Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume20 Chapter 4 (section)

===Part 15===

With a dull crash, a garbage truck drove in from the side and ran into the prosthetic eye woman standing in front of Catherine.

The company logo painted on the side said Battlefield Cleanup Service.

Quenser gasped.

(What are they doing in Paris? Aren’t they officially a Capitalist Corporations PMC!? And I thought the report said no one could find any sign of the company ever having existed!!)

But now wasn’t the time to worry about that.

Several suppressed gunshots followed. Catherine had immediately leaped behind the garbage truck, but the prosthetic eye woman fired Quenser’s way to pin him in place while she tried to escape onto the street. And she also grabbed something the size of a backpack from a fallen commando.

“There’s more to this!!” shouted the student boy.

“Then quit talking and do something about it, Quenser!” shouted Heivia. “Charlotte and Elise, you two circle in from behind. And you stay where you are, Catherine!! We don’t want you getting hurt!!”

The stench of flames and smoke hung in the air.

The Paris cityscape was gradually falling apart. They had to end this before it fully collapsed.

They heard a muffled explosion.

This wasn’t just a gunshot. It was bigger than a grenade.

There was nowhere to hide on the narrow street. Quenser ducked down in fear, but he felt no pain. This explosion had sounded different from the previous ones.

Heivia was the first to realize why.

“Was that their elastic wave exploration thing? She just drove the stake into the ground to scope things out underground!! And in this position, she’ll find Shelter 9!”

Once the computer completed its analysis of the reflected waves, she would know where they had to attack to crush the royals hidden in the shelter 5000m below the surface.

Once those preparations were complete, she only had to point out the location to their Object and the plasma blast would be coming.

But that blast wouldn’t just kill the chosen members of the privileged class. The damage would cover a diameter of 20km, so all the ordinary people in the city would be engulfed by the fireball and vaporized.

“Damn you.”

Heivia took a step further but was knocked back by a dry gunshot.

She was very close.

The impact had gotten to him even through his bulletproof jacket. Heivia had been distracted by his impatience and now he was collapsed on his back forced to give instructions by gesturing. He couldn’t speak, but he was telling Quenser to continue on.

The student hid behind a metal dumpster, molded his plastic explosive into an egg shape, and stabbed a fuse in. He tossed it out ahead and filled the narrow space with an explosive blast and shockwave before rushing in himself.

The prosthetic eye woman wasn’t there.

However, some rust had fallen from the emergency stairs on a building wall. He could tell that wasn’t just the explosion. There were signs of the chain link gate’s hinges having moved and a footprint in the rust powder on the steps. Someone had forced their way onto some stairs no one had used in a long time. Quenser radioed Charlotte and the others in case he was taken out and then ran up the stairs.

He arrived on the small building’s rooftop.

The prosthetic eye woman had her back to him and had just reached into the backpack to pull out a pair of binoculars larger than a next generation game console. They were large enough to fill the entire backpack. That wasn’t normal, so he guessed it was designed to instruct the Object to attack whatever she viewed through them. She wasn’t just going to destroy a piece of Paris; she was going to blow herself up along with it.

If she hit the switch on the side of the binoculars, Paris would be reduced to rubble.

Unfortunately, Quenser had audibly gasped when he noticed.

She turned around and fired her small handgun at him, so he was forced to jump to the side and throw a round plastic explosive that didn’t even come close to reaching her.

It did, however, reach the industrial air conditioning unit on the roof.

When he detonated it, the unit’s exterior and hoses were shredded and thrown through the air, a chemical coolant sprayed out as a white smoke of well below 0 degrees, and everything it touched froze solid, including the concrete and the metal pipes. White frost like inside a store’s ice cream freezer covered the prosthetic eye woman’s clothing and fingers.

She didn’t bat an eye.

She kept her gun aimed directly at him and spoke.

“You chose your target poorly.”

“Did I?”

The first bullet hadn’t hit the boy, but he was down on his knee and she was confident the next one would kill. She tried to do just that, but then she noticed something. She looked down at her binoculars instead of her enemy.

Those binoculars were clearly equipped with a delicate computer and a large battery and now it was coated with white frost.

Needless to say, precision equipment was vulnerable to extremely low temperatures.

“It can’t be…”

Quenser rushed in before she looked up again.

