Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 7===

Explosions sounded out without end.

Checking through binoculars showed nothing, but one glance at the flat LCD screen was enough to tell the number of barrage balloons was dropping. At the same time, scream-like reports continued pouring in from the attack formation disguised as stranded tanks and armored trucks.

The intercepted military radio signals were encrypted, so what they were saying was unknown. Still, the frequency of signals had increased considerably, so the soldiers were obviously elated as they approached.

It was as if they had found an opening.

The group swarmed toward this one idea like ants.

“Just as expected.”

Newsmaker spat out his low voice. He was the middle-aged man who ran the copied weapons factory that gave physical form to the information stolen by terrorist organizations and guerrilla groups around the world.

“The springtime swamp saved us, but scattering the contents of our warehouse wasn’t enough to drive off the Legitimacy Kingdom. We can continue as planned. How many of the Flying Fish were serviced in the time that bought us?”

That man was stubborn and picky about his field of expertise, but he looked far kinder than in the image usually shown off. His current wrinkled brow looked out of place with the rest of his face.

He wore a military uniform produced at this factory, but it looked more like a factory uniform. He may not have been the type to harm others and take things from them.

“Forty eight of them.”

The subordinate who replied looked like a slender literary young man.

“We won’t have time to prepare the rocket motors for the rest. The Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers would be here by the time the liquid fuel was loaded.”

“We can drag them down into chaos well enough without that.”

“But the thermobaric warheads were a failure…”

“That was to be expected. With our level of tech, we would have been lucky if one in twenty of them detonated. The whole point of this act was to make sure they didn’t catch on to that.”

That was why they had not been able to surround the factory with thermobaric bombs as if they were nuclear mines. The Rafflesia antiaircraft guns had not been in working order either. Even one in twenty detonating would kill a lot of soldiers, but if the enemy knew a lot of them were duds, they would take an optimistic view and charge right in. That would defeat the purpose of the barricade.

“How are the rocket motors?”

“The ones on the Flying Fish to be sent out are in perfect working order.”

“Then we’ll be fine. That provides enough power on its own. We don’t need to insist on the thermobaric warheads.”

Newsmaker briefly fell silent as he thought about the meaning of the rocket motors and the outcome they would bring.

And finally…

“I’ve finished the list of volunteers. I’ll join you after completely erasing the data on our clients.”

“Newsmaker.”

A female voice spoke from the side with a somewhat low tone.

The woman wore ready-made white and neon pink skiwear. She had likely chosen the outfit after hearing she was going to the Arctic, but the sweat on her forehead made it obvious that had been a bad decision. She had her long blonde hair stuffed inside a knit cap and she looked something like a college girl or a new office worker.

But she was not.

She was Yog-Sothoth, a Legitimacy Kingdom white hacker and also a spy from a Capitalist Corporations intelligence agency.

“There’s no need to go this far. I only asked you to help as much as you were able and this is clearly going beyond that.”

“It will take another thirty minutes before the submarine arrives on the coast, so we need to buy some time.”

“But this isn’t the right way to do that.”

She slowly looked back at the several dozen identically-shaped weapons filling the vast space.

Yog-Sothoth had been born into this age of war and had come into contact with plenty of technological information about weapons, but even she found these to be an oddity. The factory workers who had built them had likely felt the same. No one would actually want to ride something like that.

“Newsmaker, I thought I taught you that the key to psychological warfare is increasing fear and that killing is just one means to that end. The killing isn’t absolutely necessary. If you want to increase social unrest and paralyze administrative functions, you only need to cover walls and guardrails with stickers and spray paint meaningful-sounding graffiti on apartment doors. What you’re doing here is extremely inefficient.”

“But painting eyeballs on the barrage balloons did not stop them.”

“But it had some effect. Our psychological warfare is affecting them far deeper than they realize. If we move to the next step and shake their hearts even further, their unit will collapse into chaos without any bloodshed.”

“Sorry, but we lost people in that attack formation,” quietly replied Newsmaker. “We’re already past the point of no return.”

