Editing HEAVY OBJECT:EX Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 8===

After a deafening explosion and a blinding light, a few of the Baby Magnum’s main cannons were torn away. The sound of blowing wind came next. It seemed to happen with a certain frequency, like someone slowly swinging a metal bat, and then something arrived.

One of the Baby Magnum’s lost main cannons slammed into the jungle Quenser and the others were hiding in.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

Quenser grabbed Skuld and Heivia grabbed the old lady’s hand as they took off running. They leaped into a depression in the ground and hid there just in time for the wreckage of the main cannon to pass by overhead while knocking down all the trees in the area.

But that was not the only damage.

Either the wires had snapped or the welded points had come undone because the swinging analysis equipment, armored trucks, and transport helicopters flew their way in long parabolic arcs. The analysis equipment felled countless trees, the rotors of the rapidly spinning helicopters mowed down the underbrush, and the armored trucks exploded and set the surrounding jungle ablaze.

Heivia trembled next to Quenser inside the depression.

“You’re kidding! You have ''got'' to be kidding!! What the hell was that!? I thought the Trinity Style’s main cannon had been blown away!!”

“They’re called Dvergr,” said Skuld in Quenser’s arms. “They are the smallest unit making up our Norn. They are the dwarves that create the weapons of the gods, so there isn’t just one form. The damage doesn’t matter. The Norn will just take on a new form, become a new Object, and attack.”

“I can’t believe this,” groaned Quenser. “So it only looked out of commission after taking that ablative shell because you were playing dead!? You were waiting for us to get close so you could easily take out the Princess who was so far away!?”

“We didn’t plan it out that well. Your attack really was a complete surprise. The three of us were discussing how to best turn things around and we voted two-against-one to sacrifice me.”

“It doesn’t really matter either way. This just means the insecticide wasn’t enough to kill the roach, right!? What do we do? The disgusting thing’s still alive and kicking!!”

The Princess could still move even with a few of her main cannons lost. She was moving quickly to recover from the disadvantage of taking a surprise attack head on and she fired low-stability plasma cannons in retaliation.

The Trinity Style avoided a few of them, but one clearly hit it dead on.

It should have pierced right through it, but…

“It…stopped it!? But that was definitely a clean hit!!”

The surface was a little melted and orange, but that was it. Even as Quenser shouted his question, he came up with the answer on his own.

“Don’t tell me… You’ve got to be kidding me!! Did it take the evenly-distributed onion armor and focus it on that one point? It forced its way through using the thickness of its armor!? It can do that!?”

It no longer seemed feasible to simply blow through a single point of the armor. Unless the Princess burned through all of the tiny blocks making up the fifty meter, two hundred thousand ton mass, the Trinity Style would continue moving.

He started feeling faint from the hopelessness of the situation.

The Princess would be worn down like this. Once she was defeated, they would lose their support. And with the Trinity Style functioning, there was a chance the surrendered Faith Organization troops would resume the fight. The situation was doubly bad as things were.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Skuld who had her hands bound behind her back with Quenser’s arm around her shoulders.

She looked up at him from near his chest with a smile of resignation.

“I’ll be killed by the Norn. A single Elite isn’t worth all that much to the Faith Organization. They’re perfectly willing to abandon us if it means winning the battle.”

The Object was made up of tiny robots and could freely change its design.

It always used three Pilot Elites, so they did not need any unique characteristics.

It made sense from a design perspective.

The idea had been discussed in the past. With one Elite per Object, military action could be stopped by personal issues like a stomachache, a cavity, or heartbreak. Those fears were generally ignored because a single Object was more useful than one thousand normal tanks, but the Trinity Style’s unit had taken a different approach.

They had raised the value of the whole by reducing the individual value to near zero.

But…

“That’s Experimental Battlefield Madagascar for you. Everyone here is insane.”

“?”

When it came down to it, weapons development was about killing people in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible. There was no room for idealism there. The news on TV might talk about inhumane weapons, but who would be willing to head out there wearing a suit and holding a rose in order to elegantly kill people? Only the side suffering the death bothered with those consolations.

But this was different.

This design principle was lowering the value of the lives onboard the Object and of the lives the other soldiers were trusting their own lives in. That did not sit well with Quenser who was not even a novice designer yet. No matter how much it improved the odds of victory, no matter how low it brought the costs, and no matter how much the customer would love a design like this, he felt a chill before any excitement.

“…”

The next thing he knew, he was glaring at the loathsome colossal weapon and bringing his radio to his mouth.

“Princess, I know this can’t be easy, but please listen. Focus your main cannons on the front of the Trinity Style. Don’t give them a chance to rest.”

“They aren’t giving me a chance to circle around anyway, but then what, Quenser?”

“Then…”

He paused as he stared at the monster. If the “cool weapon” he had hoped for was a soda, then this was that soda after it had gone flat.

“We’ll circle behind it and destroy the damn thing.”