Editing HEAVY OBJECT:EX Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 5===

“That damn geek. Let’s kick his ass if we don’t find anything this time!!”

“Calm down. We need some practice like this from time to time. Our skills will get rusty if we never use them, so just think of it as honing your skills.”

“Whatever’s fine, but does he have to point the light this way? The bugs are swarming us!!”

The Faith Organization soldiers complained and showed no intent to hide their voices or other noises. They effectively ruled this area, so they were confident they would maintain the upper hand no matter what happened.

They roughly made their way through the grass while pointing around the microphones attached to their assault rifles like bayonets.

“There’s something there. What is this reading?”

“You sure you’re not picking up your own breaths?”

“Doesn’t look like it. It might be a wild animal, though.”

“But it might be a human?”

“Maybe a conservation group…but maybe enemy soldiers.”

Tension ran through them.

The others all pointed their assault rifles in that same direction and detected the same unusual waveform.

And…

“?”

A shrill flute-like noise pierced the night sky.

The soldiers all looked up without thinking.

The heavens seemed to burst apart.

A heavy vibration shook their guts like the beat of a giant drum and flashes of light filled the dark sky. The Faith Organization soldiers were knocked over, but the unusual event did not end there.

It happened again and again.

It went beyond a mere one hundred or one thousand times. Tens of thousands of large flowers blossomed all over the sky as if to blow away the twinkling stars. The wild dance of light filled the night.

“What…the hell!?”

“They’re fireworks! Dammit, I’d heard a Legitimacy Kingdom Object had taken up a position at the edge of the Experimental Battlefield, but they must be having some kind of wild party!!”

Basically, fireworks had been crammed into the hundred or more cannons on the Object’s main spherical body, and then they had been scattered in every direction using the railguns and coilguns. The fireworks covered both the area around their maintenance base as well as this region of sky a few dozen kilometers away. Ten kilometers was the standard range for Object battles, but they could easily fire further when there was no need to accurately hit anything. When they grabbed their radios to report, a careless transmission with no real encryption cut in.

“Happy!! Birthday!! A salute to the Princess of Volga from the other side of the globe☆!! Yahaaaa! This beer is delicious!!”

“This is amazing! The people’s tax money is paying for all of this, you know? We’re stuffing our faces with caviar and foie gras and they’re paying! Am I dreaming!?”

“Team 1 to Team 3. We want to slip some alcohol into the glasses-wearing class rep’s drink, but we need help making sure she won’t notice when she tastes it. All volunteers reply at once. Over!”

The Faith Organization soldiers clicked their tongues or ground their teeth.

The deluge of voices made them feel silly for poking through the grass with strange bugs attacking them.

“Damn those depraved feudalists!”

“Hey, what do we do? We can’t pick up any noise around here with this racket!”

“We’ll report it and then check around for any footprints. We’ll move on after doing everything we can. Let’s go!!”