Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume15 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 11===

All sound had vanished.

Heivia had no idea what had happened.

“Bwahh, ahhhhhh!!!??? Abfweah!!”

Something had fallen from directly above and crushed the subway station building like a cardboard box. Then, like drawing a thick line along the ground, the reinforced concrete building and asphalt road were destroyed and a cascade of destruction pressed in on the Legitimacy Kingdom potatoes.

It was like a child crushing a line of ants below their shoe.

Heivia just barely escaped the threat.

Something cut by horizontally in front of him and familiar faces were transformed into red and black stains.

“Get indoors!!”

The extreme situation had left Heivia in a daze, but Wraith’s shout acted like a slap to the face.

“They’re placing the metal balls used for grenades and mines inside the ridiculously powerful artificial air current used to keep that 200,000-ton mass afloat and firing them down from that height. If you don’t want to be torn apart by that deadly waterfall, then run!!”

Heivia still could not react, so Myonri grabbed his limp hand.

“Let’s go! We can’t just die here!!”

“…”

Something else happened before he could say anything.

A different shockwave hit Heivia and the others from above. Their legs could not support them and they were sent rolling across the asphalt. They looked up from the ground just in time to see all of the high-rise buildings’ windows shatter and a downpour of glittering glass enter the sky.

“Dammit!!”

This time, Heivia picked up Myonri and crawled below a nearby truck. An ear-splitting cacophony followed. The glass downpour was crashing into the ground.

“What happened to Wraith? Did she actually die this time?”

“She’s waving from behind cover over there. More importantly, what was that just now?”

If the Object was simply launching a cruel attack on the ground, it only had to use that same combination of wind and metal balls. The glass was merely a side effect of something. This only made sense if it had done something else.

A low rumbling and shaking finally reached them.

They were confused at first, but it slowly dawned on them.

“It was firing something…no, it was a shockwave. That was all it took to shatter all the glass here…”

“But there wasn’t anything like a main cannon,” said Myonri.

“Damn, we have no idea how it works without Quenser here. And we can’t come up with a weird name for it without our busty commander. Yeah, that settles it. I’m definitely groping those tits later on since she ran off and left us!!”

“I get that your lust won out over your friendship there, but could you at least put me down before saying things like that?”

Since the enemy could crush a tall, reinforced-concrete building like it was a cardboard box, staying in one spot would be a bad idea, so Heivia and Myonri crawled out from below the truck.

“Hey,” said Wraith when they regrouped. “How were you planning to escape?”

“What?”

[[Image:HO_v15_105.png|thumb]]

“That came from the harbor block. In a reliable but boring move, I imagine that thing fired its main cannon on the Frigate 042 in C Dock. Those of us here in Olympia Dome will be next. If you had personal watercraft or submersibles loaded on that ship, we need to find a new method.”

“I-its main cannon!? But there was no sign of that…”

“It used the coaxial rotors that support it. It probably has giant, heavy-metal shells loaded inside it like a handgun magazine. Those things have a rotation speed high enough to support 200,000 tons. It only has to open the end of the magazine and release the shell within. Just imagine the destructive power of using centrifugal force to throw a shell like a meteor.”

A storm of small metal balls launched downward by the wind and giant heavy-metal shells launched into the distance using centrifugal force. That left the Faith Organization’s flying Object with no bind spots. There was nowhere they could hide that it could not fire on them.

“Are you kidding? This really is a nightmare…”

“Is it? This seems better than if they had attached a laser cannon to the end of the main rotor and sliced us to pieces with that rotating blade. Would you prefer to be chased by an infinitely-expanding circular saw?”

Wraith nonchalantly upgraded the nightmare while protected by the aide young man. The history giving form to her imagination had to be insane.

“Centrifugal force, shell throwing…no, it might be better to think of it like the hammer throw. Yes, for now, let’s use the enemy codename of Hammer Throw 001.”

“We have to call it that too? We just keep getting more and more influenced by the shitty Information Alliance method.”

“Yes, it is hard to say we are a perfect world power. The one who holds the most information is the winner, but so many idiots misunderstand that concept to the point that they think the sign of the privileged class is cutting off all information to the point that you can buy a private beach in Miami and swim in the nude. All the bored young wives with ringlet-curls are turning into nudists who claim to aspire to a natural lifestyle.”

“Are you just clueless, or are you trying to win me over!?”

“Please, can someone take this seriously!? Our lives are on the line here!!”

Myonri pleaded with them, but she had not taken into account the possibility that the idiots were trying to avoid facing the intense fear before them.

And the Hammer Throw 001 no longer had a distant target to prioritize.

It would be their turn soon.

Myonri’s shout had dragged Heivia back to reality, so he felt sweat on his brow.

“…What do we do?”

What would that boy who was not here have done at a time like this?

What would Quenser Barbotage have done?

“What the hell are we supposed to do!?”

A moment later…

It fell.

The flying Object that had been looking down on them dropped far too easily.

“……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Ah?”

Heivia’s thoughts could not keep up with the crazy sight before him.

But it was no illusion.

After a brief delay, an incredible storm of destruction was thrown out in all directions. More than just the glass, entire groups of buildings were knocked over this time. And it was more than just a shockwave. The connections between the dice-like floating objects made of aluminum and stainless steel were smashed and shaken.

“Ohhhhhwah!?”

Shouting was not going to accomplish anything.

The fact that the ground could softly “sink” into the ocean, allowing some of the force to escape, was the only reason they did not end up with anything like an ice age brought on by an asteroid strike.

“The Hammer Throw 001…fell???”

The rising curtain of dust was swept away by the storm. Myonri reported on what she saw in a daze.

“It was…a crane. …Did the crane on a building rooftop swing around and…catch on the main rotor?”

“It didn’t swing the arm around,” corrected Wraith while seawater swelled up from below.

An old guerilla tactic against helicopters and tiltrotors was to throw a wire or net over them from the top of a building. But…

“The crane rotated vertically. Some kind of explosive blasted it at the base to tangle the thick wire in the rotor. It didn’t matter that the spherical main body can withstand a nuke.”

An explosive.

A flesh-and-blood soldier had attacked one of the Objects which were synonymous with war.

The 50-meter and 20,000-ton spherical main body had lost its balance and fallen at one corner of the city. It seemed to be near the broadcast station. The exact level of damage was unclear while on the ground like this.

“Could it be…?”

However.

That had to be Heivia’s greatest hope.

So the delinquent soldier could not help but say it aloud.

“Quen-…”

“No.”

A voice bluntly cut him off.

It came from Wraith Martini Vermouthspray.

She could not look him in the eye as she forced out the words.

“I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t possible.”