Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume19 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 4===

And so they were thrown into another hellish war.

Quenser and Heivia stood in a blowing blizzard.

“Did I just see my life flash before my eyes? Where are we?”

“This can’t be real. We only got out of the truck 5 minutes ago. How are we already lost!?”

They turned around and rushed back the way they had come, but there was no truck and no tire tracks. Only the thick white curtain of snow.

Farewell, sweet treats.

The unwanted scent of war pushed in toward them instead.

They saw no sign of their fellow Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers despite how many of them were supposed to be out here. Quenser was no longer confident they had actually gone back the way they had come. He feared they were walking in circles thanks to this white screen of snow that kept them from seeing even a few meters away.

“My mobile device isn’t working either. How can we be 120km from the 37th’s maintenance base zone? The Baby Magnum should be nearby, but I can’t see that 50m giant anywhere.”

“It’s -15 degrees out here. I’d be amazed if our electronics ''weren’t'' breaking. And let’s not forget that I’m a noble. This cold had better not be killing all my valuable sperm.”

“If it’s so valuable, you should probably stop wrapping it up in a tissue and throwing it out.”

The two idiots warmed themselves with a nice fistfight.

Their objective out here was to secure and retrieve Elina Silverbullet, the genius girl hidden somewhere in this forest of spear-like conifer trees. They didn’t need to battle the Information Alliance or the Retro Gunner loaded with the Ghost Changer. But if it did come to a fight, they could probably find some reason or another to slaughter them all.

The temperature was 15 below freezing.

The thick layer of snow made it easy to lose track of distance and direction. That gave it an otherworldly feeling, like they were surrounded by greenscreens.

The trees standing more than 20m tall were packed in as close as the crowds downtown on the weekend. They were probably cedars, but they looked all fluffy thanks to the blowing snow. Quenser and Heivia knew they would be frozen solid like that too if they weren’t careful. It was colder than a kitchen freezer, so they knew their corpse wouldn’t rot until spring.

There was no sign of civilization out here.

No homes or stores and no roads or power poles.

“And if that wasn’t enough…”

Quenser Barbotage glanced to the side.

“A ghost, huh? Dreadfully unscientific, but rather amusing for Tunguska. 2000 square kilometers of this old-growth forest were reduced to ashes by a mysterious explosion. There are many theories, including that it was an asteroid breaking up in the atmosphere.” (Sladder Honeysuckle)

“Underestimate past knowledge like that and you will come to regret it. The exact same drugs developed from a complex chemical formula in a sterile lab can also be found in Chinese medicine made by crushing up tree roots over a thousand years ago. And the very idea of breaking free of gravity and flying into the heavens above came from old fairy tales like Kaguya-hime or Jack and the Beanstalk.” (Louisiana Honeysuckle)

A stubbly man and a silver-haired 17-year-old were both grinning darkly.

Sladder Honeysuckle was a mass driver researcher who had led the Capitalist Corporations’ Mass Driver Conglomerate and used the Second Generation Break Carrier to start a war so he could defect to the Information Alliance.

Louisiana Honeysuckle was a space elevator researcher who had used the Elevator Alliance, jointly funded by the Capitalist Corporations’ 7th Core, to create the 100 thousand kilometer balancing weight needed to correct the earth’s axis from the distortion caused by the use of 200 thousand ton Objects.

They were both geniuses in the bad way.

They were global-level war criminals who never should have been released from the prison located on a remote African island.

(Why are we reusing prisoners just because they can think in unique ways? I know the Ghost Changer is eating through our troops like crazy, but this can’t be a good idea. Controlling these monsters is way harder than fighting some ghost.)

Quenser gulped.

Those siblings had been given the bare minimum of camouflage, but they were not given any pockets where they could hide stuff. And to prevent them from hiding anything inside the clothing, they had belts wrapped tightly around them like a parachute harness, forcibly filling in all the internal space.

They were tough and easy to move in, but they looked more like prison uniforms than military ones.

And more than that…

Quenser heard the jangling of thick chains. Those two had long chains attached to their ankles. They also had handcuffs on their wrists. He didn’t see how they could possibly fight like this, but they were here for their knowledge. The higher ups had apparently decided they only needed enough freedom to work with their fingers and to fire a handgun for the bare minimum of self-defense. They were still basically prisoners, and they had been sent into this ghost battle without any real preparation. The higher ups didn’t expect them to come back alive any more than the 37th’s potatoes.

