Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume16 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 7===

The surprisingly loud sound of the wheels wore on Quensette’s nerves.

The wheels belonged to a cleaning cart he had borrowed from the linen room on the same floor.

He was rolling it down the air-conditioned hallway to the office from which he had come.

“Is everything fine, Rosa?”

The dog barked in response.

Grinov managed a weak laugh with his hands tied behind his back and the dog keeping an eye on him.

“What do you hope to accomplish by stuffing me in there? Do you really think you can even escape this mansion?”

“If that isn’t going to work, I can always chop off your bearded head and stuff it in a barf bag. Is that what you would prefer?”

“…Are you enjoying this?”

“What?”

“I have what you do not. In fact, this fate has befallen me because I have it. This is how oppressive our world is. There is no freedom here, only despair. How does it feel to prove that with your own actions?”

“…”

“We have almost certainly killed more criminals than all of you have. Everyone kills to keep themselves safe. The only difference is the set of rules we follow, but no one can really say which set is the correct one. You must know just how selfish the laws and international treaties enacted by the four world powers are. The justice you believe in is simply that which is poured from the tap when you hold out your hands. We have constructed a different set of rules on the other side of the coin. That is the truth of the matter.”

After instilling some politeness in the bearded man using a kick to his defenseless gut, Quenser chucked him into the cleaning cart and then had Rosa join him in that cramped space. What would happen to the man if he did anything to displease those two? Without the use of his hands, he could not avoid Quenser’s kicks and now there was a legit military dog right in front of him. There was no escape this time and no clever suicide was available, so it was sure to be a fun little picnic.

“Tear out his windpipe if he says anything, Rosa. Bringing back his corpse is good enough.”

It was unclear if she could actually understand such a complex command, but it only had to keep Grinov quiet.

After placing a few sheets over the cleaning cart to cover up the openings, Quenser glanced over at the drawers he had pulled out from the desk. They contained everything from documents to a handgun, but he was interested in something else: a car key.

“A Dynamix EV Grade 500s? That’s a luxury self-driving electric car, right?”

Seeing the maker’s logo reminded him of the TV commercial. It was an odd choice for Grinov who disliked the cloud and big data, but Dora Blue-Hawaii, the naked woman from the arms dealer he had met back in Hawaii, had wielded special equipment based on a flying car. He had also seen a self-driving tractor rolled over in the farms and the sprinkler system supporting those farms was program controlled. Perhaps Grinov’s personal desktop was its own thing and the organization as a whole had an online environment. …Of course, they would be paying a hacker to provide specialized maintenance and inspections of the system just like paying a personal lawyer or accountant.

Quenser could not drive a car or motorcycle, but he could not be picky. He would let the machine handle it.

A peaceful solution had ceased to be an option from the moment he stun gunned Grinov. The snowball was already rolling down the hill, so he had to leave this Southern European mansion before things got worse at an accelerating rate.

“Okay.”

He pushed the cleaning cart down the hall now that it was much heavier than before. He could not use the stairs with this, so he needed the service elevator used for carrying food.

This was supposedly the top floor, but for some reason, there was both an up and a down button. Had they simply used the same standard panels for all floors, or was there an attic area? Either way, Quenser was only interested in going down. He pressed that button and waited.

The elevator was not like those found in a department store or hotel. It was the simple type with a metal accordion door that pulled to the side to open. It was small enough that the cart would almost entirely fill it. The wires were exposed and you could likely reach them if you stuck your hand through the gaps in the door.

Was this so plain and old-fashioned compared to the rest because the mansion’s owner would never use it?

For a while, Quenser only heard a clanking sound much like an old clothes dryer. The building was only 3 floors, but the elevator must have used a pretty cheap motor.

(Hurry, hurry.)

Standing still only fueled his impatience. He had to consciously suppress the urge to tap his feet.

How long did it really take? A minute? Three minutes?

Finally, the view through the accordion door showed a giant mass appearing in the emptiness of the elevator shaft. There was no sign of a safety device, so there was nothing you could do if your finger or clothing got caught. Quenser waited for the elevator to come to a complete stop before he reached for the door.

And…

“Wait, don’t do that! You need to press the button before sliding the door. If the elevator starts moving, you’ll be caught in it!!”

He gasped.

