Editing HEAVY OBJECT:EX Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 3===

The inside was a lot like a slide made from a two meter tube. The only strange part was how it did not take the shortest route like in the Princess’s Baby Magnum. Instead, it took a large curve like a highway off-ramp. It seemed inefficient, but there may have been some design reason for it.

They reached the deepest portion.

There were no lights, so they only had Quenser’s flashlight and the light on Heivia’s rifle.

There seemed to have been seventy barriers in total, but only the final one was still closed. The Elite may have locked it from inside. However, only the outside needed to withstand a nuke. Heivia fired his assault rifle at the important points, kicked down the door with the sole of his military boot, and stuck the rifle barrel inside.

“Freeze!! …Huh?”

It was a two meter wide cylindrical space. The front was covered in large monitors, but they were dark. There was a single chair in the center, but there were far fewer control columns and buttons than in the Princess’s cockpit. Instead, there was a single cable curled up on the floor. It also contained a mini-fridge and microwave oven just like the Baby Magnum. However, this one also had a travel pillow, a bottle of aromatic oil, a blanket, and other goods. The Elite seemed to be picky about getting some quality shut-eye.

But that was all.

The two of them were met with the stagnant atmosphere of a school at night.

“Hey, where’d they go?” Heivia asked a ridiculous question. “Where’d the Pilot Elite go!? This was supposed to be the world’s most solid sealed room!!”

“…”

Quenser peeked inside the cockpit and carefully tapped around the walls and floor while thinking. However, he did not find any obvious seams or handles.

“Hold on. This isn’t some ninja mansion. I doubt there are any hidden doors.”

“If it wasn’t here, it must’ve been in the tunnel on the way.”

They continued the search after borrowing some sodas and ice cream from the government-issued fridge. They checked through the upwards-sloping tunnel with their lights on and soon found it.

Quenser brought his radio to his mouth.

“Old lady! We found a hatch near the cockpit that’s probably a maintenance hatch for the react-…huh? Damn, are the walls too thick for the radio waves to get out!?”

“This stuff is good. They must give the Elites all the best food. So what are we gonna do, Quenser? Keep going or head back for reinforcements?”

“To be honest, I want to head back,” admitted Quenser. “But you heard me say this is probably the reactor’s maintenance hatch, right? We’ll be in trouble if the Elite is desperate enough to mess with the reactor. If it loses control, this two hundred thousand ton mass will be blown away and only a giant crater will remain.”

“Just once, can’t war give us a break!?”

Heivia tossed aside the empty container of ice cream and aimed his assault rifle toward the maintenance hatch. Quenser crouched down and grabbed the hatch’s handle.

“Here I go.”

“One question. An Object’s heart won’t rupture from a 5.56mm bullet, will it?”

As they spoke, they threw the hatch open.

Immediately, gunfire burst out from within.

“Wah!”

With their plans immediately ruined, Heivia frantically pulled back while orange sparks scattered from the walls around him. Not only were bullets flying, but they were ricocheting like pinballs too.

“Close it, idiot! Close the hatch, Quenser!”

“We can’t fall back! If they go the self-destruct route, not even one of our trucks can get us to safety! Fire, fire!!”

Quenser forcibly urged Heivia on and Heivia sprayed bullets through the hatch in near desperation. Even with all its sensors, he was not going to hit anything like this.

But Quenser was not expecting him to hit.

While their opponent flinched back from Heivia’s gunfire, Quenser ducked through the hatch. Their opponent did not know he was a student and they must have been afraid of gunfire or a grenade because they moved further and further back while firing quick bursts back at the two boys.

“Just surrender!! We’ve already received the White Flag signal. You were abandoned!!”

Quenser courteously shouted into the darkness, but he of course received no response. That meant their opponent was not done fighting.

Heivia stepped through the hatch too.

“Ugh. What is this place?”

“A maintenance passageway positioned along the reactor. I doubt it was meant to be used while the reactor is active, though.”

