Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume16 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 9===

There was no reason for concern.

Dora Blue-Hawaii only had to do the same thing again.

She audibly swallowed the red flower petal in her mouth.

She sent it to her stomach.

She had one of the red wings remain by her side to protect her while she sent the other toward the target. A 1-ton mass of armor would collide with them at 80km/h. That would be even more deadly than an anti-materiel rifle. Her opponent would be torn to pieces even if they wore a full-body powered suit.

This would end it.

Or so she thought.

“Que’ser!”

“?”

But the naked woman frowned in confusion when she walked casually around the curved metal wall. The boy in what appeared to be a Legitimacy Kingdom uniform had indeed been knocked to the ground, but something was wrong. He was too clean for someone hit by a head-on collision with a 1-ton mass moving at highway speeds. The figure the local girl was tearfully clinging to did not look at all broken.

Dora toyed with the ribbon wrapped loosely around her.

(Did it miss? Did it only catch at the end of his clothing?)

However.

The machine would not malfunction without a reason. There had to be an explanation for why it had missed. Dora removed a red petal from the small bottle, placed it on her tongue, and tried to call back the wing she had sent out, but then she gasped.

She took a step to the side in her boots.

The red wing maintained its speed and violently crashed into the floor. The solid floor dented in. If she had stayed where she was, it might have turned her to mincemeat.

This was a first.

It had looked casual, but Dora had still taken evasive action.

“What happened?”

She saw the other one – the one she had kept with her for defense – wobbling unnaturally. It was not completely out of control, but it could stall and fall to the floor at any moment. And it was a literal ton of metal, so it could easily be a disaster if it so much as fell on her little toe.

What had that uniformed boy done at the last second? It had not looked like he threw a plastic explosive as the one trick he knew.

Just then, Dora Blue-Hawaii finally noticed something on the curved metal wall. The airtight door to the hyperbaric oxygen chamber sat partially open and the console’s light was flashing.

Plastic explosives were a special kind of explosive made by combining normal explosives with malleable rubber. They were stable enough that they would not explode without a special fuse, but they also inherited the traits of the rubber. If you dumped them in hot water, they would melt. If you removed the plastic packaging and left them in the open air for a long period of time, they could grow cracked and dissolve.

Left in the open air.

Oxygen.

So if you threw one into that hyperbaric oxygen chamber that used the air pump facility’s power to produce enough pressure to kill the person inside…

“It wasn’t EM, IR, or ultrasound.”

“Kh.”

The boy spoke from the floor.

He was weak, but he smiled and raised his middle finger.

“It was the smell. They use an ion absorption sensor. You’re naked because you control them using the adrenaline or whatever that’s mixed into your sweet sweat. That’s also why you keep taking petals out of that bottle and eating them. You didn’t want to use a gun because you had to keep the gun smoke smell out of your hair. Those giant fans don’t just blow out air; they’re made so one of them absorbs the air and the other blows it back out. Although that means you can’t send them very far even though they’re unmanned.”

“Dammit!!”

“When I hold Hina, I can sense a sweet scent from her hair. …You never know what will give you the inspiration you need to turn everything around. Hina can smell like that since she’s a civilian, but I shouldn’t have sensed the same thing from someone on the battlefield like you.”

Of course, not just any scent would have done the trick. Dora had said she could handle poison gas and white phosphorus.

But everything changed if he could guess what she used to make the judgment. He hated to admit it, but Dora had a nice body. It was hard to imagine a bitter or sour smell coming from her skin or hair.

It was sweet.

The unique stench of melting rubber could sometimes seem sweet.

That had confused the controls.

Dora gave a shout and sent in one of the red wings. The boy in the military uniform pulled the brown girl close and rolled to the side. Normally, that would never be enough to dodge it, but things were different now. It failed to keep up with his amateurish movement, just barely missed him, and crashed into the half-open door to the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, slamming it shut.

A failed attack was acceptable.

But she also had to question the precision of their defenses. A single mistake there could literally cost her everything. That was the much bigger problem.

Dora Blue-Hawaii made a swift decision.

She still had an overwhelming advantage. It would be a problem if the intruders destroyed the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, but there was no need to finish this here. She could fall back and try again later. She could escape elsewhere and then make an attack with the pair of red wings to turn those small fries to mincemeat in a single second.

But.

But.

But.

A floral scent snuck into Dora’s nose.

“Ugh!?”

The wings casually fell to the floor. The naked woman came to a complete stop. The flying cars had not completely ceased functioning, but they weighed a literal ton each. If she tried to send them out while imbalanced like this, they might run wild like a pinwheel firework and crush her instead.

That boy had said you never know what would give you the inspiration you needed to turn everything around.

“…”

It was that chocolate-colored girl who Dora had thought was powerless.

She had a hibiscus decoration in her hair. Was it not just an imitation? The boy had grabbed that flower and crushed it in his hand. All so he could scatter the sweet scent created by mixing a girl’s sweat with a flower’s nectar.

That was the same as the scent created by the contents of Dora’s bottle after it passed through her female body.

She could not have wielded these weapons like this on a normal battlefield. Soldiers generally wanted to remain odorless to not give away their position to the enemy, so they would avoid not just perfume but soaps and clothing starch too.

