Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume12 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 7===

Meanwhile, Heivia threw himself from the metal catwalk’s railing. He jumped inward rather than outward. He sought footing on the steel beams arranged like the ceiling of a gym.

But his comrades did not make it in time.

Conrad had not had time to let go of his T-shaped handlebars and he vanished from sight. The midair wire was meaningless if it was not taut. The soldier was still holding onto that entirely useless lifeline as he vanished into the east side cityscape that looked so tiny below them.

“Conrad!!”

“We don’t have time for sentimentality, Heivia! Here they come! Get re-…gabh!?”

As Marks shouted over at Heivia, his mask grew red from the inside. Heivia heard the light gunshots of a handgun. His eyes widened at how close by they were. And they came from “outside”, where the metal catwalks and stairs had just been purged.

He glanced over and saw the enemy.

It was a toy drone flying with four rotors. It had a camera lens on the bottom and a military handgun was attached with plastic tape. Finally, a thin shaft had been forcibly attached to pull the trigger.

This was likely what had noticed their approach and signaled for the detonation.

It was a very Information Alliance style of ambush.

“Dammit!!”

Heivia fired his silencer-equipped carbine again and again. He easily hit the thing, but unlike with a human target, he could not guess how many times he had to shoot it. He felt like he had wasted a lot of ammo, but he did manage to shoot down the attack drone.

While swapping out the carbine’s magazine, he glanced over to his remaining comrades.

Marks was not moving.

He sat on one of the tower’s steel beams and simply clung to it.

It was unlikely they could retrieve the body if Heivia left it there, but he could not just push it off either. Heivia settled on taking the dog tags and spare magazines. He dropped Marks’s handgun and carbine down to destroy them (even though he had no idea whether or not the enemy soldiers would bother venturing down there).

Then he looked straight up.

He was the only one left, but he was not entirely isolated.

Being driven insane by silent isolation could wait until later.

He spoke over his radio.

“Evans, attach a camera and monitor to the heavy machinegun and watch me from that side. If you see any drones flying around the tower, shoot them all down. And make sure you don’t hit me.”

“You’re going to continue!?”

“If I said I was too scared to keep going, do you really think someone would come collect me!? A helicopter can’t get this close to the wall!! I have no choice, you idiot!!”

He was 200 meters from the ground and he had about 100 more meters before the observation deck. He could use the complex arrangement of steel beams for footing, but it was still like scaling a cliff.

“This just keeps getting more dangerous… Thank god I practiced my wall-climbing skills so I could peep on our busty commander in the bath.”

This took both hands, so he could not hold his carbine properly. If another handgun-wielding drone showed up, he would have a million bullets up the ass before he could do anything. He had to rely on Evans for support.

It was a hellish climb.

The crosswind and gusts of wind were terrible. And the wind sometimes blew the black smokescreen toward him. The drones were occasionally shot down by Evans’s heavy machinegun, but it was not perfect. He was sometimes spotted and a detonation was triggered directly above him, so pieces of the stairs and catwalks would fall like stones. He had to stop his climb and slip between the steel beams to escape.

“That settles it!! If those Information Alliance bastards aren’t cute girls, I’m killing them on the spot! They’ll look like Swiss cheese when I’m done with them!!”

“Heivia, someone’s leaning out from the observation deck. An old man with a beard is aiming a fully-auto shotgun down your way!!”

“I wasn’t asking for spoilerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs!!”

Heivia tearfully ducked back from rapid-fire with a somewhat slower cycle than an assault rifle or submachinegun.

A courageous voice reached him over the radio.

“Should I take him out!?”

“Shut up! We don’t know how many are inside, so we lose our source of information if he’s alone! I’m almost to the observation deck, so spray some bullets around to keep him from moving but don’t hit him!!”

As requested, the heavy machinegun fired toward the observation deck. Each bullet was as large as from an anti-materiel rifle, so the fright of being anywhere near where they hit would take years off of someone’s life.

Some of the remaining reinforced glass must have shattered because clear shards rained down toward Heivia. He had to bite his lip because he could not get angry when he had been the one to request it.

Even so, he somehow managed to reach the observation deck at 300 meters.

He stepped inside through a broken window.

“Wait!”

There were only about three people there.

The only other thing to see was the cheerful idol showing off her swimsuit on the various monitors.

“Time for a topic drawn from a hat! The topic this time is…tah dah! O-oh? The moment when you see a member of the opposite sex and your heart skips a beat? Oh ho ho. I seem to have drawn quite an exciting topic.”

One of them aimed the fully-auto shotgun at him, so Heivia silenced him with a carbine shot between the eyes. Another one seemed bored and was toying with something like a game controller with a small monitor attached. He had a stiff smile on his face, but Heivia could not figure out what was so amusing, grabbed the guy by the collar, and threw him out the observation deck window.

“I cannot help but be charmed by a gentleman who runs full-sped toward his goal without worrying about appearances. Instead of trying to act cool, I like it when he is covered in sweat and mud while making a straight shot toward…kyah☆ I think I said too much. Oh ho ho.”

