Editing HEAVY OBJECT:EX Chapter 7 (section)

===Part 6===

Verdandi’s special attack started by throwing her opponent off balance and taking up a checkmate position that allowed her to kill them with her next attack, but there were some ways to fight it if you knew it was coming. The Princess swiftly slid the Baby Magnum to the side to escape outside the movable range of her enemy’s main cannon.

She might have perfectly avoided Verdandi’s laser beam like that.

In that case, what happened next?

Not even Quenser understood what had happened as he watched it all from the side.

A terrifying flash of light burned into the entire world.

The Trinity Style had changed form. It only had the one main cannon on the side, but it hung down like an Island Nation katana sheath and the entire main cannon seemed to swing around using a booster.

It was not a laser beam or a rapid-fire beam cannon. Nor was it a railgun or coilgun. If anything, it reminded him of a low-stability plasma cannon, but that probably was not it either.

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

Quenser covered his face with his hands and screamed. He writhed in pain in the boat.

His eyes hurt so bad he feared he would never open them again.

Even so, he repeatedly replayed the scene burned into his brain.

Something like a saber or blade of light had burst from the Trinity Style’s main cannon. It had looked like a blowtorch’s bluish-white flame stretched to several kilometers long.

It had swung around as if hopping up diagonally.

More than just the main cannon, the entire Object had rotated.

The Princess had quickly dodged. She had even forced down the repulsion of the static electricity to sink her Object down. That slight distance had saved her. A few of her main cannons had been mowed down like weeds, but she had avoided a fatal blow.

(What…in the hell…was that!?)

At the most basic level, the Trinity Style’s main cannon was a laser space elevator tilted on its side. Urd fired metal container shells from there while Verdandi directly fired the powerful laser beam at the enemy.

Then what about Skuld?

How did she use the elevator to produce mass destruction?

(Oh, I get it…)

Quenser reached a conclusion in his lightless imagination while his eyeballs stills suffered from stabbing pain.

(The elevator is made to fire a powerful laser on the bottom of the container to expand the air and propel it forward. I’ve heard the heat can destroy the bottom of the container and turn it to plasma if the power is too high. Is she vaporizing the entire container to create a powerful plasma current that fires out like a blowtorch or flamethrower!?)

“…enser…Quenser!! Skinny boy! Get up already!!”

The boy finally focused on the outside world when he heard someone shouting in his ear.

He shook his head and got up as rain poured down on the boat.

“Dammit… I’ve figured out the Trinity Style’s main cannon. It’s creating plasma without a low-stability plasma cannon’s special gas…”

“Did you receive a message from heaven during your near-death experience? If the angel was a hot blonde, you’d better introduce me.”

Meanwhile, Skuld’s plasma blade fired again and again. The din was loud enough to nearly burst their eardrums, but it did not blind them like the first shot had.

There was a simple reason for that.

“What? Fog?”

“That’s probably water vapor. Its main cannon is too hot, so it’s boiling the muddy water around it without even grazing it. This might even trigger a water vapor explosion.”

“…”

They could see a giant mass glowing orange beyond the sauna-like haze.

But it was not the Baby Magnum. The Trinity Style’s own armor was faintly glowing due to the residual heat of its own plasma blades.

If that was happening to the Trinity Style, how badly damaged would the Princess be as she constantly fled from it?

“That’s way too hot… How can it be melting nuke-resistant armor without even grazing it? That’s more like a shotgun or flamethrower. You can’t just dodge a single point. It covers an entire surface to keep its opponent from getting away.”

“Then what do we do!? How do we support the Princess!? If there’s nothing we can do, maybe we should flip over the boat, cling to it under the water, and pretend we were hit. Yeah, if we’re lucky the war treaties might protect us!”

“That’s not gonna work with that serial killer. She’ll slaughter us with a grin on her face.”

Quenser felt sick to his stomach just saying it.

The 5km blade was perfect for mid-range. And if she had free use of that, she should have been able to slice the Princess apart right off the bat. Even if Urd and Verdandi were not experts at using it, they could have borrowed the method to confuse the Princess. However, they had not done so. The reason why was simple: the weapon was so powerful that it even swung around the Trinity Style itself. Without the constant slight adjustments by a genius like Skuld Silent-Third, the 200,000 ton mass could easily have flipped right over.

She was not swinging the blade however she liked. She was making it look that way by skillfully redirecting that power which was great enough to swing around the entire Object.

It was just like that serial killer’s lifestyle.

She planned nothing, she adlibbed everything, and she killed as many people as she could at the moment. …In her pursuit of that, she set aside the concept of risk and produced enough results that it all “looked like” military actions.

But…

“She’s using an air cushion this time.”

“?”

“We have a ballista that was meant to add air resistance to interfere with her movements. The arrowheads were filled with aluminum and iron oxide powder for the chemical fusion needed to attach them.”

“What about it?”

“This isn’t a lake. It’s a giant river full of muddy water. That means it has a definite current. And the Trinity Style specializes in acoustic scanning. It probably can’t tell what’s flowing through the water. Or it has difficulty doing so.”

“Yeah, and what about it!?”

“There might still be something we can do…” said Quenser on the boat. “Let’s take a look at the things floating in the river. It can be drums or plastic tanks, but we need empty containers above a certain size!!”