Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume6 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 2===

The stealth bomber was a flying wing that was shaped similar to a boomerang. The jet black craft showed up quite well in the white snowy mountains.

It had landed next to a frozen river in the gap between two mountains. The ground was covered in small rocks, so the bomber’s wheels had of course been punctured. The craft could easily have lost its balance and burst into flames in that situation, so the pilot must have been quite skilled to neatly land there.

It seemed it was the right side of the craft that had been damaged by the missile. Black smoke was rising from the edge, but there was no other visible sign of damage.

“That’s just a scratch. Why did it go down?”

“Flying wings have a large capacity but they have poor stability. It had to deal with this blizzard and there may have been turbulence up above.”

The giant powered suit got out of the military truck and used an arc burner to cut away the bomber’s hatch.

Once the powered suit had removed the thick hatch and waved over that the way was clear, the female leader peered inside the bomber.

That was when a gunshot rang out.

“Huh?”

“What? What? Why would she need to pull the trigger here!?”

The two boys got down and tried their best to hide behind the snow, but nothing more happened. They exchanged a glance and approached the bomber just in time to see the female leader exiting the hatch with blood splattered on her uniform. The red liquid quickly began to freeze.

“The secret material is inside. Carry it out.”

“What happened!?”

“We do not have time to carry the injured with us. We’re cutting it close with just ourselves. Why should we waste our effort on charity? Not to mention that a few of you would have to stay behind to make room for the injured.”

“…”

“Don’t give me that look. The crew of that bomber is also made up of soldiers not registered in any clean war. They won’t show up on the international lists of war dead. They’re the same as us. The report will only say some people died wearing Legitimacy Kingdom uniforms. We never had a chance to determine their identity, so they will be deemed cosplay-obsessed saboteurs.”

“I can’t believe you…” groaned Heivia, but there was nothing he could do.

Complaining about it would not bring back the dead.

The female leader paid him no heed and said, “Hurry, hurry. We need to do our best to make sure not even others from the Legitimacy Kingdom know what we are doing. I’ve heard that Unicorn is working undercover in this area. We do not want to run into them.”

“Please, no! I don’t want to hear that name!! It brings back all that trauma!!” shouted Quenser half in desperation, but he began working regardless.

First, he headed into the bloody cockpit and pressed the button to open the cargo door used to load bombs. The Perfect Idol used her giant powered suit to enter the back cargo bay, pick up a refrigerator-sized metal container, and carry it to the trucks. The sizes of the different containers varied.

Quenser left the bomber to escape the stench that made him sick to his stomach and asked the powered suit a question.

“How heavy are they?”

“About as heavy as a bronze statue.”

“I have no idea how heavy one of those is.”

However, it seemed they had no choice but to rely on the powered suit for the reloading work. The other soldiers scattered around the stealth bomber and kept watch. …Or perhaps they just wanted to leave an annoying job to someone else.

The number of boxes filled with the secret material was greater than expected. They filled three entire trucks.

That meant the soldiers initially divided into five trucks had to cram themselves into the remaining two.

Heivia groaned amid the foul heat, “This is horrible! Everything about this is horrible!! This is like a crowded train in southeast Asia!!”

“Yes, yes, but it is better than dying, isn’t it? Okay, we’re all loaded up now,” said the female leader offhandedly. “It’s time to leave. Is everyone aboard? If you aren’t on in time, we’ll leave you behind, so hurry up.”

The truck set off while shaking the truck bed horribly. The truck’s balance may have been thrown off by all the people aboard.

“This much weight isn’t going to blow a tire, is it?”

“The truck’s tires don’t have air inside. They’re filled with synthetic fiber all the way through. A lot of advances have been made in the field of shock absorption, so we might soon see a new weapon somewhere between a tank and an armored vehicle that has thick armor and moves at high speed.”

“Okay, I get it, you design nerd! Don’t add any more heat to this human sauna!!”

Incidentally, Quenser had ended up practically embracing the Perfect Idol, but he was hardly grateful since she was wearing that giant powered suit. It was neither warm nor soft. The heat left him safe for the time being, but if a cold wind blew in through a gap in the canopy, he could easily have the skin of his cheek freeze to the armor plates.

Quenser then noticed a sound like a champagne cork being removed. The sound was coming from a great distance beyond the thick canopy.

“What is-…?”

Quenser did not even have time to finish his question.

He heard a great explosive noise and the truck came to a sudden stop.

There was nothing to grab onto in the jam-packed truck bed. With nothing to brace against as the truck slammed on its brakes, everyone in the back was thrown forward. Quenser distinctly heard a screaming noise come from his ribs.

“Gyahh!? Cough…what was that!?”

“Shit. Shit!! I think that was a mortar! I smell something burning. The front armored vehicle was blown away!!”

A mortar was shot up in the air like a long throw in baseball, so it fell down on top of the target. It was a simple weapon used all across the world.

“Eh? Wait! Then we need to force that armored vehicle out of the way! If we stay stopped here…!!”

