Editing HEAVY OBJECT:Volume8 Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 8===

As he travelled along the embankment with only his head sticking above the dark sea, Quenser was horrified by the poked hornet’s nest of motion above.

(Wh-what!? Why are they shooting? Did someone mess up!?)

The Legitimacy Kingdom shot that had killed the beautiful (possible) Elite had occurred at the same time as the acetylene tank explosion, so he had not heard it. He was suspicious because of the random firing from the mountain. In other words, he suspected Heivia who was actually putting his life on the line to allow him to escape.

Gratitude could only be felt by someone smart enough to realize what had been done for them.

At any rate, if the enemy had discovered them, they had to leave the island as soon as possible.

As Quenser hurried yet moved carefully enough to not cause any splashing, a transmission arrived at his radio.

“Shit! We screwed up. Thanks to some idiot’s sniper shot, the several Elites are being led to the Megalodiver by their bodyguards. If we don’t get the hell out of here, that monster will be on the move!!”

“Several? Sniper shot!? I don’t get what’s going on! What did you do, Heivia!?”

“I didn’t take the shot, you idiot! Oh, damn. They aren’t hesitating. That must mean the one that died in the shower room was a body double!”

This commotion meant the attempt to disguise the acetylene tank explosion as an accident had been for nothing.

They would have difficulty gathering any more information.

The most they had accomplished was forcing the Megalodiver out with the lava removal incomplete. That meant it still could not dive as it clashed with the Baby Magnum on the surface.

(But the Baby Magnum won’t be able to do any damage thanks to the Hiding Clothes of Water, dammit!)

“Heivia! What does my handheld device say? It should’ve been automatically stealing their wireless LAN signals, so did it grab anything useful!?”

“This thing’s got hundreds of emails! I’ve got the unit itself, but we’ll have to wait for things to calm down before looking through it. They’re firing mortars at me right now!! Oh, that was close!”

Static filled the transmission and it cut out.

As far as Quenser could tell, Heivia and the others had strayed from the intelligence gathering mission and attempted to shoot the Pilot Elite outside the Object. But this was the result. He wanted to tell them that slow and steady wins the race.

At any rate, he needed to leave the ocean, climb the mountain, and reach the rendezvous point on the opposite side of the island. If Heivia and the others who had left earlier decided to give up on him and withdrew the rubber boats, he would be stranded on the island.

(Those cowards might actually do it.)

With that in mind, he slowly travelled along the embankment and toward land.

Before even making it a meter further, he heard a sound from directly overhead.

He looked up and found someone peering down from the top of the embankment. They were naturally doing so through a carbine’s sight.

“Uuh!?” groaned Quenser.

With no warning, he clearly saw the man’s index finger move.

A moment later, a few muffled gunshots rang out.

However, they did not belong to the soldier targeting Quenser. His gun had no silencer.

After the soldier lost his balance and fell into the ocean, someone else ran across the embankment while keeping low.

It was a female soldier wearing a Legitimacy Kingdom uniform and holding an assault rifle with a grenade launcher attached below the barrel. Even when excluding the silencer on the end, the barrel seemed a little longer than the other soldiers’ guns.

“Hurry on up! You aren’t going to survive on that route either way!!”

“Th-thanks.”

For some reason, the female soldier averted her gaze.

“Sorry. I can’t accept your thanks. I was the one that got carried away and fired the sniper shot.”

“…”

Quenser found a wonderful new reason to survive this: punishment time. He could not allow himself to die here no matter what.

He grabbed the proffered hand, climbed up onto the embankment, and ran toward land.

As soon as they approached the harbor, they heard a great number of footsteps, so they leaned against the wall of a nearby warehouse.

At least twenty soldiers passed very nearby and they wore a mixture of normal uniforms and the special suits of a Pilot Elite.

“Wh-what was that!?”

“Shh. It seems they have body double Elites in addition to the real one. In fact, they have a few dozen of them.”

“That must be why they didn’t look all that beautiful up close. They seemed like cheap knock-offs.”

The base of the short mountain was not far away. Even from their position, the scent of the dense greenery could be detected in the salty sea air. Once the group of enemy soldiers finished running by, they could run over and hide in the forest.

However, an unpleasant sound ruined that plan.

The sound came from the warehouse they were leaning up against.

“What was that? It sounded like a bunch of thick metal fitting together.”

“What is it?”

“Shit. This is really bad! On my signal, break that window. I’ll throw an explosive in as you do!”

“You’re causing a commotion here!?”

“The sounds on the other side of the wall are powered suits being put on. Once they’re finished, who do you think they’ll chase after first!?”

The female soldier asked no further questions.

She broke the window with her rifle’s stock and Quenser leaned over to toss in a Hand Axe explosive with an electric fuse attached.

