Heavy Object

Volume 19, Chapter 2: When You See a Ghost on the Battlefield ]] Ghost Unit Interception in the Tunguska District Part 8-12

Part 8

But no matter how cruel it might seem, it was still the most logical choice.

Quenser was forced to accept that fact when Azureyfear Winchell used some kind of self-defense technique to send him spinning through the air. Sladder simply shrugged without a scratch on him. Quenser had been right next to the man, so he really wished he had just hit him with the rock instead of throwing it.

The prisoners were handcuffed, but they had him overpowered.

While he groaned down on the snow, Elina Silverbullet whispered in his ear.

“I envy you.”

“?”

“When I heard the gunfire, I too considered how we could use it. That must mean I am more like them than you.”

If they had some way of crossing the ravine, they might just find a rubber boat with the Legitimacy Kingdom corpse. But there was no sign of a bridge and any bridge that did exist would be a crucial point. The Information Alliance would definitely have at least one guard there.

(It’s around a dozen meters across. All we have to work with are dirt, snow, rocks, and trees. It’s 15 below. The trees are tall and straight, so maybe we could turn one into a bridge. Or…?)

Quenser shook his head.

No, they didn’t even need to cross the ravine. Hadn’t he heard metal being destroyed too?

“The burning wax corpse, the human sherbet on the rock, and the organs caught in the trees.”

“You mean the ghost victims? What of them?”

“They were Legitimacy Kingdom too, so the animal robot carrying their gear might still be wandering nearby!!”

He shouldn’t have had to explain that, but the obvious solution had slipped their minds entirely.

Maybe they had been too focused on needing to cross the ravine and maybe their fear of the ghost had worn them out too much.

They soon found a deer-like shape moving through the trees. That was the robot. The corpses may have been too mutilated for it to recognize them. Without a controller, Quenser had to trip it with his long stick and then the prisoners broke its lenses and legs with their chains. He opened one of the bags it was carrying. It only carried some bent assault rifles and some mobile devices with cracked screens. Azureyfear clicked her tongue when she saw the useless rifles. They were made to fire grenades too, but that didn’t look promising either.

“I doubt these fuses will work anymore. Carrying those around would be too dangerous.”

“You were given handguns for self-defense, weren’t you? You could always pick up some ammo.”

Quenser wasn’t interested in the weapons. He wanted a way to escape, not to fight.

He glanced over at the broken robot.

(Sorry, but I need to borrow your gear.)

He feared the thick military rubber boat would have been broken by all this damage. And even if the boat was intact, would the large motor run? For that matter, those mutilated soldiers might not have even had a boat.

He feared more and more that he had been clinging to false hope here.

Then he opened another bag and felt something inside.

“Yes,” he said on reflex. “I found the boat!! I was right after all!!”

“But…hasn’t it melted from the heat?”

“That doesn’t matter, Elina. The boat might have a hole, but we have the motor and battery. As long as we find an intact boat, we can combine it with the surviving parts. We might even be able to press the hole against part of another boat and melt them together with some fire. That’s the beauty of standardized devices.”

It turned out only the exterior bag was damaged and the actual boat inside was fine. That saved them the time of patching it up.

“Now we can travel down the river.”

They would still have to be careful about the noise from the motor, but the Information Alliance patrols would be easy to detect since they were using trucks. Switching off the motor whenever they heard those loud engines would be enough. And since the Information Alliance had let the gear robot survive, they must not have done much recon work. If they didn’t know the Legitimacy Kingdom was carrying boats, they wouldn’t think to focus their search on the frigid ravine river.

The bright path to survival was finally in sight.

They approached the ravine with the deflated unit. Quenser used his stick to check for a snow cornice and then looked down to see it was more than 10m to the bottom. Climbing down to the river might sound simple, but now they needed an actual method of doing so.

Still, it was better than no plan at all.

Azureyfear whispered to Quenser while he looked down into the ravine.

“About the ghost.”

“?”

“Animals don’t use fire and we still can’t explain how that one soldier was turned to wax, but I think your observation was decent for a commoner. I think we should divide the ghost victims into two categories: those that were killed by the ‘ghost’ phenomenon and those who died to something else.”

“Died to…something else?”

She held her long hair down with a hand to peer down into the deep ravine while she nodded.

“We still haven’t seen for ourselves what this ghost even is. I am worried about my brother…but the ghost produced by the Ghost Changer may be something surprisingly mundane. Something that only becomes so unimaginably deadly when used in the Tunguska District.”

The Tunguska District was the origin of a mysterious event.

An explosion with no apparent source had instantly turned 2000 square kilometers of old-growth forest to charcoal and left the land barren for decades. It was covered in green again now, but the legend remained.

Quenser thought for a bit and then groaned. He had only learned one thing: no immediate answer was forthcoming.

“I can’t believe this. Does that mean we have to solve the mystery of the Tunguska event on top of the Ghost Changer? I thought people had settled on it being an asteroid breaking up in the atmosphere?”

“Ah ha ha. But doesn’t that make it a lot easier to investigate? Whatever the answer, it was a natural phenomenon, just like a wild animal attack. When people find the answer, they go ‘oh, is that all’ and lose interest. That’s the kind of secret you can find just lying around, unlike a new piece of military technology protected by countless layers of security.”

Sladder, the expert who had developed mass drivers capable of reaching the moon, had hinted at another possibility earlier. Quenser only had a passing familiarity with it due to its relation to Object main cannons, so the man would know more about it.

Something about this bothered Quenser, so he looked up from the ravine.

He wanted to gather all the necessary information before continuing.

“Hey, Sladder. What exactly caused the Tungus-”

He trailed off.

That wasn’t Sladder Honeysuckle standing next to him.

It was someone with half his face melting off.

Quenser’s breath caught in his throat and he couldn’t even scream.

But the half-melted face did scream, shoving Quenser away with both hands.

“M-monster!!!”

“?”

Did Quenser look like a monster to him?

But he didn’t have time to ponder that. He had just been peering down in the ravine while on the lookout for snow cornices, so what happened when he was shoved hard?

He staggered back into the deflated rubber boat and the small child standing nearby.

He and Elina Silverbullet fell from the 10m ravine as a chunk of snow broke free below them.

Part 9

Ten meters was a tricky height. You might survive if you landed on a soft flower bed, a sheet iron roof, or the thick cushion used for the pole vault, but you didn’t stand much of a chance if you landed on the jagged rocks at the bottom of a ravine.

On instinct, Quenser held young Elina tight in one arm and used the other hand to pull in the elliptical object floating next to him. Then he used his mouth to pull hard on the thick cord.

Nitrogen gas burst out, rapidly inflating the rubber boat. It probably worked similar to a car airbag or a fire extinguisher.

Of course, it didn’t slow them as much as a parachute. The boat dropped quite rapidly while still bent nearly in half with Quenser and Elina contained within. Then it hit the hard ground.