But he was pretty sure he managed to keep it from showing on his face.

A sexy maid who looked a lot like a young wife stepped around a corner of the hallway and responded to Newcomer Quensette’s clothing rather than his face.

“Wait. Why are you wearing the outdoor uniform for indoor work?”

He just about clicked his tongue. When he put on this maid uniform back in the prefab hut, hadn’t he assumed the thick, heavy-duty uniform was meant for farm work? There was more than one variety of maid uniform here.

He did not need a lame excuse right now.

He shoved the cleaning cart into the elevator.

“Ah!”

He left behind the young wife maid, who clearly took her job too seriously to be wasted on a criminal organization, and he rapidly tapped the down button inside the elevator. The sexy and panicked maid ran over, but just before she arrived, the elevator (which was probably older than her) started moving with that disconcerting clanking sound.

Three floors.

Just three floors.

His heart was pounding. If that pheromone-leaking maid ran down the stairs or calmly used a radio or internal phone to call down to the lower floors, he might find some swarthy soldiers waiting for him when the elevator arrived. He was reminded of Grinov’s amused threat about executing people by tying them to a car, dumping lighter fluid over their head, setting them on fire, and dragging them around until the flames died down.

“It does not matter if you achieve your dream or not.”

“Shut up, Grinov.”

“If an undesirable individual achieves success, this is how they are rewarded. Those in power will steal success from anyone who shows up later. And which side of that equation would you fall on? I doubt your position is as safe as you think it is.”

“I said shut up!!”

(It doesn’t matter if he’s dead. Would it have been easier to chuck him out the window and just casually walk down the stairs? Dammit!)

The best ideas always came to you after the train had passed that station.

The elevator arrived at the first floor.

The garage could not be that far away. He was sure to find it after walking 20 or 30 meters down the hallway.

But he ran across a maintenance soldier the instant he pushed the cleaning cart out into the hallway.

A gold necklace glittered at the man’s neck.

This could have been a chance for sweet Quensette to test her acting skills, but…

“Gyah!”

A low zapping sound rang out.

The instant he was in range, Quenser hit the guy with his electric bug sprayer stun gun. He had no way of knowing how far word had spread from the young wife maid on the third floor, so he had to abandon the possibility of a safe option.

He did not know the right way to do this.

Nothing he was doing may have resembled the recommendations in the manuals of the Legitimacy Kingdom military’s intelligence division.

But he had to trust that he had done the right thing.

“Hh!!”

He had seen the general location of the garage when viewing the mansion from outside, so he gripped the cleaning cart’s handle and pushed it forcefully ahead. He sped up to a run and slammed the cart into a maintenance soldier who turned around in the center of the hallway to see what was happening.

With a sound louder than a bicycle crash, the cart hit him in the back of the hip and he writhed and rolled on the floor. However, he had a friend who stuck his head out of a nearby door.

“Rosa!!”

At his shout, the sheets placed over the cart were swept off from within. A dog leapt out like a jack-in-the-box and attacked before the surprised soldier could grab the assault rifle from the sling belt.

Quenser did not have time to see how it turned out.

He simply pushed the Grinov-carrying cart further on.

Then he heard a short scream.

He looked back with skirt fluttering and gave a quick shout.

“Rosa, leave her alone! Come here!!”

The dog ran right past a crouching girl in overalls.

“Dad…? No, how could this happen!?”

“Kh.”

This is what it meant to fight the arms dealers. The only people here were their friends and family. Nothing he did here would be appreciated in the slightest.

He still had a ways to go before reaching the garage.

The German shepherd caught up and easily passed him.

He did not bother opening the door.

Instead, he used the cart’s weight to smash through the door like a battering ram and continued right on in.

The place smelled of motor oil.

The air conditioning must have been off since no one was here, so it was sweltering inside.

It was quite large for a garage. Brightly polished luxury cars were lined up like at a dealership. They looked more like they were being displayed than stored.

Quenser walked quickly across the garage while making sure he did not accidentally kick any of the imitation platinum lying around. Enough to fill a 1-liter bottle would weigh 21.4kg, so he could easily break a toe on those things. He checked the inscription on the car key he had found.

“Rosa, search with me! N-A-5-7-8-7-6-4-4-3!!”

She cheerfully barked in response.