It was a curving passageway only two meters wide. A pipe wider than the passageway itself covered the inside of the curve. There were other pipes for power and steam positioned along the ceiling.

If Quenser was right, the entire passageway formed a donut shape. Reactors came in a variety of shapes and varieties, but the Trinity Style was likely using the kind that resembled the fusion reactors of an older age. In other words, a circular frame was surrounded by powerful magnetic lines to manage a plasma flow with such overwhelming heat it was often referred to as a small sun.

“That sounded like a submachinegun, but the whizzing of the bullets was a little too high-pitched. Those were probably bullets designed specifically for PDW use,” said Heivia. “If that’s the Elite’s hidden weapon, then there probably aren’t any spare magazines. After all, they’d take up valuable space and be less useful than a fire extinguisher. It probably has at most fifty bullets inside.”

“Meaning?”

“If they’ve got limited ammo, this can act as a barometer to how desperate they are. They’ve already fired about thirty shots, so if we don’t capture them soon, they’ll turn one of the valves in here to cause an explosion.”

In other words, their opponent had already used up half their tickets to survival. They had to be feeling tragically heroic.

“Anyway, did you see that? I only caught a glimpse of them as they vanished around the curve, but they had twintails.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. …But if it’s a guy with twintails, I’m filling them with lead.”

The passageway was donut-shaped, so following after the Elite could allow that Elite to circle around and escape out of the maintenance hatch. However, it would be too dangerous for Quenser to cut them off the other way since he had no gun.

After some thought, Quenser pulled a few pen-sized electric fuses from his waist pouch.

“Wait, are you using bombs here!? As durable as an Object may be, there’s plasma at temperatures higher than ten or even a hundred thousand degrees right next to us!”

“I’m not putting these in the Hand Axe. The fuses themselves are just like giant firecrackers, but the Elite won’t be able to tell them apart from gunfire while cowering in the dark.”

“Oh, I see. You’re pretty bad yourself.”

“I’ll drive the bunny forward with some loud noises, so you circle around the other way for a surprise attack. We can only gamble that they won’t try to break through in this direction.”

Heivia tapped Quenser’s shoulder and then vanished down the passageway.

Left alone, the boy had a simple task at hand. He only had to throw the fuses randomly down the passageway and grab his radio. He had not been able to contact the old lady, but outside and inside were different. The signal would reach things inside the same Object.

He pressed the switch with his thumb and dry explosive sounds rang out. He heard a short surprised burst of gunfire that was likely the Pilot Elite’s counterattack. He seemed to have tricked them just fine. The Elite and Heivia must have run across each other on the other side of the donut because he heard an even shorter exchange of gunfire.

However…

“Shit!! Shit, shit, shit!!”

“What is it, Heivia!? Why are you coming back!?”

“That wasn’t random! They were calculating out the ricochets! Oh, goddammit! I’d be dead if I hadn’t fallen back!!”

“Oh, c’mon! You can’t even do your job!?”

Quenser seriously considered kicking the boy back the way he had come, but then a twintailed figure appeared down the curving passageway. When he saw the ultra-small fully-automatic firearm simplified to the point of being T-shaped, he realized he did not have time to be stupid. The two boys scrambled out into the external tunnel and shut the hatch. They heard the heavy sound of bullets slamming into the hatch behind them.

“What do we do!? Wait until they’re out of ammo!?”

“You said they probably have at most fifty shots, right? But even if we counted accurately, we’ll get our brains blown out if they happen to have fifty-one shots. And what if there are more PDWs hidden around like fire extinguishers? We’ll make our triumphant entrance once things quiet down and then be filled with holes. We can’t rely on that.”

“Then do you have some clever idea!? Or is that clever head of yours only any good at wearing stolen panties!?”

“I’ve already done it.”

“?”

“Hey, Heivia. Assault rifles and PDWs are convenient, but you don’t need anything that impressive to kill. You don’t even need a single bullet or blade. Not even poison or drugs are necessary.”

He waved his hand with a smile.

“All you need is water and air. That’s enough to get them to give up.”