(And what’s this about the bare minimum? Even the puniest gun is still a gun. Did the higher ups give even a second’s thought to how we’ll feel getting shot in the back by them!?)

[[Image:HO_v19_BW4.png|thumb]]

The Legitimacy Kingdom had decided to reuse brutal war criminals.

Which meant another pair of siblings was here too.

“Oh, my beloved brother! At long last, the time has come for us to work side by side! Hee hee. Hee hee. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!” (Azureyfear Winchell)

“Nooooooo!! Please, someone tell me the blizzard is making me hallucinate thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!!!” (Heivia Winchell)

Oops, he was starting to place Heivia in the war criminal category alongside his sister.

The girl with long blonde hair blowing in the wind was a daughter of the noble Winchell family. However, she had used the secretly-constructed Second Generation Destruction Fes to attack a civilian cruise ship and start an internal conflict with the daughter of the noble Vanderbilt family. All because she loved her big brother a little too much.

They were all bad news.

In a way, these villains were more frightening than the Objects themselves. Spending time in a prison in the middle of nowhere had done nothing to rehabilitate them. These were the human irregularities whose charisma could infect the rest of the prison instead.

Thanks to them, Quenser and Heivia’s group was the only one without an animal robot to carry their gear. Because no one wanted the prisoners to steal that gear.

“H-hey, it could be worse. Skuld and Mariage could be here too.”

“You need to fix your habit of staring at the ground and smiling, Quenser. You’ll never get promoted like that.”

“I’m not even a solider. Students don’t get promoted.”

“Oh, shut up. If we’re playing that game, then I’m a noble heir, so I’m supposed to be set for life! So why am I out here nearly freezing to death when there aren’t even any enemies around!?”

“You love to call yourself the heir, but where in the line of succession are you among all your siblings?”

“I’d better at least be above Azureyfear since she’s a goddamn war criminal, but I’ve gotta be in the top 3 at least. And with some military accomplishments under my belt, I’ll be #1. But not even I know how many candidates there are out there. I’d rather not count up how many times my relatives decided not to use a condom.”

“Y-you’re talking about blood-related relatives here, right?”

“Of course he is. But the dirty old men distantly related to us don’t care about the line of succession. They just use their money to cum inside their maids, random sex workers, orphanage directors in need of funding, and god knows who else, making a complete mess of our family tree. If we included the mistresses who claim a blood relation they don’t have and all the illegitimate children, the number of candidates might increase tenfold or more,” explained Azureyfear with a shrug (and rubbing her cheek against her big brother). Evidently, she was not a sheltered girl who was appalled by the filthy turn of the boys’ conversation. “Of course, the Winchell women with nothing but time on their hands after being kicked out of the line of succession are known to sleep around a lot too, but the risks associate with pleasure are a lot greater for women. Their fun rarely leads to us suddenly having more new brothers and sisters. Hmm, I wish they had given me some perfume when they let me out.”

“Wait, so that wasn’t just this idiot’s values being messed up? Is the entire Winchell family like this?”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” spat Heivia. Louisiana must not have been as bad as them because she gave those siblings an exasperated look. “Anyway, everyone from my godawful siblings to the bastards I’ve never even heard of claim they’re the heir. And the Winchell family controls way too much wealth to simply pass control of the family to the oldest son. That’s why I have to prove my worth in the military! And I was supposed to get an easy deployment meant for hyper VIPs. I’m a radar analyst! So why the hell was I kicked out here to destroy the world’s most dangerous superweapon!? It’s not right!!”

They were already lost.

They were enjoying a nice picnic surrounded by war criminals in a white forest cut off from civilization. It could hardly get worse. It was wrong that the number of prisoners was greater than the number of jailors just five minutes after leaving the military truck. And those prisoners were armed with guns. Quenser could see them in his mind’s eye grinning past a fanned-out hand of cards. A revolt was inevitable.

“Where did Myonri get off to anyway?” Quenser felt a little dizzy. “An annoying odd job like this is perfect for that jack-of-all-trades with all sorts of qualifications that seem entirely useless in combat. Get back here, you wildflower sommelier!”

