Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume16 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 6===

“Ah, ah, ahh. Test, test. Is the audio good? Is the camera working? The lights really make my skin shine, so do them right. You’re going to count down from 10? Director, give me my cue. Let’s get this done together! Okay, this is Monica, the idol reporter who can both dance and kill, beginning her live broadcast!!”

Modern idols did not have it easy. The blonde girl flapped her vampire cape with both hands to provide glimpses of her bat bikini chest and her hips as she motivated the staff with her charm before directing that charm at the audience. Quenser kept his head low and snuck around while viewing her from a distance. She likely had an insulating gel on her skin, but it was still impressive to be dressed so skimpily in November.

It was the following day.

The sun was at its peak overhead.

The morning’s milky white fog had entirely cleared away.

It was the perfect weather for an event.

In less than half a day, the south would declare its independence and two Objects would clash within a safe country.

He was at a thick oak door in a fortress wall filling the gap between a steep slope and some old stone buildings.

But this was not the city entrance.

The south was something of a fortress city with plenty of orange-roofed old castles and monasteries, so there were ancient walls and gates all over. But you could still get public wi-fi while drinking coffee at Farbucks, so the world was a strange place.

(I still can’t believe I crossed the border like that. This is the Information Alliance. If something happens, the Legitimacy Kingdom is bound to throw me under the bus and claim they knew nothing about this.)

“Quenser, we can see you with the satellite. You’re a tourist now, so act suspicious and their security camera programs will trigger an alert. Walking like normal is the best camouflage.”

“Frolaytia, what am I supposed to do with this flimsy fake ID?”

“Don’t worry. It was made using one of the real devices. After all, we found it in Ivory Garden’s stockyard.”

“Am I just doomed, is that it!?”

There was no tension in the voice in his ear. That was what it was like watching from afar.

Then he heard a dull clunk.

The heavy bar had been removed from the castle gate three times his height and it was slowly opening.

“Hurry on in, Quenser,” said Heivia who was actually there with him. “If you’re not in there, we lose our justification to be here.”

“Are you sure I should do this?”

Quenser made a home visit despite the unresolved questions rolling around in his gut. Heivia quickly recovered the synthetic rope and stainless steel piton he had used to scale the wall.

“We are acting on the pretext of retrieving the idiot who fled our base,” explained Frolaytia in his earphone. “A runaway soldier shames a military unit, so we would never want to ask for help searching for one. And it becomes an international incident if they have crossed to another world power’s territory. We could not possibly make a request then.”

“That doesn’t make it okay to send a fully-armed assassination squad across the border to walk around the back alleys.”

“But it’s good enough.” She did not seem to care at all. “Object or not, the south will face a great many trials once they declare independence. For example, diplomacy. The Transylvania District’s connections will be off limits to them. But what if they gained a supporter early on? It wouldn’t hurt them to learn of some unrelated country’s mistake or scandal, right?”

“I didn’t realize I was getting involved in such a dirty job.”

“Those dirty jobs are what maintain peace. There are times when the powerful would rather do nothing but have to take action to keep up appearances because they cannot control the public video sites and pirate broadcasts that Heivia mentioned in the conference room. But this is different.”

“Is it about deception and camouflage again?”

“Exactly. If they have any sense at all, they will overlook this. They will let you and Heivia’s team go free. Pressure from exchange rates and tariffs and embargoes on food and fuel are all ways of using money to crush a new country with little productive power. The south will be familiar with those cases, so they will want to preserve any secret connections they can set up with the Legitimacy Kingdom.”

This was especially cruel because, even if they turned a blind eye to Quenser and Heivia, those potatoes did not have the authority the south would want. In fact, they were here to take away the south’s greatest trump card. Quenser could not help but feel bad for tricking them like that.

“Don’t relax based on what she says, Quenser,” said his awful friend. “Everything she said assumes the south will act rationally. They’re about to declare independence remember? They’re at their highest moment. If they’re high on adrenaline while shouting nonsense about autonomy and sovereignty, they might just follow their emotions and gang up on us without considering the consequences. So be on your guard. We know from experience just how bad a day you have when you rest your hopes on that busty commander’s predictions.”

“So there’s no such thing as safety around here, huh?”

“This is enemy territory. Now get moving, turkey.”

With Heivia, Myonri, and the others pushing him forward, Quenser ran through the old fortress streets with stone paving and distinctive orange roofs while surrounded by curving fortress walls and wild mountain slopes.

