Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 5===

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Even for a Capitalist Corporations’ Second Generation, an absurd amount of funding and technology had been pumped into the Miskatonic. The Object represented one of the seven giant corporations making up 7th Core which directly managed their home country.

Even from the edge of the scarlet lake which reflected the burning color of the sky, it could clearly be seen deep in the giant destroyed industrial sector across the Panama Canal.

It had a bizarre design.

One look at its main cannons was enough to know that.

A giant mechanical flower spread out from the back. It was shifted upwards a little like a straw hat on someone’s head. Except the flower was actually made up of giant reels and two meter wide tubes extending from them. Eight identical devices were laid out in a circle like on a clock face and the special tubes could move freely like the fiber scopes used for endoscopes.

They looked like eight snakes or the tentacles of a squishy sea creature.

The Miskatonic’s main cannons were high-power plasma cannons that were fired through the tubes. It fired from different positions, at different angles, and with different timing to seal off its opponent’s movements.

It was similar yet completely different from the Baby Magnum’s cannons that were supported by seven arms and could be used for diffusion or convergence.

However, they did not have time to sit there analyzing its structure.

Death was pursuing Quenser and the others in the form of drones.

“This ain’t good! The forest! Run into the forest, Quenser!!”

Heivia gestured toward and instructed the student as he ran.

“Get somewhere where they can’t see you from the sky! Luckily, they can’t use an IR search with all this heat and smoke. If we can escape the cameras, we still have a chance!!”

Quenser immediately grabbed Nyarlathotep’s wrist, much to the surprise of the man with the neatly parted hair.

“You could just leave me, you know?”

“I’m not letting you use this confusion to fake your death.”

Quenser started running while dragging along a ghost who showed no desire to live.

Lots of drones were fried, blown up, and shot down overhead. That was thanks to the Baby Magnum’s anti-air support. But the surviving ones and even the ones that were shot down produced whirring sounds from their camera lenses and transmitted the fleeing soldiers’ location to the Miskatonic.

An explosive roar followed.

This was not the Object’s fierce plasma main cannon. Most likely, its many railguns and coilguns had been simultaneously fired into the sky.

It poured down just like rain.

This downpour of death was meant to crush the target even with some level of targeting error.

Its own drones were shot down as the shells rained down on the edge of the lake.

“Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

After a scream, Quenser flew through the air.

He could no longer feel Nyarlathotep’s wrist in his grasp, but his vision was spinning around too much to tell if he had let go or if one or the other’s arm had been blown off.

He slammed back-first into the ground and something soft fell from the heavens.

The items that had been blasted into the air with the black soil were horribly dark-red metallic-smelling clumps.

Quenser nearly tore at his hair in a panic, but a powerful strength grabbed his arm.

Nyarlathotep was pulling him to his feet.

“Can you stand?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Run. If you aren’t ready to meet the grim reaper before finishing your job, that is.”

He fully focused himself on running.

Whether it was rain or spears falling from the sky, he forced his legs to continue moving.

He finally half-slid into the deep forest next to the lake.

Shells poured down on the forest as well and trees too thick to reach one’s arms around splintered like chopsticks.

Still, the accuracy had dropped and the shells started falling nowhere near them as they ran deeper and deeper into the forest.

It finally stopped after about ten minutes or a little more, but that hell seemed to have lasted an eternity.

Had it given up?

Or had the Princess’s anti-air support successfully shot down all of the drones?

That was Quenser’s guess as he leaned against a tree and tried to catch his breath, but then Nyarlathotep spoke up.

“Here it comes.”

The world vanished into whiteness.

Eight blasts of high-power plasma instantly filled the entire terrain with destruction.

The forest melted.

The trees were not even allowed to burn. They and the ground turned to a glowing orange liquid which formed rivers of lava.

The downpour from the heavens had been at least generally aimed, but the eight main cannons had not even done that.

The enemy had escaped into the forest, so the Object was melting the entire forest.

