Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 6===

“What is going on here?” groaned Quenser.

The rubber military boat travelling across the black ocean was packed full of around ten men. To keep as quiet as possible, it used a large motor rather than an engine and several identical boats cut through the waves along with it.

“Where did Mariage go? What about those maids!? I let down my guard for an instant, and I’m surrounded by filthy guys again!!”

“All of them count as civilians,” answered Heivia in annoyance. “We can’t take them to the battlefield.”

“They can come as guests! And where are the female soldiers!?”

“They’re packed in the next boat over and I’d much rather be there too!!”

“La la la♪ I’m a civilian student, so what ever happened to not bringing civilians with you? La la la la♪”

“Shut up!!” shouted several voices. “If you hadn’t noticed anything, we wouldn’t be out here in the first place!!”

Quenser experienced the truly rare experience of having fists strike him equally from all directions.

They had yet to run into the enemy, yet he had a serious bloody nose. Life was cruel.

As Quenser made makeshift plugs for his nose, Heivia spat out a comment.

“Well, with those savage maids around, the fleet can’t let their guard down. Heading out to the battlefield might be the better option.”

“Why do you get along so poorly? As a commoner, living with a maid sounds amazing.”

“How should I know? She probably doesn’t like that the heir to the Winchell family gets along with someone from the Vanderbilt family.” He meaninglessly performed maintenance on his rifle as he spoke. “The whole thing’s ridiculous. Who cares about noble pride? No one knows who started this damn tradition, but they’re trying to continue centuries of bloodshed. I’m going to destroy that grudge and these family rules in my generation. If I wasn’t prepared for that, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to take part in these wars.”

To remain hidden, they were not using lights. Instead, the soldier in the back of the boat controlling the combination rudder and motor was wearing infrared goggles. Quenser and the others could only glimpse the mountainous silhouette of the island splitting the black sea from the indigo night sky.

The soldier in the back gave instructions over his radio.

“All boats, come to a stop. There’s a searchlight, so be careful.”

Heivia frowned in the darkness.

“What? A searchlight?”

“It’s infrared,” said the soldier. “Take a peek through your scope and you’ll see all too well. They’re searching the ocean with active sensors.”

Quenser shrugged.

It sounded frightening enough, but it also meant they would be fine so long as they did not enter the invisible circle of the searchlight. The enemy was essentially telling them how to escape detection.

Heivia scratched his head.

“Are they joking around?”

“An invisible trap might be located past this obvious trap, so let’s be careful.”

Fortunately, the island in question was a scrapyard used to take apart rusted and falling-apart tankers. Plenty of rusty masses were scattered around the island after their last efforts were not quite enough to reach the island.

Quenser, Heivia, and the others’ rubber boat used them as cover to escape the infrared searchlights and slowly but surely approach.

“The island is shaped like a fried egg with two yolks,” explained Heivia. “It’s small enough to travel around in an hour and it has two mountains. The tanker dismantling harbor is located on the north side, so we’re sneaking in on the empty south side and travelling through the forest and mountain to the harbor.”

“Was that infrared searchlight coming from the top of the ‘yolk’?”

“Don’t take out the sensors. If they don’t realize anything is happening, we’ll have more freedom of movement.”

Heivia switched from spitting out his words to weakly groaning.

“The worst part is the Object. The Megalodiver. If its sensors are fully activated, we’ll be spotted right away. It was identifying an individual by the heartbeat back at that prison, so holding your breath isn’t gonna hide you.”

“That won’t happen,” readily replied Quenser.

Heivia looked doubtful, so the student clarified.

“It’s a psychological issue, not a technological one. Heivia, we were working at the ridiculous depths of 1500 meters under the ocean, remember? What did you think once you were freed from there and made it back on the ship?”

“What? I was happy to say goodbye to that cramped prison of water pressure and I wanted to jump in a king sized bed and sleep for about three days.”

“The same should apply to the Megalodiver’s Pilot Elite. That monster may have fought off our princess both underwater and on the surface, but it didn’t go perfectly for it. It frantically surfaced after being covered in lava, it failed to assassinate Mariage Nightcap, and Karen’s armed cruise ship blew up over half its supply and maintenance unit.”

“Come to think of it, I guess they weren’t exactly sitting around watching it all play out. The impact on their side was so great it doesn’t feel real, though.”

“Once the maintenance is complete, the Megalodiver has to head back out to sea, so wouldn’t a human want to breathe some fresh air before that happened?”

“Perhaps, but a military is a management method for systematically killing people. Personal feelings and convenience won’t come into it.”

