Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume1 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 7===

Once the sun had set, it was time for dinner.

Instead of heading for the mess hall, Quenser headed out into the falling snow. He was having a barbecue that night. As he had caught the deer, Heivia was of course joining him, but it seemed their superior, Froleytia, would be there too because she claimed to just care about her subordinates that much.

Everyone was bored since they left everything about the war to the Object. If they had offered, it seemed likely all 800 soldiers would have come along, but Froleytia decided it should remain a confidential matter between the three of them. After all, they only had a limited amount of meat.

And so the three of them had their barbecue.

They held their barbecue within the grounds of the maintenance base zone.

The base zone was nothing more than a collection of large base vehicles and they had secretly gathered in a space surrounded by facilities on all sides so the winter wind would not blow on them too much. There, they built a fire and placed a metal sheet above it.

Froleytia, the superior officer, had gotten there first and was warming her hands on the fire she had started. She may have been the one looking forward to the dinner the most.

“Even if I warm myself, the cold still permeates my body. I need to eat some fatty meat to warm myself from the inside.”

Quenser glanced at Froleytia’s legs.

“Aren’t stockings warmer than bare legs?”

“Do you want me to shove them over your head so you can find out, Quenser? These are just for my appearance. They give nothing but peace of mind. Do you choose your socks based on what will keep out the cold best? I’m jealous of you guys that get to wear pants year-round,” said the woman in the tight skirt before turning to Heivia. “Good work, Heivia. Thanks to you, the runway can be used to take off from at any time. I’m sure that the STOL group from the air unit will thank you as well.”

“Heh heh. It was nothing.”

“But really the air unit is completely unnecessary. Those cowards removed all the weapons from their own planes, claiming it was to improve agility and stealth functionality. Really, they’re just afraid of having the enemy decide to shoot them down because they see them as a threat. They brazenly claim to specialize in reconnaissance, but almost all of the information on enemy Objects is brought back from the princess’s actual battles.”

“Dammit!! I had a vague idea that what I was doing was useless, but it really pisses me off to have someone else say it!! And given the condition out here, the snow’ll probably all be back by morning!!”

“Well, the age of fighters started going on the decline as far back as when chemical oxygen iodine lasers started being put on bombers. …The units were simply too big to fit on a small fighter. Once light came into play, being able to fly at the speed of sound didn’t matter so much. And then Objects came along. They have all sorts of different kinds of lasers. They can shoot repeatedly and in any direction. It’s impossible to fight against that in a fighter. All air units can do these days is bring in pizza from the safe country before it gets cold.”

“…That was 700 meters. I cleared snow from all 700 meters of that short takeoff runway all on my own!!”

As Heivia trembled in anger, Froleytia stuck her tongue out where he could not see her. She then spoke to Quenser much more familiarly than how she gave orders to her many subordinates.

“By the way, I hear you spoke with the princess outside the base zone,” asked his beautiful superior officer who even had carefully-maintained manicured nails despite being a soldier on the front lines.

Her tone made it sound like that was more important than the fact that he had disobeyed his orders.

“Umm, is that a problem? I talk with her occasionally in the maintenance area, so I just interacted with her in the same way. Should I have thought more about our positions?”

“I don’t see a problem with it. Apparently, the medical group feeds her rations even worse than ours to make absolutely sure her health does not suffer, but I say that will lead to the stress doing her in before poor nutrition ever would.”

“Doesn’t the Elite princess have an exclusive recreation building? From what I hear, it is supposed to be filled with devices that have digitalized healing effects,” said Heivia more politely than he was wont to do.

Froleytia grabbed a juicy piece of cooked venison with the chopsticks she used as part of her Japan obsession.

“That thing costs us all sorts of money, but does no real good. Do you think you could actually have fun playing with teaching materials your teachers at school handed out? Apparently, the princess dropped by once and has never gone there again.”

“So that’s how it is,” replied Quenser as he was reminded of the conversation with her from earlier that day.

He could not imagine anything making that girl smile.

That was the girl who had ominously said she might not be able to win in the next battle.

As those words of hers floated up in his mind, Quenser asked, “Have you ever lost, Froleytia?”

“Yes,” she readily affirmed while looking like she wished she had some beer to go with the meat. “I’ve lost three times when commanding remotely and once with the unit I was stationed with. It was terrible. The criticism when I returned home was worse than the flight itself. But that isn’t too surprising. I had lost a weapon used for strategies on a national scale after all.”

“Eh? Objects are synonymous with war, right? What do you do once the other side destroys your Object? I doubt you could manage with a tank or a fighter,” asked Heivia, brimming with curiosity.

