Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume17 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 4===

Now that their vehicle had fallen, Quenser’s group was in a bind.

They had to assume the worst at all times.

For example, what would they do if their opponents had fallen into a silly pitfall?

“Get down! Hurry!!”

Quenser kicked the busty blonde from the roof she was so stubbornly clinging to and then jumped down himself. A solid metallic thunk reached his ears before she could cry out in protest.

A grenade sans pin had been thrown down before bouncing off the military engineering vehicle’s roof.

“!!!???”

They managed to shove themselves in the slight space between the two tank-like continuous tracks just before the powerful explosion erupted out. More than a simple explosion, it came with the added bonus of small metal fragments. If they had not gotten below the vehicle so quickly, they never would have survived.

Since the anti-personnel grenade used fragments to injure, it could not destroy the tank-based vehicle.

The ringing in Quenser’s ears was too loud to hear anything, but he tapped Heivia’s shoulder and pointed upwards.

The Capitalist Corporations group had to be delighted.

But just as they peeked over the edge of the cliff to check on the results, Heivia aimed his assault rifle up and let loose a quick spray of bullets. Heads were blown away along with their distinctive hats, but they could not relax yet.

“We don’t know how many of them there were!! Find some way to check!!”

Their enemies were human too, so they were not going to just stand there after being hit by a surprise attack. They would likely fall back and use the salt walls for cover.

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“Nhh.”

A deep hydraulic sound rumbled without warning.

“Now I’m pissed!!”

Myonri appeared to be a tad upset about falling for a trap and then having a grenade thrown on her head, so she spread out the folded-up mantis-like arms and made a horizontal sweeping blow to the trench a level above them.

Except this functioned as more than sweeping the enemy’s legs out from under them.

With a disturbingly raw slicing sound, the police officers (were they too privatized in the Capitalist Corporations?) had their upper bodies separated from their lower bodies.

Heivia quickly pulled his head back under the vehicle to avoid the shower of blood and gore.

“Not the women…ugh!!” shouted Heivia. “Wh-wh-what is wrong with you!? I’m so sick of this war!!”

“Says the killer,” replied Myonri. “Minding your manners now is not going to make you seem refined.”

Myonri used one of the crab-claw arms to grab a grenade from one of the enemy’s corpses. She could not pull the pin out like that, but it did no matter. She held the arm up on the higher level and crushed it with the hydraulic power to detonate it. The blast scattered metal balls across that entire space.

All the gunfire and screams ceased.

“Some might be playing dead, so please go up and check for me,” said Myonri.

“Who do you expect to do that? Because I know I’m not peeking up at that upper level full of mutilated corpses. That’s the kind of thing that traumatizes-”

Myonri grabbed the stubborn child by the back collar of his uniform and lifted him up.

“Gyah! Not the sexy policewomen in tight skirrrrrrrts!!!”

Heivia’s sensibilities were far from normal, yet what he saw up their still managed to elicit a scream from him, so Quenser and Elise huddled together like kittens below the bed while their teeth chattered in fear.

Human Periscope Heivia was slowly lowered to the ground while his soul tried to escape from his mouth.

“Okay, I checked. They’re all dead. So very, very dead.”

“U-um, they technically count as police officers, so should we have killed them?” asked Elise. “I don’t want to be accused of slaughtering foreign civilians.”

“They have an Object. Once you’ve acquired the right to fight a battle, your life is fair game.”

It was unclear how the trenches had been dug, but the second level ran perpendicular to the first level. It was like a river cutting across the path, or like an intersection shifted vertically. If they were not prepared to further crush those mutilated corpses with the continuous tracks, it would be better to continue along the second level instead of returning to the first. Although that was more about their mental health than pure logical reasoning.

Elise must not have wanted to sit on the roof while it was filthy with red blood and guts, so she sprinkled some salt all over the roof and then pulled a device out of the vehicle. It was a polisher, a car-washing device that used a motor to rotate a polishing disk that would get the exterior of a car nice and shiny in no time.

“Things are finally feeling in line with that Royal Cleaner event.”

“N-now I’m worried there might be a third and fourth level as well.”

“I will follow the second level for now, but the ceiling above us introduces even more risk if the salt collapses,” said Myonri. “Be careful, everyone.”

“How is being careful supposed to increase our odds of survival, dammit?”

Myonri was right that the salt above them made the second level a true tunnel, so they did not even have the sunlight anymore. She switched on the vehicle’s headlights, but that felt terribly inadequate. This was very different from a highway tunnel that had orange lights installed every so often.

Heivia gave an annoyed look down at his staticky radio.

“What, did it get some salt inside and break?”

“Yay!” celebrated Elise. “I’m not the only clumsy one!”

“Wait, I don’t want people thinking I’m as clumsy as her! Anything but that!!”

Of course he did not. Heivia did not wear glasses, he was not busty, and he was not a young woman, so he would receive none of the breaks she had.

However, Quenser had a more optimistic view.

“I bet the connection is just blocked by the tunnel. Myonri, radio check.”

“Feeling lonely, Quenser?”

That exchange proved two radios in the tunnel together still worked.

“Based on my mobile device, we should be approaching F9.”

“Thank god the map was stored on the local device. But what if we reach the goal and find we still have a salt ceiling above us?”

Luckily, there were no traps that detonated the entrances on either end to bury them alive. After driving about 200m along, the ceiling opened up again and connected back to a large trench on the first level.

Quenser blew up the wall, Myonri used the arms to smooth out the ramp, and the military engineering vehicle drove up to the higher level.

“We’re finally here,” said Quenser while walking out ahead of the vehicle instead of returning to the rusty-smelling roof. “I see Point F9 up ahead. Now we can finally help out the Princess.”