“For a proper military, no. But these are the remnants that managed to gather together after fleeing from the sinking Ame-no-Darin. The organizational structure will have collapsed. Even normal militaries rely on Objects to the point that Pilot Elites are treated extremely well, so they’re probably treating the Elite like a queen on that island. After all, they’re done for if the Elite abandons them.”

“In that case, is the Megalodiver empty?”

“Whether this change of pace lasts five minutes or an hour depends on the specific Pilot Elite, but this is our chance. Luck is on our side.”

The closest tanker wreckage to the island was lying on its side fifty meters from the island. To remain hidden from the infrared searchlights, Quenser’s group tied the rubber boat behind the tanker and swam the rest of the way.

“Gasp gasp…. Dammit. The waves are huge here and I’m wearing all this clothing and heavy equipment. I-I’m not sure whether I’m swimming or drowning.”

“If you’re strength isn’t going to last, you can always strip naked and backstroke the rest of the way. But don’t throw away the equipment.”

They somehow made it to the southern side of the island.

The information that no one lived there and the tanker dismantling harbor was located to the north proved accurate. Immediately past the coast of round stones was a damp tropical forest. The mountains referred to as the ‘yolk’ of a fried egg were only about two hundred meters tall.

“Let’s go,” said Heivia while adjusting his grip on his assault rifle. “Our objective is investigating the Megalodiver and interfering with the work to remove the hardened lava if possible. If the Elite really is cooling off outside the Object, we’ll never have a better chance.”

The landing team split into three groups and took different routes: one moving clockwise around the island, one counterclockwise, and one down the center of the mountain region.

They chose routes via rock-paper-scissors and Quenser and Heivia were stuck with the central mountain route.

Quenser had played rock-paper-scissors for his group, so they kicked him again.

“No using the radio from here on. Make your own decisions. We’ll return at 0330 hours or when some idiot gives us away and we have to get the hell out of here. We won’t wait for anyone who’s late, so they’ll have to deal with it themselves. Now go!”

On Heivia’s command, the three groups started down their respective paths.

Quenser’s group travelled through the central forest that was more like a jungle.

“Everything comes down to how you think about it, so let’s try to stay positive. Heading through this thick forest makes it harder for them to find us.”

“You can think positively if you like, but how about you start before we have to punch and kick you again?”

But once they actually entered the jungle covering the low mountain, they suddenly ran across something unexpected.

“What? The forest suddenly disappears.”

It did not seem natural.

All the trees of an area were toppled over and blackened. They had been burned. Some small fires were still visible here and there.

“This was the Summer Vacation,” groaned Heivia in utter annoyance. “Isn’t the dismantling harbor on the north side? Firing so much it hits here is going too far even if some of the shots do hit.”

“Well, even a 20% hit rate is really good for artillery.”

When they looked around again, they found thirty to forty meter craters scattered throughout the jungle. They travelled along while circling around those areas.

“That’s a parabolic microphone. It’s fallen over and useless, though.”

“It looks like those maids were of some use.”

Even if they were travelling over the mountain, they could not approach the peak. The large infrared searchlight was located there and it would have at least a few guards stationed at it. There was no point in fighting them and producing gunfire.

They circled around the peak and remained relatively low along the mountain ridge and took up a position where the northern dismantling harbor was visible.

“There it is. That’s their base.”

“The Object stands out the most. If it were using all its sensors, we would’ve been found by now.”

“That must mean the Pilot Elite really is resting outside.”

They did not even need to use binoculars.

A fifty meter mass floated on the black sea next to the crumbling concrete embankment. It was surrounded by makeshift scaffolding made of wires and bamboo. Bluish-white flashes of light were visible in places, but they were likely burners being used to strip away the hardened lava.

A few simple prefab buildings and barracks were located in the harbor area, but most of them had been blown away. That and the destroyed embankment were likely the result of Karen I Winchell’s bombardment from the Summer Vacation.

“They’re everywhere,” groaned Heivia as he began observing the harbor through his scope. “If they can spare that many people for guard duty, they must have a decent amount of personnel. I don’t see any sign of a tragic lack of food or ammunition or anything.”

“Does that mean someone’s supporting them?”

“Who knows. But there sure are a lot of white and black people for an Island Nation force. What happened to the Nadeshiko with long, straight, and black hair?”

“The self-defense PMC was supposed to be a collection of foreign mercenaries.”

Quenser used his binoculars to see for himself, but then he stopped.

He instead focused on the great darkness lurking around the harbor.

