Chapter 2(2/3)
After some thought, Quenser pulled a few pen-sized electric fuses from his waist pouch.
“Wait, are you using bombs here!? As durable as an Object may be, there’s plasma at temperatures higher than ten or even a hundred thousand degrees right next to us!”
“I’m not putting these in the Hand Axe. The fuses themselves are just like giant firecrackers, but the Elite won’t be able to tell them apart from gunfire while cowering in the dark.”
“Oh, I see. You’re pretty bad yourself.”
“I’ll drive the bunny forward with some loud noises, so you circle around the other way for a surprise attack. We can only gamble that they won’t try to break through in this direction.”
Heivia tapped Quenser’s shoulder and then vanished down the passageway.
Left alone, the boy had a simple task at hand. He only had to throw the fuses randomly down the passageway and grab his radio. He had not been able to contact the old lady, but outside and inside were different. The signal would reach things inside the same Object.
He pressed the switch with his thumb and dry explosive sounds rang out. He heard a short surprised burst of gunfire that was likely the Pilot Elite’s counterattack. He seemed to have tricked them just fine. The Elite and Heivia must have run across each other on the other side of the donut because he heard an even shorter exchange of gunfire.
However...
“Shit!! Shit, shit, shit!!”
“What is it, Heivia!? Why are you coming back!?”
“That wasn’t random! They were calculating out the ricochets! Oh, goddammit! I’d be dead if I hadn’t fallen back!!”
“Oh, c’mon! You can’t even do your job!?”
Quenser seriously considered kicking the boy back the way he had come, but then a twintailed figure appeared down the curving passageway. When he saw the ultra-small fully-automatic firearm simplified to the point of being T-shaped, he realized he did not have time to be stupid. The two boys scrambled out into the external tunnel and shut the hatch. They heard the heavy sound of bullets slamming into the hatch behind them.
“What do we do!? Wait until they’re out of ammo!?”
“You said they probably have at most fifty shots, right? But even if we counted accurately, we’ll get our brains blown out if they happen to have fifty-one shots. And what if there are more PDWs hidden around like fire extinguishers? We’ll make our triumphant entrance once things quiet down and then be filled with holes. We can’t rely on that.”
“Then do you have some clever idea!? Or is that clever head of yours only any good at wearing stolen panties!?”
“I’ve already done it.”
“?”
“Hey, Heivia. Assault rifles and PDWs are convenient, but you don’t need anything that impressive to kill. You don’t even need a single bullet or blade. Not even poison or drugs are necessary.”
He waved his hand with a smile.
“All you need is water and air. That’s enough to get them to give up.”
Part 4
The twintailed girl was holed up in the donut-shaped reactor maintenance corridor.
She was the Trinity Style’s Pilot Elite.
She gasped for breath holding a PDW simplified to the point of being T-shaped, but this was already over. She understood that, but she could not just let this happen.
She could not surrender to the Legitimacy Kingdom.
If she did that, she would definitely be killed.
That future appeared far too vividly in her mind.
(What should I do?)
The small elite thought deeply inside the donut-shaped passageway after driving the enemy soldiers out.
(What am I supposed to do now?)
Object reactors were generally electronically controlled. They would mechanically supply power without any input from the Pilot Elite and they could be manually controlled from the cockpit if absolutely necessary.
If the reactor was completely out of control, there were countless valves along this passageway for emergency intervention.
But that also meant she could send a stable reactor out of control and blow away everything for kilometers around.
Or she could convince the Legitimacy Kingdom she was doing so in order to get the entire unit to withdraw.
(I just have to do whatever I can.)
That may have sounded like a decent idea, but there was another important factor here.
That plan would change things too much.
Once she started, there was no turning back. If she successfully tricked the Legitimacy Kingdom into retreating, that was great, but there was nothing she could do if she failed and they remained at the maintenance hatch. And if she messed up her bluff and really did send the reactor out of control, she would be vaporized as much as anyone else.
(Yes, that’s right.)
The twintailed girl’s eyes fell on the many valves lined up along the donut’s inner wall. She faced them and touched one of them.
Was she really thinking logically here?
Or was that just an excuse and she really just wanted to take her enemy down with her?
(This has to be the best plan!!)
Without noticing that, she prepared to turn the valve.
But something stopped her.
“?”
Her sense of balance was suddenly thrown off.
