Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume20 Chapter 4 (section)

===Part 8===

It felt like the world had been torn apart by the color white, starting from a single point.

“Gyaaahhhh!!!???”

Quenser couldn’t even hear his own scream.

Something had fallen from the sky and hit the runway in the center of the flat airport grounds. It lost its shape and scattered in every direction, tearing up, burning, and melting the dirt and asphalt. He vaguely recalled Heivia shoving him behind a pillar, but he was having trouble recalling how that had turned into this.

He very nearly kissed the ceiling.

But not because he had left the floor. All the pillars supporting the lobby had collapsed and the ceiling had fallen nearly to where the boy lay on the floor.

A bitterness hung in the air. It reminded him of the Water Strider and the Extra Arc.

He may have been lucky his lungs and eyes had survived.

“Ugh…”

The gap between ceiling and floor was so short he couldn’t even roll over like he was trying to get comfortable in bed. He was stuck on his back until someone pulled him out. His blurry vision couldn’t make out their face. He focused on psychological care, trying to keep the claustrophobia from setting in.

(Who…is this?)

“Hey, Quenser!? Are you still alive, you bastard!?”

“Heivia?” he weakly muttered before sitting up. “Oh, were you who saved me?”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

Apparently it hadn’t been Heivia. But he looked around and didn’t see any other surviving soldiers in the vicinity.

His radio was only receiving a noisy signal.

“Charlotte here!! Ksh! Based on the damage, that blast was likely an Object’s low-stability plasma cannon! But the enemy Object’s location is unknown!! Ksshh!?”

“Narumi was carbonized… Kssshhh, we have several injured and I recommend we evacuate them. The crater is shallow, ksh, so we should be able to escape safely if we head back underground!”

The fence surrounding the airport grounds had been knocked over and the sea of flames had spread its damage beyond that. The surrounding minefield had to be burning too. That meant the damage likely covered a diameter of more than 20km.

This had been their aim from the beginning.

Hold the Legitimacy Kingdom’s attention on the airport for as long as possible, take out as many Legitimacy Kingdom forces out as they could, and make it look like their own people had been killed too to give them greater freedom and safety behind enemy lines.

That meant all of this was just a means to some other end. The Faith Organization commandos had been given freedom for some other task.

Where were they headed?

They didn’t need to lay out the evidence for that one.

“Frolaytia…”

Quenser grabbed his radio again while leaning against some rubble.

“Respond if you’re still alive, you incompetent commander! This is always what happens when we obey your orders!! The Faith Organization commandos are using this chaos to infiltrate Paris itself. Pay special attention to the transport routes for military doctors and medical equipment that reeks of ethanol! As well as all civilian media and communication companies!! I don’t know how they fired it over such long range, but we can’t let them launch a low-stability plasma cannon blast into the center of Paris!! Our home country will be decimated!!!!!!”