Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume14 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 11===

They heard an explosion and felt a tremor.

Gunfire followed.

Only now did Quenser realize his mobile device and radio were not functioning. Powerful jamming must have begun at the same time as the blackout.

The enemy had no intention of hiding it any longer.

“Oh, no! This doesn’t sound like the infiltration phase! They’ve already set everything up and are starting the attack phase!!”

“More importantly, what caused them to start shooting? Their target is that old woman named Katarina Martini, right!? I doubt they would be shooting this much before reaching her!!”

The Legitimacy Kingdom potatoes shouted to each other as they swiftly got to work. The sleeping Princess woke up with no need for an alarm clock.

They split into two general groups.

The first was a search team confirming the safety of Katarina Martini. The second was a bodyguard team guiding the Princess to the Baby Magnum where she would be most safe.

“Even with all the insanity at that silo city, the maintenance base still functioned as a shield. But as soon as the Martini Series shows up, we get this!”

“You only realize how much you liked a rule after it’s been broken. The collapse of the Martini Series has arrived. If we don’t stop it here, this will spread to the safe countries around the world.”

The enemy was already breaking the rules, so they would have no way of stopping the violence if they lost their Object. Then they would have no one to stop the Nitrogen Mirage from reaching New Caribbean Island.

They wanted to know more about Piranirie Martini Smoky. They had to see Katarina to approach the core of this, but Quenser and Heivia had chosen to guard the Princess. Without solidifying their footing, they would be unable to advance any further.

Heivia raised his assault rifle as he spoke.

“This is bad… We’ve reached an age of slaughter led by rational killers. I feel bad for the Information Alliance soldiers for being sent out by someone like that…”

“Those arguments are meaningless if we don’t win first.”

“Damn right!”

The gloomy and windowless electronic simulation division room was one thing, but it was a sunny day outside. And yet Heivia groaned as soon as he opened the door.

They could not see.

A pink chemical smokescreen was obscuring their vision. They could not even see the crunchy chocolate volcanic rock below their feet.

“Ugh, cough!! This is the worst. Watch out for enemy attack and friendly fire!!”

“My eyes are watering…” muttered the Princess.

It was all over if he lost sight of her, so Quenser firmly held her hand.

“So what are we supposed to do?” he asked.

“Grab the Princess’s head and have her crouch down. Don’t let that VIP’s head get any higher than our you-know-whats!”

The enemy did not seem to be evenly spread across the island. They could hear gunshots from a short distance away. And the smokescreen did not seem to have been fired at them in particular. It had only been blown here by the wind.

“This tuna base is basically a noble’s manor, right? And an enemy nation is seriously trespassing and firing guns? If Sir Bloodrics had a short temper, this would trigger an international incident…”

“The war has already begun, you moron! And it sounds like the worst of it is at the detention barracks where we hold POWs. This isn’t random. They know the layout.”

Myonri drove a military truck over from the front of the building.

Even if the smokescreen was only what the wind had blown over, they could barely see anymore. Quenser opened the back door, pushed on the Princess’s small butt to help her inside, and then climbed in after her. Heivia circled around to the passenger side and then clicked his tongue.

“Damn, if I was gonna operate the heavy machinegun on the roof, I should’ve gone to the back!!”

The Princess tilted her head at that.

“I could be the gunner.”

“Quenser, you can grab her this one time! Just stop the Princess! In what world do you stick your VIP up on the roof!?”

“We don’t have time, so I’m leaving with or without you!”

With almost zero visibility, Myonri clenched her teeth together and floored it with a submachinegun in her lap.

Not ten meters into their drive, what could only have been a human silhouette was sent flying by the bumper. Myonri screamed and started to brake, but Heivia slapped her head from the passenger seat.

“That was an Information Alliance uniform, so one down! Keep going!!”

The drive was entirely reliant on luck. All the windows were covered with walls of pink, so it was easy to lose your sense of direction. They had to determine direction from the compass in their hand instead of the sun in the sky.

“But don’t trust that too much, Myonri. This is an artificial island made from volcanic rock, so it’s chock full of metal. That can mess with the geomagnetism, so the needle might change directions.”

“Can someone with two hands free please handle the navigation!?”

