Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume17 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 9===

The idea had come from the cruelly crushed tunnel-drilling vehicle.

Or more accurately, from a piece of equipment they had transferred over from it: the electric mill used to crush coffee beans.

Myonri’s military engineering vehicle traveled through a few of the labyrinthine trenches and tunnels to reach E7.

“I’ll tear down the wall like you said, but is this really enough to defeat a Second Generation Object!?”

The hard-working jack of all trades was still skeptical, but…

“Damn this coffee’s good.”

“You gotta let the pros do their job. No one would know how to use that coffee maker like the owner, so it’s a good thing that silver-haired girl we rescued has recovered.”

“If you don’t make me any, I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel, so I hope you’ve lived a life without regrets!”

Myonri was getting really angry now, but spoiled Quenser only answered her previous question with his hands wrapped around a mug.

“Just get us to the location. Please! Once we’re there, the Police Queen should tell you what a threat we are. But through its fearful actions instead of its words!!”

Once they arrived, Myonri used the folded-up mantis-like arms to tear down a nearby salt wall. The others put on the dust masks that were standard equipment within the vehicle.

“The salt won’t just get in through your mouth and nose. It can get into your body through any mucus membranes, so that means your eyes and ears too. Salt is the perfect example of something we need to live, but will kill us if we get too much of it. Dumping salt over your head means taking in more than if you swallowed an entire shaker of it, so be very careful!!”

They left through the hatch and walked to the salt torn down by Myonri’s mechanical arms. There were plenty of white chunks the size of large stones. They looked hard, but they easily crumbled below the heels of their boots.

Yes.

“It never really made sense.” Quenser was not talking about the Capitalist Corporations Second Generation. “Those white pyramids all around are just unnatural! Digging up the salt from the salt flat is all well and good, but salt is still salt. It would never stick together like that. The bottom side would be crushed and it would all collapse!”

“Are you saying they used some kind of trick? We’re not talking about the deadly food made by a newlywed wife who never learned how to cook! Will this really defeat an Object!?”

“It was baked together.” He got to the point, which meant suddenly shifting focus to the Police Queen. “That thing keeps scattering napalm and engulfing the salt flat in flames so it can harden the salt land. Why? Because it doesn’t want the salt collapsing below it. Simple, right?”

“Will it really freak out if we destroy the ground below it now, though? I mean, that big, old corrupt cop is already hopping over the trench labyrinth!”

“It isn’t the ground collapsing it’s afraid of.”

“Huh?”

“Elise, you’ve figured it out already, haven’t you? I saw that look of realization on your face when I mentioned liquid helium.”

The actual work they had to do was simple.

They were fighting a nuke-resistant Object, but they did not have to construct some massive bomb.

Quenser pulled in one of the salt blocks in front of him.

Today was the once-a-year special event known as the Royal Cleaner.

“That’s a polisher, isn’t it?”

He held a piece of metal larger than a family-size water bottle. The electric cleaning device was normally used to polish the exterior of a car. A motor rotated the disk and a polishing surface similar to a short carpet removed any stains.

Quenser kept a straight face as he pressed the rotating disk against the salt block

The block immediately crumbled, but…

“Looks like this isn’t enough. The pieces are too coarse and it doesn’t make enough quickly enough.”

“A-atomization.”

An unexpected voice joined the conversation.

They looked over to see the man they had saved leaving the vehicle with a dust mask on.

“Couldn’t you use atomization? That’s what we use to obtain large quantities in the factory. You can’t sell the salt extracted from the flat when it’s still in large chunks.”

He was right.

That method would work.

“Hey, Myonri. You mentioned that salt can melt, didn’t you!?”

The driver girl responded to the student over the radio.

“Oh, you mean the radiator? Yes, if you stick salt somewhere that hot, it will melt just like cheese.”

“In other words, it doesn’t burn. You could even wrap something in it to cook it.” He sighed. “Let’s use heat to completely melt the salt. If we spray it out after that, it should transform into miniscule particles finer than pollen when it cools and rehardens. That’s how they make metal powder, anyway.”

That was why they were so excessively worried about their masks and their exposed skin. An extremely fine powder would behave differently from normal matter. For example, the kidneys were a fine filter, but some medicines were made into small enough particles to pass right through it. They needed salt to live, but it was still frightening to think of it passing through the filters for their brain and kidneys to reach every last part of their body.

So why did they need such fine salt despite the risk it entailed?

“It uses low-temperature superconducting magnets,” said Elise.

“Huh? What’s that?” asked Heivia. “Some kind of main cannon?”