She assumed the dizziness came from fear or anxiety. She wiped at her forehead with the back of her hand and found oddly warm sweat coating it.
No.
It was not sweat.
(What...is this?)
It hit her as soon as she asked.
“Is that what they’re doing!? Dammit!!”
She let go of the valve and frantically ran over to the maintenance hatch, but it was too late. The hatch was shut from outside and someone seemed to be pressing up against it. When she realized she could not open it from within, she aimed her PDW toward the thick hatch and sprayed bullets at it in desperation.
Part 5
The two idiots desperately held the hatch closed while hearing dull sounds from within. They knew the bullets were theoretically unable to get through, but the roaring sound was enough for their balls to shrivel up.
“I messed with the steam pipe running along the ceiling,” explained Quenser. “Humans can’t live long in a high-temperature high-humidity environment. There are detailed manuals they follow when constructing tunnels or working in mines. Saunas are adjusted for safety, but you won’t last twenty minutes in an improperly maintained one.”
The gunfire soon stopped.
The Elite seemed to kick at and bang on the hatch for a while afterwards, but even that eventually ended.
They waited a few minutes after that.
True silence surrounded them as the enemy put up no resistance at all.
The two of them nodded to each other, hesitantly opened the hatch, and felt the same humid steam as when opening an Island Nation rice cooker.
Inside, they found a girl with long blonde twintails wearing a green special suit that covered her entire body.
A loose cloth was wrapped around her body over the thin, skin-tight suit. The cloth formed an X over her chest and her waist, and together they created a diamond shape. It may have pointed to some kind of doctrine or rank within the Faith Organization, but the uncultured and unintellectual idiots could only see it as an oddly-designed swimsuit for a pin-up model.
She was lying on her side like a heat stroke victim.
Her skin was flushed and her bangs were plastered to her forehead. Her entire face was red and her entire body was covered in what may have been beads of sweat or drops of water.
Quenser sighed as he looked down at her.
“Things are finally starting to get sexy around here, so it would be a waste to turn her into a corpse. Let’s take her back while she’s still alive.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you: is that calm demeanor of yours something you buy at a store somewhere?”
Part 6
In truth, the next step was the hardest part.
After all, the Trinity Style’s tunnel was a steep slope that curved around like an off-ramp. Even if girls were light, they still weighed forty to fifty kilograms, so it was the same as carrying a bag of rice. The two idiots slipped several times on the way and were very nearly forced to start again from square one.
The twintailed Elite woke up on the way, but she seemed to decide resisting was a poor plan when she had no gun and her thumbs were bound behind her back. For how much she had struggled before, she was being quite docile.
They somehow managed to arrive outside.
When the two idiots showed up absolutely soaking with sweat, the old maintenance lady gave them a puzzled look.
“It wore you out that much to catch one little rabbit?”
“Do you want to try it? I don’t even remember how many times we almost died in there.”
Heivia was too exhausted to say anything more.
Quenser placed his hands on the back of the twintailed girl’s shoulders, but not because he was a sexually harassing lowlife. The Object’s main body was a round sphere and the Elite could easily lose her balance and fall with her hands bound. And that was true of an accident or an intentional act.
“What’s your name? You’ll be interrogated more than enough later, but I thought I’d ask.”
“Skuld. Skuld Silent-Third.”
That was all the Elite girl said.
Or maybe it was all she could bear to say. Even taking into account the moonlight illumination, her skin was unnaturally pale. Quenser also felt a tremor in the shoulders he held in his hands.
She must have just been that fearful and anxious of falling into enemy hands. Unlike all the random grunts, she was the one actually participating in war and killing so many people. She may have been aware of the grudges she would have made.
However, that did not seem to be the real reason.
Skuld looked back toward Quenser and spoke in a slow, trembling voice.
“I’ll be killed. I’ll definitely be killed.”
“Listen. We already received the White Flag. The battle is over.”
“No.”
Skuld shook her head, but not because she could not trust Quenser and the others.
“I’ll be killed by the Norn.”
“?”
Quenser did not initially understand, but...
“I’m talking about this Object!!”
By the time he grasped what she meant, the situation was already underway.
The round Object that Quenser, Heivia, and the others stood on began to move.
The Pilot Elite was no longer onboard, it should have been empty, and it should not have been able to move, yet it was. With the simple movement of a wet dog shaking off some water, it worked at throwing off the puny humans clinging to it. No, it even swung around the helicopters and armored trucks attached by wires. It looked like an amusement park thrill ride using centrifugal force.