The old city was built along the base and slope of the mountain, so its stone walls and sloping roads formed something like a tiered field. But instead of crops, spires and chimneys stuck up and the people were all gathered inside stone and brick apartments. More and more walls had been built over time like the rings of a tree, so the inside was somewhat labyrinthine.

It felt like the solid city was clinging to the ground amidst the dark mountains forests surrounding it. It did not look like a kind place for moving companies and online stores.

“We’re just talking about one province, right? Do we have any guesses where the reactor is?”

“That southern city is almost entirely registered as a world heritage site. What you see on the mountain slope is just the tip of the iceberg. The underground is riddled with wine cellars, catacombs, and secret torture chambers.”

“Ugh.”

“Post-independence, 80% of their income will be reliant on tourism. They wouldn’t want to destroy their old fortress area to hide the Object.”

That explained why the roads were still paved with bumpy stone despite the trouble that caused for cars. Quenser pulled a free pamphlet from a stand that functioned as a visitor’s center.

“Hm, looks like the higher up on the mountain you are, the higher up in the hierarchy you are. Sounds inconvenient. I guess it’s just like high-rise apartments. Or how they say idiots like to climb as high as possible.”

“The very top will be covered in clouds depending on the weather, so I imagine it’s more about gravity than the view. Both rainwater and sewage flow down through the pipes.”

“Can you see anything with the satellite?”

“At the very least, there is no sign of a 50m machine.”

“Then is it underground? But it must not be directly below this old fortress.”

A crumbling wall was decorated with a banner saying “History Changes Tonight at Midnight!” Mobile homes were lined up on the side of the road, so all the hotels remodeled from old castles and monasteries must have been full. A digital countdown was running on an electronic sign decorated with Halloween-like bat characters. To Quenser, it looked like a giant time bomb. To go with the vampire motif, the small child passing by with her mother was holding a bat-shaped balloon. Quenser walked past them while marking the pamphlet’s map with a red pen.

“Frolaytia, have they bought a ton of bricks in the past few years? They could have claimed it was for a pizza oven, a kiln, or whatever else, but I mean bricks that use alumina.”

“A young wife with too much time on her hands gambled on a large quantity of futures. She lost a ton of money, but she didn’t complain much on social media. Her posts don’t sound like someone who ran across an unexpected accident of that magnitude. Could this be it?”

“Those are used in blast furnaces too. Bricks with alumina for heat resistance have a higher melting point than iron, so they’re perfect for lining the buckets to carry molten metal.”

Quenser always grew loquacious when it came to topics like this. Frolaytia’s fish story may not have been as implausible as it might seem. Even if the human race threw out their weapons and advocated love and peace, this boy would still be chasing after Objects with a sparkle in his eyes.

“Frolaytia, given your obsession with the Island Nation, I’m sure you’ve heard of their giant Buddha statues. Those bronze statues can be several dozen meters tall, but they weren’t built up with nuts and bolts from the bottom up. They started by making a giant mold out of earth and bricks and then poured molten metal inside.”

“Are you saying the same could be done with an Object?”

“It isn’t that simple since the onion armor requires a bunch of thin layers of armor, but they can use the general concept. The people here have a long history of building underground rooms. They could have built a framework and scaffolding like they were digging a mine and then used the entire mountain as a giant womb. And of course, they would make sure to select a silhouette-obscuring wedding dress to hide the pregnancy necessitating the marriage.”

When red-banded sand wasps captured a caterpillar, they would take it back to their nest alive and lay eggs in its body. Once the larvae hatched, they would grow while gradually consuming the host’s soft body from within. This Object was similar. Instead of creating a single giant space all at once, they had dug into the mountain bit by bit and then gradually carried in and assembled the metal armor and mechanical parts until they had an entire colossal weapon underground. It had been waiting all this time to break through the mountain surface and emerge, almost like it had consumed the mountain from within to grow its metal body.

It sucked the mountain dry.

Like a blood sucker.

“…”

Quenser placed a finger on the pamphlet map and then looked to the mountain slope a short distance away.

“Frolaytia, check Moldoveanu Peak. The info on the pamphlet doesn’t match what I’m seeing. There are a few extra monasteries.”

“Based on the database of a local university, there was a risk of acid rain eroding the limestone slope, so all of the valuable buildings were moved and evacuated to safe locations.”

“And were those the world heritage sites you mentioned, or everything else that could be wrapped up in packing material?”

“…”

“It’s camouflage. Unless this is an elaborate trap, that mountain must be the womb. It’s like using leafy branches to hide a tank in the grass.”