They bounced.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to worry about jagged rocks piercing their bodies. These military boats had been designed to accommodate rough landing operations anywhere from a sandy beach to a rocky coast, so the cushioning of the air within was nothing to sneeze at.

But it was too soon to breathe a sigh of relief. Gravity seized ahold of them again after their bounce. This time, they landed in the dark river running down the center of the V-shaped ravine.

Quenser thought his heart was going to stop when the liquid touched him.

He reflexively curled up, but then he realized he had let go of the girl and she was vanishing into the dark river!

“Pwah!! Elina, where are you!?”

When his head breached the surface, the biting wind grew twice as powerful. His bangs began to freeze starting from the tips. He had never imagined 1-degree water would actually feel warm to him.

And his cries received no response.

The current was even faster than it had looked from above. If he hadn’t grabbed onto the boat with aching and rapidly numbing fingers, he would have been tossed about wildly. There was no way a 9-year-old like Elina Silverbullet could swim while fully clothed here.

Quenser held onto the boat for dear life and turned on his light despite the danger.

He was risking his life with that light, but it barely helped.

Steam was rising from the river even though it was only 1 degree. That was just how deadly the air was.

A dark and gloomy feeling pressed down on him, but then he spotted something. That wasn’t just an illusion brought on by the wavering steam. A small hand stuck straight up out of the dark water a short distance away.

This wasn’t something from a ghost story. It was a living human being still trying desperately to survive.

“…”

She was about 10m away and upstream of him, but if he waited too long, her hand would sink back below the water and probably never resurface. Yet if he let go of the motorboat in these rapids, he would lose his means of getting downstream.

He could choose the girl or the boat.

Quenser Barbotage clenched his teeth and made his choice.

“Argh!!”

He tore away his fingers that were half freezing to the boat and he fought the current.

He couldn’t use his light anymore. Darkness surrounded him once more, hiding the small hand from view.

He ended up relying mostly on intuition.

He trusted the sensation he felt in his fingers, grabbed tight, and pulled up.

“Cough!! Cough, cough!?”

“No, Elina!! Don’t breathe in through your nose!! Gather the air in your mouth and let it warm up before breathing it in. You’ll damage your lungs otherwise!”

To prevent coughing Elina from reflexively delivering a finishing blow to her own body, Quenser forced his wet hand over her small face and warned her. The nose could inhale more air than the mouth and you could not hold the air between your cheeks when breathing through the nose. It went without saying what would happen if you sent this piercing cold air directly to your lungs.

(But what do we do now!? We’ve lost our boat!!)

For now, he focused on staying afloat while they held each other close and let the current carry them. He kept one arm solidly around Elina’s shockingly small hips and used the other hand to shine his unreliable light around.

The light reflected off of something.

It was the abandoned rubber boat. It had been swept downstream, but it must have gotten caught on a sharp rock jutting up from the riverbed.

He reached desperately for it.

Grabbing it must have affected its balance because it resumed moving. It flowed downstream once more.

There was no saving them if they remained in the 1-degree river.

It was difficult with just the one arm, but since Elina was buoyant, she didn’t feel as heavy in the water. He held his light in his mouth and first pushed her small body up into the boat. Then he climbed in after her. If she hadn’t moved to the other side, the boat might have capsized under his weight.

But boarding the boat did not make them safe.

He thought he could actually hear it when he saw Elina’s hair and poncho freezing. He could guess the same was happening to him.

It was 15 below zero out here.

The white hell of Siberia had truly bared its fangs now.

The two of them held each other tight. There was no room for shame here. If they didn’t overcome this cold, their ears, fingers, and whatever else would get frostbitten and fall off. Elina’s fluffy knit clothing was designed to store air to insulate her from the cold, but cold water was its worst nightmare. There was no preventing the wool from soaking up all that water.

They shivered while looking out ahead - downstream.

The motorboat was supposed to let them escape the battlefield at nearly 200km/h, but that felt like a joke now. The V-shaped ravine curved this way and that through the darkness and sharp rocks stuck out of the water all over the place. Quenser was hesitant to start the motor up at all, much less travel at nearly 200km/h. Simply letting the current take them was terrifying enough. The most he could do was shine his unreliable light out ahead and cling to the rear motor unit to operate the rudder.

(Another example of Frolaytia’s ultra optimism. When I get back, I’m warming my fingers on her boobs until they stop trembling.)

As sturdy as the military boat was, a tear from one of the fang-like rocks would still sink it. And just because it had survived last time did not mean it would survive next time. The damage would not go away on its own. Unfortunately, shining his light on the river ahead did not tell him what was lurking below the surface.

(This won’t last long.)

Quenser felt dizzy while he held Elina with his teeth chattering.

He could feel his pulse more than ever before, but that felt more like a last-ditch effort than anything. And if his heartbeat weakened, he doubted it would ever recover. The upper limit would gradually fall until finally reaching a flatline zero.

(We’ll both die if we don’t find some place to dry off and change clothes!! Even if we do make it downstream, we won’t make it to the Legitimacy Kingdom evac point 120km past that!!)

“Wh-what is…that?”

Elina Silverbullet was shivering too, but she pointed her small finger elsewhere. She was looking up at a dark shape in the distance.

“A bridge?”

“Shh!”

Quenser wrapped both arms around her and lay down in the boat.

The Information Alliance probably had the area surrounded while they gradually worked their way inwards, but they would be focusing their inspections and hunting on the known land routes. They wouldn’t be focused on the ravine river, but a bridge where the road met the river was bad news. He didn’t see any searchlights, but he knew they had been driving a truck around with the headlights off and shooting any Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers they found.

The bridge was more than 10m above.

They could be sending something invisible down into the ravine even now. Whether it was IR or microwaves, he, Elina, and the boat would be shredded by a machinegun or grenade launcher the instant they were detected.

It was risky, but they couldn’t turn back either.

He had no plan, but their only option was to let the current carry them. Forcing the motor to fight the rapid current would make a dangerously loud noise. Besides, running away would just get them frozen to death. This was another danger to contend with, but their best bet was still to travel downstream and try to reach the Legitimacy Kingdom maintenance base.

He steeled himself as they approached the concrete bridge spanning the ravine.

Would they make it through or not?

His tension rose to its peak.

“…”

The boat came to an unexpected stop. He looked around in shock to find the boat’s path was blocked by a metal fence placed across the water’s surface.

It was an unusual thing, so the Information Alliance must have done it.

“What now?”

“We can’t keep going! There don’t seem to be any soldiers above us, but the fence might be electrified. Touching it might have triggered a sensor!!”

At least it hadn’t been linked with a naval mine that detonated as soon as they touched the fence. Maybe the Information Alliance hadn’t wanted large fish or trash triggering it on accident.

Fortunately, there was a metal staircase installed on the ravine wall, presumably for bridge inspection and maintenance. On the other hand, that meant there was only the one path up. They had to run up there and vanish into the night before those Information Alliance freaks came to investigate.

He grabbed the fence and pushed his body against it to slide the boat over. Once at the edge of the ravine, he picked up Elina, hopped onto land, and climbed the metal stairs.

