Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 8===

'''Mission Report B-04

'''March 21 – 2335 Hours

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



“Th-this is the third watchtower.”

“Stand back. I’ll do the work.”

Quenser was reluctant to say goodbye to Mariage’s softness and warmth, but he did not want to lose track of what mattered and be shot by the jailers.

He approached the watchtower alone and checked around carefully while the blood-like rain poured down on his head.

The watchtower itself was made up of countless metal pipes. This kept the jailers’ view open, but it also exposed the wiring that would normally be hidden in the walls. It would not be difficult to rewire a few things.

“Sh-should you really be touching that?”

“As long as it isn’t a high voltage power cable, I’ll be fine. I just have to make sure I don’t grab the wrong thing.”

He selected a few communication cables and ripped off the plastic covering with his teeth. They were normal copper wires instead of fiber optic.

“How are you going to reconnect them?”

“This prison has updated its security system a few times and the old cables were left in place. You can even see the unused cables hanging right there. I can tear off pieces of them to make bypass lines.”

“Wow… You’re really good at this.”

“Don’t tell anyone, but I once messed with the insides of a slot machine back in my safe country. We all gathered our knowledge to take revenge against a cheating casino.”

He had no tools, but he finished the work in no time.

He was like a fish given water.

“Done. Now the security server that manages the prison’s closed system has an opening to the outside.”

“Wh-what now? Do we return to our cells and wait?”

“No. Once the electronic simulation division detects the open line, the military will take action. We’ll head somewhere where we won’t be caught in the crossfire. We’re supposed to meet up at the abandoned boat pier, so we can hide underneath it and wait for the retrieval unit.”

“Ughh…”

“Please lead the way. I don’t want to get lost after all this. …Don’t worry. The military is fully supporting this attack. The prison can’t hope to stand up to them when it comes to pure firepower. We only need to fear unpredictable stray bullets.”

“Um, uh…”

“More importantly, have you figured anything out about the Megalodiver!? I’ve told you everything I have to tell you, including the plan to seal its water intake using the volcano’s lava!! Is there anything else?”

“That’s not it. Heh…eh heh heh…”

Quenser frowned.

(That’s not it?)

Why was she rejecting what he had said? Why had she felt the need to end the conversation?

After coming this far, there was nothing else to do and it was not like she could have other plans, so why?

“U-um… I’m really sorry, Quenser.”

He heard a footstep.

It was such a frightening noise that he hesitated to turn around.

(It can’t be…)

He had a bad feeling about this.

He felt like he had made a faulty assumption at the very, very beginning and had only noticed after the theory was complete.

(It can’t be!!)

“Quenser Barbotage.”

He heard a voice, but it was not Mariage Nightcap’s.

It was the deep male voice of a jailer and it came from directly behind him.

“How about we discuss this large-scale jailbreak that is supposed to occur tonight?”

A vise-like grip squeezed his shoulder and he was forcibly turned around.

He shouted out, but there was nothing he could do. Several men rushed up with the full-auto shotguns known as Don Chicago Can Openers. He had his back slammed into the wall and a shotgun barrel shoved into his mouth. Another man then beat the side of his head with another shotgun’s stock. He felt like the roots of his teeth had bent. As he held his mouth and curled up, a rain of blows came from every direction.

His consciousness flashed in and out.

Partway through, he even forgot to remain balled up to protect his organs.

He was grabbed by the hair and thrown into a passageway that reeked of the salty wind.

All of the jailers looked the same to him, but one smiled and asked a question.

“Are you gonna talk or not?”

The man shoved his shotgun barrel under Quenser’s jaw to force him to look up.

“Listen. Reality isn’t like the movies. If I pull the trigger now, you won’t die. Your face will be smashed to pieces and some of your brain’s frontal lobe might splatter out, but you’ll keep living. Do you want to see what that’s like?”

“What…is she?” groaned Quenser with the taste of iron in his mouth. “Mariage Nightcap is a prisoner here… I thought that meant she was sent here for a crime she didn’t commit.”

[[Image:HO_v08_196.jpg|thumb]]

“And so she hated being here?”

The man’s smile deepened to something vulgar.

He violently grabbed the bespectacled and fainthearted-looking girl’s arm, but she showed no sign of struggling or trying to run. In fact, she gave a stiff smile as the jailer embraced her shoulder.

“I…don’t think this place is all that bad. I can write ebooks and trade stocks from here. Breaking me out would be a biiiit of a problem. Eh heh…eh heh heh…”

Quenser doubted that was what she actually thought.

Even the smile on her face was broken.

He did not know what kind of life she was being forced to live, but her own will had grown remarkably feeble.

Quenser himself had said the prison had no morals.

He had also said there might be relationships between jailers or even between jailers and prisoners.

“Did you give into them, NTR girl?”

“Don’t say that,” said the smiling and shotgun-wielding jailer. “Virgins are the easiest. When they’ve got something to protect, they’ll do anything you say in exchange. She’s even the one that suggested earning a little money from book royalties and stocks. She offered to give us a cut as long as we spared her that.”