It didn’t matter if the device was really broken or not. He had successfully gotten her eyes off of him for a moment while directly in front of her. Her immediate gunshot missed him and he tackled her with his full weight behind his shoulder.

Their feet left the ground.

A moment later, they slammed into the hard concrete and rolled along the roof together.

The large binoculars slipped from the woman’s hands and bounced along.

But Quenser couldn’t relax yet.

He couldn’t defeat a commando in an honest fight. And if his adorable stepsister was correct, this special soldier had been modified just like Catherine and Putana. She managed to get on top of him and then aimed her poorly-silenced handgun at his face.

He shoved a pen-like electric fuse directly down the barrel. It was too late for her to panic now. The fuse was a delicate explosive itself, so if she pulled the trigger the gun would blow up. And he would detonate it for her if she didn’t pull it.

He used his other hand to hit his radio’s switch and blow up the gun.

The countless metal shards hit both of them equally.

She held her mutilated hand with her other hand and screamed.

“Gahhh!!”

Quenser’s face felt hot.

He couldn’t even imagine how much damage he had just taken.

(I need to protect Paris.)

Half his vision was blocked by a sticky dark red, but he still saw the woman roll off of him while holding her bloody hand and unsteadily crawl toward the fallen binoculars.

(I need to protect all the people living here.)

He had only blacked out for a few seconds due to the metal shards he took to the forehead, but his lack of reaction seemed to have convinced her he was dead. Or maybe she had lost too much blood to think straight.

He couldn’t let her reach those binoculars. He had to protect all the people living in Paris.

No matter what.

“!!”

He had to do whatever it took.

He clenched his teeth, got up, and grabbed a TV antenna lying on the roof thanks to the explosion. The metal pole was thicker than his index finger and he grabbed it like a stake and rushed toward the woman’s curled up back as she tried to collect the binoculars.

He stabbed her with it.

The special suit she wore under her clothes apparently had a lot of gaps, giving it poor bulletproofing.

She roared with anger and spun around to face him, but he shoved her away with both hands. The antenna rod must have done more damage than he had thought because she failed to prepare for her landing and hit the roof hard, her own weight driving the rod deeper into her back. The tip burst out from her chest.

But.

But even then, she didn’t die.

She was lying on her back and coughing up blood, but she still clawed at the concrete roof. Her fingers found the large binoculars and a definite smile formed on her bloody lips.

[[Image:HO_v20_BW4.png|thumb]]

The flip of a single switch would blast a scorching hole in Paris.

“Ohhhhh!!!!!” yelled Quenser.

He grabbed the metal antenna rod piercing her body and used the full strength of both his arms to stir it around, widening the dark red hole and finally pulling the entire rod out from her gut even though it had originally entered through her back.

“Die! Just die alreadyyyyyy!!”

Her body convulsed on the roof.

Quenser clenched his teeth but failed to suppress the scream that erupted from his throat as he stabbed the tip of the slick antenna back down into her. This time, into the face. And not just once – over and over. He kept doing it until she had stopped moving altogether.

“Please! Don’t destroy our cityyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!”

Her face was no longer recognizable.

The hemispherical prosthetic eye was now lying on the roof next to her.

He realized her convulsing had stopped.

Biological death may have occurred well before this.

“Pant, pant.”

He threw aside the dark red antenna rod and fell back on his butt. There was no human dignity left in that mutilated corpse. It looked like a wild animal had feasted on it. He couldn’t believe he had done that. But he had a feeling a mirror would reveal he was covered in her blood. He couldn’t have looked more like a deranged murderer.

“Ha…ha ha.”

His psyche had been pushed to the breaking point.

But he had still managed to preserve their usual city.

It hadn’t been destroyed.

He had managed to protect the few million residents of Paris. Heivia, Frolaytia, Monica, Catherine, and everyone else were still alive. As long as those binoculars didn’t send out their signal, the long-distance Object strike would not occur.

The hero had prevailed.

If he didn’t cling to that fact, his psyche really would shatter.

Or so he thought.

But then he noticed something on the roof. It had apparently fallen from the woman’s clothing. Those were her dog tags. Apparently even a commando on an unofficial mission didn’t use a fake name on those. Maybe because this was only a short-term mission and not a long-term espionage job. Or maybe the Faith Organization had been in such disarray after the destruction of Rome they hadn’t bene able to prepare the best equipment and fake IDs.

