Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 6===

'''Mission Report B-03

'''March 21 – 2300 Hours

'''Legitimacy Kingdom New Caledonia District – Special Political Prison “Château de Rouge”



“It’s about time,” muttered Quenser. “We’re leaving, so get ready.”

“Wh-what!? Wh-why?”

“I said a military unit was coming in after a virus was sent in to take over the prison’s system, right? There’s a piece missing before that can happen. The facility’s core isn’t connected to the outside, so we have to manually mess with the wiring.”

“B-but, um, get out…? Heh…eh heh heh. The cells are locked from the outside.”

“There’s a slot in the door to receive food. We can get metal parts and wires by dismantling the hand washer and toilet. That just leaves picking the lock. If you bend a fairly long wire, you can stick it in the keyhole directly above the food slot.”

He got down to work as he spoke.

After a heavy click, the lock’s deadbolt released.

“E-eee!? I-it only took you thirty seconds? A-and I thought these were electronic locks.”

“I didn’t release the lock; I destroyed the internal components. There are rumors that the developer intentionally left this vulnerability. We ordered an identical lock and I spent two or three days learning how to do this. I couldn’t open any other lock.”

He took a step outside his container cell.

As soon as he did, his head was covered in a downpour of rain as warm as human blood. Either due to the salt water or the metal, an odd raw smell rose up from below.

If he was discovered, he was dead.

That simple fact gradually entered the tips of his fingers and toes and spread to the core of his body.

But standing still would not help, so he adjusted his grip on the wire and opened Mariage’s cell as well.

“Let’s go!”

“W-wait, wait!? Th-they have surveillance cameras outside!!”

“Messing with the camera here was the most they could do. The rest is up to us! We have to connect the line!! Unless we take control of the prison’s system, the unit outside can’t move in!!”

He mercilessly pulled her from the cell.

Mariage was a girl with an unbalanced build. She was short yet had large breasts. Her glasses looked like they would slip down at any moment and tears were welling up in her eyes that looked like those of a small animal. She wore the prisoner’s uniform of a thick jumpsuit with no pockets to hide anything in, but hers was baggy and did not suit her at all. It seemed to implicitly state how unfortunate her circumstances were.

He dragged her on and whispered to her while the blood-warm rain washed over them.

“Guide me to the third watchtower.”

“Eh? Eh? B-but if you’re going to mess with the communication wiring, you would need to go to the security server in the center-…”

“If we went straight there, they’d catch us right away. Instead, we’ll cut the wiring somewhere less secure and reconnect it. Now hurry.”

“W-will we really be okay?”

“I’m not an expert in undercover operations or infiltrations. This is a job even a student can handle, so don’t worry.”

The prison was a large birdcage. The walls, floors, and everything else were all made from metal pipes and wire mesh, so there were plenty of gaps too small for a human to pass through. There were no absolute blind spots.

However…

“They may have left their vision wide open, but they only point the lights straight forward. That’s because they don’t want to look up and have the rain cover their faces. After all, this isn’t any old rainwater. This is the filth that’s passed through the floors the other jailers have stepped on.”

“A-and they can’t tell a jailor from a prisoner if they’re walking in the dark?”

“They think the surveillance cameras are working properly, so they’ll assume everything is okay until they hear something from them. As long as we don’t press against the walls or crawl around, they won’t catch on.”

Quenser was of course not a specialist. He was giving all this knowledge secondhand.

“B-but won’t it seem weird that we’re walking together? And we don’t have lights or guns.”

“They can’t tell if we have guns or not in the dark.”

“And the lights?”

“I have a suggestion concerning that. Mariage, grab onto me.”

“What!?”

“This prison has no morals, so there have got to be jailors who go have some fun together during their patrols. There’s no other entertainment here. In the worst case, there might even be relationships between jailors and prisoners. At any rate, we can make it so the other jailers make their own assumptions about why we don’t have a light on.”

“U-ugh… I’m not seeing much of an upside in this for me…”

Despite her comment, Mariage did as Quenser asked.

