Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 5===

At an altitude of 80km, they were leaving the thermosphere and entering the mesosphere.

“We’re in Area 1, Louisiana!” called Quenser in his puffy spacesuit.

“Yes, yes.”

She had adapted to earth’s gravity just as she had insisted she would.

She was still slow, but she could move her arms and legs.

Not only did she know the elevator’s structure better than anyone else, but she also had better use of her hands in that slim spacesuit that showed off her figure.

The scraping noise from the wires grew even more violent, so the multiple brake shoes must have tightened around the carbon nanotube wire.

However…

“Wait, what the hell?” Heivia looked around in a panic. “The brakes! Apply the brakes!! Why are we still slipping? Don’t tell me this handmade car has finally malfunctioned on us! What, did this thing go off prematurely!? I told you we were only edging today!!”

“It will take us at least a kilometer to decelerate. I could slam on the brakes and stop us immediately, but the inertia would squash us all flat.”

Space existed on a much larger scale, but given the length of an airplane runway, this may have actually been quite short.

Regardless, the vertical sliding continued to squeeze at Quenser’s heart until they came to a stop in midair.

The elevator car was the size of a large tour bus standing on end.

Jack-of-all-trades Myonri reached her puffy fingers toward the thick door.

“U-um, I’m going to open this now. This has a heating element inside, doesn’t it? I hope it hasn’t frozen shut.”

“Oh, you should either let the air out of the room first or attach yourself with a carabiner.”

Gasmask Girl Louisiana tried to warn her, but Myonri had already turned the heavy wheel and the door burst open on its own. Myonri immediately let go of the wheel, but she was still swept outwards.

They were 80km above the ground.

That was about 10 times the height of Everest and there was no air that high. When the pressurized room’s door burst open, it created a powerful gust of wind like the air being let out of a balloon.

“Ahhhhhh!?”

“Myonri, you idiot! Grab on!!”

Quenser immediately reached out, but he could not support her weight with just the one hand and was nearly dragged out with her. Heivia had to wrap his arms around the student’s hips to pull them both back inside.

“Th-that was way too close.”

Heivia gulped while unable to wipe the sweat from his face through the thick helmet, but then he heard a dry crackling sound. It may have actually taken him a moment to notice since he was too close to the source.

White frost was spreading across his helmet’s visor starting from one end.

Quenser glanced down at the computer on his arm to find it was dead. Was that thanks to the special EM waves, or due to the extreme cold?

Louisiana casually provided another warning inside her black and yellow special suit.

But not about the cold.

“Oh, and needless to say, this is the mesosphere. We aren’t protected by the ozone layer here, so we’re exposed to the full force of the sun’s radiation. Are your electronics okay? Let’s hope your Legitimacy Kingdom spacesuits can handle this.”

“Are you kidding me!? How many ways can this battlefield kill you before the fighting even begins!?”

“You are viewing this all backwards. We are in outer space, so you don’t need a special reason to die. Here, you need a special reason to survive.”

“So we’ve got less chance at life than the sticky goo balled up in a tissue, huh?”

But now was not the time for introspection through Zen dialogue.

The Capitalist Corporations’ Federation of Elevator Industries’ World’s End was plummeting toward the earth as a colossal fireball. They were still positioned below it, but other than the spiral course it had taken using air resistance, it was essentially in a freefall. It was in gravity’s grasp, so it would not just come to a stop in midair.

They had been 500km up, but they could not do anything while in the thermosphere, so they had ended up down at 80km. This was the earth’s time limit. If they could not cause the nuke-resistant Object to break up in midair, today would be the planet’s final day.

“Let’s do this, Heivia, Myonri. The instant its altitude matches ours is our best chance.”

“But what exactly are we supposed to do?” Myonri panicked inside her puffy spacesuit while Quenser continued to hold onto her from behind. “Not only can it survive a nuke, but it’s falling in a spiral with a radius of about 10km. That’s a range of 10,000 meters. That’s outside the range of a specialized sniper rifle, not to mention our ordinary assault rifles!”

“Are our missiles the only viable weapons? Hey, everyone, gather up every one we’ve got. How many do we have left!?”

While still cautious of the open door, everyone laid their weapons out on the floor, revealing they had 30 missiles left. However, around half of them gave no response to the tester. The radiation may have damaged their sensors. That meant they could not even be launched.

“That giant bomb is falling toward the surface and this is all we’ve got to work with?” asked Heivia. “Can’t we ever catch a break, dammit? How can we possibly win this?”

“There’s no use complaining now,” said Myonri. “Besides, you should have known your luck ran out from the moment you were assigned to the 37th. Anyway, the Object is coming. It should be- ahhhh!?”

Myonri screamed after noticing something.

After being hit by more of an invisible wall than a noise, Quenser and the others were thrown to the floor and the sturdy elevator car shook unnaturally.

The World’s End fireball had arrived.

It looked different than it had out in space. Instead of an orange-glowing mass, it was more of a white light, similar to a camera flash or welding light. Just looking at it felt like it was damaging your eyes, but more than that, the roar of its shockwave reached them from at least 10km away.

That meant there was air here.

There was far too little to support life, but sound could still travel through it.

“Ah!”

Heivia noticed something and quickly reached out his hand while still lying on the floor. A few of the missiles lined up on the floor rolled on out through the airlock. And they were all ones they had sorted into the “still working” category.

He could only scream unintelligibly.

“Nwahhhh!! Gwohhhhh!?”

“Shove the rest in your launchers before we lose any more! Hurry!!”

They were of course closest to the Object when their altitudes matched. Without needing to include the height difference in the calculation, their range was exactly 10km.

Heivia and Myonri leaned out through the door at the same time to aim the launchers on their shoulders.

Quenser had nothing to do, so he quickly ducked down just before the two shoulder-fired missiles were launched. The white smoke ejected from the back filled the car. Their helmets meant there was no need to cough, but being unable to see was still frightening. Everything they did seemed to work against them, so Quenser was afraid he would roll on out.

“Dammit!!” groaned Heivia.

“What happened?”

“They won’t fly straight! What, is the air too thin for a stable flight!?”

That made sense, but they had brought this equipment along to use in space. How had they used them out there?

Louisiana sighed behind her helmet.

“The tail fins wouldn’t do anything out in empty space, so you just used them as straight-flying rockets, didn’t you? But as thin as the air is up here, we are still in the grasp of earth’s gravity. They will not fly straight like they did in zero-g.”

They really could not catch a break.

They watched as the World’s End continued to drop in its spiral that maintained a 10km radius around the elevator wires. It dropped below them once more. They could see it, but they could do nothing about it. They knew the earth would be destroyed, but they lacked the equipment. They could not play a role here.

“What do we do?” asked a dazed Heivia with his useless missile launcher dangling from his hand.

Their attacks could not hit.

And even if they could, what would that accomplish? What could they hope to do about that mass of metal that had remained in one piece even after having its reactor pierced through by the Baby Magnum’s main cannon?

“These tiny missiles aren’t going to do jack shit, but what else can we even do!?”