Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 4===

“Carry the corpse back with you. If that isn’t possible, dig a hole and burn it. Napalm, an aluminum reaction, or a grenade with some kind of chemical incendiary properties would be perfect. If the Capitalist Corporations can’t check his teeth, fingerprints, or DNA, we can just barely pull through.”

They had contacted Frolaytia for some help with their troubles, but her answer was more severe than they would have liked.

But since the blue planet Gagarin had seen was on the verge of turning red with flames, that kind of severity should not have been surprising.

“Normal gasoline or oil wouldn’t have enough firepower, so you need to make some modifications to turn it into napalm. That shouldn’t be a difficult job for a bomb specialist like you.”

“This isn’t killing the enemy before my eyes to survive. I’ll be destroying an unmoving corpse until even the bones burn away. I feel like I’m only one step away from cannibalism here.”

“You’ll have to focus on the fact that it’s better than dumping gasoline over the head of a living person who can still beg for their life. And make no mistake here. Everything you’ll be doing here is still ‘to survive’. And now the survival of another six billion people is hanging in the balance too.”

She ended her transmission there.

Quenser desperately suppressed the urge to vomit rising from the pit of his stomach and kicked the sole of his military boot against a partially broken pillar.

With that loud sound, he finally gathered his resolve.

“There’s no way we can carry him back, is there?”

One of the shiny members of the intelligence division answered him.

“Since we’ll have to sneak past the Blue Cross on our way out, not a chance. Disposing of him here to lighten the load would be best. The garage out back had collapsed, but there was some gasoline left in the scrap metal that had been a car. Can you make napalm out of that?”

“I can manage as long as I have some cleaning supplies, some household painting supplies, a metal bowl, and the kind of mixer used to make shortcakes. They’re all a housewife’s allies, so I’ll look around for them.”

“Then you take care of that. We’ll dig a hole out back. Let’s go!”

After a few members of the intelligence division left, Quenser breathed a heavy sigh.

From there, nothing felt real and he felt like his feet were floating.

It was not easy work, but losing himself in it lessened the pressure on his heart.

The kitchen had mostly collapsed, so he placed the metal bowl on the dining room table and got to work. Naturally, Nyarlathotep sat obediently in the same room with the intelligence division aiming their guns at him.

As Quenser transformed the gasoline into jelly with the electric mixer, Nyarlathotep spoke with a smile that was strangely lacking in humanity.

“It looks like I’ve caused you all a lot of trouble. Sorry about that.”

“Why did you turn on your own big boss? You may not have known the Legitimacy Kingdom would be involved, but you had to have guessed it would cause a war somewhere in the world.”

“The Soberania Disturbance began because Salem Logistics tried to take the Panama Canal for themselves to expand their business. And this was my house. …If this is what remains of the house meant to protect my family, what do you think happened to the wife and son who lived with me here?”

“…”

“My wife was helping the Blue Cross. She was creating a list of the people who fled to this blank region to help them register for citizenship and insurance. My only son was just five and he was so excited about getting to go to school for the first time. But all of that was taken from me by that money-worshiping piece of shit.”

What did Quenser look like to him?

What did he think of the boy creating napalm to burn away a corpse using the mixer that may very well have been used to make his son’s birthday cake?

That man had brought the entire world to the precipice, but that did not change the fact that his smaller world was being trampled on.

“That doesn’t matter.”

Quenser heard a low, low, dreadfully low voice cut in.

It belonged to Heivia Winchell.

“I don’t care what kind of life you lived or what kind of despair you carry with you. That’s no excuse for burning our homes and families to the ground!! This is…this is really why the world’s gonna end? Thousands of years of human history are going to come to an end for one guy’s private life!?”

“Hey, Heivia…?”

“Do we really need to bring this bastard back alive? Who knows when this expert illusionist of a spy is gonna slip from our fingers! Wouldn’t the world be better off if we put a bullet between his eyes!?”

“You can’t shoot him here, Heivia!!”

“Why not!? What possible reason do you have to cover for the guy who set the world on fire!?”

“The napalm! The air here is already around a hundred degrees, so the contents of this bowl are pretty unstable. Fire your gun now and we’ll all be roasted like turkeys!”

Heivia clicked his tongue.

He removed his eye from his assault rifle’s sight, but he did not remove his index finger from the trigger. He was in such a state of disarray that he was completely ignoring the most basic lessons from boot camp.

“I won’t run away.”

The man with the neatly parted hair spoke up as if to throw oil on the fire.

He had a disturbingly thin smile on his lips.

“I’ve finished everything I wanted to do. After all this, I have no dreams for my future.”

“…”

Heivia moved both arms and produced a sound like a swinging metal bat.

Next came the sound of Nyarlathotep’s nose being broken by the rifle’s stock.

The man did not even utter a groan.

Heivia tapped a member of the intelligence division on the shoulder and made his way to the dining room door.