“What, does your unit have a failed idol who never got a chance at stardom? If she wants to win the guys’ hearts, she needs to throw out all those high-level qualifications and show off how good-looking but scatterbrained she is. On days off, she could strip down to something indecent and take a nap with the rest of her clothing lying around her. With lots of tossing and turning to show off her body, of course.”

“Shut up, Louisiana. Boys don’t fall for that calculated crap. And we aren’t interested in some wrinkly clothes on the floor. What matters is the body wearing them!”

“Oh, really? A funny thing to say for the guy who ate my sports bloomers and underwear. Don’t act like the sweet smell didn’t knock your brain out of commission for a bit there.”

“Ho ho?” laughed Big Bro Sladder in great interest. Like he had spotted a vintage wine at a neighborhood bar, or like he had seen someone make a highly unorthodox move in a chess game. Quenser paled, fearing the man felt a new affinity with him because geniuses were so often also eccentrics.

“Y-you’re the one that shoved them in my mouth! Listen, don’t you forget I can tighten all those belts enough to strangle you at the press of a button on my radio. And once the switch is thrown, they give off a GPS signal and the glow-in-the-dark paint and scent capsules burst. Even if you try to attack us and run off, you will be immediately shot to death. No matter where you try to run in this white forest, the dogs will track you down.”

“I thought these were positioned oddly for a harness. Is this the Island Nation’s tortoise shell bondage? You said your mobile devices weren’t working, so let’s hope the simpler radios still function. I mean, that GPS will scatter its signal everywhere once it switches on, right? I certainly don’t want to summon the enemy to us if it malfunctions.”

“Gh!?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I have no intention of running away,” spat blonde Louisiana with a shadow over her face. “Because there isn’t anywhere to run to on this planet. With all those 200 thousand ton weapons moving at such high speeds around the globe, the earth’s environment has already been fatally thrown out of balance.”

“…”

There was no point in listening to their nonsense.

If they were civilians trapped out in the blizzard, it would be better to stay in one place and preserve their strength while finding some way of letting the others know where they were. But they were in the middle of a military operation. With a time limit, waiting was not an option.

It was unclear how useful it was, but Louisiana blew on her thickly-gloved hands before saying more.

“It’s awfully presumptuous of you people to just march us out here and expect us to have some way of fighting that Ghost Changer thing. Admittedly, there are no end of UFO sightings at high altitude and space.”

“Isn’t that just the high g’s, weightlessness, and oxygen levels messing with people’s perception?”

“I refuse to accept that the human brain is that simple.”

Needless to say, no one knew how the Ghost Changer worked. The story sounded absurd, but since a maintenance base zone of 800 really was wiped out in a single night, the Legitimacy Kingdom needed to analyze this ASAP. And when they weren’t even sure if this was a bio, chemical, or physical weapon, they needed to send in geniuses from a variety of fields to analyze it.

On the other hand, they didn’t want to needlessly kill off the Legitimacy Kingdom’s treasured scientists and engineers.

That had created a need for geniuses who could be sacrificed. The criminals whose talents were going to waste behind bars were perfect for the job. And ones with a familiarity in several fields were even better.

(Why don’t the goddamn higher ups ever consider how we feel having to babysit these people!? But how could they when they’re so far up the chain of command I’ve never even seen them?)

At any rate, they needed to find Elina Silverbullet, the genius girl living in a log cabin tucked away somewhere in the Tunguska District. And they needed to do this before the Information Alliance and their Ghost Changer-equipped Object got there.

Quenser sighed.

“We know the Princess, Myonri, and the others are somewhere around here and we know they’re headed to the same place. We just have to trust that we’ll find them as we approach the log cabin.”

“Yeah, but where is that cabin? Damn, getting scared and turning back may have been a mistake.”

Heivia complained while checking the distribution of trees, the rises and dips in the terrain, and the water sources and comparing them against his paper map.

Quenser frowned.

“What will that tell you? All I see out here is fluffy white snow. It has to be more than a meter thick.”

“Don’t you know how to glean information from the terrain? A forest’s trees grow with a different distribution between sloped and flat areas and they won’t grow at all without any water. …Oh, here we go. We’re at A9. So if we follow this Y-shaped river south for 20km, we’ll find the log cabin from the satellite photo.”

“What, you could find her secret base in a search engine?”