“That soldier you just hit was carrying a drum and cables.” Quenser had a knack for not hearing anything he did not want to hear. “They brought combat engineers who specialize in explosives just like me. And New Caribbean Island was made by gathering magma using artificial earthquakes triggered by a ton of explosives, right?”

“Are you kidding me!? If there’s an eruption now, we’ve got nowhere to run!”

The idiot duo’s conversation seemed to have inspired enough fear in Myonri to have a negative sort of awakening.

While driving through the thick smokescreen, she used her instincts to lock onto silhouettes and ran over several enemy soldiers in a row.

The Princess turned her emotionless eyes outside the window which seemed coated with cotton candy and she listened to the gunshots coming from mostly one direction.

“There’s no hesitation in their movements… Do they have a drone flying overhead for support?”

“In this smokescreen? They set it up, so how are they telling friend from foe?”

“How should I know?” said Heivia. “Maybe they have IR markers on all their allies. We don’t have time to check one of their corpses, though. Getting the Princess onboard her Object comes first!”

A few dull explosions rang out.

It came from their destination.

“The Object hangar is under attack,” said the Princess.

“The reactor stays active even when it’s on standby, right? If they get inside and mess with the reactor, this entire island could be wiped from the map…”

“That would be terrible, but not even a nuke can destroy the Baby Magnum, so I doubt they can break it open so easily. Let’s get in there before we lose our foothold!!”

The smokescreen really was the worst.

Myonri crashed the truck not through the wide-open front door entrance but through a completely normal and entirely unrelated wall.

The engine grill was crushed like an empty can and Quenser’s butt rose from his seat and he gave a rather forceful kiss to the driver’s seat headrest.

“Bwah!?”

“Quenser, you idiot. You’re supposed to act as the Princess’s meat cushion at times like this.”

Myonri tried shifting into reverse and backing out, but it was no use.

“Dammit. My eyes are stinging again. Prepare yourselves!!”

Heivia placed a hand on her shoulder as a signal and then left through the passenger side door. Quenser grabbed the Princess’s slender shoulders and they jumped out of the back seat and onto the rough black ground.

The sound of gunfire pounded at their entire bodies instead of just their eardrums.

“It’s close,” said the Princess. “That gunfire is coming from inside.”

Quenser looked around and moved so nervously it was unclear who was protecting who.

“This is bad. Those are definitely the sounds of war. I could really die here.”

“Quenser, why did you even come out to the battlefield countries anyway?” said Heivia.

They choked on the smokescreen, but they had no choice but to keep going.

Quenser, Heivia, and Myonri surrounded the Princess in a single clump as the potatoes moved along the giant hangar wall. They came across a human-sized entrance on one side.

“Armageddon is underway in there. Quenser, you take a gun just in case.”

While pressed against the wall, Heivia tossed over his magnum sidearm, but it was not his awful friend who caught it. The Princess reached over and grabbed it first.

“I’m worried about the old lady,” said the expressionless girl.

Heivia and Myonri were unsure what to do when she immediately started aiming it around, but they had to chase after her regardless.

The aforementioned old lady must have realized reinforcements had arrived because her familiar voice reached them from atop the scaffolding.

“Watch out for 25mm grenades! They fire them in quick succession and they’re smart weapons!!”

“Are you kidding me?” muttered Heivia in shock as they hid behind some spare onion armor stacked up to waist height.

With smart weapons, it was game over once the electronically-controlled sight locked onto them. The grenades would alter their trajectory midflight to accurately hit them. And hiding behind cover would not be enough to escape. If they fled behind any kind of shield, the enemy just had to fire somewhere past the cover so the shrapnel would do lethal damage to everything behind the shield. If they were driven out by those and then shot down with rifle bullets, they would never recover.

But that also told them something.

(How are the launcher and the grenade linked? They’re jamming the place and infrared wouldn’t work well in this heat. And if this chemical smokescreen is blocking out all kinds of light, everything from IR to UV would be suspect. In that case…)

“The grenades are coming! Get down and protect your head!!”

“Kh.”

Just like with hand grenades, the standard was to attack from two places at once.

Even if they took care of one attacker, the other explosion would get them.

While Heivia and Myonri tearfully covered their head with their hands, Quenser alone did something odd. He opened the door to a nearby fire hydrant, pulled out the thick hose, and aimed the nozzle toward the Information Alliance soldiers.