There was nothing they could do.
By the time he caught on, Quenser had already been thrown out into the night sky. And he was not the only one. Heivia, the old maintenance lady, and the many other young technician soldiers joined him. They were all amusingly flailing around like awkward birds, but Quenser was no different.
A girl floated in the air nearby. Skuld had her thumbs bound behind her back, so he grabbed at her body and pulled her close.
There was nothing more to do.
The one piece of luck was just how huge the Object was. Instead of falling into the flower field directly below, they fell into a densely packed jungle a short distance away.
Narrow branches audibly broke and absorbed some of their momentum before they hit the ground.
“Gh...bah!? Aghgeh...gehah!!”
He landed on his back and had trouble breathing, but the pain told him he had not died quite yet.
Not wearing a lifeline had actually proved fortunate. Even now, some of the spider web or cat’s cradle wires remained and both equipment and personnel were being swung around like morning stars.
“Ah...ghah!! Skuld...are you...okay?”
He looked to the girl in his arms.
She would not have been able to land properly with her hands tied behind her, so Quenser may have been right to grab her. At the very least, it did not look like anything was broken.
“If you are, then explain this. What is that!? Why is the Trinity Style taking strategic action with the Pilot Elite removed!?”
Was she going to say it was AI-controlled and did not need a Pilot Elite?
That was Quenser’s thought, but the answer was something else entirely.
“The Norns are the three goddesses of destiny.”
“You don’t mean...”
“Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld. The Norn has three Elites.”
That explained things.
If the other two Elites could pilot the Object even with Skuld captured, the current situation made sense.
If the alternative was letting Skuld, who held highly classified information, fall into enemy hands, killing her here was the logical decision when the Elites were replaceable like that.
“Now I get it,” said Heivia who had fallen nearby.
Could a student like Quenser get away with calling him pathetic? That awful friend was beaten up and the old maintenance lady was practically grabbing at the back of his uniform’s collar to support herself.
“That busty commander was right when she said it looked like different Elites were boarding the Trinity Style. That’s exactly what was happening! But who would have ever thought that three of them were controlling the thing at once!? Goddammit!!”
“That would also be why the tunnel curved like an off-ramp. The shortest route would mean the tunnels leading to the three cockpits would intersect. They had to spiral around so that wouldn’t happen.”
But...
“What’s going to happen now that they’re forcing it to move!? It was already taken out of commission by that ablative shell, right!? It can’t move right with that damage and its main cannon was blown away and turned into a flower or something. Are they really going to fight the Princess like that!?”
“You understand nothing,” said Skuld harshly.
The machine she had entrusted her life to was now targeting her and she spoke in the face of that unreasonable reality.
“You understand nothing of how dreadful the Norn is.”
A moment later, the most unreasonable thing of all happened.
With a blinding flash of light, the Trinity Style’s supposedly destroyed main cannon fired.
Part 7
In truth, the old lady and other maintenance soldiers had found something strange while Quenser and Heivia were having their firefight with Skuld.
It was a blocky work robot the size of a brick. It had a few wheels covered in small suction cups, so it could likely move along the walls and ceiling.
Quenser had found one inside the main cannon that had opened up like a blooming flower.
He had guessed it was a maintenance device meant to clean the air conditioner or something, but the old lady and the others had a different idea.
“What is this?”
“We found a bunch underneath the armor panels. They completely covered the inside like wharf roaches. With that many, they could probably lift up and move the armor panels.”
“What about the cannons?”
“We can’t rely on the main one since it was blown to bits, but we took some samples from the smaller secondary cannons. Same with the supports. It’s like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.”
“In other words...”
They heard the sound of a bug’s jaws opening and closing.
The old lady could not tell where it was coming from, but the creaking sound came from somewhere inside the giant machine. Almost as if it was changing form like a living creature.
“This Object isn’t a solid mass of metal. Is it more like children’s building blocks? Can a group of small blocks move around to create a completely different Object?”
Part 8
After a deafening explosion and a blinding light, a few of the Baby Magnum’s main cannons were torn away. The sound of blowing wind came next. It seemed to happen with a certain frequency, like someone slowly swinging a metal bat, and then something arrived.
