Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume20 Chapter 6 (section)

===Part 16===

Steam exploded all around them.

“Whoa!!” shouted Quenser while clinging to the edge of the rubber boat that was threatening to flip over.

The area felt as hot as a sauna.

In the boat alongside his, Mariydi clenched her teeth and worked the rudder attached to the motor to avoid something.

“Hey, Quenser! Is this what I think it is!?” asked Heivia.

“It is. We saw this same disaster in the Hawaii District.”

Orange and black.

The lava erupting from the ocean floor rapidly cooled and hardened in the February ocean. The end result felt very different from being pursued by a scorching liquid like that found in a blast furnace.

Rough, black land visibly grew before their eyes.

The fizzy bubbling had stopped.

There simply wasn’t any ocean water here for the air bubbles to exist in.

All 20km of the Manhattan 000 had been pulled out of the sea. Almost like it was being lifted by the world’s biggest jack.

It could no longer move.

It shifted diagonally with a deafening groan. The lava land wasn’t flat, but the Manhattan was shaped like a single flat panel. The pressure grew as it bent like a fishing rod held out straight with a weight attached to the end. The straining and cracking sounds continued without end.

Frolaytia and Lendy’s voices arrived over the radio.

Sending a transmission from the submarine should have been suicide because it would give away their position, so this meant they had decided it was safe to use the radio again.

“Its bend rate has passed 30%! We did it!! The shear force has passed the limit!!”

“That means it’s going to perform a bridge and then break. Our sonar officer has already detected more than 12 thousand snapping sounds. Its internal structure must already be broken beyond repair.”

The Manhattan 000 reached its limit.

When it broke, it sounded more like a thick eraser than metal.

Quenser heard a dull snapping sound and then saw it break in two like a giant wafer.

“Melly!!”

“Ah ha ha.”

He couldn’t make out whatever she tried to say in that final moment.

They had said before that the Manhattan 000 carried around a massive amount of energy to keep something so large moving.

The break had either hit a major power conduit or just taken out a reactor because a pure white explosion erupted from within.

And that wasn’t the end of it.

The other reactors began exploding too, creating a single colossal blast.

Just before it blinded him, Quenser thought he saw a giant flame burst skyward from one half of the broken Manhattan.

Maybe he had only imagined it.

But when his senses returned to him after 30 seconds or maybe longer, the Manhattan was no longer there. The Manhattan must have thrown them into the ocean before it exploded because the many cubes containing the innocent civilians floated in the ocean alongside the dark cooled lava land.

“I hope she’s found herself in a better place. Like a world without war,” muttered Quenser.

Yes. The Manhattan 000 had always had just the one weakness.

It was an exclusively naval Object, so it could not move on land. It couldn’t remain intact on land, so it had to avoid running into it at all costs.