Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume9 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 11===

Putana was not the only one who was confused.

It happened as soon as dawn arrived.

“Wh-what the hell!?”

The marine experts of the Clovers had been killing time along the Great Fence three kilometers north of the southern cape, but the too-young member let out a hysterical shout.

The rising sun had lessened the effect of the lighthouse and the screen of fog had gradually cleared away, but at the same time, the fifty meter weapon had vanished like an illusion. As they all watched, that massive machine disappeared.

“What is going on? O-oh, I know! We need to contact the Pilot Elite!!”

“We’ve already tried, but we can’t get through!!”

While communicating to a number of places via radio, they crossed the Great Fence and hurried back to their workplace. They got the security system back up and running and performed a thorough scan of the land and the sea, but the cameras and sensors found nothing.

They were looking for a two hundred thousand ton mass.

That was far too large to hide, yet their cutting-edge observation equipment could not find a single trace of it.

“What the hell is going on? Did it really just vanish in the fog?”

“C-could it have had some trouble and sunk into the ocean?”

“The water around the dock is only about ten meters deep. Even if that round thing sank, it would still rise far above the surface. That wasn’t it. But if it wasn’t…then what was?”

At that moment, an operator gave a report of something below the ocean further out to sea.

But it was not the Object.

The data from the ultrasonic scan said it was less than twenty meters, putting it at about the size of a tug boat.

However, it had something attached that a normal tug boat would not have.

At first, they thought it was a crane meant to drag up rocks and sunken ships, but it was not.

“What is this?”

“A metal tower?”

That guess by the older white collar was not entirely wrong.

However, another name came to mind when they saw what was attached to the top.

The photograph taken by an underwater drone showed a giant light that could not even rotate and a special lens that focused the light on a single point.

Altogether…

“A lightship?”

Instead of building a tower on an island or cape, the lighthouse would float in the sea like a buoy.

And if it had sunk there…

“Wait. Does that mean…there were two lighthouses last night?”

The older white collar quickly looked over to the sea.

There was supposed to be a small island out there with nothing but a lighthouse on it.

“Then which of the two lights were we seeing!?”