Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 12===

Placing even a single bomb was a risky process.

As Quenser attached the plastic explosive to the base of the stairs, Heivia and a few others fired their assault rifles up the stairs. They were trying to hold the enemy back. By creating a barrage without even a gap to poke one’s head out, the enemy could not throw down a grenade.

But it only lasted thirty seconds.

“Shit! Here comes a grenade!!”

“I’m done here!! Fall back!! Fall back!!”

Quenser, Heivia, and the others practically rolled back to the corridor.

A moment later, the first grenade exploded.

Quenser then placed his hand on his radio and detonated his Hand Axe plastic explosive.

Just like when a building was demolished, the spiraling staircase smoothly crumbled and almost seemed to sink down underground. A great cloud of dust surged out toward them, but the corridor was already much worse due to the bleach and cleanser.

However, a problem presented itself.

“What the hell!? The door’s filled with rubble! We can’t escape through here!!”

“Then we just have to destroy the wall and ceiling to widen the hole. Outta the way, everyone!!”

After destroying the wall and ceiling enough to widen the “gap”, they entered the vertical hole which had been a stairwell.

Several moaning and bloody figures were mixed in with the piles of rubble.

“Don’t,” said Heivia quickly.

Even so, one of the enemy soldiers pulled out a handgun despite being unable to stand.

After a few assault rifle shots, the groaning stopped.

Heivia clicked his tongue and spoke to Quenser.

“I’ve had enough of this. Let’s climb on up.”

They had no specialized device to fire a rope to the top, so they gathered a random weight from the bloody rubble at their feet. It was a fist-sized piece of concrete with twisted rebar sticking out of it in places. They tied one end of a rope to it, swung it around like a morning star, and tossed it straight up.

“Oh? Ah? What? I didn’t get in on the first try.”

“And now it’s falling. Move!”

After the second and third try, they were shedding tears over how wonderful the helmets supplied by their fellow soldiers were. Finally, Heivia tossed the rope and felt it firmly stick. It seemed the rebar sticking out from the concrete weight had caught on the remains of the staircase on the wall. And it had caught right next to the door on the upper floor.

Heivia put all his weight on it to thoroughly check it.

“If the enemy starts firing down while I’m climbing, there’s nothing I can do, so make sure to cover for me.”

“Then why don’t you give me a gun? I’m confident I can at least fire right up your asshole.”

With a parting raise of the middle finger, Heivia started climbing up the rope. Meanwhile, the other soldiers threw more ropes and secured a second and third route up.

Unsurprisingly, scrawny Quenser could not rock climb on his own, so the others had to pull him up last.

After exiting into the corridor, Quenser glanced at the sign on the wall.

It said 0m.

This floor had none of the pipes travelling around like blood vessels and the floor and walls were a shiny white. Nevertheless, some of the panels were still missing.

“It looks like we’ve made it above the waterline. They can’t flood us now.”

They were all battered and they had lost the soldier who had protected them from the grenade.

Their uniforms were covered in blood from god knows who, were ripped in places, and stank of chemicals.

“I get that they can’t flood us, but what do we do now?”

“We can’t just run. We have to wear down the numbers of those monsters from the Northern Restricted Zone. To ensure the civil war drags on and causes a great depression for the Island Nation’s economy, we need to wear down the stronger side.”

“I’ve had enough. We can’t beat them. What do they eat anyway? Pure protein? Steroids?”

An Object had not even shown up and yet Heivia was already in full complaining mode, so the Moss Green PMC was clearly quite skilled.

Heivia contacted the other units by radio, but it seemed they had already received their baptism from Moss Green as well. None of them wanted a direct fight with them.

However, they could not leave enemy territory until someone produced some results.

That left deciding the loser by drawing lots.

“Moss Green will be heading down, right? That means we have to head down to fight them, but we’ll be wiped out if they flood the area. What are we supposed to do?”

“I have an idea.” Quenser sat with his back against the wall. “All the pumps here are electronic. The manual valves will only let a trickle out, so we don’t have to worry about them.”

“Are you saying we attack the power source? The Ame-no-Darin is shaped like a ship’s wheel. In addition to the central power source, it has secondary power sources in each of the twelve spokes. Do you really think we can wander around such a huge facility and destroy all of them? If we could, we wouldn’t be in so much trouble right now.”

“We only need to take out one.”

“They’ll just switch to another power source.”

“Normally, yes.” Quenser grinned. “Think about the handheld game systems popular in the safe countries. They have two power sources: the AC plug and the DC battery. If you repeatedly insert and remove the plug a whole bunch, it can cause an error in the power source switching process and the entire system will die. But it might wipe out your save data, so I don’t recommend trying it yourself.”

“And you want to try that in a legit war?”

“There’s no better answer for us right now. We want to stop them from sinking this thing and we want the war to continue, so we can’t completely destroy their power source. If we did that, the war would be over.”

Hearing that, Heivia glanced over at the other surviving soldiers.

None of them shouted support, but no one spoke up in protest either. They likely wanted the correct answer whatever it might be.

Heivia clicked his tongue.

“If no one has any other ideas, we’ll have to go with that. If we hang around here, we’ll just end up cornered. It’s kill or be killed.”

“Where’s the closest power source?”

“The sixth secondary power supply is three hundred meters ahead.”

After eating some tasteless soap-like rations and drinking from their water bottles, the group started walking toward the sixth secondary power supply with guns in hand once more.

Because they had risen above the waterline, one wall was covered in windows. The cold gray ocean spread out beyond the glass and what looked like an embankment was visible two or three kilometers away. That was likely one of the harbor blocks sticking out from the center just like the one they were on.

As soon as Quenser turned toward it, someone strongly grabbed his shoulders from behind.

Heivia tackled him to the shiny white floor and a high-pitched sound rang out a moment later.

At first, he did not know what had happened.

It was only when he heard the gunshot that he finally realized it was a sniper.

“Get down, you idiots! Get down!!”

As Heivia shouted, his follow soldiers frantically dove to the floor.

Quenser moved just his eyes to look at the window. It only contained a small hole and crack as if the tip of an umbrella had pierced it. The rifle bullet had been travelling so quickly that it had passed through the glass before the force of the impact could propagate.

“How did you notice that!?”

“My rifle’s passive sensors just happened to pick something up. He’s using microwaves that react to motion! It’s a necessary item when doing long-distance sniping without a spotter!!”

A few of their allies held up their assault rifles while crouching down. They connected a line between the hole in the glass and the hole on the opposite wall and they followed that to determine where the sniper had fired from.

But Heivia spoke up from the floor.

“Don’t try it. He’ll have already moved and you couldn’t reach him without anti-materiel rifles anyway. If he’s using microwaves, he’s the type that shoots and runs. If he’s set the equipment somewhere else and is linked to it through his radio, that won’t tell us anything either. If you pop up to fire back, he’ll just shoot you from his next point!”

“How about we continue on along the floor?” asked Quenser. “If we stay below the windows, the walls will protect us.”

“I’d love to, but do you have any guarantee he isn’t using an anti-materiel rifle? And if he pulls out a missile or Gatling gun, he can rip us and the walls to pieces.”