“It’s simple. You raise the white flag,” responded Froleytia nonchalantly.

“Hah?”

“Wars these days are not all-out wars. Once one side’s Object has been destroyed, the victor has been decided. And this victor doesn’t have the time to spare needed to pursue all of the powerless infantry units. No treaty has been formally made in that regard, but it’s one of the basic facts of war that no one even feels the need to bring up. If the unit quickly retreats and surrenders the territory, there is no need to make things more complicated and hunt them down.”

Seeing the gaping mouths of the two novices, Froleytia put on a carefree smile.

“Ha ha. I understand why you’re so surprised by that. When they train you, they don’t want to lower the tension, so they don’t tell you about conventions like that. But just look at me. I joined the military as a child soldier at 13 and have been on various campaigns ever since, but I do not have a single scar. In order to prevent any unnecessary deaths, we use clean weapons like Objects that gather all the military might in one place rather than spreading it out. My lovely skin shows that this is truly a ‘safe battlefield’.” Froleytia spun her chopsticks around a little. “Did you know that the #1 reason for soldiers to be sent home from this unit is not being shot by the enemy or carelessly stepping on a landmine? It’s actually due to fights between men and women within the base zone. On the modern battlefield, you need to be more afraid of love affairs than bullets. Do you see just how peaceful this place is?”

Quenser started to agree, but then a question popped into his mind.

“Wait. But Froleytia, weren’t you sending bombardments directly on enemy bases using a friendly Object in the Pacific earlier today?”

“You have a good eye, Quenser. That was not a war against another proper army. Attacks against guerillas or terrorists are nothing but suppression operations, so the previous conventions do not apply. …Listen up and remember this. That is the most efficient plan for using an Object. Large nations need some kind of mechanism for skillfully pushing back opposing forces.”

As the unpleasant turn of the conversation was ruining the taste of his food, Quenser decided to change the subject. The only subject other than the Objects he could come up with was the food.

Quenser looked at the venison that was acting as the main part of their dinner and then looked over at Heivia who had hunted it down.

“So are soldiers trained in how to hunt for food? I’m only at the level where I might be able to catch a single salmon after 3 hours.”

“Modern rifles have more than just optical scopes. They also have infrared cameras and microphones for searching for the enemy. It’s made so you can trace your target in multiple different ways. I wouldn’t end up with anything either if I headed into the great outdoors with just a fishing pole. Although the rifles are a complete waste of taxes since all the fighting is left to the Object.”

Froleytia then spoke up while skillfully using her chopsticks.

“Unless the supply line to the base zone is cut off, we can get as much food as we want from the home country. And the base will never be taken out as long as we have the Object. Even when I was a new soldier, they didn’t always train us in how to hunt animals. At the very least, it certainly isn’t a skill combat engineers like you need.”

“A combat engineer…hm? I just can’t get used to how that sounds.”

“The management of the base zone revolves around taxes. If we didn’t give a job to the students that hang around, it could affect the number of votes the politicians get. The climax of the council election is coming up back in the home country and Councilor Flide is getting worried.”

There were many different kinds of combat engineers, but the ones Quenser and the others were talking about were soldiers that dealt with explosives. However, they were not professionals that used them to kill enemy soldiers. Instead, they destroyed bridges to cut off the enemy’s path or blew stones out of the way of their own path.

For a student who was full of strange knowledge and did not have the guts to actually shoot someone, that role was perfect. There was also the course of being a medic, but Quenser’s specialty was machines and he did not know much about living things.

“But then our base is made up of the base vehicles, so we can set up camp just by driving those vehicles around, and we also have the Object. There really isn’t much for combat engineers to do.”

“That isn’t just the combat engineers. It’s pretty much the same for everyone in the base zone,” said Froleytia as she reached her chopsticks for one of the few pieces of salmon. “God damn this is a peaceful world. It feels like my gun could rust over and I could get zits from over-nutrition.”

“I know. As long as we have the Object, we’re safe. After three years in a base, I have the path of a noble waiting for me and Quenser here can go back to the safe country and become one of those distinguished scholars,” said Heivia with a smile as he patted Quenser familiarly on the shoulder.

“You kids are making me jealous,” spat out Froleytia, but there was not the slightest hint of jealousy on her face. Most likely, she preferred staying on the safe battlefield to being promoted from the military to a strict political post.

“Yeah,” Quenser said. “As long as we have the Object, even those dulled by peace like us can fight a war.”

Quenser’s words there addressed one truth of the world.

It was true ''as long as they had the Object''.