“Hm? There are a few ships in addition to the Object. Are those subs?”

“They’re probably carrying supplies and maintenance equipment for the people. Before the Island Nation made a ton of money off of the resources at the bottom of the Pacific, they did a bunch of research on maintaining an ocean supply line. I think they called it the Ghost Fleet Project. This might be a remnant of that.”

“Another cool name for a project. It makes me want to laugh.”

“They spent billions of euros on the thing, so they’re not going to give it a pathetic name,” pointed out Heivia. “The submarine mother ship project being worked on by the Faith Organization was probably influenced by this. The Island Nation’s ideas really are leaking out.”

“Heivia, I want to be clear about something. This Ghost Fleet Project wasn’t supplying the self-defense PMC defending the Ame-no-Darin, was it?”

“Of course not. With all the ocean resources available now, they don’t need to bother with a method of transporting them long distances through the ocean.”

“So someone called back these retired transport subs? Are you sure the remnants of the self-defense PMC that fled from the Ame-no-Darin are our only enemy here?”

A lot bothered Quenser, but their time was limited. The Object came first. They could take plenty of time to safely consider everything else after the Megalodiver had been sunk.

There were a few pieces of information they wanted:

*The Tatami Shield or Hiding Clothes of Water increased the viscosity of the seawater and then produced giant pillars of water to deflect enemy cannon fire. Raising the seawater’s viscosity was fine, but that would affect the seawater it used for its water jet propulsion, its reactor cooling, and its oxygen supply secured via electrolysis. How did it allow those elements to coexist?

*When they had run across it in the deep sea, the Megalodiver had presumably used a water intake on the top, but it had continued using the systems requiring seawater after surfacing. Did it have another water intake on the bottom? What was the condition for switching?

*The Tatami Shield defense system was overwhelmingly accurate. Simply relying on sound would not allow it to keep up with ultra-high speed laser beams, so how was it so accurately grasping its surroundings amid all the noise?

Those unseen systems were directly related to the Object functioning. If they could find the answers and interfere, they could literally suffocate it.

“Where should we attack first?”

“The other units are heading in on their own paths, so we should avoid anything too noticeable. Bring an interception antenna here. Let’s start by picking up all the wireless LAN signals flying around the area.”

“Won’t the military encryption be hard to crack?”

“This is the same as with the Pilot Elite. They aren’t maintaining a proper military structure, so they’re probably using a system made from a bunch of civilian equipment they could gather together. It might not be too hard to intercept and analyze.”

While complaining, Quenser set up a 40cm long and 10cm wide metal cylinder on a tripod. It was not a rocket launcher or any other weapon. Just like a parabolic antenna, this was an antenna used to pick up weak signals.

Heivia looked doubtful.

“I heard that’s an improvised piece of equipment thrown together just before we left. Are you sure it’ll work, student?”

“It’s a hell of a lot safer than sneaking into the middle of the enemy base. Just leave it to me. I can intercept wireless LAN signals using a plastic bottle cut in half and wrapped in aluminum foil. It’s a much simpler design than a parabolic microphone.”

“Why do you know all these tricks?”

“This was popular back in my safe country school. Yandere girls would use it to peek at the emails of people they had decided were their boyfriend. Unlike hacking, this doesn’t require any specialized knowledge, so it’s often used to target Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.”

“Honestly, you STEM students.”

“It wasn’t that bad a place. A girl in the sciences sounds rarer than a normal girl, but all the girls in the school were like that. Upperclassmen, underclassmen, all of them.”

“If you know that many, introduce me to some of them! An army of girls in glasses and lab coats sounds like a dream come true!!”

“If you want. Their defenses are weak, but they jump to conclusions way too fast. If you just think you’re having some fun, it can come back to bite you. You’ll start to think a girl wielding a knife is downright cute when you have to deal with one’s using homemade railguns or thermobaric bombs. Don’t forget the E in STEM.”

Quenser used a thin cable to attach the bottom of the cylinder to his handheld device and carefully rotated the top of the tripod. It looked like he was pointing the open end of the cylinder toward a target computer a few hundred meters away. The inbox quickly began to fill with new emails. They were various communications and reports travelling through the harbor.

Heivia looked even less pleased than before.

“That’s scary. Maybe I should put a free encryption app on my phone.”

“Those always have a backdoor. More importantly, I’ve got a few emails we can read right away.”

Quenser opened the emails, but he did not hit the jackpot right away. Standard reports from guards, shift times for maintenance soldiers, and even some stupid jokes and pranks were being sent around as well.