“Apparently, it was normally hidden by a tunnel of tress, but the weight of the snow brought down some of them. Without the thick layer of snow to deflect everything from IR to UV, the heat source was impossible to miss.”

The color white tended to deflect all wavelengths of light instead of absorbing them, and that included the near-infrared often used for mechanical searches by satellites and drones. Far-infrared was absorbed on the interior, so the log cabin was covered either way. It also created an insulating layer of air like inside an igloo.

“What are you saying – it was protected by snow that never melted?”

“Don’t die out here. Who knows how many years you’ll be buried in the snow for. You’ll end up on display at a museum someday.”

They couldn’t trust their mobile devices in this cold, so they trusted Heivia’s trivia that moss grew thicker on the north side of a tree trunk because it would avoid the sunlight. Once they had their bearings, they began their hellish march through the snowy forest with criminals in tow.

Whenever a gust of wind would blow in and alter the density of the white curtain, they had no choice but to stop and bear with it. Quenser looked back time and time again, but not because he wanted to head back the way they had come. He was obsessively checking on the number and positions of the untrustworthy criminals.

Sladder grinned while frequently shaking his hands so the metal handcuffs didn’t stick to his skin in the cold.

“What are you so worried about? We’re not going to snatch you up and eat you. Life in solitary confinement wasn’t all that bad. There was a window, even if it did have bars over it. And the combination of the damp, cracked wall and the sunlight allowed some small flowers to grow.”

“Okay, Sladder. I get it. If you hold a grudge, just come out and say you want to kill me.”

20km.

They had to travel 20km. That was a half marathon, but those would be run on paved city streets, not in over a meter of snow while carrying more than 10kg of military gear. They were risking their lives just reaching the log cabin. Quenser could only pray they would not be the ones needing help when they arrived.

“We were not given any detailed information on this mission. How do you plan to retrieve this Elina Silverbullet girl once you reach her? The blizzard might obscure us, but there is still an enemy Object on this battlefield. That means anti-air laser beams, which in turn means no helicopters or tiltrotors.”

“Shut up, Sladder. And stay out of my sight because I don’t want to see tortoise shell bondage on a guy. To answer your question, that extra gear Heivia is carrying is a reinforced rubber motorboat. If we climb to the bottom of the ravine and escape along the river, we can leave the battlefield at nearly 200km/h without worrying about the las- dwah!?”

Quenser nearly bit his tongue.

His vision suddenly dropped straight down and he would have fallen 10m to the bottom of that very ravine if Sladder hadn’t grabbed his arm. The height was bad enough, but he would have fallen into rapids rough enough to keep from freezing at this temperature.

“That was a snow cornice. The snow blown from the edge of the ravine will freeze and stick out like a roof or bridge. You can think of it like a naturally-forming pitfall. Step through it and you win a one-way trip to the bottom.”

“…”

“You are one of the jailers, meaning you are supposed to look after us prisoners. We might be doomed if our caretakers need to rely on a skinny scientist like me on the physical front. I was hoping to live the good life on the taxpayers’ money, so do your part, civil servant.”

Quenser had not mentally recovered enough to respond. His heart was hammering away in his ears, but probably not because he was falling in love with Sladder due to the suspension bridge effect.

Louisiana laughed lightly, holding her handcuffed hands up to her mouth.

“Heh heh. Extremely low temperature oxidants such as liquid oxygen and ice accretion on artificial surfaces are common causes of trouble in need of a lot of research, so aerospace scientists like us know a lot about the structure and traits of ice. With an elevator, we use wires and pulleys. With a mass driver, they use grease to control the trail of the projectile.”

“Oh? In my field, ice and powder are more commonly associated with stimulants and synthetic drugs. Hee hee. Like amphetamines or MDMA. Although if you’re only interested in cost-effectiveness, you can’t go wrong with LSD that can be mass-produced from the ergots on wheat infected with a certain fungus.”

Why didn’t Azureyfear notice how depressed it made Heivia to see his dangerous sister show off the expertise she had developed while securing the 5 billion dollars she needed to build a brand new Second Generation? That cute and sexy sister was not going to win the heart of her big brother (who was engaged to a rival family’s daughter) anytime soon.

To repeat, their mission did not truly begin until they had arrived at the log cabin 20km away and secured the 9-year-old girl there.