One of the Baby Magnum’s lost main cannons slammed into the jungle Quenser and the others were hiding in.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”
Quenser grabbed Skuld and Heivia grabbed the old lady’s hand as they took off running. They leaped into a depression in the ground and hid there just in time for the wreckage of the main cannon to pass by overhead while knocking down all the trees in the area.
But that was not the only damage.
Either the wires had snapped or the welded points had come undone because the swinging analysis equipment, armored trucks, and transport helicopters flew their way in long parabolic arcs. The analysis equipment felled countless trees, the rotors of the rapidly spinning helicopters mowed down the underbrush, and the armored trucks exploded and set the surrounding jungle ablaze.
Heivia trembled next to Quenser inside the depression.
“You’re kidding! You have got to be kidding!! What the hell was that!? I thought the Trinity Style’s main cannon had been blown away!!”
“They’re called Dvergr,” said Skuld in Quenser’s arms. “They are the smallest unit making up our Norn. They are the dwarves that create the weapons of the gods, so there isn’t just one form. The damage doesn’t matter. The Norn will just take on a new form, become a new Object, and attack.”
“I can’t believe this,” groaned Quenser. “So it only looked out of commission after taking that ablative shell because you were playing dead!? You were waiting for us to get close so you could easily take out the Princess who was so far away!?”
“We didn’t plan it out that well. Your attack really was a complete surprise. The three of us were discussing how to best turn things around and we voted two-against-one to sacrifice me.”
“It doesn’t really matter either way. This just means the insecticide wasn’t enough to kill the roach, right!? What do we do? The disgusting thing’s still alive and kicking!!”
The Princess could still move even with a few of her main cannons lost. She was moving quickly to recover from the disadvantage of taking a surprise attack head on and she fired low-stability plasma cannons in retaliation.
The Trinity Style avoided a few of them, but one clearly hit it dead on.
It should have pierced right through it, but...
“It...stopped it!? But that was definitely a clean hit!!”
The surface was a little melted and orange, but that was it. Even as Quenser shouted his question, he came up with the answer on his own.
“Don’t tell me... You’ve got to be kidding me!! Did it take the evenly-distributed onion armor and focus it on that one point? It forced its way through using the thickness of its armor!? It can do that!?”
It no longer seemed feasible to simply blow through a single point of the armor. Unless the Princess burned through all of the tiny blocks making up the fifty meter, two hundred thousand ton mass, the Trinity Style would continue moving.
He started feeling faint from the hopelessness of the situation.
The Princess would be worn down like this. Once she was defeated, they would lose their support. And with the Trinity Style functioning, there was a chance the surrendered Faith Organization troops would resume the fight. The situation was doubly bad as things were.
“Didn’t I tell you?” said Skuld who had her hands bound behind her back with Quenser’s arm around her shoulders.
She looked up at him from near his chest with a smile of resignation.
“I’ll be killed by the Norn. A single Elite isn’t worth all that much to the Faith Organization. They’re perfectly willing to abandon us if it means winning the battle.”
The Object was made up of tiny robots and could freely change its design.
It always used three Pilot Elites, so they did not need any unique characteristics.
It made sense from a design perspective.
The idea had been discussed in the past. With one Elite per Object, military action could be stopped by personal issues like a stomachache, a cavity, or heartbreak. Those fears were generally ignored because a single Object was more useful than one thousand normal tanks, but the Trinity Style’s unit had taken a different approach.
They had raised the value of the whole by reducing the individual value to near zero.
But...
“That’s Experimental Battlefield Madagascar for you. Everyone here is insane.”
“?”
When it came down to it, weapons development was about killing people in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible. There was no room for idealism there. The news on TV might talk about inhumane weapons, but who would be willing to head out there wearing a suit and holding a rose in order to elegantly kill people? Only the side suffering the death bothered with those consolations.
But this was different.
This design principle was lowering the value of the lives onboard the Object and of the lives the other soldiers were trusting their own lives in. That did not sit well with Quenser who was not even a novice designer yet. No matter how much it improved the odds of victory, no matter how low it brought the costs, and no matter how much the customer would love a design like this, he felt a chill before any excitement.
“...”
The next thing he knew, he was glaring at the loathsome colossal weapon and bringing his radio to his mouth.
“Princess, I know this can’t be easy, but please listen. Focus your main cannons on the front of the Trinity Style. Don’t give them a chance to rest.”
