Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume20 Chapter 5 (section)

===Part 12===

How many meters did they actually drop?

“Ugh…”

When Quenser came to, he found himself on his back. He had been clinging to one of the Martini sisters last he remembered, but none of them were around. He noticed a scorching smell and found the armored truck lying on its side.

He was below Shinjuku.

The vast space was encased in concrete.

There were lights, but not nearly enough. A tunnel-like darkness remained.

Containers were piled up like this was a supply warehouse, but the space was larger than a soccer field.

Yes, this was simply a space. It wasn’t a subway tunnel or a highway. It wasn’t a route leading somewhere. It felt more like a public facility of some kind. He shook his heavy head and slowly got up while guessing this was a common utility duct used to manage rainwater, power cables, and more.

A handgun he didn’t recognize lay nearby.

He silently picked it up and walked onward. The armored recovery vehicle they had been pursuing was stopped a short distance away. Its eight wheels were on the ground, but the driver’s compartment was half scrapped after crashing into a concrete wall.

Someone was groaning below the passenger side door.

She was a blonde-haired brown-skinned girl of about 15. That would make her Daria Weddingbell of the Faith Organization.

She was part of Azumaya.

She was one of the villains who had started a world war for their own benefit. The shock of falling underground must not have killed her, but she appeared to have severe internal injuries. Quenser slowly approached from head on, but she didn’t even have the strength to ready a gun or knife.

If not for her…

If not for that piece of shit, that boy and his mother would still be…

“You…”

He immediately fired a shot into the center of her body.

He didn’t care if he was violating the rules. She continued groaning even after collapsing into a pool of her own blood, so he fired another shot into her head at close range. That fully silenced her.

Immediately afterwards, a scorching bullet tore through the air from a different angle.

It hit Quenser, knocking him to the side. Someone else was lurking in the shadows here. When the younger girl had said “you”, she may not have been talking to Quenser.

Had she been cursing this other person for using her as bait?

The four members of Azumaya had used the confusion to escape Ichigaya together, but that didn’t mean they were good buddies. It was damage to the Faith Organization alone that had led to the start of the world war which had made the strength of the world powers crumble, so they may have been at each other’s throats already.

“Ha. Ha ha. I’m not dying here.”

“…Azumaya.”

This one was an Asian man of around forty.

He was probably Fong-Lan Greendevil.

“I will do whatever it takes to survive. It’s not like this world is worth protecting anyway!!”

Quenser had still not let go of his gun. His muscles may have locked up while he gripped it in his overexcited state.

He held the gun out while collapsed on his side.

But the man was faster.

A dry gunshot echoed through the enclosed underground space.

Quenser was untrained and his hand was trembling, so his shot missed. It hit the wall, sending orange sparks flying.

But the Azumaya man, Fong-Lan, didn’t hit either.

“Oh?”

The global villain had a final question on his lips as he doubled over and collapsed to the filthy floor. The man had sacrificed his comrade to survive, but his fate was a swift one.

There was someone else here.

That was the answer to his question.

“Are you alive, boy?”

That someone else wore a Legitimacy Kingdom uniform.

But Quenser had never seen him before. His smile did nothing to put Quenser at ease. But the ''last time'' Quenser had seen this man, he had already used plastic surgery to alter the face he was born with.

He could only think of one person this could be.

“Are you…Nyarlathotep?”

“That name holds no meaning,” said the faceless man.

He was a monster in a different way from the Objects.

He had started out as a Capitalist Corporations spy, but he had refused to forgive the society that stole his family and birthplace from him and become a true “evil god” who had assassinated a 7th Core CEO all on his own.

“If you can ask a question like that, you must not be bleeding too badly. Something in your survival kit pouch must have stopped the bullet. Your gear will be a mess, but it’s better than dying.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I never intended to show my face again, but the current age demanded it. And I think I’ll repay it by tearing down this world war.”

When had he infiltrated the 37th? Come to think of it, hadn’t someone Quenser didn’t recognize pulled him out from below the rubble after the plasma strike on Charles de Gaulle Airport?

He heard some movement.

From deeper in.

“Let’s go.”

“…Yeah.”

They opened the door to find stairs leading down.

Their eyes met someone else’s when they took a look down the metal stairway. Quenser and Nyarlathotep fired simultaneously.

The third Azumaya member was holding something, but she could only shoot one person at a time. One of the two bullets hit the woman, knocking her back against the wall where she slid to the floor with a red stain growing around her.

Quenser remained standing.

Nyarlathotep had fallen to the floor and stopped moving.