In the next instant, they heard an explosion from directly behind them. The armored vehicle at the end of the convoy had likely been destroyed. With the front and back of the convoy destroyed, the trucks between them were stuck in place.

“This situation is so stereotypical, you could probably find it in a textbook!!”

“Get out, get out! The trucks are going to be taken out one by one!” shouted the female leader as the soldiers began getting out of the truck bed all at once.

The Perfect Idol used her tremendous physical strength to rip apart the thick canopy and forced Quenser out the side of the truck.

But the enemy was not going to wait for them to scatter.

They heard the champagne cork sound once more.

“Scatter! Get down!!” came the female leader’s conflicting orders.

An explosive noise rang out.

Quenser’s vision became filled with white.

He thought his entire face had been crushed along with his two eyeballs, but it turned out the mortar that had landed a short distance away had only blasted snow up at him. But having snow slammed into his face at tremendous speed was enough to temporarily rob him of his sense of balance.

Heivia shouted from where he was lying on the ground nearby, “Quenser, you idiot! Crawl under the truck!! The armored vehicles were only taken out because the tires and suspension were destroyed. It wasn’t enough to get through the armor!”

“How are they aiming so accurately in the wind of this blizzard!? I thought the first two or three shots with a mortar were used as a baseline to aim from!?”

“It’s a GPS mortar! It just has to be fired up in the right general direction and then its tail moves based on GPS information from a satellite to strike the target. Scattering out across the snow will only get us targeted on a touch panel!!”

Quenser crawled across the snow and below the military truck as he shouted, “Then we need to jam it!!”

“The communications soldiers with the huge machinery on their backs were taken out first. As was that domineering woman commanding us!”

“She died that easily!? I thought she was going to be the final boss!!”

After a few more explosions, their number of allies had fallen considerably. Having the snow fly up at him hard may have saved Quenser by hiding him amid the grotesque scenery of red and black.

“This truck isn’t going to last repeated strikes. If we don’t do something soon, we’ll be crushed by the scrap.”

“There they are. There they fucking are. About 1700 meters to the northwest. A few Information Alliance troop transport vehicles are stopped near the foot of the mountain. The mortar is probably set up behind them!”

Quenser checked with his binoculars and he did indeed spot several vehicles that looked like tanks with the turret removed. Their armor looked thick enough that a rifle bullet would be useless against them. Not to mention that they were too far away.

Since mortars were initially fired up into the air, they could be fired continually while remaining behind cover.

“Where’s your shoulder-fired anti-tank missile!? Set it up already!!”

“I could blow up the troop transport vehicles they’re using as a shield, but the scrap would remain there. I can’t destroy the mortar team behind the trucks with it!” said Heivia in annoyance. “Our attacks can’t reach them. We can only sit here while they throw those baseballs at us. What are we supposed to do?”

“Hey, Heivia. Do you think they attacked us because they know about the secret material?”

“Are you saying we can survive by using the trucks with the secret material aboard as a shield?” Heivia frowned. “No one attacks with nothing but a GPS mortar. That’s just a portion of their force. Infantry will be creeping closer while they keep us in place with the mortar. I think those troop transport vehicles the Information Alliance is using as a shield are enough to hold 60 to 70 people.”

“Then what do we do? Either way, we need to destroy that GPS mortar as soon as possible.”

Quenser pulled a clay-like explosive out of his backpack and looked out from below the truck while stabbing a rod-shaped fuse into it.

He was looking for the Perfect Idol wearing the powered suit.

“Hey, hey! Can you still move? I’m going to blow snow into the air with a bomb in the place of smoke. Run to the front armored vehicle in the time that gives us!”

“That armored vehicle has already been destroyed!” she replied.

“That’s why you need to pull off just the turret! It fires based on an electric signal. You can fire it just by pressing together the torn off cords!”

Quenser crawled out from under the truck and threw the Hand Axe plastic explosive onto the snow. The powered suit was caught in the explosion, but the thick armor protected the Perfect Idol so she could run to the armored vehicle.

Heivia shouted from behind Quenser, “That won’t work, you idiot!! That’s an 80mm anti-personnel turret on the armored vehicle. It may look like a tank, but it’s only meant to tear human flesh apart with shrapnel. It doesn’t have the penetrative power needed to pierce the armor of those armored vehicles!!”

“I know that!” shouted Quenser as he crawled completely out from under the truck.

He stood up and ran toward the destroyed armored vehicle while keeping his hips low.

Several shells fell a short distance away from him.

They had not missed. The GPS mortar was very accurate. They were taking the lives of soldiers other than Quenser. It simply meant he was a low priority target who would be targeted later.

After the powered suit pulled the turret off of the top of the armored vehicle, Quenser climbed below the suit. The shells were normally loaded automatically, but they could be manually ejected in case it jammed. Quenser pulled the thick lever and the loaded shell fell onto the snow.

The shell was about the size of three two liter thermoses stacked end on end. It was as heavy as if it was filled with metal.

“What are you doing?” asked the Perfect Idol.

“Switching out the fuse.”

