Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume20 Chapter 4 (section)

===Part 13===

A transport craft exploded in midair, becoming a fireball trailing black smoke.

The smaller dots scattering from it may have been human torches with their parachutes burning.

Heivia threw up his hands and gave a meaningless roar.

“That’s what you get, you shits! That fall’s gonna last at least 30 seconds, I’ll bet. Plenty of time to suffer and regret your actions before you die! No one’s gonna pretty you up for a funeral, you greedy assholes!!”

“Uh, Heivia? Their uniforms and parachutes are still on fire. Th-the city is going to burn!!”

The wind carried the charred remains of a Capitalist Corporations soldier so it fell right next to Quenser’s group. It made a wet splat and made a puddle of filth, but the fire was still burning. It probably used fuel or something like that. When Quenser looked into the distance again, he could see several pillars of dark smoke rising into the evening sky.

He was at a loss now.

“Where do we even start with cleaning this up? There’s the Faith Organization commandos, whatever silenced the defense Objects, and the Capitalist Corporations fighters and transport ship full of paratroopers. Am I forgetting any other problems we have to deal with!?”

“This does not change our initial plans,” said Charlotte Zoom. “Our top priority is the Faith Organization. If we do not stop their commandos from acquiring targeting information, Paris will be burned to the ground with a plasma blast. A single shot covers a diameter of 20km!”

With fire truck sirens blaring all over the city, the Black Uniform urged the rest of them to resume their mission. Hadn’t Elise Montana said sounding an alarm from the city’s disaster speakers would cause those professional spies to panic and give away their position?

They heard a gasping shriek.

A few members of a TV crew were collapsed on a major Paris street. The smell of blood hung in the air. The shriek appeared to have come from a young female reporter who had fallen onto her butt.

Someone whose skin had fused with a melted parachute and military uniform was aiming a carbine her way.

“Oh, no you don’t!” shouted Heivia, raising his assault rifle.

“Monica!!” shouted Quenser from the other side to draw the badly burned soldier’s attention. That eliminated the possibility of him taking Monica hostage.

The soldier didn’t do anything fancy. He didn’t acrobatically kick off the walls.

It looked like he only walked diagonally forward.

But he managed to accurately avoid the short burst of bullets fired from Heivia’s assault rifle.

“The hell was that!?”

“He must have learned that in the Northern Restricted Zone,” said Elise. “They train you way better there!!”

People assumed an object’s movement was a continuous thing and they would correct their aim for an extrapolated future position of their target without even noticing it, so by keeping your movement one step to the side of that extrapolation, you could avoid the enemy’s aim.

As soon as Elise shouted her conclusion, the soldier rushed in toward them. It was a perfectly reasonable speed for a human, but he had intentionally slowed his earlier movements to mimic an immobilizing injury. After assuming the man was injured, it took Heivia a second too long to switch gears.

By the time he did, the soldier was within knife range.

Elise’s rifle moved in to block the flash of silver. She caught the blade on the stock, stomped on the soldier’s foot with her boot’s heel, spun her rifle around, and pressed the muzzle against him.

With a sharp gunshot, her bullet punched through the burned soldier’s chest.

Heivia felt the need to praise someone else’s skill for once.

“Damn. They knew what they were doing when they made you an instructor for the 7th Special Training Unit, didn’t they?”

“We were lucky he was so badly burned. He would have won if he was in top form.” Elise Montana urged them to keep their guard up. “Anyway, they’re coming!! We need to hide now!!”

Quenser picked up Monica and hid below a nearby overpass. A Capitalist Corporations Zig-27 flew by overhead and a straight line of machinegun bullet holes were blasted in the asphalt ground. If they had been out in the open, they would have essentially exploded and been splattered across the wall.

Meanwhile, Monica had entered dreaming maiden mode in her childhood friend’s arms.