There was nothing special about it.

No matter how long he had remained undercover and no matter how much he acted like it was a piece of cake, a single bullet was all it took in a real war. The same conditions applied to Quenser as well.

But Quenser would almost certainly have died without him here.

“Nyarlat-”

“You moron!! This is Yog-Sothoth!! The last one is still alive and unfortunately you’re the only one still capable of doing anything about it!! So go!! End this world war!!”

The voice of an elusive female hacker came from the phone in Nyarlathotep’s pocket. She would have been the one who gave him the electronic ID he needed to infiltrate the Legitimacy Kingdom military.

Quenser didn’t have time to be sentimental.

There was only one left.

He had no one left to rely on. From here on, it would be one-on-one.

He would stop them, no matter what.

(Wait just a little longer, Carat.)

“Caines Ambrosia.”

He was the bastard who had come to the Island Nation from the Legitimacy Kingdom.

Quenser had four rounds left in his gun. Killing this man would eliminate the Azumaya group that had taken root in the Island Nation. That would prevent him from attempting the same thing again.

Quenser pictured the hemispherical prosthetic eye lying on that roof.

And he recalled the message inside the amulet: ''Good luck, mom.

“…”

At the bottom of the metal stairs, found a door leading to a small chamber and another door. That was to keep people from tracking dirt inside and to keep even small amounts of dust from blowing in with the air as the door opened and closed. It was a common feature at semiconductor plants. He passed through both doors.

On the other side, he found bright lights and a model roller coaster filling a vast space.

The automated factory had a great number of test tubes traveling along conveyer belts arranged in all three directions. Some kind of thick, clear jelly filled the bottom few centimeters of the tubes, but he had no idea what the factory was meant to do.

“Those are sperm and ova.”

Quenser wordlessly spun around and aimed his gun toward the sudden voice, but that spot was already deserted. A young man’s voice came from behind a metal box larger than a refrigerator. It may have been a control panel of some kind.

That was Caines.

The final member of Azumaya and the bastard who had started the world war.

No one would have suffered without him.

“The Island Nationers are created here. They labor away, follow the government’s recommendations even in how they use their days off, and make sure to pay their taxes – all without questioning any of it. You should have noticed something off about things on the surface.”

“The apartments you blew up were empty even late at night. And again, those were apartments, not office buildings.”

“The civilian evacuation happened awfully quickly for how unexpected your attack was. You didn’t see anyone out on the streets or a single abandoned civilian vehicle, did you?”

Quenser slowly circled behind the piece of machinery with deadly gun in hand, but there was no one there.

Caines Ambrosia’s voice came from a second-floor walkway overhead. There weren’t any stairs nearby, so what had he used to climb up?

“They didn’t disappear – they weren’t there to begin with. The country’s poor birthrate has caused the population to fall to critical levels over the past decade. Maybe 20% of residences are occupied anymore. Really, the mystery is how they built up such large cities in the first place. Do you know the Island Nation’s food self-sufficiency rate? Even with ample ocean resources, the place couldn’t support itself without importing a lot of food if all of those windows really did have people living behind them.”

That was why the place was full of empty homes like a city set up for a movie shoot.

That was how they had continued on with the resource and food consumption rates dwindling.

That was why the world powers no longer considered the Island Nation a threat.

Eventually, the resource and food consumption rates would drop to zero. The country would destroy itself on its own, so why bother fighting it? This was the trick to turning that around.

The real population of Island Nationers could be massive.

There could a hundred million of them, if not a billion.

They were mass-producing humans to bolster their national strength without anyone the wiser. If you could create humans like that, you could build factories for other kinds of meat as well. And if that wasn’t enough, chemically-created jellies and supplements could be made.

It was all meaningless of course.

It was an empty trick created to cling to their pride. They didn’t want to grow old and die off, so they were using their precious technology to fool the rest of the world.

Quenser Barbotage thought carefully and aimed his handgun straight up.

“So what?”

“…”

“I’m not talking about the Island Nation’s crisis or contradictions. Don’t dodge the issue, Caines. You’re part of Azumaya. You aren’t an Island Nationer; you’re one of the coordinators sent in from one of the world powers. You don’t really care if this nation of modified Asian DNA crumbles – you just want to use it to escape.”

“Can’t really deny that one.”

“Why did you start the world war? War profiteering? But if that’s all, you could have lived the high life using the clean wars just as well.”

“I removed the hindrances,” said the young man. “Each of the world powers has its own problems just like the Island Nation. And those distortions are concentrated at the very top of the four pyramids. Did you know about this? Bloodline and history are everything to your Legitimacy Kingdom. You might think that means the royals and nobles there are lionized, but that’s not actually true.”