Climbing a 10m spiral staircase was a lot like climbing 3 stories.

He needed to clear those stairs before any Information Alliance soldiers showed up. With that and the biting chill, he ran up the stairs without worrying about his clanging footsteps, but he thought his heart was going to stop once he reached the top.

He saw simple structures similar to boxy metal containers, the unique silhouette of a radar facility, and even giant hangars resembling gyms with semicircular roofs. They were so surrounded on all sides that the curtain of snow wasn’t enough to hide it.

This was the Information Alliance maintenance base zone.

They must have been restricting light usage because the entire place was dark.

The bridge across the ravine was crucial to transportation around here, so they could monitor who moved in and out by setting up a checkpoint at that one point. So the Information Alliance had set up their easily-deployed maintenance base around the bridge.

(Well, this sucks.)

They really had hit a dead end now.

An Object maintenance base zone would hold anywhere between 800 and 1000 soldiers. There was no way an amateur battlefield student could sneak his way through there without being spotted. But returning to the ravine wasn’t an option either. If that fence had been electrified, the Information Alliance would send an armed team down to investigate the alarm he had triggered.

They were in a real “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

The tension was enough to distract him from the cold, but then Elina spoke from his arms.

“Umm.”

“What is it? I’m trying to come up with a plan here.”

“It’s not about that. I was wondering what happened here.”

He wasn’t sure what the genius girl meant.

She must have noticed because she clarified for him.

“Like you said before, there are no soldiers up here.”

“Oh.”

“But this is undeniably a military facility. And a large one at that. So isn’t it odd that there’s no one around?”

He had a bad feeling about this.

Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any guards around. And not just because they were using night vision goggles and didn’t need their lights.

The place felt deserted.

The lack of artificial lights could be explained, but could a “small city” of at least 800 people really stay as silent as an old-growth forest in midwinter?

Quenser gulped and took a step away from the stairs and into the Information Alliance maintenance base zone.

His bad feeling had been right on the money.

Countless corpses had been mutilated, burned, and splattered against the walls in ways that couldn’t be explained with bullets.

The base was littered with victims of the ghost.

Part 10

Quenser had hit his limit.

He wanted to run away somewhere - anywhere - but the maintenance base surrounding the bridge was filled with death and gore.

With his psyche pushed to the limit, he simply obeyed his sense of danger. He picked up Elina again, accidentally kicked aside a flare gun buried in the snow, tackled open a nearby building’s door, and stumbled inside.

The gentle, heated air washed across his half-frozen skin and hair.

Was the dampness he felt in the corners of his eyes really just the frost and ice melting?

“What happened here?”

An Information Alliance truck had been out on patrol earlier, but they wouldn’t be following those routines if this were happening. So had this only just happened?

The building he had entered looked like a barracks or medical room. He still felt dizzy as he tossed Elina Silverbullet one of the towels hanging on the wall. He couldn’t support his own weight, so he sat down on a nearby bed.

A broken radio sat at his feet, like it had been thrown against the floor. Who had its owner been unable to contact? Was the ghost interfering with radio communications too?

“Wasn’t the ghost supposed to be something caused by the Ghost Changer loaded onto the Information Alliance Object? So why were their own people killed after being cursed or possessed or whatever!?”

He was shouting at the top of his lungs in the Legitimacy Kingdom language, but the Information Alliance never showed up to surround him. No one was left to hear him. The base was entirely dead.

Elina did not seem to have an answer either.

She simply sat there in thought with the towel over her head, so Quenser crouched down and wrung her knit clothing out like a rag to try and get the cold water out and then dried her off with the towel as best he could over her clothing. Otherwise, she could easily freeze to death inside this heated room.

Not even a well-supplied Information Alliance base would have a uniform that fit a 9-year-old girl, so her only real option was to soak up as much of the water with the towel and then stand in front of the stove to dry the rest of the way off.

“Nh, nhhh.”

He was making these decisions for her, but the genius girl seemed fairly satisfied. Either she was surprisingly defenseless or she had opened up to him more than her emotionless eyes let on.

“Let’s start by listing off the possibilities,” she said. “Did the Information Alliance lose control of their ghost and self-destruct? Or were they not the ones who released the ghost on the battlefield in the first place?”

“Neither of those makes sense.”

Quenser shook his head.

He was looking after Elina and keeping her alive. Without that simple heroism, he may have succumbed to the fear, searched out a gun, thoughtless fired on the wall as a way to lash out at sharing a base with so many corpses, and been killed by a ricocheting bullet.

The responsibility changed the way he thought.

But not even he could say if that was a positive change.

“This isn’t the Information Alliance’s first time using the Ghost Changer. They move it from Object to Object as an add-on weapon to hide it from the records, but they must have some kind of detailed manual or routine they share. I doubt they would have screwed things up so badly it killed the 800 or 1000 people on the base.”

“In that case.”

That did not stop Elina.

Her cold expression remained, but she may have needed to keep thinking to distract herself from her anxiety. She laid out her thoughts while he dried her hair with the towel.

“Could the Information Alliance’s ghost not be what killed these soldiers? That would mean there is another mysterious cause of death out there.”

“…”

Something hidden in this land had caused the Tunguska event.

That something had blown away an area of 2000 square kilometers, filled Europe’s sky with an eerie glow, and left the site of the blast barren for decades afterwards.

When the Information Alliance had tried to conquer this battlefield with their dreadful technology, had they awoken something else they hadn’t known was here?

“Even if their skills had dulled with Objects ruling the battlefield, what could possibly wipe out a base of 1000 before they could even send out an SOS?”

“Every possibility falls under one of two categories.”

Elina did not have all the answers.

She looked like a loner genius girl, but she may have actually been the type to take inspiration from discussions.

She stood in front of the stove to dry off and watched Quenser transform the hot water in the kettle into a hot drink using the cocoa powder at the bottom of the mugs.

He knew having wet underwear felt awful, but he frantically slapped her hands down when she started to lift her knit skirt in front of the stove. What exactly was she trying to warm by the fire there!?

Her desire for warmth was greater than her shame, but her restless hands instead reached for a pocket-size plant guide. Had the Information Alliance soldiers been looking for edible plants in between shifts?

“Either the Information Alliance destroyed itself from within, or it was slaughtered from without. Whatever theory we construct will be greatly influenced by that.”

Even with their Object out and about, the 1000 soldiers at the base would have been well armed with guns, artillery, tanks, and armored trucks. Not even 1000 bears would be enough to slaughter them in the blink of an eye.

Was the ghost’s curse or possession even more powerful than that?

External heat was not enough to keep the cold out, so Elina took the mug Quenser offered her, wrapped her small hands around it, and tested the hot cocoa with the tip of her tongue.

“It could have been a gas or bacteria. What if a sealed container was sent down from upstream and detonated when it hit the fence at the bottom of the ravine near the center of the base? Hot.”