“Run!!”

As soon as they left the wall, several gazes stabbed into the two of them.

But before the enemy soldiers’ carbines could accurately target them, Quenser hit the switch on his radio.

A tremendous explosion blew down all four giant walls of the warehouse like it was a magic box.

The unexpected blast knocked the soldiers to the concrete.

Quenser had been prepared, but even he was almost knocked over. The female soldier grabbed his arm and they ran for the nearby forest.

Gunshots pursued them, but the shaken soldiers were in no state to aim accurately. That just barely kept the two of them alive.

“We can’t use the obvious shortest route,” warned the female soldier. “We’ll run into the enemy if we do!”

“If we use up too much time, Heivia and the others will leave!”

“I’ll make sure we still get there in time. Follow me!!”

The two of them continued running through the trees. Occasionally, the student would stab an electric fuse into a clay-like bomb so it could be detonated by radio and randomly threw it into a thicket.

The female soldier took issue with that as they ran.

“If you set traps, they can follow them. It’s like laying a trail of bread crumbs through the forest!”

“I’m sure they have skilled trackers and scouts who can find us either way! We can’t escape while worrying about footprints in the dirt, trampled blades of grass, and broken branches. We’re going to leave a trail regardless, so it’s better to leave some traps too!!”

They continued to make progress through the forest and its hot and humid air.

Suddenly, they heard a loud sound of breaking branches in front of them.

Something much larger than a human was approaching.

“Shit! They figured out our path. They had an infrared searchlight facility at the mountain peak, so the security team probably radioed them for help. We’ve been cut off!!”

“Wait… What is that!?”

“A powered suit. Hide!!”

Quenser immediately grabbed the female soldier’s arm, pulled her toward him, and jumped behind a large, mossy tree that looked like it would be the home of fairies.

The attack came an instant later.

It began with an eerie, flickering flame that resembled a will-o’-the-wisp.

Then a blended fuel mist made from mixing an oxidant with napalm was sprayed their way.

With a roar, tremendous flames split apart the darkness of the night and swept across the warm, damp forest for around thirty meters. That murderous flame would not be extinguished even if water was dumped on it and sand covered it.

The world was dyed orange.

“A flamethrower!!” groaned the female soldier in his arms.

The straight line of flame was five meters away because it had been fired in the wrong direction, but Quenser still felt a sizzling pain on his skin even through the thick military uniform. It felt like a bad sunburn.

“We can’t do anything against this. They can continue firing that flame indefinitely and my rifle can’t pierce its armor. Facing it will just get us burned to death!”

“We can’t circle around on a different route. We’ll be caught by all the pursuers from the harbor,” said Quenser as he wiped sweat from his face. “Fire a grenade on my signal.”

“An anti-personnel frag grenade won’t get through its armor!”

“We’re not targeting the powered suit.”

He pointed at the feet of the humanoid armor weapon that was producing the flickering will-o’-the-wisp.

“Blow away the ground. The earth is wet here, we’re on a mountain slope, and powered suits have poor balance. If you gouge out the ground below its feet, it’ll topple over.”

As he spoke, he reached into his backpack and pulled out a Hand Axe plastic explosive.

“Then I’ll walk right up to it and attach this. We only have one chance! Do it!!”

The rest was a complete mess.

The grenade blasted a large amount of dirt into the air. Quenser ran through the earthy smell, ignored the creaking of the powered suit, and tossed the clay toward the back of the metal mass that had fallen face forward. The instant he hit the switch on his radio, he heard an explosion and he was tossed a few meters through the air. By the time he realized he had detonated it too soon, the taste of iron had already filled his mouth.

A moment later, the tank on the powered suit’s back exploded and Quenser was very nearly fried.

“Wah!?”

The female soldier whose name he did not know helped him up and the two of them ran as quickly as they could. The trees of the forest shook around them and they could not tell whether they were hearing the night wind or approaching enemies.

Soon, the salty wind reached their noses once more.

As soon as they left the forest, a few dry gunshots filled the air.

But they had come from ahead rather than the pursuers behind them.

The female soldier tried to grab Quenser’s arm and stop.

“They cut us off!?”

“No, it’s Heivia and the others. They waited for us!!”

A few rubber boats sat on the harsh coast. They had originally been hidden behind a tanker, so they must have been brought to the island just now.

Heivia shouted out while aiming his assault rifle behind Quenser and using his sensors to detect something unseen.

“Hurry it up! They’re right behind you!!”

Enemy and ally both fired shoulder-fired missiles.

With the explosive blasts beating on their backs, Quenser and the female soldier almost fell several times as they continued running.

After their comrades pulled them onto the boats, all of the rubber boats set out into the dark ocean.