He gave it a somewhat wide-angle spray by rotating the metal ring surrounding the nozzle and he forcibly held the bucking hose in place as the high-pressure water shot out.

That was precisely when the 25mm cylinders flew out in parabolic arcs, but they soon turned in the wrong direction. The explosive noise and shockwaves pounded on their right ears, but Quenser’s group was unharmed.

“Wow…”

“With a wide-angle spray, it’s a lot like a searchlight, so controlling it isn’t hard. More importantly, Heivia, you take over the hose. Don’t move too far forward and get yourself shot, okay?”

“Wait, hold on! What are you gonna do!?”

“I’ll be making some sparks with the circular saw in the work area back there, so cover me.”

“Why!? Are you making some kind of secret weapon!?”

“They aren’t using radio or IR. But the old lady’s voice reached us loud and clear. It’s ultrasound. They’re sending out their signals using sound waves beyond the audible range.”

Heivia looked surprised, so Quenser drove his point home.

“That’s also why they bothered with a blackout in the middle of the day. They wanted to shut off any kind of speaker. But handheld power tools are generally battery-powered. If I make a whole bunch of noise scraping at metal, the smart control of their grenades and their markers preventing friendly fire won’t work anymore!”

They did not have time to hesitate.

Quenser could not use a gun properly, but he ran over to the work bench while Heivia created a barrier against the grenade launchers and rifles using the firehose water and Myonri fired her submachinegun to keep the enemy soldiers behind cover.

Once he pressed the rapidly-rotating blade against a thick metal panel and orange sparks scattered everywhere, things began to change.

The detonation of the grenades was program-controlled, so once that function was lost, the enemy was outnumbered. The firehose was no longer necessary. The potatoes used cover to accurately avoid the line of fire as they surrounded the Information Alliance attackers and mercilessly filled them with lead.

Historically, strategists and tricksters would occasionally have their time in the limelight, but there was one thing they had to watch out for. Their fame was all well and good when they were winning, but their fate would be even more tragic than most when they lost.

“Okay, clear! Watch out for any remaining wires and get the Princess into the cockpit!!”

“Heivia, I found an ultrasonic wave marker on one of the corpses. See that band wrapped around the upper arm? It’s just like the mosquito noise devices hanging under the eaves at a convenience store.”

“Quenser, pass one of those to me,” said the Princess. “Only the Information Alliance is wearing these things, right? I can scan the frequency and take out every last one of them with my anti-personnel laser planetarium.”

(Hmm, the Princess really is a warfighter. I guess she isn’t the type to shriek and cling to my arm in a haunted house.)

Quenser kept that honest opinion to himself as he saw off the cutting-edge warrior girl with a grin. If he said anything to upset the Pilot Elite here, every last one of his allies was sure to punch him later on.

Once the Generation One was moving, the battle was as good as won.

Unlike the Generation Twos which were specialized for Object battles alone, the Baby Magnum was designed for battles with tanks, aircraft, and even infantry groups. Even inside that smokescreen, she could accurately determine who was an enemy and send a horizontal storm of laser beams their way.

A sizzling sound that could have come from a Chinese restaurant came from outside the hangar.

It was best not to think about what had just been vaporized.

“Oh, looks like the jamming’s gone.”

“The Princess probably blew up a work boat out at sea or an electronic warfare aircraft with a big plate on its back.”

And with the radios functioning again, they received a very welcome message from their commander.

“This is Frolaytia. Listen up, everyone!”

“This is sure to be some kind of hellish work. Quick, get the jamming back up!!”

“If she really wanted us to listen, she should show off those wonderful tits of hers.”

“Things have calmed down, but Katarina Martini is nowhere to be found. She may have already been killed, but begin a search under the assumption she has been recaptured. Check the straight-line path between this artificial volcano island and the Information Alliance maintenance fleet. The Princess has the advantage when it comes to speed, but she isn’t that dexterous. We need infantry to settle things after she’s held them up! And the more the better!!”

“What do we do, Heivia?”

“Nothing. We’ve already done our share of work today. It’s not like we get overtime pay, so I’m taking a dump and getting to sleep.”

“By the way,” continued Frolaytia. “The assembly point is this island and 200 nautical miles around it. If you wish to refuse this mission, please leave that area at once. Otherwise, you might just be stuck here with the rest of us.”

“What are you doing, Quenser!? We need to jump in the ocean immediately!!”