“The corpses were mutilated. Some kind of macro force was used to kill them.”

“Foo, foo. Then maybe a large unit of powered suits attacked. Maybe another part of your Legitimacy Kingdom force.”

“Powered suits aren’t as convenient as they look. A tank or attack helicopter can overpower them, so you can think of them as stronger than infantry but weaker than an armored truck. They can’t unilaterally slaughter an entire base if you have enough of them. There would definitely be some Legitimacy Kingdom corpses, wreckage, and bullet holes, but I don’t see any.”

“Oh, this isn’t just sugar. It has coconut and caramel too… Then could it have been something more powerful than a tank or attack helicopter?”

But what exactly could it have been? They were right back to discussing an unidentified ghostly curse or grudge.

Still, something bothered Quenser about it all.

Some corpses had been burned with an intense heat. Others had been crushed by a powerful shockwave. All of the gruesome deaths were reminiscent of the legendary Tunguska event.

However…

(Huh? What was it Frolaytia told us about the Hornos District at the southernmost part of South America?)

Now he wished he had secretly recorded her. He had unfortunately filled up his memory with the sensation of her ass on his face. He held a hand to his chin and tried as hard as he could to remember. This time, the conversation mattered more than the butt.

Yes.

This is what she had said…

“But then things changed. All 800 soldiers in the Legitimacy Kingdom’s maintenance base were slaughtered in a single night. There were signs of gunfire, but no Information Alliance bullets were found. That suggests the Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers were shooting each other. More than 99% of the soldiers were killed, including the base commander and the Pilot Elite. Looking at the bullet holes, the seemingly random gunfire is most noticeable, but it looks like the nature of the battle changed once friendly fire detonated the ammo dump. …Some bodies were found with bite marks in their uniforms and flesh, suggesting the fighting continued even after they used up all their ammo. The bites were deep, leaving toothmarks on the bone in some cases. And since the same corpse sometimes had multiple sets of toothmarks, it looks like they were attacked in groups.”

Part of that caught his interest.

“Friendly fire?”

“Hm? Did any of them have bullet wounds?”

Elina tilted her head while holding the adult-sized mug which was a little too large for her hands.

Yes, they hadn’t seen that here. All of the corpses had been mutilated, blown away, turned to wax, or reduced to mere organs. No actual autopsies had been performed and it was still possible they had been mutilated after being shot in the head, but it still didn’t look like these soldiers had killed each other. If they had been firing wildly like that, there would be bullet holes in the walls and floor, but none of that was in evidence.

The most material damage they had seen was the radio thrown against the floor and the flare gun buried out in the snow.

But the Ghost Changer itself was the same piece of equipment.

It had to have the same affect as last time. This might look like an entirely different result, but it had to have the same cause. Both attacks started in the same place but then branched out differently for unknown reasons. So what was the real cause? And what had caused this difference?

A ghost.

The Tunguska District was a special place.

But was that really what he needed to focus on?

“Because there isn’t anywhere to run to on this planet. With all those 200 thousand ton weapons moving at such high speeds around the globe, the earth’s environment has already been fatally thrown out of balance.”

“Animals don’t use fire and we still can’t explain how that one soldier was turned to wax, but I think your observation was decent for a commoner. I think we should divide the ghost victims into two categories: those that were killed by the ‘ghost’ phenomenon and those who died to something else.”

“What are you so worried about? We’re not going to snatch you up and eat you. Life in solitary confinement wasn’t all that bad. There was a window, even if it did have bars over it. And the combination of the damp, cracked wall and the sunlight allowed some small flowers to grow.”

Quenser Barbotage looked up.

“Could it be?”

Part 11

There was no good and evil in war.

The Legitimacy Kingdom and the Information Alliance would have their own reasons for their actions here in the Tunguska District. The mysterious Unit X would also have been desperate to stay alive. The Ghost Changer-equipped Object was like a nightmare for Quenser’s group, but it may have looked like a legendary sword to the Information Alliance who wanted to protect their comrades’ lives however they could.

So there was no point in discussing who was the villain here.

Or at the very least, reflexively declaring the Information Alliance evil wouldn’t be productive.

And in this case, Quenser couldn’t just chalk it all up to a conspiracy of the four world powers. That was the same as insisting everything that had ever gone wrong for him was due to a mysterious curse interfering with all the critical moments in his life.

But there was a villain here.

And Quenser had seen them himself.

They had been within arm’s reach.

They were out here on this battlefield, but not as a bizarre ghost story - as a living, breathing human.

“Elina.”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to end this, but we’re the ones who brought this battle to your doorstep, so you have no obligation to accompany me. If you don’t want to die, you can stay here in this warm base, waiting for someone to rescue you.”

“I do hate to say goodbye to this warm stove and more hot cocoa, but I too played a role in this.”

The fear of the battlefield would have soaked into her very bones - the terror of the cold, the bullets, and the eerie ghost’s curse or spirit possession.

But the emotionless genius girl did not hesitate.

“Whatever the actual method is, I was the one who set the stage for it by living here in the Tunguska District. I knew I would have to face some kind of problem like this if I refused to back down on my suppressed paper. But I refused to give up and that led to this war. If not for my selfishness, this plan may have never panned out.”

“…I see.”

Her cold and robotic demeanor made it hard to tell, but she did have emotions.

Intelligence had its pros and its cons. She would have been happier if she had never arrived at that answer.

She may have felt somewhat responsible for this battlefield littered with Legitimacy Kingdom and Information Alliance corpses. But whatever calculations the true genius’s conclusion were based on, that average student could confidently tell her she was wrong. This war was something they had brought to the Tunguska District. None of this was her fault and she shouldn’t feel any of that weight on her shoulders.

But the risk to her would not go away if he left her behind. The corpses covering the base were enough to know the place was not safe.

He sighed and nodded.

“Then I’ll take you with me. …To be honest, I was terrified of having to reenter that frozen forest on my own.”

“I don’t know what you intend to do about that ghost, but I am honored you consider me worthwhile to have around. It tells me I’m not just dead weight.”

They were both ready to go now.

The boy had said from the beginning that they already had the greatest weapon against them. He had said trying to run away would only lead to death, so it was best to not even try.

So now there was just one thing to do: begin to fight.

He pressed his radio’s switch.

He sent out the emergency signal that restrained the prisoners and transmitted their location.

“Found you.”

He glanced down at his mobile device instead of his radio.

He had booted up the military’s highly accurate map app.

“Sladder Honeysuckle!! I have his GPS signal and I’ve detonated his glow-in-the-dark paint and scent capsules. He can’t escape now!!”

“Sladder?” Eliza clearly didn’t understand. “And I thought you said your radio and mobile device weren’t working in the cold.”

“They weren’t actually broken.”

Quenser smiled and looked around while drying his hair with a towel.

The Information Alliance maintenance base would be stocked with all sorts of weapons, from handguns to missiles, but Quenser and Elina couldn’t use weapons like that. He guessed this would come down to throwing Hand Axe plastic explosives.

