Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume19 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 8===

But no matter how cruel it might seem, it was still the most logical choice.

Quenser was forced to accept that fact when Azureyfear Winchell used some kind of self-defense technique to send him spinning through the air. Sladder simply shrugged without a scratch on him. Quenser had been right next to the man, so he really wished he had just hit him with the rock instead of throwing it.

The prisoners were handcuffed, but they had him overpowered.

While he groaned down on the snow, Elina Silverbullet whispered in his ear.

“I envy you.”

“?”

“When I heard the gunfire, I too considered how we could use it. That must mean I am more like them than you.”

If they had some way of crossing the ravine, they might just find a rubber boat with the Legitimacy Kingdom corpse. But there was no sign of a bridge and any bridge that did exist would be a crucial point. The Information Alliance would definitely have at least one guard there.

(It’s around a dozen meters across. All we have to work with are dirt, snow, rocks, and trees. It’s 15 below. The trees are tall and straight, so maybe we could turn one into a bridge. Or…?)

Quenser shook his head.

No, they didn’t even need to cross the ravine. Hadn’t he heard metal being destroyed too?

“The burning wax corpse, the human sherbet on the rock, and the organs caught in the trees.”

“You mean the ghost victims? What of them?”

“They were Legitimacy Kingdom too, so the animal robot carrying their gear might still be wandering nearby!!”

He shouldn’t have had to explain that, but the obvious solution had slipped their minds entirely.

Maybe they had been too focused on needing to cross the ravine and maybe their fear of the ghost had worn them out too much.

They soon found a deer-like shape moving through the trees. That was the robot. The corpses may have been too mutilated for it to recognize them. Without a controller, Quenser had to trip it with his long stick and then the prisoners broke its lenses and legs with their chains. He opened one of the bags it was carrying. It only carried some bent assault rifles and some mobile devices with cracked screens. Azureyfear clicked her tongue when she saw the useless rifles. They were made to fire grenades too, but that didn’t look promising either.

“I doubt these fuses will work anymore. Carrying those around would be too dangerous.”

“You were given handguns for self-defense, weren’t you? You could always pick up some ammo.”

Quenser wasn’t interested in the weapons. He wanted a way to escape, not to fight.

He glanced over at the broken robot.

(Sorry, but I need to borrow your gear.)

He feared the thick military rubber boat would have been broken by all this damage. And even if the boat was intact, would the large motor run? For that matter, those mutilated soldiers might not have even had a boat.

He feared more and more that he had been clinging to false hope here.

Then he opened another bag and felt something inside.

“Yes,” he said on reflex. “I found the boat!! I was right after all!!”

“But…hasn’t it melted from the heat?”

“That doesn’t matter, Elina. The boat might have a hole, but we have the motor and battery. As long as we find an intact boat, we can combine it with the surviving parts. We might even be able to press the hole against part of another boat and melt them together with some fire. That’s the beauty of standardized devices.”

It turned out only the exterior bag was damaged and the actual boat inside was fine. That saved them the time of patching it up.

“Now we can travel down the river.”

They would still have to be careful about the noise from the motor, but the Information Alliance patrols would be easy to detect since they were using trucks. Switching off the motor whenever they heard those loud engines would be enough. And since the Information Alliance had let the gear robot survive, they must not have done much recon work. If they didn’t know the Legitimacy Kingdom was carrying boats, they wouldn’t think to focus their search on the frigid ravine river.

The bright path to survival was finally in sight.

They approached the ravine with the deflated unit. Quenser used his stick to check for a snow cornice and then looked down to see it was more than 10m to the bottom. Climbing down to the river might sound simple, but now they needed an actual method of doing so.

Still, it was better than no plan at all.

Azureyfear whispered to Quenser while he looked down into the ravine.

“About the ghost.”

“?”

“Animals don’t use fire and we still can’t explain how that one soldier was turned to wax, but I think your observation was decent for a commoner. I think we should divide the ghost victims into two categories: those that were killed by the ‘ghost’ phenomenon and those who died to something else.”

“Died to…something else?”

She held her long hair down with a hand to peer down into the deep ravine while she nodded.

“We still haven’t seen for ourselves what this ghost even is. I am worried about my brother…but the ghost produced by the Ghost Changer may be something surprisingly mundane. Something that only becomes so unimaginably deadly when used in the Tunguska District.”

The Tunguska District was the origin of a mysterious event.

An explosion with no apparent source had instantly turned 2000 square kilometers of old-growth forest to charcoal and left the land barren for decades. It was covered in green again now, but the legend remained.

Quenser thought for a bit and then groaned. He had only learned one thing: no immediate answer was forthcoming.

“I can’t believe this. Does that mean we have to solve the mystery of the Tunguska event on top of the Ghost Changer? I thought people had settled on it being an asteroid breaking up in the atmosphere?”

“Ah ha ha. But doesn’t that make it a lot easier to investigate? Whatever the answer, it was a natural phenomenon, just like a wild animal attack. When people find the answer, they go ‘oh, is that all’ and lose interest. That’s the kind of secret you can find just lying around, unlike a new piece of military technology protected by countless layers of security.”

Sladder, the expert who had developed mass drivers capable of reaching the moon, had hinted at another possibility earlier. Quenser only had a passing familiarity with it due to its relation to 
Object main cannons, so the man would know more about it.

Something about this bothered Quenser, so he looked up from the ravine.

He wanted to gather all the necessary information before continuing.

“Hey, Sladder. What exactly caused the Tungus-”

He trailed off.

That wasn’t Sladder Honeysuckle standing next to him.

It was someone with half his face melting off.

Quenser’s breath caught in his throat and he couldn’t even scream.

But the half-melted face did scream, shoving Quenser away with both hands.

“M-monster!!!”

“?”

Did Quenser look like a monster to him?

But he didn’t have time to ponder that. He had just been peering down in the ravine while on the lookout for snow cornices, so what happened when he was shoved hard?

He staggered back into the deflated rubber boat and the small child standing nearby.

He and Elina Silverbullet fell from the 10m ravine as a chunk of snow broke free below them.