Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume15 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 2===

“The world’s…gest Obje… New Yo…Manhattan…tself was…mation Alliance’s Object!?”

“An offici…statement was…with a video. The Manhat…intends…join this war!!”

“Not good…ood!! Everyone, brace for impact! The enemy…an electromagnetically…ched reactor cannon. It’s a demonic weapon that…the heat usually contai…the reactor which uses lasers…pellet fuel!! Our New Caribb…blown away!?”

“Curse the Marti…ries. How insane…they!?”

It was pandemonium.

The busty silver-haired high-ranking officer named Frolaytia Capistrano’s vision had been entirely flipped upside down and she initially could not remember where she was.

Light flashed before her eyes like she had been slapped the instant she ran across someone. The core of her mind was unsteady and she spent a while in an unthinking daze.

Slowly, like thin ice being melted by a blow dryer, her mind managed to focus on the cruel reality.

“Uh, kh…?”

She first realized she was collapsed face down.

She had been in the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion’s officer’s barracks using her laptop to receive a report from a subordinate in their distant home country. But the scene around her had entirely changed. The ceiling was too low. No, the entire barracks building had been crushed down. The space was too cramped and the other things in the room were so close she could barely see. She did not have time to check on her Island Nation collection. Her military-issued items and personal possessions were scattered around her. Among those, she grabbed a laptop with a broken LCD screen and a keyring of hardware keys. Then she crawled through the cramped space.

Luckily, she was not trapped by an ankle caught in the rubble or anything else like that.

Did she have to crawl a few meters or a few dozen meters? Her sense of time and distance were far too vague as she bit her lip and made her way outside. She could see the outside light ahead of her, but the end never seemed to arrive. She had no guarantee this was the right way to go. The collapsed ceiling approached ever closer overhead the further she crawled, so she might find her hips trapped before she reached the exit.

That self-produced doubt gnawed at her mind as she dug at the ground with neatly clipped and filed nails to slowly but surely make her way forward.

(Finally…)

The light was approaching.

She had somehow managed to escape the pile of rubble under her own power.

(…Finally.)

And as soon as she did, a hellish scene spread out before her eyes.

As a reminder, Frolaytia Capistrano was on New Caribbean Island located in the Atlantic Ocean near Central America. It was a special island made by the lava of an artificial eruption caused by stimulating a submarine volcano with explosives. The island was a collection of small black rocks that looked like crunchy chocolate and it had originally been made as a bluefin tuna breeding base for her brother Bloodrics Capistrano. Frolaytia had stationed her Object maintenance battalion there and had been in the middle of a battle with an Information Alliance maintenance fleet and its Second Generation Object, the Nitrogen Mirage.

Those assumptions had been blown away.

First of all, the color was wrong.

The dark stone ground was glowing like an electrically-heated wire or a reactor. The cooled and solidified lava had been melted anew by an outside heat source. Like two scoops of ice cream dropped on the midsummer asphalt, the melted surface formed orange rivers that flowed toward the sea and then formed rising walls of billowing steam. Thanks to the immense light, heat, and steam, the bright sun overhead appeared to waver and dim. It may have been the same as the lights of a metropolis erasing the stars from the night sky.

“…”

It took Frolaytia a while to accept her situation here.

(This was done by the Manhattan’s main cannon. And it fired from a few thousand kilometers away…)

But she had to face reality.

There were around 1000 people in the maintenance battalion and half of them had gone to the front line based on the military operation Frolaytia had planned. So how many of the approximately 500 logistical support and standby personnel remained in this hell containing several orange rivers? That was about two schools’ worth of people. She had no idea how many more were lost with each passing second. She did not have time to stop just because she found it hard to accept.

“Report…”

Frolaytia raised her voice so it would not be drowned out by the explosive steam rising from the coast.

“Someone give me a report!! We need to know the scope of the damage, we need a relatively undamaged area we can evacuate to, and we need a set of surviving equipment and facilities! Simply saving the lives in front of you will only waste valuable resources. Then we can’t even save the lives you think you’ve saved. We need to avoid redundancies and carry out a rescue operation with maximum efficiency!!”

There was no response.

Not even the very basics were functioning.

“Hi, Tia-chan…”

“…”

The busty silver-haired commander’s shoulders jumped when someone spoke gently from behind her.

She just about let out her face as a family member, but she just barely managed to suppress it before turning around. She greeted the young man as the commander of the maintenance battalion.

It was Bloodrics Capistrano.

He had worn a black tailcoat even on this tropical island, but he had removed that, leaving him with just a white shirt. Had he used the coat to treat a wounded soldier, or had he discarded it before it melted in the heat?

He held a drawn katana in one hand.

There was no scabbard. For some reason, the blade was wet with a red liquid. It was unclear what had happened on the way here, but that was a clear sign of just how chaotic the situation was.

The sweat on his brow may have gotten in his eye or he may have had some other reason, but Bloodrics kept one eye unnaturally shut as he forced a smile on his blatantly exhausted face.

“Shouting won’t do you any good. The previous war is over. This has gone beyond Piranirie Martini Smoky or the Nitrogen Mirage. The conditions have changed.”

“What are you talking about? That isn’t for me to decide! It’s true the damage is severe, but we can’t just quit fighting a war like flipping a switch!! No matter the devastation before our eyes, we can still gather the surviving personnel and equipment for a counterattack. I’ll admit it’s like whipping the dead, but if we give up and stop resisting, everyone under my command will simply sink into the lava!!”

Frolaytia was not illogically relying on pure willpower.

She had more to say.

