Editing HEAVY OBJECT:EX Chapter 4 (section)

===Part 5===

It was a hellish exchange from the very first shot.

“…!!!???”

Quenser and Heivia dropped everything and dove down onto the orange-dyed wasteland. The Baby Magnum and Trinity Style fired shell after shell from several kilometers apart.

From a distance, it might have looked like a light show.

They used low-stability plasma cannons, laser beams, railguns, coilguns, and rapid-fire beam cannons.

But for the people there, they were like the fingers of death itself.

If one merely stroked their back, they truly would lose their life. Merely being exposed to the tingling shockwaves felt like having years worn off their life.

As soon as a soldier frantically jumped out of a chemical firetruck’s driver’s seat, a laser beam pierced it.

The long bridge truck that crossed the 100 meter river was more melted than broken when a shot hit it.

“What are we supposed to do with all this going on, dammit!?”

“At least we’re not the Faith Organization soldiers on the other side of the river. Looks like they were trying to cross the river too, but the Princess’s Killer Squall made short work of them.”

The Killer Squall was a laser beam weapon shaped like a planetarium lens and it was the kind of anti-personnel weapon not seen on more recent Objects. It fired more than 100 lasers at once and they scattered like an actual squall to vaporize the waves of approaching people. The First Generation Objects had been built on the multi-role concept, so they were built for anti-Object, anti-encampment, anti-vehicle, anti-ship, anti-air, and anti-personnel purposes.

The single-focused Second Generations were certainly terrifying, but it was the older First Generations that made the puny soldiers’ throats dry up.

“Hey, what’s going on? The Princess is falling back as she fires. Is she leaving us behind!?”

“Have you already forgotten our strategy, Heivia? Urd prefers long-range and Verdandi prefers short-range, but with the river blocking their way, they’ll be forced to use Urd if the Princess falls back. We’re limiting their choices before blowing them away.”

And the Trinity Style’s main purpose here was to prevent the Legitimacy Kingdom from withdrawing. If the Trinity Style did not take the bait and they simply glared at each other from a distance, the Princess would be outside of her attack range, but that was fine.

If they could buy some time, they could finish their withdrawal preparations.

And that made it more likely that Skuld would escape.

So the Trinity Seven would rush things.

It would approach as close to the river as it could.

That clearly worked against it in the short run, but that left a possibility of destroying the Princess. Urd would be forced to fight in that mindset.

Or so they thought.

They could not have been more wrong.

A moment later, something unbelievable happened.

The 200,000 ton mass leaped as if jumping over the river.

Quenser gasped on the ground and it took him some time to grasp what had happened.

First, the Trinity Seven’s horizontal laser space elevator of a main cannon aimed downwards. And with a deafening roar, it had fired something toward the ground.

But it had not used that blast to make the jump.

Instead of a heatwave or shockwave, a strange sticky liquid spread out from the blast. It hardened in just a few seconds, creating a giant upwards slope made of plastic.

The Trinity Style raced up that at full speed.

It had used a ramp.

And that provided a powerful enough jump to cross the river.

“Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wahhh!?”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!!”

The two idiots shot to their feet and ran as far away from its expected landing point as they could get.

The Trinity Style would have landed at least 100 meters away, but with a crackling and air-splitting explosion, bluish-white sparks scattered in every direction. The two idiots fell to the ground more due to the fear than actually being hit by something. The massive amount of static electricity keeping the 200,000 ton mass afloat had reacted with the repellent scattered across the ground. It turned the air into ozone, scorched the ground, and nearly blew Quenser and Heivia away.

The Trinity Style did not care about them at all.

It accelerated straight toward the Baby Magnum.

And the Princess was caught off guard by the unexpected development.

“You can’t fall back any further, Princess!!” warned Frolaytia. “The maintenance base zone is far closer to the front line than usual. Any further and the base will be in range!!”

“Kh…understood!!”

The Princess had been gradually falling back, but a definite change came over her actions. She moved forward to meet the Trinity Style.

