Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 7===

Death was approaching.

It could hardly have been closer in this zero-g space that barely felt real.

Quenser could not even think about the space elevator or the plan to unify the earth’s atmosphere. Not when his survival one second from now was far from guaranteed.

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” 

A radio transmission suddenly reached his spacesuit’s helmet.

It was from his awful friend Heivia.

“The World’s End? I don’t want its name! I want to know what to do about it! Was that one staticky transmission all we get!? No one told me they had an Object! We don’t have any equipment capable of taking that thing down, you idiots!!”

(Then stop sending out this meaningless transmission, you true idiot!! Do you want it to detect your location!?)

Quenser did not dare send out a warning.

This Generation Two space Object was bizarre even for the Capitalist Corporations.

It was fundamentally different from the traditional Objects that traveled along land or sea. It lacked a system for keeping its 200 thousand ton weight afloat, so no air cushion engine and no static electricity propulsion device. It had ring-like parts on the back and bottom of its spherical main body, but they looked too delicate. The exact system was unknown, but those had some sort of propulsion device attached at even intervals which were likely used for attitude control and as both rockets and retrorockets.

The central main body had an additional component attached like headphones or like a hagoromo from Island Nation mythology and that component had cylindrical tanks attached at even intervals. Its primary weapons were the pressurized oxygen nozzles extending from either side. It controlled massive amounts of oxygen in the vacuum of space to burn away all enemies in the ultimate act of waste and luxury.

The propulsion devices attached on the ring-like units behind and below it could apparently all be moved separately.

Whether they used oxygen, ions, photons, or jets, those were likely used for attitude control, acceleration, deceleration, and turning. Its main cannons could melt armor, but they may have been able to emit different amounts of oxygen from both sides to rotate the enemy.

(The Capitalist Corporations includes the Island Nation that’s gone mostly isolationist, doesn’t it?)

Quenser gulped.

(Is it supposed to look like their Fujin and Raijin? Dammit, this is why it isn’t healthy to have enough money and talent to actually build every little idea that occurs to you!!)

And he did not have time to just sit there observing it.

He could not escape the Object’s attacks by spinning defenselessly around in empty space. Before even thinking about winning this, he had to find a shield capable of protecting him or he would die.

He heard what sounded like a soda being opened but much louder.

That was the oxygen.

If that sound could reach him, then there was enough oxygen for the sound to propagate through.

“The space station.”

He grabbed the grip connected to his extravehicular activity unit by a cable.

He knew it was risky, but he still gave a shout.

“Listen, you don’t have to respond. Doing so would only tell it where you are. That damn thing won’t want to destroy its own home base!! So use your nitrogen or whatever else to get over there. Hurry!!”

The student was traveling toward the giant donut-shaped space station’s wall even as he sent the message. Specifically, toward the back side of a giant parabolic communication antenna sticking out from the gently curving wall.

His reasoning had to be correct.

One look at the sun was enough to tell, but heat traveled differently in space. Instead of heating the air or water, the sunlight was emitted as rays of heat and anything they shined on would receive that energy. In other words, it happened directly. Structures built for space would be made to reflect the radiation that caused machine malfunctions and health problems, so the station would reflect infrared.

However.

The invisible oxygen that normally represented life could move behind anything in the way.

When the oxygen was ignited, some of the spacesuited soldiers were roasted despite using one of the container-shaped experiment modules as cover. The flames moved like a chameleon’s tongue to accurately capture its prey.

That was less than 20m from Quenser. On the astronomical scale of outer space, that distance was razor thin.

“Gyahhhh!?”

The scream that reached the student’s ears belonged to Cottage who had survived so many seemingly hopeless situations before. Not even the miracle boy was a match for that Object. He was killed before he could even fantasize about a medical girl. Quenser actually had trouble telling whether that had been a human scream or simple noise from the heat destroying the communication equipment.

Only a few round blobs remained afterwards.

It was those balls with the same color as flesh.

The exact same tragedy had repeated itself. This was a stabilized form of hell.

People were robbed of their dignity and reduced to mere things. It felt like getting a glimpse of a factory production line that automatically processed human bodies into leather bags.

“We can’t last like this.”

Peeping Tom Heivia defeated the entire purpose of hiding by complaining over his radio. Maybe he feared the stress would destroy his heart if he did not.

“For one, we can barely move! These extravehicular activity units are only meant to stabilize us – they aren’t rocket boosters. If we try to use them like that, we’ll run out of nitrogen in no time. Then we’ll be stuck spinning endlessly through space. Even after we die!!”

The Object would send out just enough oxygen for the flames to reach the soldiers hiding behind cover but not enough that it would destroy the heat and radiation-resistant space station’s hull. It only had to repeat that process to eliminate all of the aphids crawling on its precious flower. As huge as it was, it was surprisingly good at delicately adjusting its power. That meant Quenser and the others could not use the elevator, the space station, or any other Mother Lady facilities as hostages.

(What do we do?)

Quenser could not calm his breathing or even wipe the sweat from his face. It occurred to him that he might be able to breathe right now if he removed that troublesome helmet, but if that were true, it would mean having his flesh and even bone roasted away by a brutal flamethrower a moment later.

(How can we possibly survive this!? That thing’s an Object, so not even a nuke could destroy it. We couldn’t even scratch it if we fired our peashooters at it while carefully keeping our balance out in space!!)

Flames exploded not far away from him. They was more distance this time, so the oxygen must have run out while it was spreading in a marble pattern. He could not hear the explosion, so it had the same empty feeling of watching an old silent film. But the lives being burned away were 37th soldiers in the same uniform as him.

“Can’t we contact the Princess who must be itching to join the fight down there!?” said Heivia. “She has to be directly below us since she was protecting the elevator’s ground base!”

“You heard all that noise in her long-range transmission, didn’t you? Not even an RC toy would work out here! Besides, do you really think her attacks could reach up here even if we did contact her? We’re 36 thousand kilometers up, so nearly the entire circumference of the earth! And that distance is straight up for her!!”

“What about her anti-air laser beams?”

“Even the old-fashioned ballistic missiles only flew at around 3000km up, so this is another world altogether!!”

In fact, they had to pray that the Capitalist Corporations Second Generation World’s End did not have any ground-attack weapons. If it could launch an Object-level bombing from satellite orbit, the Princess would be unilaterally destroyed. From the BCE wars when boiling water or quicklime were dropped from atop cliffs to modern wars where the terrain could be permanently changed with the tap of a touchscreen, holding the high ground had always provided a significant advantage.

But now was not the time to be worried about her.

It was Quenser’s group that was being directly targeted right now. Only Object-level firepower could blow away an Object. They knew they were asking for the impossible, but if they could not procure some firepower on that level for themselves, they would be destroyed by that 200 thousand ton weapon.

“What do we do!?”