“Calm down, think, and never give up on being human! Why did the Information Alliance suddenly pull out their greatest secret weapon like this? It was at the center of their home country, so they shouldn’t have had any reason to send it to the front line. I don’t know the details of the issues with the Martini Series who monitor the AI network which may not even have a core, but if they have the full authority of a world power, they had to have had a better way of doing this.”

“…”

“We do not know how far the problems have spread within the Martini Series. If it’s limited to the ones in charge of protecting New York, it makes sense that only the Manhattan was sent out. But this is a fluid situation. If the other Martinis also begin acting oddly, the problems could spread uncontrollably throughout the Information Alliance!”

“Tia-chan, you are overwhelmingly correct here.”

Her brother slowly breathed out.

Bloodrics was supposedly a civilian, but he spoke to his sister like he was calmly explaining something while she threw a tantrum.

“But there is no one to answer your call.”

“!?”

“By a general estimate, 60-70% of those remaining on the island were lost. And losing 30% is normally considered a rout, is it not? You can no longer maintain ordinary military activity here. Tia-chan, your job here is to remove or destroy all classified information so the Information Alliance cannot steal it. And that includes yourself as the major in command of the entire battalion.”

“…”

“You must not be captured. No matter what. Do you really think the Manhattan is finished with only that one shot? Whether it fires a second and third shot or they send a large landing unit to the devastated remnants of the battalion, you have a single job here, Tia-chan: …Escape. It does not matter how pathetic or cowardly you feel. Tia-chan, you carry a responsibility here, so you must get yourself away from here. Even if you are the only one that escapes.”

She intellectually understood that.

If she was captured, the enemy could steal the biometric information like her center of gravity or iris scan that allowed access to the military datalink. Or they could get her to talk about future operations no one was supposed to know about or the names of spies who had infiltrated enemy countries. Then the damage would spread beyond ''just this war''. To minimize the losses, she had to make sure it was limited to ''just this war''.

The busty silver-haired commander slowly breathed out.

After throwing the laptop and hardware keys into the lava, she drew her military handgun from its holster.

“…I will withdraw only after saving as many lives as I can. As their commander, I will be rear guard.”

“Tia-chan.”

“Yes, yes!! I know it’s inefficient!!”

Frolaytia shouted back at him and pressed the military handgun’s muzzle against her own temple.

Brother and sister glared at each other and she gathered strength in her brow to keep her face as a girl from coming out.

“But there are still so many allies buried alive in this rubble and lava, unable to even groan! Not to mention the soldiers fighting the Information Alliance at the maintenance fleet out at sea!! They’re out there because I ordered them there! I can’t use insufficient data as an excuse. I can’t abandon them and run away. They would die pointless deaths if I did!!”

“…”

“Destroying all classified information was the bare minimum requirement, wasn’t it? That won’t be a problem. Officers aren’t issued guns to shoot the enemy. It’s to blow their own brains out if need be!!”

Still holding his drawn katana, Bloodrics shook his head with a sorrowful look on his face.

He must have understood his sister’s feelings all too well.

She did not let her status as a noble bind her. When necessary, she had risked her life and used her own strength to protect her soldiers. That was a joyous thing for Bloodrics. If his sister had something she wanted to protect, he wanted to fight alongside her as her brother. He truly did.

Finally, he took a deep breath of resignation.

And the brother spoke to his sister.

“I’m sorry, Tia-chan. But I can’t let you do that.”

Did Frolaytia even know what caused the quiet sound on her head?

“Bh…?”

The pommel of the katana held by the silver-haired young man had dug into the side of her head. Just like knocking someone out with a pistol grip. Before she could even move her finger to pull the trigger, the ''girl''’s eyes grew unfocused and her body went limp.

Before she fully collapsed, Bloodrics wrapped an arm around her waist which, as her brother, he felt was too skinny. If he was not careful, the finger on the trigger could accidentally fire the bullet.

“Striking my own sister… I am truly a disgrace to the concept of chivalry.”

He sounded utterly disgusted, but he was extremely dry when it came to this. Those military reasons meant nothing to him since he was a civilian, albeit a noble one. His first and foremost objective was to protect his precious sister no matter what it took.

On his way here, he had heard many voices begging him to kill them.

Some had had lava dumped on their head and others were caught in the rubble. Bloodrics had turned the tip of his katana on those soldiers who had no hope left.

He would not forget their words of thanks.

How could he ever forget?

“…I’m sick of it all.”

Frolaytia had built up this world of hers bit by bit as she resisted the noble society, so he could not allow her to see it tragically fall apart.

She could resent him if she liked.

She could hate his guts if she had to.

Bloodrics tossed aside his bloodstained katana and placed a finger to his ear. He was about to send out a transmission.

“It’s me.”

As soon as he focused on the small earpiece, the young man took on the face of a noble.

“Yes, I would like an emergency exit. Use that submarine. I would like to pick up as many Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers as possible, but there is no need to force it. We leave in 15 minutes. Give up on any we cannot pick up. Don’t worry. None of you need play the villain’s role. That I will do alone.”

Still supporting his unconscious family member’s weight, Bloodrics looked through the lava’s heat and steam to view the distant horizon.

According to Frolaytia, she had sent some of her soldiers out to sea.

It had been necessary. Even if it had required ignoring her personal feelings.

But if the maintenance battalion withdrew from New Caribbean Island, they would have nowhere to return to. Once isolated out at sea, no one would come to save them no matter how much they screamed.

Bloodrics Capistrano was doing that to them.

He was prepared to dirty his hands with the things that someone had to do.

“…Such a disaster. For us and them.”