“Call me first when it’s time kill the bastard. If we’re out of ammo, I’ll tear out his throat with my teeth.”

“The napalm’s done. If you want a breath of what passes for fresh air around here, then take it to the group digging the hole out back. But tell them to detonate it with a wire and fuse, not a lighter or matches. Otherwise, they’ll end up roasting their own face with a magnificent pillar of fire.”

Heivia snatched the metal bowl and finally vanished from the dining room.

Quenser toyed with the mixer still covered in sticky flammable jelly, but finally set it on the table and collapsed into a chair. He was sitting directly across from Nyarlathotep.

He glared at the man across the table that could burst into flames at any time for any reason.

“Just to be clear, I’m not on your side.”

“Oh, I know.”

The man with the neatly parted hair smiled but sounded like he was spitting out the words.

“If a single person in this world were on my side, I might have walked a different path.”

Quenser also wanted to kill the bastard a hundred times if he could.

However, he was valuable as the “true culprit”.

Quenser could not guess how much the Capitalist Corporations would learn about Acre’s death or how far the chaos would spread around the world, but he knew losing the true culprit would be incredibly bad. Once the Legitimacy Kingdom and Capitalist Corporations began arguing back and forth, the truth might become as valuable as a scrap of paper, but it was still possible that a “confession” from Nyarlathotep could act as a safety switch to calm down the boiling world.

Killing him was like drilling a hole in the bottom of Noah’s ark.

While it would be best for the deluge to never occur in the first place, ruining the boat before your eyes was a lot like a gentle form of suicide.

“They’ll probably be burning the corpse in the hole before long. Are you sure you shouldn’t be helping them? You seem to be the most experienced with this sort of thing.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Oh, can you kill an enemy actively attacking you, but you’re reluctant to burn a defenseless corpse? A very European way of thinking. I suppose it’s why you like to bury bodies under crosses.”

“…”

“I can’t even remember what my wife and son looked like anymore.”

Nyarlathotep continued speaking words that may or may not have been true.

“You’re wondering how I could say that when I set the entire world on fire for my family, aren’t you? But it’s true. No matter how much I try to remember those pleasant times, their charred black faces are all I can see. So I understand why your hands are trembling. That fear isn’t something you should give visual form. …But will you really finish this in time if you rely on others?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“The Capitalist Corporations aren’t stupid. If you’re trying to burn an inconvenient corpse, you should have done so as soon as possible. They’ll be here soon.”

It happened before the unease could race down Quenser’s spine.

The small house had already lost its roof, but a tremendous shock caused it to collapse altogether.

Quenser fell from his chair and the walls collapsed. In fact, fragments flew parallel to the ground as if a directional mine had gone off. Then the walls fell over with rattling sound. A great strength grabbed Quenser’s arm and pulled him under the battered table.

Surprisingly, it was Nyarlathotep who had saved him.

The lack of the roof had helped them. The amount of rubble falling from above was not enough to break through the table or bury them alive.

When he pulled himself out from below the table and rubble, a noise started hurting Quenser’s ears.

It sounded like an electric fan amplified many, many times over.

That was the sound produced by the propeller of an aircraft given a reciprocating engine instead of a jet engine for longer flight times.

“Drones!!” shouted Heivia. “They got a picture from above. They saw where we were and they saw the corpse in the hole!!”

A pillar of fire loudly rose from the hole. That was the napalm Quenser had made, but it was anyone’s guess how effective that would be at this point. If the corpse had been photographed from the sky before it was burnt, they might have even wrapped the noose around their own necks by burning it.

“Hey, do you think the war here’ll end now that their big boss is dead!?”

“Not a chance! This’ll just cause a chemical reaction transforming the rescue operation into a mission for revenge!! In fact, now that we’ve lost our shield, they can relax and start shooting all they want!!”

The drones in question were not fighter jets with high-level computer equipment onboard. Instead, they looked like a giant paper model with an engine attached. A whole bunch of them were flying around like dragonflies in the autumn sky. It would have been hard to get an accurate count of them all.

“Those don’t carry missiles,” explained Nyarlathotep as he dug through the rubble and (for some reason) pulled out a member of the intelligence division. “Do you have an Object on your side? Now that they know where you are, you don’t need to hesitate to ask for some assistance. If you don’t have those eyes in the sky shot down by anti-air lasers, you’ll be blown to bits by Cynthia’s anti-personnel and anti-vehicle cannons. The smoke and waves of heat seem to be affecting their targeting for now, but they should correct that before long.”

Quenser frowned at the man’s prediction.

“Cynthia? Oh, you mean the Extra Arc. Is it linked with those drones to indirectly target us!?”

“No, both of those names are inaccurate. I guess I’m not thinking straight either,” curtly replied Nyarlathotep. “Its true name not recorded on any official Capitalist Corporations documents is the Miskatonic. That is the truly cruel Second Generation personally funded by Acre Kiss-of-Rose…no, by Azathoth who was using that name.”