire area had been covered by a giant roof.

What was it that handsome man was staring at with such disbelief?

“Is that…‘their’ mothership?”