“There’s no way we can swim 200 nautical miles! We’d drown!!”

“Three, two, one, zero. Good, good. I am glad to see I have so many subordinates with such passion hidden in their hearts. Thank you very much! That was the deadline.”

“What the hell was that!? It’s just like a search engine or social network’s notification of a non-negotiable change to their user policy! And our lives are on the line here!!”

“She’s really figured out how to take advantage of us…”

Q. This work environment would never be allowed in a normal company, so why was it allowed here? A. Because this was not a normal company. That simple answer was the worst part about the military. They could not reject this mission no matter how much they complained, so the idiot duo left the Object maintenance area while listening to Frolaytia’s instructions.

The sea breeze was finally sweeping the pink smokescreen away, but the puddles leftover from the earlier rain were now discolored.

“They’re polluting the environment.”

“This war hasn’t gotten so bad we have to crawl around drinking from puddles.”

“And who’s gonna be breathing in the air after the hot sun evaporates those puddles?”

As they argued, the Legitimacy Kingdom potatoes arrived at one of the hangars lined up alongside a makeshift runway. Something was being towed out of that large half-cylinder building.

“A Merman? That’s a marine rescue helicopter, not a war toy!”

“I really want to chew out whoever it was that named it Merman instead of Mermaid.”

Those unproductive idiots only complained no matter what they saw, but busty, silver-haired Frolaytia was waiting for them at the hangar.

“Wherever the enemy is headed, they’re a step ahead of us. We need speed to catch up and these are faster than a boat, so fly low and pursue any suspicious readings. If you want a gun emplacement at the side door, attach one DIY-style. You have 600 seconds!”

She clapped her hands in front of her extremely large chest and the potatoes all got to work. This was no time to be staring at those large and jiggly things. Not because they wanted to dutifully fulfill their orders, but because being too slow here would mean ending up on the front line with no protection.

“Outta the way! That .50 caliber heavy machinegun is mine!!”

“You just took twenty rockets, didn’t you!?”

“Fools. All those weapons will be useless without any power tools to attach them. Ee hee hee. I’ll grab them all for myself and trade them for the best gear…”

The Legitimacy Kingdom clearly had excess energy if they were fighting amongst themselves before heading out to battle. The arguments continued as the marine rescue helicopters of love and peace were covered in deadly weapons.

“Ah, no. I-I want some of that electronic warfare gear…”

“Here, Lilim! Take this motion sickness bag!”

“Oh, no. Has that set in!? Could you stop making that my defining trait!?”

“We’ll be traveling through the air, so make sure to bring lots of barf bags!!”

Quenser looked up after attaching a swiveling heavy machinegun that stuck out of the side door.

“Hey, Myonri, do we really need to paint a face on the front of the helicopter?”

“It looked like it could really use some paint.”

They were apparently in the same group again.

Once the promised 600 seconds had passed, Frolaytia clapped once more and Quenser’s group climbed aboard the large helicopter that had a main rotor in the front and back.

It was finally time to head out.

With Myonri at the controls, the Merman held Quenser, Heivia, and six other soldiers in its cargo space. Because it was originally meant for marine rescues, the wall was covered in a variety of equipment like oxygen tanks, masks, underwater work tools, and even medical devices like an AED and packs of saline.

“You can tell this belonged to a rich guy. They have better medical equipment than we do in the military.”

“More importantly, help me drop this wireless sonobuoy, Quenser! There’s something wrong when a commoner is taking it easy and a noble is working up a sweat!!”

Heivia tossed what looked like a long narrow sandbag out the side door and he unfortunately did not possess a spirit of noblesse oblige.

A sonobuoy was like a large float that was dropped into the ocean so it could scatter the kind of active sonar used by submarines and send back data on any dangerous readings it found. If the Information Alliance was using a submarine after capturing Katarina Martini, this would tell them where it was.

“Do you really think we’ll find them? Even if we are on the shortest path between New Caribbean Island and their maintenance fleet.”

“There’s nowhere for them to hide above or below the water. If we watch from above and drop sonobuoys, they’re trapped. If only it wasn’t a black-hearted old woman we were rescuing. But she’s the only one with info on Piranirie, so we have no choice!”

The 50m Baby Magnum passed by directly below the helicopters.