He searched through all the gear and only took a flashlight that looked more powerful than his own.

“We just couldn’t trust the signal it was showing us. The blizzard screwed with our sense of direction and distance, so we started to doubt what the machine was showing us. We’re 120km from the Legitimacy Kingdom maintenance base. I had my doubts when I checked the display, but looks like it was right. The truth is a funny thing. If I’d thought about it more, I would have realized of course the digital numbers are more accurate. I just wasn’t in a mental state that let me think straight.”

“Because of the ghost?”

“Once you get how it works, it’s kind of silly.” He snorted with laughter while walking toward the door. “We kept talking about the Ghost Changer-equipped Object, but we don’t actually know what the Ghost Changer looks like. Why is that? The Object is 50m tall and we saw it ourselves when it crushed your log cabin. The Ghost Changer is an unconventional weapon since it can be passed between Objects. But if they were adding a huge cannon or lens, it would mess with the Object’s design philosophy. So how did it work?”

“?”

“It’s simple really.”

He threw open the thick metal door.

The -15 degree air was like poison now that they were accustomed to the heated building.

But now that Quenser understood the trick, he saw the view out the door as an open world full of hope. It was now his turn to attack.

“The Ghost Changer is a special grease. The gears, cylinders, joints, the axles for its steamroller-like wheels, and every other movable part on the Object is intentionally allowed to rub together and burn the oil with friction. And the subtle flavors and smells that creates messes with the human brain!!”

They intentionally had the Object damage itself.

Was that why hey had chosen the Retro Gunner instead of a new model? Was the cost of damaging a functioning Object just too great? Or did an old piece of junk enhance the effects? Was it like how a rusty saw was more frightening than a sharp knife?

“Are you saying the Ghost Changer is like a chemical weapon spread by the smoke and steam created when burning it?”

“You wouldn’t need an Object if it was. Since they use that thing’s joints, I bet this is about high pressure physics.”

“You mean how graphite turns to diamond at a pressure of about 50 thousand atmospheres?”

“Objects weight 200 thousand tons, so the pressure on their joints is far greater than the average press. Labs and factories can apparently produce a few million atmospheres using the shockwave of an explosion, but this might be even greater.”

“I see. I have heard some other unusual reports from the world of high pressure physics, such as ferromagnetic iron becoming paramagnetic or germanium’s electrical conductivity increasing a millionfold.”

“It produces phenomena that don’t add up based on our normal understanding of physics. I doubt the Ghost Changer grease would work if you just heated it with fire. I bet the weapon only works if you use the magic of high pressure to bend the rules of property change.”

The two of them soldiered on through the blizzard.

The Information Alliance flashlight was quite bright, so it pierced a good distance through the darkness. If he wasn’t careful to angle it down a bit, it would reflect off the blizzard and dazzle his eyes. The Information Alliance seemed to prefer night vision using IR or microwaves, so he would make better use of the flashlight than them.

“Ugh…”

“What is it, Elina? Did you drink too much hot cocoa, so now you need to pee? If you can’t keep that dam from breaking, try to do it at the base of a thick tree. Any pursuers might mistake it for wild animal markings.”

“Having him caution me about being indecent was the greatest mistake of my life.”

The 9-year-old was getting ahead of herself and deciding she had already seen the worst her life had to offer. Her voice dropped terrifyingly low, but the cold was still too powerful and she remained clinging to Quenser.

However, the genius girl’s groan had not been the result of pressure building below her stomach after leaving the warm room for the cold outdoors.

“So you were saying the ghost is created with smells and flavors?”

“More accurately, they create an atmosphere where a ghost seems likely. You begin to doubt your common sense, you throw out all your accurate digital data, and you close yourself up in a shell. That makes you the perfect target for any sort of superstition. Your brain starts to misinterpret things, like the rustling leaves sounding like whispering voices or the swaying branches looking like spying people.”

“Misinterpret?”

“You know how the voices you hear over the phone are really the physical voice being recreated using a combination of electric tones, right? Or how cheap meat can seem fancier when injected with fat? People love to label the things they’re experiencing by comparing them to the categories in their head, so our senses are actually pretty inaccurate.”

“But you expect me to believe this works on everyone, regardless of physical constitution and mental structure? What kind of miracle drug is this Ghost Changer? The Island Nation’s Hangonko was theorized to use mustard, but it’s actually just a legend with no real chemical formula. Talk of hallucinogens might sound convincing, but it’s not like they ran a proper clinical trial to make sure it would cause everyone see the exact same ghost. That claim is as absurd as saying zombie powder can damage anyone’s brain enough to turn them into a puppet just because it uses pufferfish.”

“Admittedly, it would be difficult with ordinary flavors and smells.”

He already knew their destination.

The Legitimacy Kingdom and Information Alliance had been removed from the battlefield. Same for the mysterious Unit X. Now that he knew that, he didn’t fear using a flashlight or activating his mobile device’s backlight. He only had to follow the GPS signal through the dark and snowy forest.

“But did you know, Elina, that flavors and smells are sensed using a process called chemoreception? Your body can detect the change in your cells when exposed to certain chemicals. That change just so happens to be greatest on your tongue and in your nose.”

“You mean how the spiciness sensed on the tongue is similar to pain or burning?”

“More or less, yes. But that’s the real issue here. We tend to think that our five senses are sensed using five different organs, but taste can actually be sensed on the skin and in the intestines, just to a much more limited extent. And the same might be possible for smell since it uses the same chemoreception process. There is also research that suggests our skin and blood vessels can just barely sense light.”

“Sensing taste and light through the skin?”

“It could be anywhere really. We think of vision as coming through the eyes, hearing through the ears, smell through the nose, taste through the tongue, and touch through the skin. But if we start to absorb sensory information through parts that don’t fit that mental mapping…well, humans like to manage the things they’re perceiving by applying labels to them. When heating food in the microwave, you think of it in terms of how long you heat it, not how many degrees or watts you use, right? You don’t question it when you heated it ‘long enough’, but the inside is still cold, do you? Most everyone is willing to accept that because they’ve never been burned by microwaves. We can swap out the labels for stimuli we can’t perceive. Same for units and quantities. If you hold a fluffy sweater in one hand and a ball of yarn weighing the same in the other hand but you aren’t told they weigh the same, you will sense the smaller ball of yarn as weighing more. Your knowledge alters what you’re sensing.”

In the military world, it wasn’t uncommon to develop weapons that secretly provided unseen stimuli.

For example, a handheld laser weapon that damaged the human eye from a distance or an acoustic weapon that induced psychological changes through long-term exposure to ultrasound or high pressure. Chemical weapons were the same. The tear gas and vomiting gas used to neutralize rioters could be viewed as weapons using taste and smell. Even stun guns and the like could apply in the sense that they applied an extreme tactile or pain stimulus.

The Information Alliance had taken that a step further.

They had increased the specs until their weapon could summon a “ghost” to the battlefield.

