HEAVY OBJECT:Volume10 Chapter 1
Status: Incomplete
4/15 parts completed
Chapter 1: The Season in Which the Flower of Hell Blooms >> Battle for the Arctic Course through the White Sea District
Part 1
“Pant, pant.”
Short, frantic breaths continued without end.
The city was buried in rubble. None of the buildings retained their roofs and the ones with all four walls were rare. Some had not even kept their box-like shape, so only a wall or two stood up like a monolith commemorating the failures of mankind. Those walls of what used to be reinforced concrete filled the wasteland.
And that was where Quenser and some other Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers were running for their lives.
They were completely out of breath and they were panting like thirsty dogs.
“Pant, pant, pant!! Pant, pant, pant, pant, pant, pant, pant, pant!!”
Behind them, dust from the collapsed building materials rose like a cumulonimbus cloud. But they knew that obvious “gazes” were piercing them from beyond that obscuring curtain. And they knew they were being pursued by the possessors of those abnormal and clearly inhuman “glowing eyes”.
A continuous metallic sound followed them.
None of them knew what exactly was pursuing them. Everyone who had been dragged back into the dust had died.
There had been no exceptions.
“Dammit…”
Quenser desperately ran while sticking his tongue out like a starving dog. Without stopping, he chucked some Hand Axe plastic explosive behind him and used his radio to detonate it.
There was an earsplitting explosion, but the dust did not clear up. And whatever was beyond it did not stop their advance.
“Dammit!! What the hell is this!? They’re clearly eating people…no, are they actually laying their eggs in them!?”
Quenser trembled in fear and his legs nearly gave out, but someone tugged on his arm. The handsome, black-haired man then shouted in his ear.
“Don’t stop running!! If we escape to the landing zone, the chopper will pick us up!!”
The sound of rotors beating the air passed by over their heads.
It was a Legitimacy Kingdom transport helicopter. The side cargo door was wide open and a ground support Gatling gun known as the Crocodile was sticking out.
His awful friend Heivia yelled angrily over the radio.
“Keep your heads down as you run!! I’ll be shooting from up here, but don’t you dare stop. If you’re late, we’re leaving you behind!!”
A solid block of sound burst out with no noticeable gap between individual shots. The variable gear switched over to the highest setting which sent 7.62mm bullets into the many forms beyond the dust at a rate of 8000 a minute.
Orange sparks covered everything.
But the bizarre silhouettes that looked like insects or armor did not stop moving.
They gained ground on Quenser’s group running along the surface.
The great noise and light was enough for the humans to instinctually shrink back. When fired from above, the Crocodile had a similar effect to a lightning strike or a stun grenade. Quenser cowered a little even though he knew this was covering fire from an ally, but the handsome man grabbed his arm and pulled. He almost seemed to drag Quenser along as he ran.
An unnatural stream of fluorescent pink smoke rose up ahead.
It was about two hundred meters away. That smoke grenade signified the landing zone. The escape helicopter was already waiting to leave. In fact, it was floating a few dozen centimeters above the ground. The pilot was getting ahead of himself from fear.
They were going to be left behind.
That fear pushed Quenser onward. He swung both arms up as he ran.
“Wait! Please wait!!”
As he shouted, the soldiers right behind him were overtaken by the dust and swallowed up. He could not look back anymore. Quenser and the handsome man ran with all their might. They climbed over waist-height rubble and ran smoothly forward. Finally, they arrived at the landing zone.
The dust was right behind them.
But the helicopter started to take off as if the pilot could not stand it any longer.
Quenser and the handsome man grabbed onto the landing gear and dangled from the metal rods. The helicopter quickly ascended and they were carried into the empty sky with no lifeline. The gray dust seemed to graze the bottom of their military boots as it filled the landing zone.
“Did we…make it?”
The handsome man crawled up first before reaching down and pulling Quenser onboard. Several other helicopters rose from the city of rubble. Heivia was leaning out nearby, still firing his Crocodile Gatling gun.
A voice arrived over the radio.
“Wing Master to all helicopters. Twenty seconds until the heat-treated missile strike. If you don’t want to be thrown from your helicopters, close the cargo door or fasten in with a harness! Brace for impact! They’re about to blow!!”
An ominous wriggling seemed to compress space itself more than destroy the target.
The gray-filled surface was painted over with a different color: a blazing orange. The explosive flames covered an area of two square kilometers.
A crosswind tossed Quenser and the handsome man’s helicopter around like a paper airplane. The handsome man was just about thrown from the open cargo door, but Quenser somehow managed to grab his arm.
“Is it…over?” blankly muttered the handsome man as he leaned out of the helicopter.
The great explosion had eliminated all trace of the dust.
Some blackened masses had been scattered everywhere. That was what remained of “them”, the creatures beyond the gray curtain. Heivia fired the Gatling gun down on them, but they showed no sign of running away. Those were nothing but corpses.