The final soldier ducked down as an insane gap appeared between the worlds inside and outside the screens, so Heivia clapped his hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Now the number of corpses on both sides is even. As a super noble with a generous heart, I would love to strike a deal here, but what about you? If you’re intent on continuing the fight, that heavy machinegun will be your one-way ticket to the afterlife. 12.7mm hurts like hell. Just a graze to the shoulder is enough to tear off an arm. It’s like breaking open a tender lobster. So are you sure you want to fight?”

“The Legitimacy Kingdom…?” The soldier sounded bewildered. “Why are ''you'' here? Oh, oh! I get it. You’re actually Information Alliance in disguise, aren’t you? Nothing else makes any sense!!”

“Tell me everything you know, one at a time.”

Heivia aimed his silencer-equipped carbine and that direct threat drove the Information Alliance soldier to silence. He glanced toward the fully-auto shotgun on the floor, but even if he could take out Heivia, he knew he could not prevent the heavy machinegun from getting back at him. He gave up on the idea and sighed.

The young soldier sat down, put his hands up, and spoke.

“I am Jax Spencer of the Information Alliance’s Sd Independent Assault Logistical Support Unit. My rank is sergeant.”

“What? Assault…logistical?”

“You can tell from our weapons that we’re not the intelligence team hidden in Second Venice, right? We were on standby so we could lend them some more firepower if they screwed up and had to make a run for it.”

In other words, they got to take every day off unless there was an emergency. And those emergencies would only occur once a year at best. They were a prime example of soldiers living off of people’s taxes. Heivia was jealous.

“That’s why it took us so long to figure out what they were doing. We thought this was a simple job like normal, but…dammit! I can’t believe they called Second Venice a world-class resort. If we’d known this was an infection base we would have refused the mission from the beginning!!”

“Wait, wait, wait. Let’s go over this in order. I just heard a really ominous term in there, didn’t I?”

“Listen, Second Venice is a world-class tourist spot. It officially belongs to the Information Alliance, but it’s actually full of wealthy residents of safe countries from all four world powers. …They gather here from all over the world and then return to every part of the world. You understand that much, right?”

“…”

“But Second Venice is an artificial island. It has a bunch of tropical-looking palm trees and such growing on it, but it’s really just barren land made from empty boxes of aluminum and reinforced stainless steel. That means the soil is fragile and almost entirely void of nutrients. To make up for that, they spread some kind of agar across the soil. It’s an Island Nation…what did they call it? Natto bacteria? Anyway, by covering the soil with that, it improves the water retention, replenishes the nutrients, and prevents the growth of mold. All of that is well and good, but there’s a problem. What do you think would happen if that harmless natto bacteria were replaced with some other kind of microbe?”

“Wait a second… Are you saying this is connected to the ‘infection base’ you mentioned earlier!?”

“The official name is Sprinkler 001. But at that point, it was still a beneficial project. More and more of our safe countries are plagued with resistant bacteria. The housewives with nothing better to do have been keeping everything so sparkling clean with anti-bacterial sprays and wipes that everyone’s losing their immunity and ability to recover. So when they get even slightly sick, they go to the hospital and take tons of antibiotics, which in turn increases the toxicity and resistance of the bacteria. The medical fees are no laughing matter. The VIPs needed to do something before the national treasuries were strained too far to continue waging war.”

Jax smiled a little.

“It was a package of convenient and harmless bacteria. By setting them in the infection base of Second Venice and disseminating them, the infected carriers would spread them to the safe countries. The clean freak housewives would be letting the bacteria into their bodies without realizing it, but that would increase their immunity and reduce the frequency with which they visit the doctor. That would reduce the medical fees and allow the Information Alliance to focus on war. It wasn’t a bad plan. At that point at least, it didn’t harm anyone. …Yes, ‘at that point’.”

“There’s more? Wait…you’re kidding, right?”

“Something unexpected happened.”

The Information Alliance soldier must have wanted to do anything but admit this out loud. His face was even more unpleasantly sweaty than when he had the gun aimed at him.

“They used a package that shouldn’t have existed. So our Second Generation was used to quarantine the island. Of course it was. We don’t know what Pathogen X is, but if it’s brought back to the safe countries around the world, it’s all over.”

“Wait, are you saying something’s happening to our bodies!? Are you saying we’re filled with something people in strange protective suits would need to pack up in a plastic bag and keep in isolated storage!?”

“But this is a manmade disaster. We were never told the risks! We only learned about the infection base by desperately gathering information on the scene!! The Information Alliance needed to protect us. How could they let us rot with all the other corpses in this good-for-nothing graveyard!? We thought we could use the threat of transmitting this information to convince the main unit to come rescue us, but…but they…!!”

“Answer me, you piece of shit!!!!”

Heivia aimed his carbine at the soldier again, but Jax Spencer only gave him a thin smile.

“…It’s too late.”

His quiet voice sounded like someone remembering something on their deathbed.

Heivia felt a chill down his spine despite being the one aiming the gun.

“The grim reaper has already sown his seeds. Spend just thirty minutes in Second Venice and you’re guaranteed to be infected. No one can escape this infection base. Yes, that’s right. Yes, no one really understands. Not even I-…”