Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume17 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 5===

Heivia Winchell groaned to himself after learning what had happened via radio.

“I’m getting back alive no matter what it takes. I swear I’m stripping that busty commander naked, wrapping her in duct tape, and leaving her in a park bathroom.”

“We now know our opponent can use enough bombs to cause Mont Blanc Tunnel to cave in,” said Frolaytia over the radio. “Would you prefer to live your life terrified of being blown up in a terrorist attack whether you were in a safe country or a battlefield country? Plus, the enemy is part of the Legitimacy Kingdom, so they could waltz right into the maintenance base if they wanted to.”

Frolaytia had essentially dragged the crocodile up out of the river. They knew they could not defeat it while it was hidden below the water, but they were the ones who would get bitten if they tried to change that. The two idiots vowed to survive this. She could make all the excuses she liked in that public bathroom that reeked of ammonia.

“Frolaytia, does the term Body File mean anything to you!?” asked Quenser.

“Where did you hear that?”

“On a mobile device that Elise stole from one of them. But the files themselves require separate passwords, so we can’t open them.”

“Bring that here. The electronic simulation division can break into it.”

“Could I just transmit the encrypted data to you now!?”

“You haven’t tried yet, have you? With some kinds of security, attempting to transmit it without entering the password will destroy the data. We don’t know what kind the 21st uses, so physically bring it to us.”

That level of caution showed Frolaytia understood the importance of that data.

“What we need now is information. I want to know what is going on behind the scenes,” she said. “You can let the Princess handle the Object! But with her firepower, I have my doubts we can take the Pilot Elite alive. That device is important, but also search out a few 21st soldiers on the ground there!!”

“Is this really the time to focus on other things!?” shouted Heivia while looking up at the white slope.

This was not a metropolis flooded with light. They were in the middle of nature, so there were no real light sources at night. However, that thing was so enormous they could still see its silhouette.

The enemy was also from the Legitimacy Kingdom.

The 21st Mobile Maintenance Battalion supported the Second Generation Crystal Scrying.

It probably used the same static electricity propulsion device as the Princess instead of an air cushion. It could generally be classified as a multi-legged type, but those legs were not even. The front legs were abnormally large and branched off, while the back legs looked like they could not possibly support that giant thing. The front legs were reminiscent of a stag beetle because they spread out to the sides from the front of the spherical main body and then gathered back in toward the center again. They were something like diamond-shaped scissors.

The main cannons…may have been the boxy containers on either side of the main body. Each side had a cannon made from strapping four barrels together.

“What is that? Is it combining them to increase the power and accuracy, or does it fire them in turn to reduce the lag of reloading and cooling???”

That question was soon answered.

The container-style main cannons on the left and right angled diagonally upward.

Then something happened.

Their eyes could not keep up with a metal shell flying at 5 or 10 times the speed of sound, but if they could trust the long, narrow contrails that seemed to slice across Mont Blanc…

“They curved!?”

A tremor seemed to shake the entire mountain and the slope’s white makeup was stripped away. Avalanches occurred all across the mountain.

“What in the hell!? Those contrails mean those must be railguns or coilguns instead of lasers, but those main cannons curved partway through!”

A total of 8 shots had been fired.

The hypersonic shells attacked simultaneously from the left and right like enormous jaws snapping shut.

Luck was the only reason the Princess had not been blown away the first time it did that. In their high-speed battles, Objects would begin taking evasive action in advance by detecting the slight movements of the lenses and barrels, but that was based on the assumption that the shells would fly straight. That method was no use for shells that could freely fly around in the sky like this. Not even a pro boxer could respond if their opponent’s second threw a beer bottle at them from the side while they were focused on their opponent’s eyeline and fists. This was the same.

The Baby Magnum had not escaped unscathed.

One of its seven main cannons had been torn off and one end of its spherical main body had split open like a flower blossom.

“We need to get out of here.”

“Heivia.”

“That busty commander clearly screwed the pooch this time!! She lied to us to draw out the enemy, but now that we’ve found that enemy, they’re going to chew us up and spit us out! The secret behind Immortanoid? The Body File? We never should have dragged this up out of the water, so why couldn’t we have just let sleeping dogs lie!?”

Another left and right pair of four metal shells tried to tear into the Princess’s Baby Magnum.

It was a close shave.

But in that case, why was the Princess still alive? It could not have been a fluke the second time.

“It uses threads,” said that lovely girl’s voice over the radio. “Probably fiber optic cables. It seems to fire railgun shells with wires attached so it can manually move the tail fins to alter its course in midair. But knowing that doesn’t help much. We need to find some kind of weakness.”

That was insane. It might seem like you could manually change the course of a railgun shell by attaching a camera and tail fins, but these were moving at Mach 5 or even 10. Only streamlines would be visible at that speed. Even with fiber optic cable, the pilot would only have a fraction of a second to think between the launch and the hit. Yet the 21st’s Pilot Elite was pulling it off. It only took them a split second to manage image reconstruction on a higher level than police drive recorder analysis that required the full use of a supercomputer and AI.

This went beyond the Object itself.

The Elite piloting it was a monster as well.

Heivia shook his head. He judged this hopeless and then pointed toward the avalanche falling due to the rumbling of the cannon fire.

No, he was probably pointing toward where some of the 37th’s people were gathered. The Crystal Scrying must have included that in the calculations when deciding on a course for its shells. The only possible explanation was that it had fired the right shells toward the Princess and fired the remaining left ones toward the humans on the ground.

“It is focusing on light.” The Princess spoke clearly over the radio. “Radar is not very reliable up here in the mountains and its own cannons are too loud to use microphones. That means using visual images should be the easiest method.”

“What are you basing this on!?”

“It’s aiming for you all instead of a large target like me because you’re pulling out your radios and mobile devices. The shine of a pilot light or backlight is enough for it.”

That thought froze Quenser’s heart.

He wanted to throw the device away immediately, but that was not an option.

“Even the smallest light can lead to death, so the moonlight and city lights can be a threat too,” continued the Princess. “Since it isn’t using night vision, I can only assume the Elite’s own calculations can’t keep up with that. Quenser, I am going to fire a shot toward Chamonix to destroy the unmanned transformer substation on the outskirts and cause a power outage. You should be able to hide in the darkness then.”

“G-got it.”

“If that isn’t enough, you can always play dead. If you try that, make sure you aren’t anywhere near the light, okay?”

“I promise you we’ll save you, so wait for us.”

He heard a quiet breath from his radio that would summon death.

It sounded like the girl laughing.

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Then a coilgun blast flew seemingly in the wrong direction to blow away the civilian transformer substation.

Everything was enveloped by a true and natural darkness void of all artificial intervention.