Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume9 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 9===

By the time Quenser arrived at the run-down motel, the Legitimacy Kingdom’s Azul Hive gang was just about ready to get moving.

It was no longer time to be punching anyone.

As a greeting, he was chased around by a stolen car and very nearly hit in the butt by the bumper.

“Wah! Wah!! Waaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!?”

“Okay! Stop, Heivia! Now, Quenser, do you have anything to say to the nice woman who just had the driver stop only twenty centimeters away?”

Millia leaned out from the car’s sunroof with a smile and Quenser answered her question while collapsed on the ground with tears and snot covering his face.

“E-e-eeeeeeeek!? I-I’m sorry… I won’t ever disobey your orders again! I’m sorryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!”

“That’s some nice crying, but I don’t buy it. …Say, that’s an awfully nice smell coming from your mouth.”

“Oh, that’s because I ate some chocolate chip mint ice cream while I was out.”

“Run him over, Heivia. What does that brat think he was doing while his commanding officer was stuck in a sour-smelling garbage truck?”

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!?”

Having cleverly given up on her search and quickly returned to the motel, Putana sat in the back seat of the car and she raised her hand to give a suggestion.

“Millia, if you are going to execute him, leave it to me. I will give it my all.”

“I feel like you really would kill him, so no. More importantly, get in, Quenser. Some excitement has reached the fleet out at sea, so we need to head out there and support them.”

“Eh? Um, what? What do you mean support them?”

He quickly opened the car’s back door and climbed inside.

Heivia answered from the driver’s seat.

“Sneaking around delivering presents like Santa Claus isn’t enough anymore. The fleet is in trouble, so they want a little help.”

Millia waved her hand in the passenger seat. Putana must have already told them what they had found, so he handed his handheld device to her.

He shared the artificial planet information with the others.

As usual, Quenser sat next to Putana. They looked friendly enough packed in next to each other, but he had no idea when she was going to shoot him at point blank range.

After Quenser got in, several stolen vehicles made their way to the southeastern commercial harbor. That was the source of Azul Hive’s funding.

The cylindrical submersibles they had used when stealing the Collective Farming were stored there. They were the type one rode on top of rather than inside of.

The vehicles stopped on the dock, they unloaded the submersibles, goggles, and oxygen tanks from a pile of containers, and the soldiers made their way back out to sea.

“Our information says the Oriental Magic is constantly sending out powerful radar waves while making its way toward the Legitimacy Kingdom fleet. The insurance organizations that are already screaming about cell phone signals causing cancer would faint if they saw this. Apparently, human flesh would turn as white as boiled chicken at a kilometer away.”

“Then how are we supposed to get close!?”

Heivia’s childish falsetto protest was not enough to stop Millia.

“Submarines prefer to use sonar over radar. Why is that?”

“Are you saying the wall of seawater will weaken the electromagnetic waves enough for us to be safe?”

Quenser found it hard to believe even as he said it, but Millia nodded.

“Despite the overwhelming power they’re using, they still seem to be thinking about efficiency. Instead of sending the microwaves uniformly in three dimensions, it’s more like a two dimensional disk. Think of it like a lighthouse. The light won’t reach the dark ocean. Or rather, it doesn’t need to reach it.”

Still, those numbers had only been roughly detected using an underwater drone. Given the timing of the battle, they would not have had time to get more accurate readings.

There was no safe path.

They only had a path that would keep them alive for the time being.

“Once we’re on the battlefield, make sure you never move to the surface. Stay at least five meters down although ten meters would be ideal. But keep in mind that heading too far down increases the risk of decompression sickness when you come back up. The next time you breathe natural air will be on the deck of the cornered fleet. Let’s go!!”

On Millia’s order, Quenser and the others used the small submersibles to dive down into the lukewarm seawater.

Quenser did not know all that much about the ocean, but he still noticed something strange while operating his submersible. The schools of small fish were moving oddly. They were not approaching the surface and he doubted they were simply afraid of seabirds. He spotted a few fish up above floating on their sides, but the other fish showed no sign of trying to eat them.

He was already seeing the damage being done.

The way the scenery was overwritten by a twisted form of learning gave him a chill.

“What…is that?”

Heivia spoke over the radio from the neighboring submersible.

He was looking straight up.

Several objects resembling long, skinny spears were sticking down from the swaying ocean surface. They looked like strange stalactites or icicles, but they were probably the opposite. In other words, they were actually sticking up above the water.

“Are they like a fishing bobber? Their center of gravity has to be lower down to stay vertical, so the underwater portion is actually larger than the exposed portion.”

“I get that, but what are they? They’re covering the surface for as far as I can see.”

Millia answered that one.

“They’re apparently equipment the Oriental Magic is firing everywhere with a Gatling system. So far, none of them have exploded like a remote cannon or mine. There are unconfirmed reports of them emitting powerful magnetism, so the electronic simulation division suspects they’re auxiliary sensors.”

“Killer radar and extra sensors everywhere? Talk about neurotic. Does the Pilot Elite suspect they’re being stalked if their toothbrush is five centimeters from its usual spot?”

“…”

Putana listened to them while silently looking up with a grim look on her face.

It looked like she was having difficulty accepting something.

The Oriental Magic used its air cushion propulsion device to float from the ocean’s surface, but the massive layer of compressed air below the two hundred thousand ton mass created tiny waves within the ocean as well. The faint stinging on the skin informed them of the monster’s approach.

“That thing can zip around the battlefield at five hundred kph, so why are we catching up to it?”

“That’s because the Princess is holding it back of course.”

They could tell the Princess was moving along the ocean with its naval floats attached. After all, its stability shark anchor plunged deep into the ocean and that giant extendable pillar very nearly smashed them to pieces.

They frantically moved out of the way, but a few of the submersibles were knocked about and flipped over by the massive water current.

Quenser lost control of his.

“Wah!?”

He was thrown from the submersible as it rotated around like a leaf in the wind. He flailed his limbs around, but he could not stop the momentum carrying him toward the surface. He was headed full speed toward being cooked in the human microwave oven of the killer radar.

But then someone grabbed his hand.

“P-Putana?”

“Please don’t get yourself killed. Then I can’t do it myself.”

Putana had apparently become a tsundere.

“Puny humans can’t keep up with a battle between giants!” said Millia. “Putana, carry Quenser with you from here on. If he stays here, he’ll just be crushed by our own ally. That Object wouldn’t notice any more than we would if we stepped on an ant!”

At any rate, they had to continue on.

They turned their backs on the Princess who continued fighting on the surface and sent their submersibles ever onward.

“Kssshhhh!! Ksshh!! Kssssshhhhhhh!! Ksshhh!! Ksssshhhh!!”

“What are you doing, Quenser?”

“It’s no good. I thought I could get a word in to the Princess, but the noise is so bad I can’t get through.”

“Well, of course not with all those radar waves.”

“I guess we can only reach other people underwater with us.”

Quenser began to shift his focus away from the radio, but something stopped him.

One channel was left open.

“What is this? Oh, I get it. It’s the line for the laser transmissions from the auxiliary cameras on the drone. …But wait.”

“What?”

“Really, what is this? Why is this down there?”

Quenser had one arm around Putana’s waist while the other held his handheld device. His face froze over as he stared at the small screen.

The underwater drone had taken a one-way trip toward the ocean floor to become scrap metal.

It gave a view beyond the vast darkness below that was not visible to the naked eye.

Was it dozens, hundreds, or thousands of meters to the bottom?

Something lay on its side in a place completely cut off from them despite being in the same ocean.

It resembled a manta measuring over ten thousand meters long.

Most likely, it was the giant artificial planet known as the Nataraja.