“People can’t fight data inputted through the ‘subconscious perception’ created when their body’s structure is at odds with their mental map of their senses. You should at least be able to imprint them with an idea more effectively than subliminal messaging which may not work at all.”

“They use stimulus signals the human mind can’t classify? That’s cheating worse than using a cryptid.”

“Probably why they call it a ghost.”

“But how does that connect to that man’s conspiracy?” Elina let out a white breath and looked up at Quenser. “Sladder Honeysuckle, I mean. Didn’t you say he was held in a Legitimacy Kingdom special prison? How could he be involved in an Information Alliance secret weapon?”

“…”

Quenser did not answer.

They were approaching the signal.

This would be checkmate if they found Sladder constricted by the belts and giving off this GPS signal, but Quenser doubted mechanical security would work against such a skilled engineer.

The odds were slim.

(Sladder was under constant surveillance just like the other prisoners. He only had freedom after shoving me off the cliff and before I hit my radio’s switch.)

When Quenser had fallen into the ravine, Sladder had looked like a ghost with a melting face, but that didn’t necessarily mean Sladder had seen the same thing when looking at him. Quenser had only heard the man shout “monster”.

It was always possible he had been entirely rational and shoved the boy while hiding a smile.

(He couldn’t have had more than half an hour. That isn’t enough time for specialty work, especially in an old-growth forest without any tools.)

He may not have slipped his restraints until Quenser’s signal reached him. So even if he had escaped, he couldn’t have gone far. Quenser was certain he could find the man by looking for a silhouette covered in glow-in-the-dark paint or following the footsteps that smelled of the tracking scent.

He was right about that.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

The snow right next to Quenser was blown away shortly before he heard a pleasant gunshot.

Quenser immediately picked up the genius girl and rushed behind a nearby tree. That gunshot had not come from a small self-defense handgun. Sladder must have stolen a sniper rifle from a dead soldier.

And that specialized gear had worked against him.

Sladder hadn’t needed to give a warning shot there, so that meant his shot had been blown off course by a crosswind. Sladder Honeysuckle, leader of the Mass Driver Conglomerate, was a master strategist who had set a global conspiracy in motion, but he had never been all that great a shot. At the end of the Break Carrier battle, he had fired a handgun several times at close range and still failed to kill an amateur like Quenser.

Quenser brought his radio to his mouth while hiding behind the tree.

He didn’t know if that sniper rifle was Legitimacy Kingdom or Information Alliance, but surely Sladder had stolen a communicator too. He chose to send an unencrypted signal across all bands.

“Sladder!! I know more or less what it is you’re trying to do here. …Yeah, you were originally planning to defect from the Capitalist Corporations to the Information Alliance, using your precious mass driver tech to get them interested. But we stopped you and you were thrown into a Legitimacy Kingdom prison instead. You’re upset your deal never went through, aren’t you? It’s only natural you would try to join the Information Alliance if you had the chance!!”

There was no response, so Quenser continued on his own.

“You were the first to notice when we were surrounded by Unit X at the log cabin, but you didn’t warn us and held your tongue to get us captured.”

Was Sladder afraid Quenser would trace the signal to locate him if he responded?

“When the Retro Gunner attacked Elina’s cabin, Azureyfear said she captured our ‘scrawny scientist’ when you were trying to head off on your own. You were hoping to slip away in the confusion, meet up with the Information Alliance, and complete your defection, weren’t you?”

Quenser took the splinters of a tree branch that broken underfoot, shoved them into a small piece of Hand Axe, and threw it in a random direction. He detonated it with his radio, spreading flames and smoke around.

The darkness was swept away, revealing their positions to each other.

They were 200m apart.

The silhouette visible through the snowy curtain revealed that Sladder still had the chain around his ankles, but he had removed the belts and handcuffs. That explained how he could use the sniper rifle.

But that also meant he hadn’t had enough time to remove the chain. He had stopped working after noticing Quenser and Elina approaching. Things were not progressing according to plan for him, which Quenser counted as a win.

There was no more point in hiding his position, so static ran through Quenser’s radio.

“What are you hoping to accomplish with this conversation?”

“What happened to Azureyfear?”

“I shot her.”

Quenser clenched his teeth hard enough to cause an odd sound from his back teeth.

200m apart was midrange, putting them just out of handgun range for a professional soldier. That was too far for Quenser’s throwing arm to get a bomb to Sladder.

But what about Sladder?

Quenser could only hope Sladder could not draw on the sniper rifle’s full specs using the multipurpose scope that made use of several sensors and lenses.

“After I used the ghost panic to shove you two into the ravine, it was only us two prisoners left at the top. If I told her how to remove her restraints, I thought for sure she would leap at the opportunity, but it turns out Azureyfear Winchell is the type of prisoner who still finds value in belonging to the Legitimacy Kingdom. She was in my way, so I had to dispose of her. But to be frank, I only won by pure luck.”

Of course he did.

Azureyfear was an expert sniper who was more comfortable wielding an anti-materiel rifle than a tennis racket and she had forced herself to board an Object despite not being a Pilot Elite. She was like a beautiful manifestation of war. Sladder never would have stood a chance in a fair firefight.

Which meant he had not fought fair. He would only need a momentary opening. Some kind of dirty trick that would get her to pause.

“She is obsessed with that brother of hers, so I only had to tell her I could remotely detonate the lithium battery of the mobile device in his breast pocket. Such a silly bluff and she still fell for it. Frankly, I was flabbergasted it bought me two whole seconds.”

“Sladder…”

“Technology is to be used. Anyone who lets it use them has no future. You should know that as a future engineer yourself.”

“You’re not using it; you’re abusing it. You’re a disgrace to the field of engineering.”

Now Quenser had a reason to kill him.

That just left finding a way to do so. Fortunately, he had an idea already.

Elina’s small hand tugged on his coat.

“Is Sladder Honeysuckle really behind this war using the Ghost Changer? But how? I understand why he would want to defect, but how could he have been involved in an Information Alliance secret weapon while in prison?”

“You can make a good guess, can’t you?” said Sladder.

“Your cell had a window. I believe you said the combination of the damp, cracked wall and the sunlight allowed some small flowers to grow,” said Quenser. “And one barred window is all you would need to exchange information and materials with a flying drone. You drew up the plans in your cell, folded up the paper, and handed it over to the Information Alliance drone. And thus the Ghost Changer was born. That’s how the add-on weapon built by the Information Alliance was really a toy created to help you break out of prison. Isn’t that right?”

“Well done.”

Sladder was not remotely shaken.

He was creepier than a vengeful ghost.

“Zero-g life leads to hallucinations. When people are thrown out into the vacuum of space wearing a perfectly sealed spacesuit, they can still panic after thinking they smell the burning grease from a nearby wire.

“So you had already planned for the 37th to be involved?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t be certain it would happen. That was more the result of coincidence than a plan. I had predicted the 37th would be involved to an extent, but I never really cared about Elina Silverbullet. Any battlefield would have worked as long as the Ghost Changer was there.”