He patted Rosa’s head when she found the car he wanted. The Dynamix EV Grade 500s was a silver 4-door, but despite looking like a sports car, it had proper 4-wheel drive. It even had a winch. It was made powerful enough to drive around in the desert here. It was also quite spacious, making it perfect for car sex.

Quenser pressed the button on the key to unlock the door.

He pulled the bearded man out from the cleaning cart.

“Do you want the passenger seat or the trunk!?”

“I would prefer to see my fate coming so I can respond accordingly. You remind me a lot of me. I can tell you wish to turn this confused world on its head even if it means breaking the rules. What you see happening to me here is a path you too will walk one day.”

Without waiting for the man’s response, Quenser grabbed his head and shoved him into the car with his hands still tied behind his back. He had Rosa sit in the back seat where she could leap at Grinov at a moment’s notice. Quenser took the driver’s seat even though he did not know how to drive.

All he could do inside the hot car was switch on the air-conditioning.

(What do I do? I’ve never used a self-driving car before! I don’t even know how to start it up!!)

For some reason, the keyhole was on the side of the GPS screen. You inserted it like USB memory. The GPS seemed to be linked with control of the car, but it of course did not have the location of the coalition force’s maintenance base zone in its map data. He ultimately had to manually input the numerical coordinates and then the 500s started up with a quiet vroom. …Although it was an electric car, so that was only a sound effect meant to sound the part.

However…

“Oh, oh? What?”

The garage’s exit was covered by a metal shutter, but the EV continued forward regardless. Based on the ads on TV, it could even parallel park on its own and it had the image recognition and collision prevention radar needed to stop just before actually hitting something. But those ads were just CG, weren’t they? Hadn’t there been a bunch of fine print at the edge of the screen saying that scenario was only for advertisement purposes? How real had it actually been??? Quenser’s shoulders tensed up, but then he saw something: Grinov Quarterdeck in the passenger seat.

The man’s hands were tied behind his back, but he kicked through the bottom of the dashboard, pulled out the bundled-together power cables, and tore them apart.

“Only miniskirt martial artist women should be that skilled with their legs!!!!!!”

Quenser stopped the man with the electric bug sprayer stun gun, but it was too late. That wiring must have been part of the auto-brake system because the luxury EV ignored the obstacle up ahead, broke right through the metal shutter, and drove out into the garden.

A maintenance soldier stood in their way.

“Waah!?”

Quenser frantically grabbed the wheel and jerked it to the side. The self-driving car was program controlled, but it still gave priority to a manual override. They just barely avoided hitting the soldier, but there was no time to step on the brake pedal.

Stopping now would mean death.

He heard a short burst of gunfire from behind and the rear window shattered. The sweltering 40-degree air poured in. This was what he got for not killing that soldier. They must have wanted some level of bulletproofing but not wanted to be trapped in the car either because the glass was designed to break into beads with rounded edges. Rosa barked in annoyance as they landed on her.

The program was still running just fine.

However, the 500s could not use its brakes no matter what stood in its way: a flower bed, a metal fence, or a human. It was like a chaotic thrill ride.

“There is no saving you.”

Either he had yet to recover from the stun gun or he had lost more blood from his neck wound than expected because the bearded man slurred his speech a bit in the passenger seat.

“No matter what happens in the meantime, you will reach a dead end. You will ultimately be surrounded and forced to beg for your life.”

“Don’t you have anything better to do?”

Why was the man provoking him like this while within arm’s reach? Quenser used another stun gun blast to silence that king of the hill. People could get used to anything, so it looked like the electrical violence was not going to work much longer. He missed when he was looking after Hina Liqueurball back in the Hawaii District. Why were there no cute girls around here? He wanted to sulk.

They noisily broke through the main gate and went airborne for a moment as they left the mansion’s property.

There was no such thing as safety around here.

But things were about to become even more dangerous. Once they reached the circular farms, they would have reached a giants’ colosseum where multiple Objects fought.

(Oh, whoops. My uniform and explosives are still in that prefab hut. The little things don’t matter as much, but I need to retrieve the communications equipment to save us some encryption trouble. This is an arms dealer’s hideout, so they’ll definitely sell them to the highest bidder!!)