Quenser had assumed she would simply grab onto his hand, but she went further.

“Wait! Ah! Why are you embracing me like that!? And why would you rub your cheek against me!?”

“Eh? But…”

“W-well, if you’re fine with it, I won’t argue.”

Quenser walked on while almost dragging her along with him.

The soft sensation sent a tingling along his spine, but he was also concerned going this far would make them stand out more.

But none of the other guards shouted any warnings their way.

It seemed he had been right in saying the place had no morals.

“Honestly. This rain is horrible. I guess that’s what you get with a tropical area.”

“U-um… I think this is probably due to a meteorological weapon.”

“So it’s artificially created rain? But why? Is there a huge plantation on a nearby island or something?”

“No, the rain is unwanted. It’s apparently a way of avoiding natural disasters by scattering the rain to other places before flooding occurs.”

(I’m more afraid of the lightning.)

Quenser kept that thought to himself.

If that light illuminated them like a camera flash, the jailers might notice the truth. As long as no one was watching in that instant, they would be fine, but there was no 100% guarantee.

But as there was no way of resolving that issue, there was no point in telling Mariage. It might even make her refuse to cooperate and that would 100% guarantee their failure.

“Anyway…”

Mariage began to speak as she led the way to the base of the third watchtower (and pressed up against Quenser).

He could feel her quickened pulse through her chest. She seemed to be desperately trying to suppress her anxiety. Given the depressing “legends” of the prison, that was not surprising.

“One thing bothers me. If the Object itself emits a lot of heat, why did the Megalodiver hide in the zone of altered temperature around the submarine volcano? It could have scattered hot water around itself to create that mirage-like anti-laser wall.”

She was clever.

Without seeing it for herself, she had accurately found the question needing answering.

“We have a number of theories concerning that.”

“Like that it wanted to prioritize controlling the reactor’s temperature and thus wanted to avoid letting the situation adjust the amount of emitted hot water?”

“Or that it was using the two different types of hot water to construct a more complex and difficult to analyze temperature difference.”

Quenser was unsure what expression to give as he noticed the sweet scent coming from Mariage’s hair, so he simply continued down the walkway she indicated.

As expected, there were no metal bar barriers on the way to the third watchtower, so they would not have to attack a jailor from behind and swipe the key.

The smell of the rain and the smell of iron vaguely mixed together. It may have been coming from the wire mesh floor or the metal pipe railings, but he had no guarantee it was actually the metal he was smelling. In a place like this, other possibilities presented themselves.

“To sum it up, we never found a part that seemed to handle water intake. We’re assuming there was a hole on the top we couldn’t see from below or it has a mechanism to open the armor when it needs to take in seawater. We’re guessing the former because it should be constantly circulating seawater.”

“And Objects’ are meant to be sturdy. You would either hide the water intake because it would take damage if attacked while exposed or you would design it to withstand a nuclear attack even while exposed. If I was designing it, I would choose the latter.” She trembled a bit and strengthened her grip on Quenser, but she finally continued. “Putting the water intake on the top might be to prevent it from mistakenly taking in sand from the ocean floor.”

“It’s possible, but there were deep sea fish gathered around it and it didn’t have any trouble from mistakenly taking in a small fish.”

“Well, it is an Object.”

“That it is.”

They continued pleasantly speaking for a while, but then Mariage asked a question as if she had only just remembered.

“U-um… Then what did you do?”

“A bit of sand or a deep sea fish wasn’t enough to block the intake and we hadn’t brought anything like a large plastic sheet with us. Not that we could have placed one on top of a fifty meter Object even if we had. The sound of air bubbles when we used the air to surface would have likely given us away, and we would have been heard climbing up the spherical body in our thick diving suits. There was no way to reach the water intake on the top.”

“No, no, no, no ,no…”

Mariage Nightcap seemed to be panicking just from hearing the story.

“Th-there was nothing you could do.”

“But we had to do something.” Quenser let out a short breath as he walked. “And there was one ‘material’ we could use to block up the New Model’s water intake.”