Heivia gave a shout while trembling on the ground and uncomfortably sweaty.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen!! This puts the Princess at a geographic disadvantage! Now they can switch back and forth between Urd and Verdandi! This thing was enough of a black box already, but our odds of victory are slipping further and further away!!”

“But it’s not like we can just tell them to stop. Heivia, keep the observation equipment focused on the Trinity Style. We need to figure out whether that’s Urd or Verdandi, how the Object is structured, and where the armor is thinnest. We need to get all that data to the Princess in real time! Hurry!!”

“What? Hey, wait! Where do you think you’re going!?”

Quenser did not answer as he approached a chemical firetruck that had rolled onto its side nearby. One of the packed-together military vehicles had been hit by a small laser beam, but the rest were fine. He traced a finger along the side and recalled its structure before pulling out some Hand Axe plastic explosive from his backpack. He stuck a fuse in the clay-like explosive, pasted it to the rolled-over firetruck, and detonated it.

Meanwhile, the two giants continued their shootout a short distance away.

The Baby Magnum and Trinity Style were only a kilometer away from each other now. In an Object battle, that was like infighting with their foreheads pressed together. The Trinity Style was moving quickly in every direction to confuse the Princess. While making quick steps forward and back or left and right, it would occasionally fire a container shell full of sulfuric acid or liquid nitrogen. Even without a direct hit, they created toxic swamps that restricted the Princess’s movement and sometimes damaged her armor or sensors with their vaporized gases. It also used its ramps made of a special plastic. Those gave the Trinity Style a new axis of movement in addition to the existing 360 degrees of horizontal motion.

“What do we do? What the hell do we do!? It’s all over if the Princess loses, but I can’t think of any way to help! And Quenser, what the hell are you pulling out!?”

“Baking soda.”

The student pulled a few tanks out of the chemical firetruck. They were about the size of industrial beer containers.

“It’s a foaming agent used in chemical fire extinguishers. Mix it with sugar and place it over a fire and you can make honeycomb toffee.”

“And what good is that? That thing is 200,000 tons of steel and not even a nuke can stop it. That isn’t going to help!”

“Just watch. More importantly, Heivia, check your handheld device’s map. Pay special attention to the ramps the Trinity Style is making.”

“?”

It was a foolish action when up against an Object’s sensors, but Quenser ducked low as he ran along the orange-burning wasteland. He was fortunate that the Second Generation was not built specifically for anti-personnel attacks and that its acoustic sensors were less accurate with all the explosions. He felt a squeezing in his chest when tingling shockwaves reached his skin and a strange chemical smell burned his nose, but he still tried to approach the region of intense fighting.

“Heivia, you’re supposed to be a radar analyst, right? Try to predict where the Trinity Style will place its ramps based on where they are on the map. We’ll get there ahead of it.”

“Sure, but then what!? This isn’t an opponent we can trip up!”

“Don’t be so sure.”

Quenser grinned and pasted some Hand Axe to the bottle of baking soda he had brought with him.

“Those ramps are probably made from cyanoacrylate. You might know it as instant glue. On its own, it’s used to stick things together, but mix in some baking soda and it will expand and harden into a plastic. It’s used with figurines and dioramas and I knew someone who was into that kind of thing back at my safe country school.”

“Baking soda? Wait, you mean…?”

“It’s probably releasing a calculated amount of cyanoacrylate and baking soda from those containers. It’s just like making a perfect circle with a firework. But what if we throw some of our own baking soda into the mix after it’s fired into the ground but before it fully hardens? Their calculated design will fall apart and they’ll have a twisted failure to deal with. If it tries to use it, it’ll trip up and this will all be over!!”

Heivia compared the empty spots on the map to the Princess’s distance and position and managed to predict where the Trinity Style was likely to place a ramp.

Quenser threw over the bottle of baking soda.

Then they waited while he held his finger over his radio’s detonation button.

And…

And…

And…