“They aren’t giving me a chance to circle around anyway, but then what, Quenser?”
“Then...”
He paused as he stared at the monster. If the “cool weapon” he had hoped for was a soda, then this was that soda after it had gone flat.
“We’ll circle behind it and destroy the damn thing.”
Part 9
They left Skuld in the depression with her hands still bound behind her back.
Quenser got up and spoke to his awful friend.
“Let’s go, Heivia. Let’s end this.”
“Are you serious? We’re going to run through this catastrophe on our own two legs!? They’d better make a movie out of this!!”
Heivia tearfully complained as he ran alongside the other boy. They left the jungle and reached the plain covered in lovely flowers. The ground had been torn into here and there, leaving the dark soil exposed. There were also plenty of smashed helicopters and armored trucks lying on their sides. That was the fate of the armored weapons that had instantly welded their wires on with aluminum or iron oxide. Soldiers performing first aid were gathered behind them like bugs preparing for winter underneath a stone.
Quenser joined a group of them, tapped on the armored truck with the back of his hand and spoke to a medic wearing a military uniform and a nurse cap.
“Hey, you alive? Can anyone move? And do you know how many of these battered shields can still run?”
“I-I can share my map data with you. But what do you hope to accomplish against that monster? Everyone’s too scared to do anything.”
“You say they can’t do anything, but they’ve got two hands and two feet, right? Then you can break though their cowardice by telling them to help out if they want a new pick-up line to use at the bar!”
Another blinding light and deafening explosion illuminated and tore up the late night flower field. The giants were duking it out. The Princess was having a hard time of it in her First Generation, but not because she could not hit her enemy. She simply could not pierce the enemy’s onion armor because the pieces would gather at the predicted point of contact.
Quenser slapped the medic girl’s back to cheer her up and then similarly asked for help over the radio. Meanwhile, he ran out from behind that puny shield while staying low to the ground.
Heivia looked about to die despite not having been hit by anything yet.
“What are we supposed to do!? If all of the Princess’s low-stability plasma cannons can’t break through, then how are we supposed to damage it from the surface!?”
“Heivia, everyone’s working hard right now. At the moment, we have fewer minds than weapons. I don’t know how much a student like me can manage, but we need to get our hands and feet moving!”
“I’m asking what good that will do! Outdated bullets and shells can’t get through armor that can withstand a nuke!!”
“Don’t be so quick to say that.”
Immediately after Quenser’s baffling answer, a unique sound came from the surviving armored trucks. They were attacking the Trinity Style from behind while the Princess attacked from the front. Instead of weapons using gunpowder, they were firing wires from the five meter crossbow-like devices. The violent roar sounded a lot like a thick flat spring snapping after being bent too far.
The long arrows were launched one after another, but they did not stab at their target with their weight and speed. That would only have gotten them deflected by the Object’s armor. Instead, they used aluminum and iron oxide chemical reactions that created instantaneous heat of a few thousand degrees to fuse onto the armor panels.
However...
“Ahh, I knew it,” lamented Heivia as he ran through the battlefield of flashing light and explosions. “That isn’t going to stop it! The trucks are being swung around instead!!”
They could see the soldiers scrambling out and diving to the ground just before the armored trucks were pulled up into the air. They never could have reacted that quickly if they had not already been prepared to escape at a moment’s notice. None of them had thought they could win.
Except one, that is.
“That’s what I wanted.”
“What?”
“Hey, Heivia. It’s true the Trinity Style looks invincible at first glance. That fifty meter and two hundred thousand ton mass is made up of small robots that can remake the entire thing to match any conditions, environment, or enemy. It’s the ultimate Second Generation. No, since it can fight no matter the weather or environment, maybe it’s gone back to being a premium model First Generation.”
“What does it matter when we can’t beat the thing!?”
“Have you forgotten? All it’s doing is rearranging its materials. It doesn’t have a factory inside to create new blocks. It hasn’t overturned the conservation of mass.”
“If you’re actually planning to explain this, then just do it already.”
“If they’re prettying up one spot, wrinkles have to appear elsewhere. I’ll put it so simply an idiot could understand: It wants to make its armor thicker, but where is it taking those parts from? When it takes that armor away, won’t it be thinner there?”
Quenser and Heivia jumped inside an armored truck lying on its side. It could no longer drive around on its tires, but the turret-like weapon on-->>