This trip was meaningless if they couldn’t get back afterwards.

They could not rush this and collapse on arrival. They had to worry about the Information Alliance army and their Ghost Changer-equipped Retro Gunner who were after the genius girl. Not to mention escaping along the ravine river.

They took occasional breaks and checked to make sure they were still going in the right way. The meter-deep snow came in handy for building a shelter since they only had to dig into it by hand to create something like an igloo.

There were no landmarks to go by when they were surrounded by a featureless white void the entire time. It was dispiriting to feel like they were endlessly walking in place like that.

At one point, Quenser nervously glanced around, even though he knew he could only see 5m at the most.

“D-did you hear something?”

“It’s just the wind. With that blowing in your ear, we’d be in a shootout already if we were close enough to actually hear someone whispering.”

Quenser had lost track of how many breaks this was, but munching on his second flavorless ration helped remind him that time really was passing. He tried looking up and found things were getting darker. He couldn’t actually see the sunset, but he knew it had to be that time of day.

“It’s finally time for the ghost to come out to play,” he said, feeling discouraged.

“Show some tact and let me sit next to my brother. And I don’t see why a ghost should only come out at night. Anyway, commoner, is this ghost of yours dressed in cold weather gear, equipped with a cutting-edge sniper rifle, and frequently contacting someone by radio?”

“?”

Quenser frantically ducked down, earning him a smack on the head from Heivia and Azureyfear both. The siblings wore identical exasperated looks. Apparently getting down was important, but moving too quickly would disturb a thick layer of snow and draw attention to them.

He could only see 5m at best through the thick curtain of falling snow, but the blizzard’s density was uneven. When the wind weakened and the white wall opened up for a brief moment, the view miraculously cleared up.

There it was at the bottom of a gentle slope.

Quenser let out a visible breath and leaned against a nearby tree while viewing the scene below them.

Snowy conifer trees surrounded a log cabin. The building was a little bigger than a studio apartment and looked to only be a single story. He saw some soldiers in white camo around it. At a glance, he noticed at least three, but there might be more behind the cabin and in the surrounding forest.

Maybe it was to fight the cold and maybe it was to hide their identity, but the soldiers all wore white masks with ski goggles over their eyes. That made them look somehow inhuman.

They had not heard anything about the 9-year-old girl being guarded by a bunch of heavily-equipped soldiers.

That meant someone had arrived ahead of Quenser’s group and taken control of the log cabin. What was happening inside there? Tension gripped Quenser’s heart, but he forced himself to stay positive: if these people wanted to kill her, they would have done so already and then left.

The delinquent noble clicked his tongue.

“What the hell? Who do those assholes belong to?”

“Wasn’t the Information Alliance supposed to be deployed here ahead of us?” asked Louisiana.

Heivia shook his head, looking disgusted.

“Those sniper rifles aren’t Information Alliance and they’re not Legitimacy Kingdom either. They’re the luxury model that won the shooting event at the Technopics. But we’re not scored by judges on the battlefield, so no pro uses them. None of the world powers issues those to their soldiers.”

“…”

Sladder was looking elsewhere.

Quenser’s thoughts turned to his backpack.

“So they’re as special and unusual as me and my Hand Axe, which is more expensive than platinum?”

“Don’t get cocky, skinny boy. And when soldiers are using nonstandard gear to hide their affiliation, you just know they’re up to no good.”

“So is the Information Alliance running an unofficial operation, or is there some third party here?”

“We can kill them either way. But first let’s check on Elina. As long as they aren’t in position to take her hostage, we can gun down all these soldiers. If they are, we start by taking out the soldiers immediately around her to keep her safe while we slaughter the rest. Simple right? First order of business is getting a look in the window, Quenser.”

Quenser did not react when his name was called.

Heivia found that odd, but then he realized what was going on. The blizzard may have been a blessing after all.

The red laser pointer line was actually visible thanks to the reflection of the snowy screen. More than 10 such lines crisscrossed vertically and horizontally to create something like a spider web trapping them.

“I know there’s supposed to be a ghost in this forest…”

Needless to say, all of those red lines were directed at someone’s chest or forehead.

Not one of them could survive.

Quenser Barbotage slowly raised his hands.

“But I hope that isn’t referring to us in the near future.”