Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume18 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 8===

Things were going well.

The space elevator was the largest structure in human history, but that also meant it had an absurd amount of secondary facilities and equipment. Enough so that the infrastructure for a whole city was not enough. The entire region’s water was sucked up for cooling purposes, a massive amount of power was needed, and powerful microwave was used to wirelessly send power to the elevator car.

A Legitimacy Kingdom tank traveled through the pitch-black night without even a single streetlight.

With a crew of four teenage girls, the inside ended up smelling awfully sweet. Specifically, it smelled of deodorant spray.

“We will have control of the #4 parabolic antenna power transmission station soon! Send the fuel and ammo supply unit this way! We will move on ahead once we have resupplied!!”

The tank commander, who was a bit older than the rest, pulled a moistened towel from the small fridge and placed it against the back of her overheated neck.

“Myonri, we’re being jammed, so the maintenance base can’t hear you.”

“There are four of us crammed in here, so can’t one of us at last shine some laser art on the night sky to communicate!?”

Whoever made the suggestion was generally stuck with doing it. Especially when they were the lowest ranking member. Myonri grew tearful as she was handed a special ray gun with a barrel about as thick as a relay baton, but she had no choice but to push open the manhole-like metal hatch and poke her head out from the sweet-smelling tank.

Needless to say, that ray gun was not a next-gen portable superweapon.

It was a backup signal device that could send instructions to their allies by drawing out lines not visible with the naked eye. They were used to prevent friendly fire during a nighttime aerial bombing or to call for rescue when stuck out on the battlefield, so it was a useful piece of equipment everyone much preferred to never have to use.

“I have plenty of qualifications, so I really need to see about getting a transfer.”

“I heard that, Myonri.”

“I really, really need a transfer!!”

Just as the short-haired girl tearfully bit her lip, she saw a flash of light in the night sky.

It almost looked like a shooting star, except it was not alone.

The night sky was soon filled with a wild dance of light.

“I-is there an alert!?”

“Why?”

“It’s that elevator!! Mother Lady!!”

She did not hear a single electronic tone from within the tank before the explosive boom pounded on her eardrums.

It came from beyond the horizon.

In a long horizontal line as far as the eye could see, a terrifying dust cloud rose several dozen meters into the air. And instead of stopping there, more explosions occurred a bit in front of that after a short pause. The pattern repeated like that, moving ever closer. The desert was filled with explosive blasts just like an industrial printer filling a blank piece of copy paper with small text.

And the explosions were gradually approaching their position.

(The artificial meteor shower!? Are the Capitalist Corporations sending down a storm of titanium or tungsten alloy!?)

“Noooo!?”

Myonri forgot to even duck back into the tank as she screamed.

Didn’t each and every one of those falling titanium or tungsten pieces rival a nuclear warhead in destructive power?

The entire scenery was obliterated by the solid walls of destruction that were spaced out enough to avoid any overlap in explosions.

Even if Myonri did duck inside the tank, the entire vehicle would be blown away. This was worse than gathering clams on the beach at low tide. This was like tearing up the entire beach with a cultivator’s row of rotating blades. Any clam that shut itself up tight would only be smashed to pieces.

Just then, a bluish-white beam of light shot up from the surface and blew away the evenly-spaced downpour of death.

A huge hole was torn into the lights in the sky. The hole had a diameter of more than 3km. That area of darkness remained as the lights descended, allowing Myonri’s group to survive, like they had been in the gap of a falling ceiling. It felt a lot like being forced through a ring of fire.

The beam of light had been a low-stability plasma cannon.

Myonri covered her mouth and nose against the powerful cloud of dust that filled the air and she saw a giant silhouette through that filthy screen.

That was the First Generation Baby Magnum.

The all-purpose multirole was an older model, but that was why it was actually capable of intercepting ballistic missiles. Thanks to the various methods of obstruction that messed with its targeting and the paths of its projectiles, it could not attack the stationary elevator without moving in close, but it could still protect the 37th while they were within that range.

“W-we’re alive?”

The artificial meteor shower continued to fall, but it was more definitive this time. More artificial light was launched upwards to fill the starry sky and protect the soldiers down on the desert.

“Our guardian deity,” said a sweaty and hotblooded girl inside the tank.

Their datalink was down thanks to the enemy jamming, but people had to be saying much the same thing all across the battlefield. In fact, a stadium-like cheer shook the desert night just a few seconds later.

“Ohhhhhh!! We have a guardian deity. We aren’t going to die here!! This battle is ours!!”