Quenser opened the tip of the shell with a tool, replaced the fuse inside with one of the radio-controlled ones he usually used, and closed the cover.

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He used his shoulders to forcibly lift up the shell and somehow managed to reload the shell despite his lower back letting out a cry of pain.

“Direction: 3409! Angle: 13 degrees!”

“That will not reach the troop transport vehicles being used as shields. It will fall before reaching them,” warned the Perfect Idol.

“That’s the point!” Quenser operated a tool below the turret, severed a few cords, and grabbed them in his hands. “Hold it in place. I’m about to fire!”

As soon as contact was made between the exposed wires, an explosive noise rang out.

Quenser was sent flipping over in the snow and the powered suit collapsed backwards, unable to withstand the shock.

He held onto his radio despite not being able to see where the shell was going. What mattered was the timing, not the exact location of the shell.

As the Perfect Idol had said, the shell did not reach the troop transport vehicles hiding the GPS mortar. It fell onto the snow in front of them.

But since he had swapped out the fuse, it did not detonate when it landed.

And what would it do then?

The force of landing was not enough to counteract the momentum from the tremendous speed at which it had been fired. The shell bounced. It bounced like a soccer ball that had been forcefully kicked.

It bounced right over the troop transport vehicles.

Right after it did, Quenser pressed the button on his radio.

The shell scattered hundreds of pieces of shrapnel while it was directly above the GPS mortar and the soldiers operating it.

“The GPS mortar has been silenced. Damn, that hurt my ears. This must be what it feels like for a deep sea fish to come up on land,” muttered Quenser as he lay flat on the white snow. He then shook his head and shouted, “Heivia! Check how many soldiers are still alive and if any trucks are still usable! Oh, and move out of the way, Miss Idol! Your giant ass almost crushed me!!”

“That is sexual harassment.”

“Don’t be stupid! Seeing that giant hunk of metal isn’t going to turn me on in the slightest!!”

Quenser struggled up to his feet, but very few soldiers were gathering around him. There had been about 150 of them to begin with and now only 10% of that remained.

“Were the crew for the trucks and armored vehicles taken out?”

“It seems the shrapnel from the mortars was enough to penetrate the trucks’ reinforced glass. The crew for the armored vehicle up front was taken out. Opening up the hatch to fire a machine gun turned out to be a bad idea. The shockwaves made their way inside.”

The survivors were not battle-hardened professionals. They were nothing but medics and supply soldiers with chef licenses. And Quenser himself was not much better.

Heivia trudged through the deep snow as he approached.

His expression was not one of relief.

“This is bad! We need to get out of here! Their main force is coming!”

“Their main force?”

“The GPS mortar was just supposed to hold us in place, remember!? From the number of troop transport vehicles, I would say there are 60 or 70 of them. With a group like this, we’ll just be mowed down!! I don’t know what this secret material is, but there’s no way we can push them back while protecting it!!”

Quenser used his thumb to point at the Perfect Idol inside her thick armor.

“If these are normal infantrymen, can’t we do something with our powered suit?”

“It just takes one shot from a shoulder-fired missile to deal with her! And what kind of armaments does our idol have? What’s inside the container case on the back of her left shoulder!?”

“Hm? A Morning Star and a few magazines,” she replied.

“Why that of all things!? That grenade machinegun tops the list for friendly fire!!”

Basically, it was a weapon that fired coffee can-sized grenades like a machinegun. Since it was heavy and had a lot of recoil, it was usually fixed on a stand or attached to a helicopter or armored vehicle.

“I was told it had the high score for attacks on terrorist compounds,” said the Perfect Idol.

“That’s just because the blasts fill up the narrow areas inside buildings. In a powered suit, you can just ignore the anti-personnel shrapnel, but any allies around you will be swallowed up by the storm of shrapnel.”

“I have a secondary 5mm sniper round I can use if the enemy soldier is near a hostage or computer.”

“But can you switch back and forth between rounds when bastards are popping out left and right as if from jack-in-the-boxes? You’ll just blow the rest of us to pieces. I don’t want to end up in a textbook as a cautionary example!”

Heivia could be surprisingly modest when his own life was on the line, but this was not a situation where they could be picky.

He began trembling when he saw the Perfect Idol pull that dangerous weapon out of the container case.

With a tone that made it sound like she was simply chatting, she asked, “How about we fight while using the secret material as a shield?”

“We’re outnumbered. There’s nothing we can do if they surround us and attack from multiple directions.”

“Hey, hey,” said Quenser to get the other boy’s attention. “Heivia, we need to go around to our fallen comrades and gather all the weapons that can fire over 1000 meters such as sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Then we scatter and leave this spot.”

“So we abandon Operation Christmas Boot?” asked the Perfect Idol.

“Fighting while protecting all of that stuff will be hard. And the same goes for the enemy.” He pointed at the military trucks. “So we’ll just swap the situation around. We give them the trucks and then fire our long range weapons from multiple directions to wear down their numbers. …Even if we’re outnumbered, the Information Alliance won’t be able to use their numbers properly while guarding those trucks.”