“…”

“Ever heard of the Caesar Project? That isn’t a specific name – it’s just a catchall term for all the titles like Kaiser and Tsar. Not that I expect you to have heard of it since you need to be at least a major general for that. And in fact, no one in the military even get to know what it entails. The real leaders of your Legitimacy Kingdom are sperm and ova. They’re being automatically crossbred in a shelter deep below the home country even as we speak. The calculations apparently said the 59th generation of crossbreeding was the earliest that the process could create the ideal ruler, but they are apparently in the middle of around 176 generations of detours to reduce or neutralize hereditary diseases.”

The young man continued with amusement in his voice.

“The Body File saying the Legitimacy Kingdom is fighting wars to gather the rare herbs and minerals needed for the frail royals and nobles is secretly a way of gathering materials for the Caesar Project. The nobles are all catalogued and the commoners are only allowed to live as sources of highly-randomized genes. Did you realize what it was you were kneeling to? If you’re fine with bowing your head to a smelly refrigerated pool sprinkled with pubic hairs and if you’re fine being no more than a faucet that provides all the white goo your superiors demand, then feel free to turn around and go home.”

Quenser heard an electronic beeping.

Was it coming from Caines Ambrosia’s pocket?

Whatever it signified, he laughed quietly before continuing.

“That means the bomb sent by the Faith Organization has blown away Caesar. The gilded test tube has been shattered and the Legitimacy Kingdom’s idol is no more.”

“…”

“It’s a real tragedy what happened to the Faith Organization. With Rome sunk, its people have finally realized that relying on charismatic religious leaders does not actually protect you from bullets. The alchemy holding together the Capitalist Corporations’ 7th Core is in fact a financial calculations computer designed for computing life insurance. To them, human life isn’t even something to preserve. It is a resource to be either sold off or consumed as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately for them, the incalculable world war caused such violent fluctuations that the 7th Core companies are filing for bankruptcy left and right. …The current world is ending. Anyone should have seen that from the very beginning. This was never about the disasters brought by Objects or what the Island Nation did to avoid its slow demise. Our world was broken in a more fundamental way from the word go.”

The world powers were like the four legs of a table.

If just one of them broke, the table would be tilted.

But what if all four were broken? Then they would reach a new stability after the catastrophic fall.

Quenser Barbotage had considered that a bit himself.

And he had arrived at an answer.

He did not hesitate to fire straight up.

Something wobbled, tumbled over the walkway railing, and dropped down.

Quenser aimed his gun at collapsed Caines.

“Everything about this stinks.”

“Kah…ah.”

“You said you needed to reach the rank of major general to have even heard of the Legitimacy Kingdom’s Caesar Project and no one in the military knows what it entails, didn’t you?”

The boy’s expression was unchanged.

No matter how disgusted he was, he couldn’t just ignore that long-ass speech.

“Then how did the coordinators of Azumaya learn about it?” His tone was icy. “How would a member of the military like you know a secret no one in the military knows about? Did you think it was a coincidence? Did you think you were just so clever you were the only exception? Not a chance. No one can keep a secret like that if there’s a loophole someone like you could exploit.”

“…”

The man must have realized the truth.

But it was too late now.

“How did you learn about it? That’ll tell you who was ''really'' behind it all. You were only being fed information like so many others.”

“Ah.”

Quenser aimed for the center of the head and pulled the trigger multiple times, permanently silencing the poor young man.

Now he was out of ammo.

He tossed the empty handgun aside.

He didn’t need to hear the answer from the man because he had already arrived at it himself.

It all came down to paying attention to what Caines Ambrosia had said.

The top of the Legitimacy Kingdom, the Caesar Project, had been blown up with a bomb.

The top of the Capitalist Corporations, 7th Core, was being driven to bankruptcy.

The top of the Faith Organization, their religious leaders, had disappointed the people and lost their charisma.

But what about the Information Alliance?

The massive AI network that ruled over all people and things in that world power was the sole survivor of this world war. More than that, it was entirely untouched.

The human factory shook violently around Quenser. An error must have been detected because the many conveyer belts carrying the test tubes came to a stop and the lights switched to red.

It didn’t matter how far he was from Tokyo Bay or that he was deep underground.

A normal Object never could have done that. Something so massive was approaching that it required a 200 thousand ton Object that cost 5 billion dollars to be qualified as “normal”.

He could only think of one option.

“That damn thing.”