It was obvious to everyone there that he was intentionally suppressing his emotions. With the likely exception of himself, that is.

“Think back to all the dramas and movies you’ve seen. Human emotions and the human heart are most strongly stimulated by death, as sad as that is. We feel happy when an enemy dies, we feel sad when a sickly girl dies, we feel fear when the protagonist is about to die, and we feel angry when the heroine is about to die. …Death is an almighty tool to draw out any emotion. And right now, we need an immediate effect. Making it a little more obvious than absolutely necessary is just what we need.”

“But!!”

“Yog-Sothoth, you head to the harbor and wait for the submarine. We’ll buy the time you need. Our piece-of-junk factory couldn’t fully recreate the classified information in your head, so you find someone more useful. That will change this world in a big way. You can change the world.”

“…”

She cursed in her heart that it was not supposed to be this way.

Their objective was obvious. They were a buffer faction born in the Arctic. With the world map shattered like stained glass, if the various vague gentleman’s agreements were broken, the boundary between battlefield country and safe country would immediately vanish. The only guarantee was the fact that “we’ve been doing this for decades, so everything will be fine”. That was why the buffer factions aimed to build obvious buffer zones between nations to lower the risk of a major metropolis becoming a battlefield. That was the kind of peaceful ideology this group subscribed to.

Of course, the major nations immediately rejected the idea of buffer zones as unrealistic because they restricted the amount of usable land and gave criminal organizations space for relay bases, increasing the flow of weapons, drugs, and even human trafficking.

Neither side was willing to compromise, so the weaker group had no choice but to rely on something beyond mere words.

To vanish after the fact, they needed to construct a stepping stone, so Yog-Sothoth had taught them how to construct a trump card without killing.

She had known her technological information was too much for them to handle. They could barely recreate any of the weapons to a usable level, but simply coming into contact with someone holding such high-level military secrets was enough to increase their perceived status. They should have been able to manipulate information enough to obtain a powerful bargaining chip without spilling any blood. Namely, the unignorable bargaining chip known as a bluff.

That was all it should have been.

But…

“I understand.” The middle-aged Newsmaker gave a small self-deprecating smile. “But this is what we ended up choosing. It’s not that we had no other choice. We specifically chose this card from the many in our deck. No matter what you say, we were nothing but filthy terrorists. We live in a different world than a pacifist like you.”

“Newsmaker…”

“We made a lot of different weapons here and scattered them through the world. We’ve caused a lot of chaos in the carefree safe countries, but it just doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything at all. I know intellectually that staying hidden in the background is safer and more reliable, but it doesn’t sit right in my heart that we’re talking about changing the world but aren’t standing in the line of fire ourselves.”

Was that what he truly thought or was it a way of thinking he intentionally used to suppress the fear?

“You live on. It would be a waste if you died here.”

The conversation did not continue.

It was cut off.

Yog-Sothoth felt like an obvious line had been pulled back and a thick barrier of glass had come between them. Newsmaker turned his back and walked toward the weapons. She could no longer reach that back as it made a loud announcement.

“We are the Crown of the Northern Lights! We wish for peace in the Arctic and the northern hemisphere as a whole!!”

The first wave of pilots approached those bizarre weapons and the man spoke as their leader.

“We will be lost here, but that will be the trigger needed to awaken our latent comrades as the Sixth Branch. We are not alone, so face forward. For the sake of our still unseen comrades, we will pave the path to tomorrow by demonstrating the Sixth Branch that is not trapped in the existing five!!”

That proclamation was as obvious as a fast food burger yet it contained a strange heat. When Yog-Sothoth heard it, she looked to the weapons once more.

They were known as the Flying Fish.

They were hovercraft equipped with rocket motors. This group had failed to reach the level of fighter craft or ballistic missiles, but they had jury-rigged together parts from a number of blueprints to create these nightmarish weapons that skimmed only a few dozen centimeters from the surface at 880 kph.

Their primary weapons were 20mm heavy machineguns and 80mm multiple rocket launchers.

And…