Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 9===

Quenser felt like the fear was going to awaken something inside him.

The chattering of his teeth was so loud and irritating. He tried to hold his jaw to stop it, but the round helmet got in the way.

He shouted into his helmet’s mic despite the risk.

“I’m going to detonate it. Hold onto something for support, everyone!!”

There was no sound.

The outer wall of the space station was destroyed. With their shuttle destroyed, Quenser’s group had nowhere else to go. If they overdid it and the station fell apart, they could only wait for their oxygen to run out. But if the station held together, they would have created a bunch of debris out in space.

Their extravehicular activity units for attitude control could not provide long-range movement like boosters, but what if they grabbed onto that scattering debris to “hitch a ride”?

“Dammit, they have a cutting-edge Object while we’re stuck surfing on metal scraps!?” complained Heivia.

“Sometimes a dress made by patching together newspapers found at the park can be sexier than full silk mourning clothes. If you don’t like it, then use that extravehicular activity unit of yours, Heivia. Now get going!!”

“I can’t stop trembling!!”

“So what? It’s the same as a baseball. Check the speed with an IR laser and then grab onto a safe piece of debris!!”

Quenser shouted those instructions while clinging to a thin panel about the size of a tatami mat. That finally allowed him to move. The piece of debris could only move in one direction, so he would have to jump to another piece if he wanted to change directions.

The World’s End space Object did not seem troubled.

He heard a gas being expelled. And since it reached his ears…

“Eek, here it comes!” said Heivia. “It’s that oxygen. Did it light the deadly fuse sticking out from its ass!? We’ll all be roasted!!”

“Shut up! I know that!!”

Quenser shouted back, stuck a pen-shaped electric fuse into a clay-like Hand Axe plastic explosive, and threw it. He used his radio to detonate it once it was suitably far away.

The resulting explosion resembled a thermobaric bomb and was large enough to engulf an entire city. His personal equipment could never have caused that. It had used the oxygen. But he had detonated it before the oxygen could reach them, so no one was hit by the flames.

Quenser breathed a sigh of relief even though he still could not wipe the sweat from his brow.

He was alive. His theory had preserved his life. He was not a chained-up pet dog that shoved its face in a bowl of food placed in front of it at a set time every day. He thought for himself to survive. That was the human way to live.

“The oxygen doesn’t care who you are or why you detonate it. If we can ignite it before their Pilot Elite, we can trigger the explosion when we want.”

The oxygen was consumed by the explosion, so they could eliminate its power over them by burning it all away before it spread too far.

The oxygen was so frightening because it was invisible, but they could take advantage of the short lag between releasing it and igniting it.

Was the Object not using its laser beams or other secondary cannons because of the oxygen? Those were never meant to aim for such small targets anyway, so it would not want to ignite the oxygen at an unexpected point.

“The earth is covered in oxygen, but that doesn’t mean you can just make the whole atmosphere explode. It has to be concentrated pretty heavily and mixed with hydrogen or acetylene to be weaponized like this. Don’t panic just because you can hear sound in space, Heivia. There’s nothing to fear if it can’t reach that deadly concentration!!”

“But how are we supposed to know if it’s reached that point!? That’s as ill-defined a standard as saying it’s healthy to play with yourself ‘in moderation’! How much is too much!?”

What mattered was that the World’s End was an Object that used large quantities of oxygen.

It could not create oxygen out of nothing in the vacuum of space. Maybe it used electrolysis on large quantities of water and maybe it had the oxygen compactly stored in liquid or solid form at an extreme low temperature, but if it did have it stored in those tanks, they only had to destroy those.

The obvious target here were those cylinders arranged around it like the drums of the Island Nation’s Raijin.

“As cutting-edge or bizarre as that thing is, it’s basically a giant flamethrower, right? Let’s set fire to the enormous flammable tanks on its back and crash it into a lunar villa.”

“And how do you propose we do that!? That’s a nuke-resistant Object!!”