“Sigh…”

(He was wearing the remains of a parachute, so he must have been a Capitalist Corporations paratrooper, not a Faith Organization commando.)

“Damn, then this was just a waste of time!!”

“What? Servant!! How can you rescue such a beautiful lady and then call it a waste of time!?”

A dry gunshot reverberated through the air.

It came from quite close by. Monica cowered down in fear, so Quenser left her in the relative safety below the overpass and checked outside. He saw someone fighting on the opposite bank of a river that had been made into something like a park. One was a small girl with a blonde braid and the other was…a woman with a highly detailed prosthetic eye?

The woman wielded a very small handgun. The barrel had a built in suppressor, so the loud volume of the gunshot suggested she hadn’t covered the ejection port with her hand. However, this was not a model issued to ordinary soldiers. Nor was it the kind a normal person could purchase. Did that mean she was one of the Faith Organization commandos on a secret mission?

They were supposed to kill the commandos once they found them, but Quenser raised his voice instead.

“Catherine!? What is she doing!?”

“Damn, I can’t get a shot with the metal railings and trees in the way!!” complained Heivia.

“Then get close enough that you do have a shot. Hurry!!”

If this was the result of panicking the commandos to flush them out, then it had been a bad plan. Quenser would have to spank Elise later. That 12-year-old girl had been enjoying her second life this Sunday afternoon, so he doubted she would have been wearing a heavy bulletproof jacket below her clothing. And if the commando really was panicking from the alarm or the scared crowds, no one knew what she might do.

Fortunately, the river between them was shallow and there were some stepping stones sticking up from the surface.

But Quenser took a panicked step forward, a terrifying new development played out before his eyes.

Two people leaped across the river toward him by kicking off of the flower beds and benches in what looked like a triple jump. They weren’t wearing any extra equipment like a powered suit, so this feat made him question if they really were carbon-based humans like him.

Catherine forgot all about her own fight to shout over at him.

“Don’t, big brother!! The commandos are freaks like me!! They’ve been customized to the point they could lift a light truck!!”

(Shut up!! The next time you call yourself a freak, I’m giving you such a talking to!!)

With a short burst of gunfire, Heivia shot down one of the two leaping commandos, but it was hard to know if that had been a lethal blow or not. And the other one was untouched.

She crashed right into Quenser.

His forward momentum was forcibly twisted so he and the Faith Organization assassin crashed into the river to the side of their paths.

“Gwah!?”

A student like him had no chance in a close quarters combat. He grimaced from the pain of getting water up his nose, but got to work with his hands. He pulled out a pen-like electric fuse and jabbed it into the commando’s chest like a stake.

The woman easily grabbed his other hand.

Her other hand held a glinting combat knife.

(Dammit. If I could just reach my radio, I could blow a hole in her chest with the fuse, but she isn’t going to give me the chance!!)

That was when he heard a sound like a popping water balloon.

The assassin had a hole the size of his fist in her chest.

“Hit 1 – confirmed down. Get up, Quenser,” said a familiar voice over his radio.

(Did Frolaytia do that!? She ''was'' carrying an anti-materiel rifle!)

Did it not matter if they were in the water as long as she had a line of fire? That demonstrated considerable skill even with the support of various sensors.

The color red had splattered in front of his face, but he only felt relief.

There were good people in the Faith Organization?

Quenser’s own words filled him with bitterness, but Catherine came first. He couldn’t be wasting time here.

“Pwah!”

He pulled his head above water and glared across the river. The situation had changed. The prosthetic eye woman had knocked Catherine Barbotage to the ground and aimed her small handgun down at the girl.

“Heivia – or Frolaytia!! Someone give me sniper support!”

“That would be difficult,” said Frolaytia. “The water helped shield you, but if I shoot her that close to the girl, the shards of her equipment and bones will hit the girl.”

Heivia had also said he couldn’t get a shot right away.

Quenser’s only option was to shout in despair while dripping with river water.

“Catherine!?”