The focus of this entire battle had been a lie.

All the death and destruction was a great vortex spiraling around Sladder, not Elina. And once you knew the truth, so much clicked into place.

“The Legitimacy Kingdom wanted as much help as they could get to fight back against the mysterious Ghost Changer, but they did not want to kill off their own valuable scientists and engineers,” said Sladder. “It wasn’t hard to predict they would choose to use any foreign prisoners with a PhD.”

“Which is why the Ghost Changer didn’t just attack the Legitimacy Kingdom. Your jailbreak was the primary goal, so if the Information Alliance here interfered with that, you were willing to sacrifice them as well.”

“I may have given them too sweet a prize up front. The Information Alliance decided protecting the Ghost Changer’s secret was more important than securing my intellect. The fools should have known that was only a sideshow before the main event. I swear this world just will not let me research mass drivers in peace.”

“So,” cut in Quenser.

He had seen a radio thrown to the floor and a flare gun buried in the snow, but who was it the soldiers had been trying unsuccessfully to contact?

“The first one to be driven mad by the Ghost Changer was the Retro Gunner’s Pilot Elite, wasn’t it? The truth of this battle was no different from the one in the Hornos District: friendly fire.”

They had seen so many crushed, mutilated, and burned Legitimacy Kingdom corpses.

Normal flames couldn’t do that. Turning a corpse to wax apparently required spending months or even years below the thick snow.

The mincemeat on the rock and organs in the tree had not frozen in the -15 degree weather, so they had concluded something had creeped up disturbingly close by without any of them noticing.

The ghost of the Tunguska District could defy the laws of physics to kill and even steal away the passage of time.

So did that mean no one could explain what had happened there?

“Don’t make me laugh. You can make wax with fat and hydrogenated oil. It can be industrially created. You don’t need to spend months cut off from all oxygen. For example, the human body will absorb the hydrogen from the air and turn to wax when under around a million atmospheres of pressure.”

“Oh,” gasped Elina.

“An Object cannon can do that easily enough. The metal shell fired by a railgun or coilgun will kill you instantly even if it doesn’t directly hit you. The thick wall of air creates a massive amount of pressure, so the corpse isn’t going to be in a pretty state. That carbonized corpse may have been considerably shorter than the poor bastard was in life.”

“B-but we would have noticed if the Retro Gunner had fired!” protested Elina. “The bodies there hadn’t frozen, but a wet towel will freeze solid in less than a minute outside.”

“Elina, I’m sure you run into wild animals living out here in the mountains, but have you ever held a tranquilizer gun?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“The ones that don’t use a needle apply great pressure to the target’s skin with a gas so they will absorb the liquid tranquilizer. And there are plenty of liquids found in nature that don’t freeze even at 15 below. For a close-to-home example, tea seed oil’s freezing point is about 20 below. Now I wish I’d brought that plant guide we found in the Information Alliance maintenance base. I’m sure there are other examples in the conifer trees around here.”

“Wait…high pressure?”

“The Object shell landed near the soldier, hitting them with a shockwave and sending plant sap and juices piercing into their body. Once their body is full of a liquid with a lower freezing point, their corpse and organs won’t freeze even at 15 below. Those Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers were killed and splattered across the area well before we arrived, but the high-pressure injection made their flesh and blood ‘hard to freeze’, so they still hadn’t frozen when we got there. That’s all there was to it. We didn’t find a crater either, but I’m guessing the blizzard had just covered it up. It wasn’t birds of prey that carried the organs into the tree branches, nor was it a ghost. An Object blast splattered them, sending their organs into the air.”

No time had been stolen. The wax corpse and the unfrozen organs could all be explained with the high pressures caused by a railgun.

At the time, Sladder had repeatedly rejected every idea anyone came up with.

He had pretended to be offering his expertise, but he had really been nipping all of Quenser’s ideas in the bud. He kept hinting at the alternative theories behind the Tunguska event, but he had never provided anything solid. Almost like he was intentionally sowing confusion and panic to more easily control the situation.

That led to another answer.

What had caused the other slaughter at the Information Alliance maintenance base zone?

“We never even needed to consider the old Tunguska event legend. They were blown away by railguns and roasted by laser beams when the Retro Gunner went nuts. Friendly fire explains it all.”

“Friendly fire?” parroted the 9-year-old girl in disbelief. “But the Ghost Changer was a special grease that intentionally grinded and burnt out the Object’s joints to create a subtle smell, right? The Object’s cockpit is airtight, so how could the smell reach the pilot!?”

“Elina, do you detect a rusty odor?”

“Eh? …N-now that you mention it. But of course I do after all the lives that were lost around here.”

“I see. But that smell isn’t real. There are no corpses or bloodstains here.”

Her shock was understandable, but it was true.

“Our sense of smell is easily influenced by our imagination. The idea of blood smelling rusty is only an imaginary link between the color red and rust. There is iron in blood, but that isn’t the same as rust and there isn’t enough of it to detect a smell anyway. Well, at least it’s a more plausible idea than trying to take a ‘blood-curdling scream’ literally. Besides, how often do you even smell rust in your everyday life? The grease’s scent didn’t actually need to reach the cockpit. As long as the Elite saw it, knew what it was supposed to do, and could imagine it vividly enough, they would ‘smell it’ just like that rusty smell you noticed just now.”

Explaining the weapon to the Pilot Elite operating it had made the problem even worse.

In a way, that was more frightening than the actual chemical substance used for the Ghost Changer. You would need the kind of detailed personal data only found through counseling or profiling and your method would need to be finetuned for the individual, but that would create a verbal weapon that truly left no evidence behind. If Sladder Honeysuckle had focused on assassinating VIPs instead of direct warfare, he might have transformed into a ghost capable of always destroying his target.

“Breaking down the established theory, huh? You sure love doing that. But don’t forget that an Object is full of communications equipment. Sladder, I don’t know whose corpse you stole that gear from, but the Retro Gunner would have picked up your transmissions if you pretended to be Information Alliance. That means you could have pushed the Pilot Elite to their psychological limits by making up some phony report.”

What you could do and what you wanted to do were not the same thing.

That had always been what made this genius suffer so much.

“So what now?” asked Sladder. “Did you think I was going to give up on life and throw myself from the cliff now that you had revealed my trick? The battle only truly begins once the threat has been identified and that is what my sniper rifle is for.”

“There is no escape for you.”

“Quenser Barbotage. I am well aware of your specs.”

“…”

“And you have no means of killing me from a range of 200m. Are you going to stuff explosives in a metal tube to build a mortar? Or are you going to load a plastic explosive on a large bottle rocket? Or perhaps apply a thin layer of explosives to the inside of parabolic antenna to build a directional mine?”

The boy clicked his tongue. He hated to admit it, but that man was the better engineer. Quenser was only a designer in training while Sladder was a top-rate professional.