After swerving around as best he could to avoid a rolled tractor and the remains of a grain silo, the hut came into view. He slammed on the brakes, pitched forward a bit, awkwardly pulled on the hand brake, and only then noticed the shift lever. He had the order backwards, but he tried grabbing that. It was an automatic, but he pushed too hard, shifting from drive all the way to reverse, and had to pull it back into park. He made a quick comment while opening the door.

“Rosa, kill him if he tries anything funny.”

He received a reassuring bark in response.

Once outside, the scorching 40-degree sunlight hit him.

He was interested in the vent on the side of the concrete base, not the inside of the prefab hut itself. He crouched down, reached inside, and pulled out the gear he had stuffed inside a garbage bag.

He had only been gone for two minutes, but he returned to find the bearded man covered in blood. And not because his neck wound had reopened.

Quenser reacted with his expression flat.

“That’s what happens when you try to run away, moron.”

He had expected for Rosa to look proud of herself, but she was actually cowering down in the back seat. The problem seemed to be the garbage bag Quenser was carrying. She must not have wanted to put her bulletproof jacket back on. The maid(?) made sure to brush the round shards of glass out of the dog’s fur, and then…

“C’mon, Rosa. Don’t struggle. A girl needs to look nice!”

Rosa barked in protest, but this was a battlefield. The jacket could be the difference between life and death, so he had to harden his heart.

Quenser got the bulletproof jacket on her.

“There, you go, Rosa. You look cute.”

She only whined in an incredibly displeased way.

Quenser returned the shift lever and hand brake to normal and let the program take control once more.

At that very moment, the prefab hut was vaporized by a deafening explosion.

He was nearly knocked over even inside the car. No, it was the 500s itself that rose up on two wheels like someone lifting one side of a tea table.

A stray shell had hit.

By the time he realized that, the windows and mirrors had shattered and transparent flakes had poured down on his head. They were designed to shatter in round bead shapes, but he might have been soaked with blood otherwise. With those reflective additions to the maid uniform, Quensette had finally begun to sparkle.

The cool air-conditioned air was escaping the car.

A normal car might have stopped running at this point, but this was a self-driving car with its safety features gone. It forcibly returned to its designated course with an unnatural grinding sound.

The sound of corn and sprinklers being knocked down was rapidly approaching from the side.

Could anyone still call this Operation Southern Cross Grim Reaper without a care in the world? The joint operation was a complete mess.

“They’re already this close!?”

This was not to the time to shout about the Object moving right in front of them. Something fell onto the hood with a sticky splat. This was not something they had hit; it had clearly fallen from above.

It was the upper half of a soldier.

“Hee! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!?”

Quenser’s eyes met those fully widened ones. There was nothing he could do. When the program-controlled electric car made a smooth turn, the corpse slid to the side and off the edge of the hood.

Only after it vanished from view did he realize it had worn a Legitimacy Kingdom uniform. But after seeing that, he did not have the courage to retrieve the dog tags.

Even now, the giants were chaotically duking it out above the heads of the mere worms. It did not matter whether or not they intended to attack. They could easily hit their own allies without meaning to. And regardless, it was obvious who would break if it was human against machine.

“Whose Object is that!? Which side are they on!?”

He tried to look up and check, but they were too close to see past the bottom. It was hard to look straight up while inside a car. He remained uncertain of anything as the windowless car ended up passing between the two fighting Objects.

And that was not the only battle.

It was happening everywhere.

The neatly-maintained circular corn fields were blown away, self-driving tractors burned on their sides, and all the grain silos had collapsed. Fresh water was precious in the desert, but it gushed from the broken sprinklers. Some horses must have escaped from somewhere because they were running around in a panic. This was hell on earth. And it was gradually approaching that mansion filled with noncombatants, even if they were the friends and family of the arms dealers. The end result was not a pleasant thing to imagine.

“Oh, right. My radio.”

Since it was a self-driving car, Quenser was free to take his eyes off the road(?). Before he even twisted around and reached into the back seat, Rosa had already dug through the garbage bag and grabbed the device in her mouth. He gave her a quick pat as he switched it on to hear different voices describing the state of the battlefield. It was a little like the audio tour at a museum.

“Ho ho. Oh ho ho ho ho! To be honest, my Gatling 033 is perfect already and has no need for a scattershot weapon, but you would make for a nice, if pitiful, backup dancer. Now watch in awe and think about how you could help accentuate what I can do. Oh ho ho ho ho ho ho!!”

