Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume17 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 3===

It must have been a split-second decision.

“!!”

Heivia drew the large knife from his hip and threw it to sever the fiber optic cable crawling across the ground. Quenser grabbed and tugged on the slender hand of that busty blonde who was bloody even though it was not that time of the month.

With the direct wiring cut, the bombs stopped detonating at that point.

Nevertheless, the entire tunnel was blocked off. The blast of wind created by the explosions pushed in toward them like the cleaning of a bath pipe.

They all ran toward the emergency exit.

Fortunately, the door opened outward from their perspective. Otherwise, the blast would have torn it from its hinges and the immense pressure would have slammed it into them.

“What happened to the others?”

“…”

“What happened to the training!?”

Quenser asked those questions while sitting on the floor and holding her close, but Elise did not respond. A mystery group had taken over the tunnel and they had set up real bombs instead of fake ones. They also had real guns. Quenser and Heivia did not know how many Aggressors there had been waiting in the tunnel for the training, but it was a miracle that even Elise had survived.

The blonde glasses woman handed Quenser something with her bloody hand.

He looked down to see it was the same kind of mobile device they used, but he doubted it was hers.

“I stole this from a defeated enemy. I don’t know the passcode, so I didn’t try to get in. I don’t want the data being erased if I get it wrong too many times.”

“An enemy, huh? They were wearing Legitimacy Kingdom uniforms, but they had a weird tattoo on their face.”

Quenser opened his own mobile device and accessed the photos he had taken before the explosion. The type of bomb and the type of computer chip they used would be crucial hints, but he was focused on the face of that masked man instead.

“Oh,” said Elise. “A snake entwined around a branch. That’s the symbol of the 21st Mobile Maintenance Battalion, I think.”

“Hold on.” Something occurred to Quenser. “The passcode changes every week, but isn’t there a pattern to it? The base number is random, but it’s altered with the date and the unit number like 37 or 21 to produce the final passcode. Although I’ve heard the commander and technicians are given different numbers to make it more complex.”

That did not tell them the actual code, but the 37th alone had nearly 1000 members. Central command was not going to work out a bunch of different passcodes and distribute them to everyone. Basically, it was the same as the handcuff keys used by the police. They were meant to prevent outsiders from unlocking them, but members of the same unit, department, or rank were considered trustworthy. They had to accept some level of automated passcode generation.

And it was not like all the data would be deleted from just one wrong passcode.

Quenser tried recalculating the passcode and punched it in. It worked.

“That actually worked?”

“But most of the data looks corrupted,” said Elise.

There were a few surviving files inside, but not many would open. Each individual file needed its own passcode on top of the overall device’s one. That must have been set manually, so they had no clues to go on.

However…

“Body File?”

Quenser noticed a term that appeared frequently in the unopenable filenames.

“What does that mean? It shows up so frequently I assume it must be important.”

Necessity of Secrecy Regarding the Body File 

Matters Concerning Erasure of the Body File.

ROE: Upon Outside Discovery of the Body File.

It was all couched in stiff, businesslike language, but it sounded very dangerous. They seemed to be taking a strict “dead men tell no tales” stance here.

“Let’s wait till we get back to the maintenance base to continue with this. They might be able to find the password or recover the corrupted files.” Heivia tossed aside his paint magazine despite the rounds remaining and loaded a magazine of real bullets instead. “Something’s up here, but we can’t contact our busty commander without use of the radio. There’s no point in staying in the tunnel, so let’s head on out. The unexploded ordnance in here is scaring the hell out of me regardless.”

Mont Blanc Tunnel had been rendered useless, so they had to use the emergency exit tunnel to leave.

“God, this unit really knows how to ruin the holidays, be it New Year’s or summer vacation.”

“Heivia, this might not be over yet. We don’t know how far this goes.”

They left the tall rectangular entrance cut out of the mountain slope and stepped outside.

And there they saw what was happening.

The Princess was fighting.

The colossal forms of two Objects were exchanging intense artillery fire while clinging to the white slope of the highest mountain in the Alps.