He stopped breathing when he saw what was written there.

Faith Organization Marine Commandos – Gnostic Witches Unit.

Cheddar Affi-

“!!!???”

He found himself straining his neck to avoid looking at a truth he didn’t want to accept.

His fingers felt something else on the filthy roof.

''“It’s an Asian amulet. You aren’t supposed to open it.”

''“Thanks. I hope it brings me good luck.”

That conversation replayed in his mind, but the amulet Carat had given him was still in his pocket.

Then what was this?

Why was an identical amulet sitting on the bloody rooftop? Where had it come from?

''“So what’s your name?”

''“…Carat Affinity.”

He slowly looked both at the unusual amulet and the mutilated corpse.

“That…can’t be true.”

Come to think of it, he had never asked that boy which world power he was from. He had rescued the boy without thinking, so he knew very little about him.

Feeling the amulet between his fingers was enough to know it had a flat piece of wood or thick paper inside. He used his trembling fingers to untie the string keeping the small pouch closed. First, the one he had. A strange but simple pattern had been drawn on it crayon. A tall cross had been drawn with a line connecting the top to the right and another line connecting the left to the bottom.

Were those four lines supposed to form a compass needle?

The words “together by chance” were written directly below that. It was a popular phrase that different people found different meanings in. The pattern was not a square or a diamond, but the four lines gathered together to point in a specific direction like a compass. It may have been dedicated to the idea of people from different countries and factions coming together by chance to work together and help each other out.

Or maybe there was no deep meaning behind it at all.

Maybe it was just a neat pattern someone had come across while playing a matchstick quiz. Even the phrase might have been something someone saw while searching an online thesaurus or messing around with a machine translator. But Quenser still sensed the unique sensibilities of a small child. It carried a magic he lacked now that his hands were soaked with blood.

“No, it can’t be…it can’t!!”

He was breathing heavily now.

He untied the other amulet lying on the roof. He wanted so badly for the exterior to be the only similarity. He prayed for a difference, even if it was just a single line.

His prayers were answered.

The scrap of paper inside was different from the one he had.

Something else was written below the “together by chance” phrase: ''Good luck, mom.

“Gh, ah…gah!!”

He couldn’t breathe. His stomach acid was pushing up into his throat.

Looking away and refusing to accept the truth earlier had been a mistake. The dog tags rushed into the center of his vision now.

Faith Organization Marine Commandos – Gnostic Witches Unit.

Cheddar Affinity.

His numb mind finally remembered how nauseous he was. He managed to turn away from the mutilated corpse, but that was all. The contents of his stomach traveled back up his esophagus and spewed out onto the roof.

“Oh, gh!? Gweh, abh!!!!!”

What had he done? Who had he killed?

Could he really call this – this! – the work of a hero?

There had to have been a chance to stop himself. What had he seen in Rome? Sarasa Gleamshifter had been perfectly reasonable. She had already proven for him that there were good people in the Faith Organization.

Yet he hadn’t questioned his actions here.

He could have avoided this tragedy, so what was it he had failed to do here?

“Agh, ahh, ahh, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!???”

His screaming did nothing to change reality, so he finally collapsed onto his side. He curled up in the fetal position and trembled.

The corpse remained a corpse.

Try as he might to deny it, his bloody crime would never go away.

Of course, he had needed to protect Paris no matter what it took. He had wanted to protect his parents, Monica, Catherine, and so many other people. There wasn’t any way he could have persuaded the commando to stop, so he hadn’t done anything wrong. Yes, just looking at that, his actions had been justified. But that’s why he found himself unable to believe in anything anymore. He reviewed his actions over and over and failed to find a single flaw each and every time, but he refused to accept this bloody and horrifying result. If these were the actions of a hero, then he wasn’t sure he could trust in the idea of heroes anymore.

This was the result of doing the heroic thing.

What would become of a world supported by heroes like that?

“Ah, ahh, ahhhhhh…”

How long would this last? Would it ever end? Had this become the norm in a world where the clean wars had been replaced by a true world war? Was this shitty new normal with them forever? Would it become as ordinary as going to sleep at night and waking up to the rising sun?

He didn’t care about the Legitimacy Kingdom or Faith Organization anymore.

He didn’t want to see any interference from the Capitalist Corporations or the Information Alliance.

He was through with this world war.

Everything about it was too painful to bear.