“What’s this? World weather forecasts, ocean currents, and…they’ve even got the Island Nation’s food self-sufficiency rate in here. What does this have to do with the Megalodiver?”

“It doesn’t look like they were just downloading the ocean and weather maps for their upcoming battles, does it? If so, the New Caledonia District would’ve been enough. They wouldn’t need to know about the other side of the globe.”

“The Island Nation is part of the Capitalist Corporations. They aren’t trading grain futures on the battlefield, are they?”

Heivia looked at the cell phone with disbelief in his eyes.

“Is this really okay?”

“The lack of regulation shows how far they’ve fallen. All the jokes are likely mental defenses to distract them. Anyway, look at this.”

Quenser was focused on the email address rather than the contents of the email.

Heivia looked confused, so the student explained.

“A lot of different groups are making contact, but most of them are gathering at a single address. They’re asking for instructions and this…what? Someone going by Ichirei Shikon is at the center of it all.”

“Ichirei…? What’s that?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably a term unique to the Island Nation. You might need to know about Buddhism or Shintoism to understand.”

At any rate, it was almost certain that this Ichirei Shikon was at the center of the incident.

The self-defense PMC was a puppet and worker ant that seemed to ask for instructions via email, but the wireless network was limited to the island. Ichirei Shikon was likely commanding them on the scene.

Heivia used his assault rifle’s scope to observe various parts of the harbor.

“This Ichirei Shikon would be their central person, right?”

“Most likely. They’re using some confusing Island Nation term for a codename while dealing with a bunch of foreign mercenaries, so they probably have some weird pride. I think we can assume they’re the person in the Island Nation responsible for all this. It also fits with those old transport submarines being used.”

“Do the emails not say where they are? Since they’re from the Island Nation, should we assume they’re short with black hair?”

“Not necessarily. Changes in their food culture has led to a bunch of giant kids attending their schools and I hear they dye their hair all sorts of colors and even their skin color can change depending on whether white skin or black skin is in at the moment. More importantly, we need information more than a person. We need to find a weakness in the Megalodiver that Ichirei Shikon built.”

“But wouldn’t it be fastest to capture this Ichirei Shikon person and get them to tell us?”

“That would stand out too much.”

As they chatted, they looked through the mountain of new emails displayed on the handheld device.

They found a few emails concerning the Object, but none of them touched on its secrets.

Instead, they gained some unwelcome information about the maintenance.

“Wow. This isn’t good.”

“What is it?”

“They’re going to finish removing the lava from the Megalodiver way sooner than we thought. According to this, in about twenty minutes.”

“We only just started our investigation! If Armageddon begins that soon, the princess doesn’t stand a chance and we’ll be annihilated!!”

“Yes, and that’s why we need to interfere with their work somehow.”

As he spoke, Quenser reached for his backpack.

When he pulled out some Hand Axe plastic explosive and an electric fuse, his partner’s eyelids twitched.

“Wait a minute. What are you planning to do?”

“They’re using high-temperature acetylene burners to remove the cooled lava, so there has to be a huge tank below the Object near the crumbling embankment. Let’s blow it up and make it look like an accident.”

“Do you have any idea how noticeable that’ll be!? We’re supposed to be gathering information, not slaughtering them! They have an Object, so they’ll blow us to pieces if we do that!!”

“Karen and the other maids fired shells all over the place, remember? There have to be cracks and dents all over. If a gas tank explodes, they won’t think it was done maliciously.”

If they could not use the acetylene burners, they could not continue removing the cooled lava from the Object. That extra time to gather information would give them a chance to find a weakness in the Megalodiver.

Quenser placed his handheld device in the grass.

“Heivia, you look after this and the antenna.”

“Seriously? You’re seriously going!? Even if we’re just dealing with Ichirei Shikon and the remnants of the self-defense PMC, it’s still a bunch of enemies. If they notice something’s wrong, they’ll send the Pilot Elite to the Megalodiver. If they so much as catch a glimpse of you, it’s all over. Are you still going!?”

“If we don’t do something, the Megalodiver will head back out into the ocean. Once it can dive and fight on the surface, it’ll defeat the princess, sink the fleet, and leave us stranded. Don’t worry. The gas tank is on the embankment. If I continue through the dark ocean with only my head above water, I can manage. I won’t be pressing against building walls like a ninja or anything.”

“No matter what you do, they aren’t gonna make a movie about you. There’s no reason for you to risk your life like this! Ah! Wait, you idiot!!”

Heivia stubbornly tried to stop him, but Quenser ignored him and slowly approached the harbor with explosive in hand.