“No, that is how the Police Queen moves around. Or more accurately, it is a special joint that can instantly change the angle of its ski-like parts.”

“They’re floating, Heivia.” Quenser took over with the tone of a child who had thought up a good prank. “Have you seen those maglev experiments? If you place a neodymium magnet above metal that has been chilled enough, it will just float there. The giant joints connecting the Police Queen’s spherical main body to its skis are hollow on the inside. Since they’re floating, there’s no friction. I imagine the parts fit perfectly together like an Island Nation tea caddy and its lid. The cylindrical support pillars that connect the main body to the propulsion devices probably have rollers and brakes inside that form the mechanism for adjusting the angle of the skis. Anyway, that’s the secret behind its absurdly quick directional changes.”

“Wait, you mean…?”

“We just have to fill in those gaps.” That frail boy’s eyes contained the gleam of a bird of prey. “The Police Queen is afraid of any unforeseen errors or clogs. It targeted us over the Princess because it feared the fine salt and wanted to solidify it all with the napalm. It may have been upset with us for tearing up the salty ground with our vehicles’ continuous tracks, but targeting us was probably just camouflage. It didn’t want anyone realizing the true purpose for the napalm, so it was simply attacking the soldiers at the same coordinates. That was all.”

So.

So.

So.

“It’s like a tea caddy and lid. Those joints have a slight gap on the sides. Or the Pilot Elite is afraid there are anyway. So we only have to target that Achilles heel. We’ll use the finest salt we can: less than a micron. Once we scatter around plenty of salt dust finer than cedar pollen, it’s sure to bring that bastard to a stop.”

“But the Police Queen is engulfing everything in flames already,” pointed out Heivia. “You said the process requires heating up the salt to melt it and then cooling it back down, right? If that was enough to clog it up, wouldn’t it have taken itself out already!? It’s already melting the ground and letting it cool!”

“It has to cool down as a spray. Simply heating it up and letting it cool will just create a single clump like when you melt cheese. Turning it into a fine spray first is crucial.”

“That part sounds like it will be hard,” said Elise.

“Really? Even 1 euro stores sell detergents in spray bottles.”

The melting point of salt was around 800 degrees, but they could easily reach that with their vehicle’s engine. By making some quick adjustments to the end of a metal pipe, attaching that to the exhaust pipe on the back, and making it so the melted salt would pour in there, the rest would happen automatically.

A large silhouette cut by a short distance away. The Police Queen had crossed over the trench labyrinth.

“It’s started!” announced Quenser.

“Hey, it uses an air cushion system, right?” said Heivia. “When it’s blasting air around at all times, our salt powder will just be blown away!!”

“Are you sure about that?”

Quenser stabbed a pen-like electric fuse into a plastic explosive and tossed it toward the pile of salt they had made to be finer than a micron. He did not have time to worry too much about the exact arrangement. Once the four of them (three potatoes and one civilian man) had circled behind Myonri’s military engineering vehicle, he hit his radio’s switch before the air cushion blast reached them.

With an ear-splitting explosion, all the salt was pushed high into the sky by the blast. The grains were too small to see with the naked eye, but the area glittered like a rainbow. The salt was reflecting the sunlight.

Then the powerful gust of wind pushed in like a bath pipe being cleaned out.

Even a large man clinging tightly to the metal vehicle could have been blown away by that, so Heivia clenched his teeth behind his dust mask and raised his voice.

“See, it didn’t work!! Our miniscule resistance was entirely wasted!!”

“You can’t create energy out of nothing, Heivia.” Quenser smiled while also desperately holding on. “An air cushion uses a lift fan for air intake. It gathers that air below itself and uses that to float. So the more powerful that gust, the more air it has to be taking in. And it gets that air from the space around it! Once the salt is in that current, the Object will do the heavy lifting for us. It’ll be gathering the very toxin that will destroy it!!”

A deep roar shook the air.

It was a deafening metallic scraping similar to an anti-earthquake structure in a skyscraper.

The salt dust finer than cedar pollen had gotten into the joints of its “skis”.

That salt filled the slight gaps on the sides similar to an Island Nation tea caddy and lid, so it started producing a creaking sound. The smooth movements ground to a halt, the skis could not change angle, and its light footwork was interrupted.

It seemed to pitch forward.

It could not change direction while sliding to the side, so it simply floated there. And then it rolled over. The spherical main body rolled and rolled, bending and breaking the main cannons and floats that got caught between it and the salt ground.

“Princess, the bugs crawling along the ground here have just one request.”

Quenser exhaled and then spoke a single coldhearted word.

“Fire.”