Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume11 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 11===

A round lifeboat floated between the drift ice.

Inside were three blonde girls in red parade uniforms and the young man in charge of their care.

“Good, good. I was a little worried when the Legitimacy Kingdom melted the ice and triggered all those water vapor explosions, but we should be fine now.”

“It’s all progressing well.”

“It feels like we’re finally back on track, doesn’t it?”

All three were facing each other with military handheld devices in hand as if they were children playing coop with handheld games. The young man was left out and he kept glancing out the round window at the intermittent light and noise.

The three sisters (who actually wanted to show off to him) were a little displeased with that, but they refocused themselves.

“I didn’t think you would accept this job, Dry.”

“Eh? Why not?”

“Because this request for help came from the Laser Cracker 001. Y’know, the one suspected to be involved in that drug war. That may be efficient, but isn’t it disgusting?”

The sensible young man’s shoulders gave a start as he stared out the window.

The triplets (mistakenly) concluded they could gather his attention with this topic, so there was no stopping them.

“He’s not some money-obsessed drug dealer. In a way, he is taking part in the drug war, though.”

“Huh? Then what is he doing?”

“The Laser Cracker 001’s Elite uses the internet to send his designer drug recipes to the enemy maintenance base, but he doesn’t do it to sow confusion in their maintenance or command structure.”

“Ohh, I get it now.”

“He wanted a bad example. Something like a poster hung up in an infirmary.”

“Right, right. Just like any other type of war, there’s offense and defense in a drug war. You attack by sending your products to the enemy nation and earning money. You defend by blocking the products from entering your own country and secretly spreading awareness to make the youth afraid of using the products. A bad example is the best for that. Like showing pictures of paint thinner addicts’ teeth or the torn-up skin of addicts after they tried to scratch at the hallucinations of bugs crawling all over them.”

“You can’t use your own people for that bad example.”

“And even if it’s an enemy nation, you don’t want to destroy the people in a safe country.”

“So he used an enemy nation’s soldiers. If the news runs a story on the sorry state of the soldiers after abusing drugs on the battlefield, no one will try to use that ‘cool and artistic key to the gates of heaven’.”

“Even drugs are about brand name and image, aren’t they? You can see that pretty clearly when a legal drug becomes an illegal drug, when the illegal drug starts being called an herb or something, and when it’s finally known as a dangerous drug. That’s a different sort of defense.”

“It leads to rumors that the filthy soldiers on the battlefield were caught in a national conspiracy, have their teeth falling apart as if from cavities, have their noses constantly running, and get hallucinations that lead to chewing their own fingers to shreds. Of course no one’s going to try to use it after hearing that.”

The young man was reaching information overload and had completely lost track of who was saying what. Oblivious to that minor change yet hoping to attract that normal person’s attention, the three genius girls continued their complicated discussion.

“But what does that say about the current incident?”

“Yes, that ergot alkaloid lysergic acid derivative.”

“Colorful Vanilla.”

“He’s the one in charge of producing that, right? That seems out of character for the Laser Cracker 001. He usually takes the defensive side of the drug war to reduce the damage done.”

“There’s a reason behind it.”

Alisa Martini Sweet smiled thinly with the kind of cruelty unique to a genius.

“This is but the tip of the iceberg.”