“I can’t believe it. Even if they missed out on being world heritage sites, that monastery has a history four centuries long.”

“When you’re at risk from an aerial bombing, you’ll break off a thousand-year-old cedar’s branches to hide your tank. Your life is on the line after all.”

The completed Object could not be removed without breaking through the frame of dirt and sand. It was like a piggy bank in that sense. The southern tourist area was not joking around.

“What should I do?” asked Quenser.

“You don’t need to head inside. Just wander around near the monastery in question. Heivia and the others can search inside on the pretext of pursuing you. They can ‘happen across’ anything they discover.”

With a sound much like an electric razor, a drone arrived overhead. The delivery box it gave him contained extra equipment, including glasses for blocking the facial recognition of security cameras. Then he walked against the flow of tourists to make his way across the stone pavement, through the fortress walls, and up the mountain slope.

On the way, he passed by some high school girls who wore submachineguns over their shoulders. The wood stocks had a very Eastern European feel and they folded up like a wire hanger. The girls wore what must have been the uniform to their school: a vampirish bat-patterned black cape worn over a blazer. Their legs were bare even in November. It looked like he might be able to blend in here better than somewhere full of camouflage uniforms. But as courageous as the girls might look, their weapons showed no sign of local production. They all had different caliber guns from different companies and different sling belts.

“Do they have a draft system or universal conscription here?” asked Quenser.

“The suggested new constitution they’ve released online says their military will be entirely voluntary,” answered Frolaytia. “Although that volunteer service might come with certain advantages.”

“If they make it so you can’t enter higher education, get a job, or get married without serving, then is it really any different from conscription?”

There was also a nervous-looking glasses girl holding the leashes of a bunch of Dobermans, but it was unclear if she was taking them for a walk or if they were dragging her around. Was she from the school’s animal care committee? Quenser was honestly more afraid of them than the drones made of lightweight materials. Their drool-covered teeth were quite intimidating.

Quenser kept his pace unchanged and continued his casual stroll.

“On-site team, I’ve arrived at the suspicious part of the slope. I’m going to ignore the monastery that was clearly added only recently. I just walked past it, but there is a truck parked unnaturally alongside a cliff here. I bet it’s covering the manhole used as an entrance, but I’m not a legendary ninja. I doubt I could move the truck and get inside without anyone noticing.”

“Leave it to us. We just needed to know where to check, so you go search elsewhere. Pretend you’re lost and sneak right into their bedroom.”

In order to help out Heivia’s group, Quenser dropped an SD card with wireless LAN support and kicked it underneath the truck. It would be unnatural for them to search there for no reason, so they would want some kind of hint or excuse to use as justification.

“Agh!”

A high school girl on the slope groaned, but Quenser did not want to stand out by turning his head to look. Someone from Heivia’s team had likely snuck up behind her and eliminated the obstacle before heading underground through a vent or whatever they had found. It was not often in life that you got a chance to sneak up behind and knock out a miniskirt high school girl instead of some filthy old guy, so the potatoes may have been more motivated than usual. Quenser walked away with an oblivious look on his face and the free pamphlet in hand.

He knew more or less where to go.

He stopped to think at about 50m from the first point. After climbing some stone steps to reach a higher level of the slope, he took out some of the “evidence” he had gotten from the drone – an electronic dictionary, a translation device, and other electronics with just enough personal information to make them a security risk – and dropped them in the ditches and manholes. Heivia’s team had already made their way into the secret area to begin their sabotage, but it was best to give them as many openings as possible.

Then Frolaytia contacted him.

“Quenser, wait just a second.”

“Am I leaving too much evidence? Sorry, I wasn’t sure how much was best.”

“Not that. We’ve lost contact with Heivia’s team.”

At first, Quenser was unsure what she meant. But this did not seem to be a metaphor or a joke.

“We have no idea if they’re even still alive. This is entirely unexpected and the satellites and drones can’t tell what’s happening inside there. Be on your guard, Quenser. You are alone out there!”

“The enemy took them out? But we’re talking about people who could only just barely manage to gather the parts of an Object using their excessive wealth. The soldiers I saw were normal high school girls. They were wearing vampire cape cosplay! I’m not about to claim we’re the world’s best special forces or anything, but I seriously doubt we would lose to them!!”

“At the moment, we can’t rule anything out. Maybe this is only technical trouble and maybe the south hired a PMC to strengthen their forces. But we need to prepare for the worst, so take a weapon from the drone, Quenser. You need to ensure your own safety first! Don’t die on us before reinforcements can arrive!!”