Quenser ignored the complaints. There was no path to survival that way. If they wanted to live, they had to push past the panic, keep thinking, and challenge their own fear. If they stopped thinking, they would either stop moving and become a stationary target, or they would charge in toward certain doom based on thoughtless emotion. They had to be brave but still rationally face the reality before them. Only those who never gave up on making progress could grab at the lifeline dangling before their eyes.

(It doesn’t move all that nimbly for an Object. Is it afraid of knocking some debris into the station it’s supposed to be protecting?)

Whatever the reason, it presented an opportunity.

Quenser moved between a few different pieces of debris larger than an Island Nation tatami mat in order to approach the Object’s surface.

If he was going to pull out a plastic explosive, it had to be here.

“Here goes. This is your only chance to see how it’s done!!”

He threw the clay.

Just as he placed his fat finger on the detonation switch, he sensed a disturbing pressure. He felt someone’s gaze crawling across him.

He was not scorched by an invisible laser beam and he was not turned into space garbage by a tackle from that 200 thousand ton weapon.

He heard a gross sound.

He looked down at his right arm. From the wrist to the elbow, the supposedly polished spacesuit was turning black.

“Oxidation!?”

It really was oxygen. The spacesuit was designed for use in a vacuum, so it never should have taken this sort of damage.

There was a reason the spacesuit with over ten layers was also polished bright. It could not deflect the sun’s heat rays or radiation without that. At this rate, he would lose his life to the fury of nature. Invisible poisons would kill him.

He suppressed the rising fear, clenched his teeth, and pressed the switch.

The sound did not reach him.

His vision spun around, but he was certain the explosion had directly hit the headphone or bridge-like part that connected Raijin’s drums in a half circle.

“This doesn’t have to break the tanks. It only has to send a shock through them to reach the internal pipeline connecting them!!”

“What good is that? A shock? You think pressing a massager against that Object is enough for her hips to give out!?”

“Whether it’s from a solid or a liquid, the World’s End has its oxygen compactly stored in a different form at ultra-low temperature. That means it has to convert it back into a gas to use it.”

He tried to hang on, but it was no use.

The piece of debris slipped from his hands and he could only flail his limbs in search of another piece.

“That means we should be able to do the same thing that causes car engines to stall. Mix some air bubbles in with the liquid and it’ll malfunction. So shaking the pipe isn’t useless. We can’t destroy it and we can’t tear it away, but a small impact should still trigger a malfunction!!”

Heivia, Myonri, and some others must have followed him because he saw some poorly-guided missiles flying toward the Object.

Just then, the World’s End quickly changed direction.

The action sent a stir through its surroundings. Specifically, the killer satellites equipped with four arms below its solar panels responded to its presence and approached.

Maybe the space Object was considered an enemy because it had never meant to be sent out to fight and thus was not registered in their systems, or maybe their sensors had malfunctioned from the heat. Either way, the weapons loaded with explosives crashed into the surface of the 50m Object.

Countless explosions followed.

“Gahhhh!?”

Quenser had already been spinning, but now he was given an additional twist in an unnatural direction. He tried using his extravehicular activity unit, but the brakes would not work. However, he must have been thrown toward the space station. He did not have time to measure their relative speed with a laser, so he just grabbed at something hard with his flailing right hand. It was probably the remains of some cargo materials used when sending the killer satellites out into space from the station. He clung to the large piece of debris that resembled a metal wall.

The Object was surrounded by explosive flames, metal balls, and all sorts of debris, but it was unharmed.

“It didn’t work at all,” lamented Heivia, wherever he was at the moment, but his voice was drowned out by another sound.

It was the sound of highly concentrated oxygen being released into the vacuum. They did not have time to let the failure bother them. The next attack had already begun.

And since Quenser could hear the oxygen, it must have reached him.

He quickly pulled out some Hand Axe.

“It lured in all those killer satellites and let them explode,” continued Heivia. “Just so it could blast the fleas off of itself!! There’s no way we can make it malfunction with an external impact!!”

Quenser was still unsure what to do when the city-sized explosion erupted.