The smile on the man’s face made it clear he was willing to kill for no good reason.

“Anyway, it looks like hacking into our system was the first stage of your plan, so we switched the entire facility to offline mode. The military likes surefire methods, so they’ll call off the operation if it falls apart at the very beginning. That way they can search for a better method. Château de Rouge will fall eventually, but it isn’t happening today. The cavalry isn’t on the way to save you.”

“…”

“Tell me what unit you belong to. We tame troublesome people for the nobles and royals’ convenience, so we’ve got plenty of secret connections. We’ll have them act on our behalf and take care of your commanding officer. And while all that’s going on, we can escape. We’ll be able to make a new secret prison soon enough. The nobles will never stop having their fun, after all.”

Quenser slowly opened his mouth, but not because he had given into the jailer before his eyes.

The boy laughed and spoke to Mariage.

“Why do you think I was the one doing this?”

“What…?”

“I’m just a student. I’ve never even been properly trained to shoot a gun. The military has countless specialists in all sorts of fields, so why do you think they left this to me instead of an infiltration expert? Doesn’t make sense, does it!? Normally, a team of commandos from the intelligence division would have rescued you and then we could have talked at our leisure at a military base. That’s the textbook path to success! But we didn’t do that. The hardheaded military left the standard path. Why!? If you really are smarter than these guys, don’t you find it strange!?”

Quenser was not from the intelligence division. It was out of the ordinary for him to be ordered on a mission needing high-level training in infiltration.

“Um…”

“Remember what I told you? Our enemy is a marine Object built in secret by the Island Nation. And it doesn’t float on the ocean like normal. This second generation is made to submerge! And where is this prison built!? It’s on the ocean, isn’t it!?”

“You can’t mean…”

Mariage gulped and Quenser shouted out despite the shotgun pressed against his jaw.

“It’s after you!! It’s trying to eliminate the ‘monster’ that might find a weakness in it!!”

As soon as he got the words out, the whole world was tossed about.

A tremendous vibration shook the entire facility that looked like a giant birdcage built on the ocean. Every single one of them was tossed along the passageway. Quenser used the confusion to kick the jaw of a jailor lying nearby.

“Due to the formal paperwork, it wasn’t clear if the rescue operation would make it in time, so I was unofficially sent ahead!! That way I could get any information out of you before the Megalodiver could kill you!!”

One of the jailers grabbed a Don Chicago Can Opener while lying on the ground.

He shouted something, stood up, and tried to aim at Quenser, but then he stopped.

He seemed to be looking off into the distance.

His gaze was turned toward the dark ocean visible past the jungle gym-like third watchtower.

Quenser knew the name of the despair before the man’s eyes. He had seen it himself in the past.

The boy sprang to his feet and tackled the confused Mariage Nightcap to the ground.

A moment later, a tremendous flash of light surged out and everything evaporated.

The laser beam fired by the New Model was just as thick as the third watchtower that acted as a pillar supporting the birdcage.

Everything melted into the color orange and scattered about: the metal watchtower, the passageways, the barriers blocking them off, and the jailers in charge of them.

“Run.”

He was half-blinded and sharp pain assaulted his temples, but he did not have time to worry about it.

He grabbed Mariage’s collar and forced her to her feet.

“We have to get out of here!! You may be a slut who gave into fear and surrendered your heart to the jailers, but you don’t want to die with them, do you!? Then run!! That was its smallest anti personnel cannon. If it fires its main cannon, we’ll be evaporated along with this part of the map!!”

“No, no, no, no, no…”

The two of them ran along the passageway and Mariage asked a question with tears in her eyes and while gasping for breath.

“What is that!? I thought you dealt with the Island Nation’s New Model at the bottom of the ocean!”

“If it had ended that easily, we wouldn’t need your help! We weren’t good enough!!”

“B-but you said the Megalodiver was a submerged Objet! Why is it firing from the surface!?”

“We caused a certain amount of damage. It seems the water intake is used for the reactor cooling, the water jet propulsion, and the pilot Elite’s oxygen supply. It creates oxygen from seawater using electrolysis!”

“What’s your point!?”

“It seems to have a few different water intakes and we sealed the oxygen supply one with the lava.”

The entire prison shook once more.

The container cells hanging down started to fall into the dark ocean. There was a living human in each and every one of them and they were all poor innocents who had earned the wrath of nobles or royals.

“In other words, it was able to keep fighting after surfacing! On the surface, it can take in air directly!!”

“But! But!! Wasn’t its greatest selling point the way it neutralized all attacks by blocking metal shells with the thick layer of water and bending laser beams with the temperature change created by the volcano!? Can’t another Object easily defeat it on the surface!?”

“We thought so, too!!”

Suddenly, the passageway itself fell. It tilted and the two of them tumbled down to a lower level like it was a slide.

“But it didn’t work. Its true terror doesn’t come from its ability to dive underwater.”

Gravity vanished.

By the time they realized the entire prison was collapsing, it was all over.

Quenser and Mariage were thrown into the lukewarm southern ocean along with all the other prisoners.