Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 4===

A tense silence hung over them all.

The elevator car was only about the size of a large tour bus. It of course artificially maintained a survivable level of oxygen, pressure, temperature, humidity, and more, but all of the Legitimacy Kingdom potatoes onboard had to be thinking it was an execution device that cost tens of billions of dollars to build.

The thermosphere was long.

It was 400km from top to bottom. Even if they were falling rapidly through it on an elevator with broken safety devices, they could not open the door as casually as with a convenience store microwave.

They could see the giant orange fireball out the window.

That hammer would bring doom to the world.

They could all see it, but none of them could reach out and do anything about it. Thanks to their similar relative speeds, it was easy to forget just how fast they were falling. It felt more like they were floating through the air in a hot-air balloon.

200,000 tons would be enough to wipe out humanity.

“I will…” Heivia Winchell muttered to himself while seated with his knees pulled up to his chest. “I will inherit the Winchell family. I refuse to die here, dammit. I have a cute fiancée waiting for me down there, so why is this happening?”

The way he was curled up with his head in his hands was probably pretty serious, but appearance was everything. It ended up looking humorous given the oversized head of the spacesuit. And since Quenser was in the same elevator car, he really wished the boy would stop bringing up marriage in this crisis situation. He did not want to die because of Heivia’s jinx.

“Ah, ahh, ahhhh,” groaned Myonri from another part of the car. She appeared to have discovered something in the drawer below her seat. “They have vacuum-packed hamburger steak…and is this lasagna!? Ugh, there’s so much food here and I can’t eat it because of this stupid helmet.”

Quenser also wanted her to stop talking about a last supper. What was he going to see next? A black cat or crow crossing his path despite the high altitude and enclosed space?

Meanwhile…

“Phew.”

Louisiana Honeysuckle leaned her back against the wall and placed her round butt on the floor while letting her arms and legs fall limply around her. She wore a skintight special suit with a gasmask, preventing him from seeing a single hair on her head, but he could still tell just how relaxed her body was.

She seemed awfully confident.

Or so he thought, but then he realized what this really was.

“Hold on. Don’t tell me…”

“Ha ha. It’s been 150 days since I felt any real gravity.”

Her head tilted to the side and did not rise back up.

She tried to wave her hand while seated on the floor with her back against the wall, but she could not even lift her hand.

When she almost slid to the side, Quenser propped her up on reflex. She could not even move her legs sprawled out on the floor, so they only trembled unnaturally while she spoke.

“I will be stuck like this until I get used to it. But don’t worry. I have been working to make sure my muscles and bones do not deteriorate. I should be able to stand once I grow accustomed to the sensation.”

“How long will that take?”

“Not long. I will have recovered by the time we contact the Elinabell.”

He certainly hoped so.

She had to take responsibility for what she had done. She might be an enemy, but no one understood space or the elevator better than her.

She could not resist at all right now and she had to know they could easily kill her, but the Capitalist Corporations genius girl remained confident even while surrounded by Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers. She seemed more curious about Quenser than the guns aimed at her.

“My muscles themselves have not deteriorated, so don’t worry – there is no risk of me embarrassing myself by carelessly relaxing my bladder.”

“Why that hypothetical in particular?”

Quenser could sense a few sharp gazes focusing this way. No one was saying it, but some of the others clearly thought they should go ahead and execute the villain who had pulled the trigger on humanity’s doom.

Louisiana ignored that and spoke to him while leaning on him for support.

“Why did you come to space?”

“For my job.”

“That is a soldier’s response. You are a student, so it does not apply to you.”

Her heated breath escaped as a quiet laugh.

She was as limp as someone collapsing after running a full marathon, but she continued speaking nonetheless.

She had built all this after graduating from a safe country university, so she had accomplished more or less what Quenser hoped to. And their ages were not all that different.

“Was it the Objects?” asked the genius girl.

“…”

“There were a few battlefield students at our university, which really just made for a few empty seats during graduation. The cost-performance of that option is not all that great. You may have signed up thinking it as a shortcut to striking it rich, but did you actually crunch the numbers? And I don’t mean following the flowchart on the flimsy pamphlet the school gave you. I mean using a massive formula on the level of an insurance company’s risk simulator.”

“I’m a commoner, so this was my only chance for any real success.”

“That idea was planted in your head by the people hoping to use you.” Louisiana snorted with laughter and spoke to the worried student from her position as a graduate who had already entered society. “The adults control people in one of two ways – they either praise you or disparage you. It was the same with me. The only thing schools teach you is how to study. And when the adults develop talent in someone, they want to use that talent for their own purposes. If I had never seen the beauty of Africa, I would never have questioned any of it and ended up holed up in a safe country office or research institute. I would have convinced myself I was happy and worked myself to death for some company while everyone around me assumed I was an eccentric who chose for herself to live in that bug cage.”

“The Turkana District changed that?”

“That is my holy land. There I found so much that I could not explain with my talent alone. It taught me that the world has more rules than the ones I believed in.”

The boy did a double take.

Louisiana Honeysuckle apparently had no intention of taking back what she had said.

“My brother Sladder’s failure was not in insisting on the mass driver system even after the rest of the world moved on. His failure was in never finding a lifechanging experience like mine in the Turkana District. That is why he could never see past his own set of rules and could only talk about himself. He became the lonely and boring sort of genius who had nothing left once the mass driver was taken from him.”

Quenser was dumbfounded. What was she talking about? She had caused all of this and there was no denying that. There was no chance of some shocking reveal of a true villain at this point. This felt like an even greater surprise than when he had encountered that space Object.

Because…

“Which Turkana District are you picturing in your head?”

“…”

“Because this space elevator destroyed the one you knew!! The verdant land and the many wild animals are all gone. All the water has been sucked from the ground, leaving nothing but a dried and cracked land covered in guerillas who reek of blood and gun smoke!! You did that. Maybe the world would have continued to ignore the Turkana District if you hadn’t done anything, but it also would have been spared the devastation you brought with Mother Lady! No, we didn’t hesitate to kill them. We didn’t give a single thought to how they felt after being made the villains of the world. But that’s because you told the whole world they were villains, Louisiana!!”

A short silence followed.

This may have been a first.

The words of a completely ordinary person had stabbed into that genius’s heart.

“Even so…”

Her voice was not quite a whisper and not quite a groan, but it was vanishingly quiet.

She spoke clearly even as she was helplessly propped up in his arms.

“I will still repay them. I have escaped a life where I simply follow the university’s recommendations and become a simple cog in a corporate machine. And I will repay the Turkana District for giving me that chance. I will do whatever it takes to do that.”

It was no use.

He had managed to land a scratch, but that was not enough to tear down the thick mental barrier.

He did not see how that dried and barren land void of all plant life could ever lead to repaying the Turkana District. Or was her idea of happiness to fill in the existing ocean with concrete, toss in foreign fish that would destroy the existing ecosystem, and smile while showing off how they could catch as many exotic fish as they liked?

How was that any different from a serial killer who went around brutally killing young girls and then proudly announcing that he had given them some “pretty makeup”!?

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you sure about that?”

She seemed to be laughing.

Maybe at Quenser, but maybe at herself.

She continued speaking while leaning against him.

“Study Objects long enough and you will realize the truth. You might be taking a different path, but we are climbing the same mountain. Once you reach the summit, you will see the same thing I do.”

“…”

“And when you look out from the summit, you will experience true despair. You will wish you had never seen it.”