But they had no time to relax.

All of a sudden, the mountain in the center of the island flashed as if it had suddenly melted. A blinding light stabbed into their eyes and its silhouette crumbled.

“The Object!!” shouted Quenser.

“Get behind the tanker! Hurry up and hide!! Shut off the motors!!”

Just as the rubber boats circled behind the rusty tanker, the mountain itself vanished.

An orange afterimage stabbed into Quenser’s retinas after it was all already over. The reverberation of the laser beam crashing diagonally into the seawater sounded like water simmering in a heated frying pan.

“Dammit,” said Heivia in irritation. “They’ve forced the Megalodiver to start moving.”

“But it still has the cooled lava all over it. They hadn’t finished removing it.”

“What does it matter? It might have simply decided to swat the flies that were annoying it. It can definitely overwhelm us while only fighting on the surface.”

With that giant machine on the move, Quenser and the others would have a difficult time returning to the fleet. The ocean was the Megalodiver’s territory. Without a doubt, it would locate and sink every single rubber boat before they made it back.

And even if they did return to the fleet, it had the firepower needed to blow away the entire fleet as well. Arriving at the goal would not change the situation in the slightest.

“What do we do? Really! What do we do!?”

“Staying on the ocean isn’t going to help. Let’s head inside the rusty tanker. That thing can hear well enough to detect an individual by their heartbeat, so it would be best to hide inside a metal box.”

The rusty tanker they hid behind had large holes in places, so they used one to enter the dark ruins that had no illumination. Not wanting to enter the water, they climbed a random staircase and took up a position along a central corridor.

“Our only choice is to have the princess’s Baby Magnum do something,” said Quenser.

“You’ve already seen how well that’ll work! She can’t do anything with that strange Tatami Shield!”

“We were gathering information to find a way through it, remember? If we bring together all the data we found, we might figure something out.”

Once the Megalodiver circled around the perimeter of the island, it would set its sights on the fleet out at sea. They had to inform the princess and Frolaytia of a weakness in the Megalodiver before it could directly target them. The most they could do was create a situation in which the Object would be defeated when it attacked.

Heivia gave Quenser the handheld device he had been left with.

“We’ve got a huge mixture of data. You saw it, too. The emails contained global weather maps, ocean current maps, and files on the food production of the Island Nation. It’s going to take forever to find the information related to the Megalodiver.”

They then heard a rustling noise.

Once they pointed their lights toward it, they saw another unit placing papers on the rusty floor. Surprisingly, it seemed they had actually entered a building and stolen paper reports rather than intercepting transmissions from a distance.

“The Twelve Earthly Branches Project? Why would they have data on the twelve original Objects?”

“From what I’ve heard it was just the Rat branch that actually brought an end to the nuclear age. When just one caused that much damage, it had to have frightened everyone to learn they still had eleven more of them in reserve. Of course, all twelve of them were sunk in the upheaval afterwards.”

Others also produced sound files that recorded the conversations of self-defense PMC soldiers and ultra-long distance photographs of maps on the walls.

“Ksshh! Salvage…”

“Reactivate…ksshhhhhhh!!”

“Ksshhh… Control tower… ksshhhhhhh!!”

Quenser persistently manipulated his handheld device and opened the hundreds or even thousands of various new emails.

“What? It looks like it isn’t just chaos.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The conversations on here. I had thought they were all unrelated topics, but it looks like there are a few common themes: weather, ocean currents, and food.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, but I can’t be sure since I haven’t checked all of the emails yet.”

For one thing, most of the emails were the hired self-defense PMC asking for instructions from the individual going by Ichirei Shikon who had hired them.

For that reason, it was odd to think the emails were overflowing with idle conversation.

“Wait a second.”

Quenser glanced at one of the image files a soldier had presented.

It was one of the ultra-long distance photographs of a map on a wall.

“Heivia.”

“What is it?”

“The original twelve Objects created for the Twelve Earthly Branches Project were all sunk in the end, right?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“It looks to me like there are twelve points marked on this world map.”

They all gathered around, but the previous female soldier frowned.

“What? These are nowhere near the same locations I’ve seen in history textbooks. They’re all at the bottom of the ocean, but the end of the early days of Objects didn’t happen in these places.”

“Then is this map complete nonsense?”

“No,” cut in Quenser. “The audio files included the word ‘salvage’, remember?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Their specialty is the ocean. Specifically, the bottom of the ocean.” Quenser chose his words carefully. “Most likely, the self-defense PMC…no, Ichirei Shikon who’s acting as their brain has been spending a long time salvaging the original twelve Objects. Then they were relocated to the points on this map.”

“But why!?”

“I have a guess, but it’s a bit of a far-fetched idea.”