Instead of just wiping them off the face of the earth, it was wiping off the face of the earth too.

That was just how insane the fan-shaped attack was.

“…”

Quenser stared blankly as he slid his back down the tree trunk to sit down.

The scenery that had been there a moment before had transformed into a red river.

Nyarlathotep glanced upwards and seemed to be sniffing at something.

“No second wave… So was that all? Or it may be focusing on its battle with the Legitimacy Kingdom Object. Either way, this is our chance to escape.”

A crackling sound reached their ears.

They looked over and saw Heivia unsteadily approaching while treading on the embers.

Quenser frowned.

“Hey, what happened to the intelligence division?”

“…”

“There were a ton of them with you, weren’t there!? What happened to them!?”

“It’s…”

Heivia did not give a clear answer.

But the rivers of lava and his next words said enough.

“It’s time…we killed this guy.”

Heivia’s assault rifle suddenly hopped up.

Quenser immediately grabbed the firearm that hung from his shoulder.

It was the bullpup sticky bomb launcher known as the War Hammer.

Two boys wearing the same military uniform aimed their weapons at each other from about twenty meters away.

“You can’t, Heivia. If you kill him, we’ll lose any way to fight back against the Capitalist Corporations’ accusations!!”

“What the hell do you think we can clear up or stop now!? We’re past the stage where the fuse was lit. The spherical bomb with a skull and crossbones on it was has already blown up! And the friendly idiots who were supposed to stop it are all below the lava. This hell is going to cover the entire world before long. And yet the gigantic idiot that set the initial fire is still alive!!”

“Heivia!”

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“He can’t fix anything, so we have no reason to risk our lives to protect him. We should just execute him already. Even if we did drag him back to the beachhead, some bizarre political decision would get in the way. …Do you really think the VIPs want this war to end? Just like the Capitalist Corporations wanted a reason to attack the Legitimacy Kingdom, the Legitimacy Kingdom has tons of reasons to have an excuse to attack them! It isn’t fear that’s burning through the world! It’s a fire of greed, so there’s no way to end it!!”

“Are you saying taking him back still wouldn’t stop this world war?”

“He won’t get a proper hearing. He’ll be found suspiciously hanged in his cell and it’ll be called a suicide, so why protect him? If it’s an issue of sooner or later, then we might as well kill him ourselves!!”

“Then…”

Quenser gave an anguished groan as he held enough firepower to blow his awful friend to smithereens.

“Then we can’t leave him with the Legitimacy Kingdom. We’ll have to leave him with the neutral Blue Cross and have the truth revealed in the international courts. It’s a long shot, but that’s the only way to stop the entire world from burning down!”

“All you’ve done is give me the justification I need, Quenser. Now I can shoot you to prevent you from deserting and leaking our information.”

“Heivia…”

“Stop. You can’t win this. Do you really think we’re on equal footing here? There’s no way I’ll lose to a student.”

“…”

“You get one warning. I’ve got an assault rifle, so even if I shoot an arm or leg, it’ll still tear open an artery. …Put down that War Hammer. I’ve said my part, Quenser. The rest is up to you.”

Still, the two boys remained entirely motionless for over ten seconds.

If either one of them moved their trigger finger five millimeters back, it would all fall apart.

But finally, something seemed to drive Quenser to remove his eye from the sight.

He slowly removed the stock from his shoulder and lowered the muzzle of the gun. Then he let it dangle down from his hands.

“There, that’s a good boy. Now you-…”

Heivia never finished speaking.

Without even looking through the sight, Quenser pulled the trigger of the firearm dangling from his hands.

Something was fired onto the thoroughly heated ground at the exact midpoint between them. It was a translucent slime that covered twenty or thirty centimeters.

A piece of metal the size of a watch battery released a mechanical flash and a large explosion followed.

Both Quenser and Heivia were swept backwards by the blast.

A cloud of dust filled the sky to block their view of each other.

Those boys always seemed to be together, but now the distance between them seemed to stretch out forever.