After seeing that, Quenser finally wiped the sweat from his chin with the back of his hand.
And a smile found its way to his lips.
But…
“Wait…a second,” muttered the handsome man.
His head was pointed in the wrong direction. Everyone else was looking down at the outcome on the surface, but he alone was looking in the exact opposite direction: straight up.
A moment later, a shadow covered everything.
It was almost like the entire area had been covered by a giant roof.
What was it that handsome man was staring at with such disbelief?
“Is that…‘their’ mothership?”
Part 2
It was April and a middle-aged man’s deep voice rang across a great plain in the White Sea District, a battlefield country.
“Cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut!! Awful!! Simply awful!! Redo it all from the beginning! You, extra over there! Do you even have a brain!? You’re not supposed to stand out more than the lead!! Showing off isn’t going to increase your pay!!”
No matter how much he shouted, his voice was not going to reach them and all communication was being handled over radio, but Film Director James Honeymoon still shouted into a megaphone, waved the megaphone around, and beat a nearby assistant director’s head with the megaphone.
Needless to say, everyone around him was fed up with it all.
He apparently believed in filming everything with practical effects instead of CGI, but each retake required resetting all of the explosives and smokescreens. It took a huge, huge, huge amount of time, money, and effort.
After the transport helicopter landed somewhere, Quenser disembarked and complained to the rest of the soldiers.
“Ten kilometers long? Is he screwing with us? If something that big simply flew full-speed into the atmosphere with toxic materials stuffed inside, it’d cause a disease-ridden ice age.”
“I wouldn’t say that if I were you.” Heivia walked up after disembarking another helicopter. “The military is giving its full support in the filming of this movie. It’s clearly a form of wartime propaganda, so it must be sponsored by some VIP way, way, way up the chain of command. Complain about it and you’re picking a fight with something too big to even see.”
Quenser and the other “extras” were not guaranteed a break while the explosives were set up. They were paid the same amount of tax money either way, but sometimes they were forced to work on and on with no end in sight.
“This whole thing is because the Capitalist Corporations and Information Alliance are really starting to get into the movie business, which is making the Legitimacy Kingdom look like the bad guys, right? So our mass media is getting into the entertainment business real fast. But it’s useless. Completely useless. Why is it useless? Because we’ll never catch up if we’re following their lead! We need to predict what’s coming and make the first move that blocks their way or else it’s all wasted effort!!”
“Oh, how scary. But I’m not complaining. If you want pick a fight with a VIP and get yourself sent out to the backwoods, do it on your own.”
It was the same reason that safe country quiz shows had started punishing wrong answers by attacking the young entertainers with special masked commandos who threw stun grenades in through the doors and windows.
Meanwhile, the handsome man with sparkling and silky black hair walked up in a military uniform that did not suit him in the slightest. He was the lead actor and he had a permanent marker in one hand.
“Heh heh heh. Don’t be so grumpy, my little kittens. How about I give you my signature? Would that give you some motivation?”
“Wait, that’s a military supplied backpack!! Don’t write directly on it! And is that thing permanent!? Oh, no! Now I’ll have to pay for it!!”
“And you even call other guys your ‘little kittens’? Get away from me.”
The scattered soldiers had slowly gathered when they heard talk of signatures. He was a well-known actor and he was apparently skilled at motivating people, even if not for the reasons he intended.
Quenser was angry at the unsolicited signature he had been given in the midst of the confusion, but then he asked Heivia a question.
“By the way, where’s the Princess?”
“Same as before. She’s been sulking ever since seeing that storyboard where the space cruiser blows away an Object in one hit. She’s probably still holed up in the Baby Magnum.”
It must have looked like the famous actor was getting along with the assisting soldiers because some of the crew gathered with a large camera. They may have been getting some behind-the scenes photos.
“Okay, here we go. Smile, smile! Three, two, one.”
The picture they took would later become an oft-discussed legend in a certain corner of the film industry.
After all, several dozen smiling soldiers all raised their middle fingers in perfect unison.
Part 3
“It’s all wrong!! You can’t set off all of the explosives at once! You start over there and move this way!! You add a lag into the detonation time to create a wave! Why do I even have to explain this to you morons!? Every last person in the audience would notice immediately!!”
As the director complained far too much for a man his age, Frolaytia held her head in her hands.
In truth, she and the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion were in the middle of a military operation. They had a target they were meant to destroy and they should have sent the Object out right away.
They were in the White Sea District, a battlefield country sandwiched between the Legitimacy Kingdom’s Volga District and the Northern Restricted Zone.
That frozen land was ruled by blizzards of -30 degrees during the winter, but things were different in April.
Simply put, the melted snow created swamp-like sludge for over one hundred kilometers in every direction.
This was not good news for the Baby Magnum’s static electricity propulsion device that had to attach floats for naval battles. They were waiting to see how it could cross the deep swamp that caused tanks and armored trucks to sink.