The top speed of a helicopter was said to be between 300 and 400kph, but an Object could easily exceed 500. The sight of the colossal weapon easily passing the aircraft had enough of an impact to feel completely surreal.

A powerful gust of wind shook the helicopter up and down.

“Kyah!?”

“Princess, I know you want to show off, but tone it down a bit!!”

However, the Baby Magnum did not seem to care.

In fact…

“But you would be in trouble if I didn’t move out ahead.”

It slowly dawned on them what she meant by that.

Quenser and Heivia exchanged a glance.

“If the Objects on both sides are working, that means the Information Alliance Nitrogen Mirage can join the battle too, doesn’t it? So wouldn’t this area be ruled by its anti-air lasers and their perfect accuracy…?”

“C-curse that busty commander… She stuffed these flying piñatas with as much living meat as she could!”

A bluish-white beam shot right past the large helicopter.

It probably had not been aimed at them. If it had, they would have been vaporized. It was only a warning shot directed at the Baby Magnum.

But a hit from a stray shot would leave them just as dead.

Also, they had to get to work before they really were the enemy’s target.

“Myonri! Move down as close to the ocean as you can manage!!”

“If we move below 50 meters, we might end up in the Baby Magnum’s path,” said Myonri.

“Are you dumb, Quenser?” added Heivia. “This is about to become a boxing match between Objects. If the Princess’s giant ass hits us during her dance, we’ll be sent straight to heaven!!”

Another laser fried the air right next to their helicopter.

But this one ''did not'' come from the Nitrogen Mirage.

“Grab whoever said I have a ‘giant ass’ and hang them out the side door. Let’s play a game of William Tell, Heivia.”

“She already knows it was me!?”

But this was no time to be messing around.

Quenser shouted over the roar of the rotors.

“Our options are the Nitrogen Mirage’s anti-air lasers which can shoot us down with perfect accuracy, or an accidental megaton butt slam. Our odds of survival are higher if we stay low. So, Myonri, just take us right down to the ocean!!”

“…Again, Heivia…?” said the Princess.

“Wait, wait, wait! It wasn’t even me this time!”

As Heivia paled, the large Merman quickly dropped down. And just as it began racing forward as if pushing down the waves, a beam of light flashed by overhead.

It was as bright as welding light and nearly blinded them. Another Merman that failed to escape in time was vaporized.

“Dammit, one down!!”

“Its nitrogen laser uses artificial mirages to bend any way it wants… Keeping our head down isn’t enough to avoid it.”

“I won’t give it time to do that.”

The Baby Magnum moved further forward and began a serious shootout with the Nitrogen Mirage.

That bought them some time, but it was not an absolute assurance of safety.

Quenser grabbed at the shaking helicopter’s wall and checked through the marine rescue equipment there.

“What are you doing, Quenser!?”

“It’s creating artificial mirages by producing extreme temperature differences in the air and it’s using those mirages as a prism to bend its ultraviolet nitrogen lasers.” The student found a monstrous container of cooling spray. “But the Nitrogen Mirage isn’t the only one that can do that. We know its trick, so we can create mirages too!!”

He sprayed a white smoke out the open side door like he was using a fire extinguisher.

Immediately afterwards, they saw bluish-white beams bend every which way, arrive right in front of them, and then bend toward empty air.

“That was close!”

“We can only see the afterimage, right? This is like unwittingly crossing a minefield and only later learning how lucky you were…”

The other helicopters that had escaped to extreme low altitude must have reached the same answer as Quenser because a few of them were trailing what looked like white smoke.

But then a bluish-white laser punched right through one of the helicopters flying alongside them.

“Wait, what!?”

“We aren’t calculating this out using meteorological radars or computers, so we can’t make perfect mirages!!”

The Princess seemed to have the upper hand, but she apparently could not destroy the Nitrogen Mirage right away.

They would be targeted in midair at this rate.

Once the tension in the helicopter changed to fear, they quickly made up their minds.

“Grab oxygen tanks and masks! And check how many underwater motor-controlled aqua scooters there are!!”

Quenser continued to scatter the cooling carbon dioxide out the side door while Heivia tossed a small oxygen tank and mask toward the cockpit.

It was time.

“Jump out!! We’ll be shot down!!”

Heivia grabbed Quenser’s shoulder and jumped out the side door.

Before they even hit the water, a bluish-white laser tore straight through the large marine rescue helicopter.