“Nice, that one earns you a lot of points. The Capitalist Corporations is edging out the Faith Organization now! Is that the final offer? Anyone else want to show off what they can do for us!?”

“Ehhh? Sticking with it longer will increase the price of fuel??? Then what’s the point of any of this!?”

“This is a gift from god! It is no mere coincidence that a cutting-edge Second Generation is within our grasp here!! Just take apart the words ‘Parasite Plan’ and rearrange them. We must not waste this opportunity!!”

“It’s almost laughable how much they’re all letting this arms dealer mess with them…”

It was complete chaos.

They had set up a temporary joint channel for Operation Southern Cross Grim Reaper, so everyone’s reports were jumbled together.

Quenser clicked his tongue in the driver’s seat and looked off into the distance.

There he saw a familiar Object: the Baby Magnum.

It had been half-dead when he left, but it was still under attack from multiple other Objects. The Legitimacy Kingdom’s Escalibor must have had trouble joining the battle, so it had yet to show itself.

Was the Legitimacy Kingdom the only one opposing the fight to take the arms dealer Object for themselves? She had to treat every other participant in this giants’ fight as an enemy. Even more than the illegal Second Generation Gangster had to.

The others were ganging up on the weakest one so they would not end up in last place themselves. They had been tricked into thinking that was the right thing to do. This was the cold principle of “survival of the fittest” applied to the economic and financial fields. This was how Grinov Quarterdeck manipulated people using profit and loss.

Simply listening was not enough.

The Princess would never last at this rate. As long as the Gangster remained at the center of it all, the coalition force would continue to be manipulated and they would continue ganging up on the Princess who was insisting on what was right.

It did not matter if they would not listen to a reasonable argument. Quenser decided to do this according to the dirty logic of the arms dealers and their Parasite Plan.

He needed to move the eye of the storm.

He hit his radio’s switch in order to save the Princess.

He had just one goal:

“What the hell, Oh Ho Ho!? Are you still stuck on something so shallow!?”

“Wha- huh!?”

“You’re free to invest in whatever you want, but if you don’t get Woodstock’s Object, everything you’ve spent on it goes right down the drain. Do you have any idea how much a single shot from an Object costs!? Surely you know wars between powerful nations are a lot like throwing attaché cases stuffed with cash at each other! This is your choice, so it’s your responsibility. You do understand that the more you pay, the riskier a gamble it is, right? Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the future idol of newspaper clothing, lady of a cardboard home, and saint of styrofoam!!”

“Quenser…?”

Weapons, ammo, fuel, and personnel. War was expensive.

They might be hoping to confiscate money and valuables from the criminal organization.

They might be after the resources in the nearby salt lake.

They might be filming material for a music video.

They might be using the result to demand funding from an international anti-crime foundation.

…After all, this was not the usual clean wars fought against other nations. You did not earn money simply by defeating dirty criminals. And no one wanted to go into debt. The world powers had only joined this fight after counting their chickens before they hatched and assuming they could make some money from it.

But what if it did not work out?

Without the income they assumed they would receive, all the money they spent would not be coming back. It was the same as investing in wheat futures or flipping real estate. If their estimates proved naïve, the amount they invested went down the drain and the VIPs in a supposed position of safety would lose their jobs.

“By the way, Oh Ho Ho, what happened to the Information Alliance’s Perfect Range? If it was blown away into scraps, you’re going to have a real hard time making up for that loss.”

Who would be forced to take responsibility there?

A deadly game of musical chairs was fast approaching.

“Ho, oh ho ho. Don’t be silly! War is a serious matter that cannot be discussed in terms of simple morality and heroism. Be a sore loser if you like, but your bluffs cannot rattle me…”

“Say cheese!”

Quenser ignored her and instead held up his mobile device. He made sure he and the restrained arms dealer boss were in the frame, snapped a photo, and uploaded it using the coalition force datalink.

“Grinov Quarterdeck has been captured. Can you really continue your deal with Woodstock if I slit his throat? Every deal they make requires his approval. These are criminals we’re talking about, so you can’t expect them to follow a verbal promise made on the battlefield. And with their boss out of his mansion, who’s going to sign the contract!?”