(But we’d never hear the end of it from the inspectors if we just sat here doing nothing. No one wants to listen to them asking if we’re having flower viewings on the people’s tax money, so we were forced to deal with a low-priority matter.)
“Besides, the full cooperation of the military is only added value.”
The director – she could not remember his name – spoke in a voice considerably too high-strung for his body type.
“It’s like a preorder bonus, a limited-time-only product, your first love, or a girl’s virginity. Those things are only a bonus. If the base product is awful, it’s meaningless. So why do you have to, y’know, be tripping me up like this…”
“Ahhh, I want to punch this guy.”
“Pardon me?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
Frolaytia used every muscle in her face to maintain her smile.
As part of their image campaign, the Legitimacy Kingdom was engaging in information manipulation to send out the disturbing message of, “The military is full of good people☆ The Legitimacy Kingdom are the good guys☆” She would ruin all of that if she went on a rampage and caused an unnecessary incident here, so she was forced to shake her butt like a model when she walked, smile like a saleswoman, and keep her back straight and her chest out to accentuate her bust. If an intelligence officer had not spent three days and three nights explaining the logic of this operation, that middle-aged man would be hanging upside-down from a helicopter as he was dragged through the swamp.
Her information terminal rang.
She checked the screen and found it was from a major general who was probably enjoying a round of golf in a safe country.
“So how does it feel to deal with those fools who have never seen real war?” asked the man. “I have to deal with them in meetings year-round.”
“This has been an important lesson that using someone is a lot harder than just killing them. In fact, that lesson is still ongoing.”
“Peace is precious and we will do whatever it takes to maintain it. As a soldier, you must never forget that original purpose of ours. And if you gain the patience to remove your claws and fangs, maintain a smile, loosen your necktie, undo the top three buttons of your blouse, and show off your cleavage in front of the camera like the director wants, then you might just have a future as a soldier who lives a life of luxury without ever visiting the battlefield.”
“This may be too forward, but I will kill you, sir.”
“Hah hah hah. You really are more suited for the battlefield. And I suppose it’s about time we ended this lesson of yours.”
“Meaning?”
“The plan your battalion suggested was approved. Find a good stopping point for the work there and head to the next site. War is waiting, major.”
Frolaytia instinctually gave a crisp salute.
“I love you, sir.”
“Hah hah hah. Now you’re being a little too friendly. If I were half a century younger, my heart might have skipped a beat.”
“I’ll tell your wife you said so, sir.”
“Do you want to see a man in his seventies cry?”
Part 4
“Phew…”
The Princess slowly piloted the Baby Magnum into the giant maintenance facility and left the cockpit through the elevator-like tunnel.
The maintenance soldiers quickly swarmed the Object and used a pressurized liquid detergent fired by special nozzles to remove the mud and soot caused by the unnecessary filming.
That filth would hardly be a problem for a First Generation Multirole built for all weather and environmental conditions, but before heading out to a real battle, they needed to eliminate anything with even a 0.1% possibility of causing an error.
On the maintenance scaffolding a level below from her, the Princess heard the sound of a carbonated drink being opened amplified several hundred times over. She also saw Quenser Barbotage covered in bubbles.
“What are you doing?”
“Nbwah. Wait, what is…? Dbyah! It won’t stop! Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!?”
The Princess glanced over at the old lady giving instructions with a tablet device in one hand, but that old lady showed no interest in helping Quenser. Any job given to a battlefield student was going to be something that did not really need doing in the first place.
And so the Princess decided to ignore him as well.
“Oh, honestly. I want to go take a shower.”
The special suits worn by Pilot Elites were made to resist blades and bullets, but they also provided high-level body temperature regulation. It was effective enough that she only needed that suit to get by in the desert, the rainforest, or the Antarctic. However, that did not change the fact that she was sometimes simply in the mood for a shower.
And whether he heard what she said or not…
“Brmrgrbrbrdrmrzr!?”
“Bfh! Wait, Quenser!”
Quenser was unable to control the nozzle as it waved right, left, and every direction in between, so its bubbles shot straight up toward the Princess on the next level up.
The white bubbles to the face took out her vision and she stated choking, but then she felt the floor slip out from under her.
She slid down the surface of the spherical main body and fell right on top of Quenser on the scaffolding below.
She knocked Quenser onto the wire mesh floor.
“Cough, cough.”
“Mgh… Princess… Gh… Wait…”
The old maintenance lady’s eyes widened and she shouted “You fool!! Are you trying to end the war early!?”, but the two of them had bigger issues to worry about.
First, the Princess had landed on her butt and that butt was flattening Quenser’s face.
Second, this was not a love comedy zone, so what happened to a human skull when someone’s full body weight was pressed down on it?
Quenser would later claim his brains nearly came out his nostrils.
But at the moment, his focus was on making sure all the blood coming from his nose was not misinterpreted because that could easily lead to a beating.