But things were different here.

All four world powers had a presence in the Hawaii District and it was not a battlefield country. It was a blank zone that belonged to no one. The civilians living in the cities would be covered in all sorts of scents.

Dora heard someone tearing a plastic explosive away from collapsed Quenser’s hand. It was Hina Liqueurball.

The deadly weapon looked entirely out of place in the 12-year-old girl’s hands.

She nervously turned toward the naked woman.

“Oh, what do you know,” said Dora. “I recognize you.”

“…”

“I visited the Rocky Coast Ocean Meteorological Research Lab a few times, so you recognize me, don’t you?”

But she was not asking the girl to spare her.

In fact…

“But I’m surprised. I thought you were more obedient…no, more powerless than this. I mean, the Oxyocean Operation run by that lab is increasing the population of dangerous great whites. Surely you aren’t going to say you have forgotten how your parents died.”

It was Quenser and not Hina who gasped at that.

And Dora’s words continued as if mercilessly digging into an old scar.

“You gave up and decided it was useless to resist when they threatened you with guns and brought up your debt, didn’t you? You knew you could not fight the grownups. And you used the very intellect your parents rubbed your head and praised you for to assist a program creating more of the very sharks that ate them! Ah ha ha!! So is this a belated attempt at a moving revenge scene? Don’t make me laugh! We both know you’re just a weak little puppy that wags her tail for whichever side the seesaw is currently tilting toward!! Do you really think you can take back your life now!?”

Thinking back, it would be hard to say Quenser had not noticed anything out of the ordinary.

When the Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers had blown up the lab’s prison-like walls and stormed the facility, why had Hina stuck so close to Quenser? Why had she followed him here instead of returning to her safe home?

She had wanted the power to fight.

Even if she did return home, she would not have found any warmth there.

She had wanted someone to rely on.

He was just some older boy she had happened to meet that day. He was little more than a stranger, but she had longed for someone who would take her side. She had wanted to hear someone speaking out against the increase in man-eating great whites.

So she had felt like maybe it was possible to go back to the way things were.

“Do it.”

With only the loose ribbon to cover her nudity, Dora gave an odd smile and spoke to the girl.

She was one of the arms dealers that had tried to absorb even the greedy Capitalist Corporations military.

“We both know you can’t do it. You would come to regret it. Do you think the Legitimacy Kingdom will accept you as one of theirs if you help them!? They’ll be gone before you know it, you’ll be left all alone again, and the seesaw will tilt back toward the Capitalist Corporations! But you’ll have been branded a traitor, so who will save you then!? First your parents, then the soldiers!! Everyone will abandon you, just like they did m-…”

She was cut off by a quiet sound.

Something had bounced off the center of her bare chest.

It was a pen-like electric fuse Quenser had tossed over from the floor.

The timer was set to three seconds.

The fuse alone produced a bang louder than a firecracker. The small bottle at her neck shattered, the ribbon wrapped loosely around her shredded, and her soft flesh burst with a dark red color. With a hole the size of a ping pong ball torn in the center of Dora Blue-Hawaii’s chest, blood gushed out and she collapsed backwards.

“Shut the hell up,” spat out the boy in an unusually violent tone of voice.

Quenser took his time standing up and pulled out his mobile device. He was of course targeting the red wings Dora had used. He attached a cable to those armored flying cars, extracted their data, and cut off the jamming.

He could finally use his radio again.

“Heivia, I have the Over Cavitation’s plans. And this is the complete version that includes the modernized parts the arms dealer added in their Parasite Plan. Use this to support the Princess.”

“You weren’t responding, so I was afraid you’d died. Where are you? We were just starting to withdraw!”

“Withdraw? Was Dora not the only arms dealer using some bizarre weapon?”

“Don’t be dumb!! Do you have any idea how bad things have gotten while you were being jammed? It’s the Object! The Over Cavitation is headed this way!! Just like when the coastguard attacked and got turned to Swiss cheese!!”

“…”

Just like then.

But Quenser had to wonder if it really would be just like then. What if the Over Cavitation’s new Pilot Elite could detect Dora’s defeat through brainwaves, an EKG, or something? It was possible the Elite would ignore all previous assumptions and blow away the entire island to get back at Quenser.

What had the Elite really wanted to protect?

If the answer was not the equipment used to maintain her, then she would be wailing in the cockpit right now.

“Hina, I have the data we need, so let’s get out of here. Hina?”

She did not respond, so he looked back to find the chocolate-colored girl named Hina Liqueurball slowly approaching the arms dealer woman.

Dora Blue-Hawaii.

The naked woman.

But she did wear solid military boots on her feet. That had been curious, so Hina crouched down and removed the right boot to reveal the foot below.

There was an old scar around the woman’s ankle.

It was the unique scar of someone who had spent a long time dragging around a ball-and-chain just like Hina’s.

“Sur…prised?”

Just like they did me.

This woman had used whatever tricks and underhanded methods she could to break free of that closed-off life.

That arms dealer had traded something for great wealth and celebrity status.

And with her dying breath, she left behind just the one word with the smile of a mischievous child.