Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume11 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 6===

Moving ahead meant mines and falling back meant mines.

However, they could not sit tight in the middle of the battlefield either.

The Capitalist Corporations forces protecting the oasis where the transport plane had crashed had bared their fangs and the Legitimacy Kingdom was sending in more and more unmanned trucks with shovels on the front.

They could sense the danger just by standing there.

The trucks were fine no matter how many explosions they were caught in, but the mines scattered shrapnel every which way. The cans that were fired a few meters up by springs before exploding were the worst. One of them would scatter small metal balls within a radius of one hundred meters. Every single part of the situation only made it worse. The only welcome aspect was the seductive tears in the (flat-chested) black-haired exposed-forehead Black Uniform’s stockings.

Heivia lay on the sand and covered the back of his head with his hands while shouting.

“Are you trying to kill us, you dumbasses!?”

“Get up, Heivia. Let’s keep going. This will only get worse otherwise.”

“This is no time to play the model soldier! Besides, they’re shooting a ton of missiles since we can’t use our Object’s anti-air lasers. They’ve already located us! If they wanted to, they could blow us up at any moment!!”

“I’m not so sure.” Quenser wiped sweat from his brow. “These are being controlled as a group. I said they were smart mines, right? They can check for the signal to find the layout of the mines and whether they’re alive or dead, so the mine-launching missiles are set to automatically fire where the distribution of mines is thinnest. The oasis is mostly protected by unmanned weapons and the human soldiers aren’t all that skilled. They haven’t actually located us.”

“Got any proof of that!?”

“They can’t use thermo when the desert’s hotter than our bodies and we can hide from anti-personnel radar behind the sand dunes. And most telling of all, we would have been slaughtered already if they knew where we were.”

That list of reassurances was enough for Heivia the sweaty coward to finally calm down. He took a sip of his water bottle’s lukewarm contents and slowly stood up.

“Whatever the case, this’ll never end if we don’t keep moving forward. Looks like this shitty road through hell is our only option.”

They traveled through the desert while doing their best to follow the path taken by the armored trucks. That would be safe until new smart mines rained down from the heavens.

Or it should have been.

Nevertheless, something was sticking up from the sand in front of them. The end of the metal pipe had a rotating sprayer attached. On a safe country golf course, they might have thought it was a sprinkler for the lawn.

But this was a battlefield.

Instead of agricultural water, it sprayed out something with an irritant odor included.

“Oh, no.”

Quenser and Heivia exchanged a glance and took off running.

A full five seconds later, it happened.

A tremendous explosion filled one corner of the desert.

The mixture of naphtha and detergent ignited and the entire area was remade into a burning hell.

They had just barely made it.

The two idiots escaped beyond the puddle, fell to their butts, and crawled around to keep the embers from falling on them.

“What the hell was that!?”

“The history of flamethrowers is an old one. It goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. But modern flamethrowers are well-known for having a metal drum buried underground and spraying out when a faucet is turned.” Quenser slowly let out a breath. “In other words, it’s a landmine.”

“I don’t care about that. I do care about what we’re going to do about our uniforms. A single spark of static could set us on fire. Even my own gun’s muzzle flash could do me in.”

They settled on pouring their water bottles over their heads, but it was obviously not going to help much.

Quenser shook his head like a wet dog and noticed a square piece of concrete nearly buried in the scorching sand. This was the desert, so it would not be a manhole to the sewers. He approached, opened the metal door with both hands, and found a stairway leading down.

“What’s this?”

“Looks pretty amateur to me. This is the entrance to North America, so I bet it’s a drug smuggling tunnel dug by the mafia or a gang.”

An oddly chemical and unhealthy smell wafted out.

Something was lying on the ground inside: several corpses burned black. This was not the result of simply roasting them in a fire. There was some obviously chemical inflammation mixed in.

“That was white phosphorus. Not only do the flames roast the entire person, but breathing in the powder mixed in with the smoke gives them chemical burns. It must have been a real disaster for these ‘dealers’. There was nowhere to escape in this small tunnel.” Heivia sounded annoyed with it all. “But this underground tunnel could be useful. All the mines up top don’t mean a thing down here. It’d be great if there’s a branch of the tunnel leading toward the oasis.”

“No, wait.”

Quenser was nowhere near as optimistic.

A large drop of sweat dripped down his nose, but he forgot to wipe it away.

“Why are these bodies here?”

“What? Because the criminal organization was wiped out, right?”

“Then wouldn’t the people who burned them know about the tunnel too?” pointed out Quenser. “I don’t know whether it was the Capitalist Corporations or the Information Alliance, but if they knew about this long tunnel under the desert, they could have reused it for a special type of mine.”

“Wait, Quenser.”

He did not have time to answer his awful friend.

He quickly turned around. He saw sand tossed up into the air as dozens of unmanned armored trucks arrived from the maintenance base zone. Quite a few soldiers would be approaching using the path the trucks cleared.

Quenser quickly shouted into his radio.

“This is bad… Really bad!! Stop your approach! You should be able to use vibration sensors or ultrasonic waves to tell where the tunnels are!!”

He received no response.

There was not enough time for one.

The explosives buried in the web of underground tunnels covering a total of 160 kilometers exploded all at once.