“You can’t do it. If you were alone, you may have attempted a reckless last-ditch effort, but you can’t bring yourself to attempt a risky adlibbed weapon with that 9-year-old girl with you. None of that has been on the table ever since Elina Silverbullet entered the picture. And when safe and reliable options are all you have left, you are no more than an amateur. …Thus, I can shoot you from a position of safety. And I will if you insist on standing in the way of my mass driver research.”

“Is that so?” Quenser smiled in self-deprecation while pressed against the backside of the tree. Sladder was exactly right on all counts. “I get using the confusion to fake your death and leave the battlefield. With so many mutilated corpses, no one’s going to bother to identify them all. But what are you going to do about the Retro Gunner? If the Pilot Elite is still running wild after seeing the ghost, you could always be killed. Not even your genius plotting can do anything about that. And the odds of it happening seem greater than being struck by lightning while outdoors.”

“Why would I tell you that?”

“So you do have some trick keeping it from attacking you.”

Steal that and they could settle things with the Retro Gunner. Carrying a trump card that kept the Object from attacking would allow the Legitimacy Kingdom to go on the attack without fearing the old First Generation.

That meant Quenser’s top priority was Sladder Honeysuckle who had all the answers.

He had to kill that man to pave the way for everything else.

“By the way, Sladder, didn’t you say you shot Azureyfear Winchell since she was in the way of your jailbreak?”

“I did say that.”

“And you said you used a silly bluff to kill her since she was so much more skilled than you. You said you got that sister to freeze up for just a moment because you lied about detonating the mobile device by Heivia’s chest.”

“Yes, and?”

“Here’s the thing.” Quenser kept his tone light while he held Elina close and pressed his back against the tree. “You seem to be getting a hard-on over how badly you outplayed everyone, but I haven’t encrypted this radio. Every radio on both sides can read this signal. And, Sladder, you seem to think you played a perfect game using both sides to your advantage, but was your control of the board really as flawless as you thought?”

“?”

“So.”

This was war.

Had Sladder really thought Quenser’s actions here were entirely meaningless?

“What do you think is going to happen to you if the very-much-alive Big Bro Heivia and your own sister Louisiana hear all this and track you down using your GPS signal?”

Sladder Honeysuckle unnaturally crumpled to the ground before Quenser even heard the gunshot.

It took a moment before the sound of bursting explosives arrived from the side.

This kind of dirty war really was more Heivia’s thing. Sladder had missed while using a sniper rifle packed full of sensors, but Heivia had accurately shot right through his target’s thigh during a snowy night. He would only have been able to see silhouettes through the snow, but he could identify his target from the sniper rifle Sladder himself had said he had.

The mass driver engineer’s strong will could be seen in how he refused to let go of the sniper rifle even now.

But then his hand and the sniper rifle’s grip were destroyed by another shot.

He curled up in agony on the snow while someone else trudged toward him. It was Louisiana holding her small self-defense handgun.

“You absolute disgrace!! Using your tech for the public good is the bare minimum required of a genius to avoid being labeled an eccentric. But you sold it off for your personal gain, so you don’t even deserve to live!!”

“Heivia, restrain her! We can’t kill him yet! He still has a countermeasure against the Retro Gunner!!”

While Sladder had tried to build a mass driver for his own purposes, Louisiana had constructed her space elevator to protect everyone on the earth.

Quenser didn’t need to hide any longer.

He was still on the lookout for mines or bombs buried in the snow, but he doubted Sladder would have stuck with the sniper rifle then. Sladder was a strategist. If he had plenty of mines around him, he would have rolled around in pain after the initial shot to the leg, luring Heivia in to step on one of the mines.

He didn’t need any help to stop the bleeding.

At 15 below, his bloody wound would freeze on its own.

Quenser, Heivia, Louisiana, and Elina - the survivors of the ghost panic - surrounded him and he weakly looked up at them with a bullet hole in his hand and leg.

“There is an antidote.”

“I thought as much. The sense of smell is said to be 20 thousand times more powerful than taste, but it’s also very delicate since mixing different compounds easily changes their nature entirely. Perfume and artificial fragrances would be the best examples of that. …You couldn’t let yourself be affected by the ghost while out here, but you weren’t wearing a gasmask or a hazmat suit to cover all your skin. That meant you must have another chemical compound that negates its effects.”

For the Retro Gunner, it might be even simpler. The Elite was only imaging the smell due to their knowledge of the Ghost Changer, so tearing down that mental image would be enough to bring them back under control.

Quenser crouched down and stuck his hand in the neck of Sladder’s prisoner uniform. He tore something away. The man had worn it around his neck like a good-luck charm, but it actually contained a mixture of a few herbal leaves and flower petals.

Hadn’t he said some small flowers grew in his prison cell?

The human nose couldn’t detect it, but it wasn’t meant to be smelled with the nose.

“A sachet, huh? Pretty romantic, but it doesn’t suit you at all.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. All engineers should be romantics. Even if no one else understands them.”

Quenser could never agree with that.

Maybe this man was the ultimate form of a designer, but he had gone in a different direction than the boy was interested in.

“What will you do with me now?”

“I don’t know and frankly I don’t care what happens to you,” said Quenser, slowly straightening his knees to stand up. Almost like he had lost interest in Sladder. “So I’m going to make a bet with you. And I promise you, I will accept either outcome.”

“?”

“If.”

Quenser brought his usual radio to his mouth. But who was he talking to? His plan to use an unencrypted signal to share information with Heivia and Louisiana had already paid off.

But Quenser was definitely speaking to someone other than Sladder.

“If you really are dead, then no one will deliver a killing blow to Sladder. But if you aren’t quite dead, then I’d say you have a right to revenge. So it’s your choice. I will leave this all up to fate.”

Sladder seemed to finally understand what this was about.

Quenser and Heivia turned their backs on the villain. Louisiana proved to be surprisingly kindhearted since she gently covered Elina’s eyes. She looked back toward her brother just once, but her duty as a researcher must have won out. She tore her gaze from him and followed the potatoes with Elina.

And Quenser, Heivia, and Louisiana spoke in unison.

“My money is on Azureyfear being alive.”

Wherever she had heard them from, an anti-materiel rifle fired in the distance and a life was snuffed out faster than the speed of sound.

Part 12

“The Information Alliance’s Retro Gunner has sent the white flag signal. The pilot must have regained enough of their senses to realize they destroyed their own maintenance base.”

“I see,” replied Frolaytia when the electronic simulation division operator gave that report. Their “verbal countermeasure” had actually worked. Although the end of Sladder’s interference may have been what really mattered. “What about the Ghost Changer?”

“Did you not read the old maintenance lady’s report? The joints have completely burned out, so we can’t extract and analyze any of the special grease. That was probably their last way to resist before surrendering.”

“…Probably for the best.”

Even if there was an antidote, the rules of war would finally collapse altogether if the Legitimacy Kingdom copied that weapon and every side started using it against each other.

Losses had been heavy this time.

If Elina Silverbullet’s claim was accurate, then the 37th had been sent to an unwinnable war solely to kill both Louisiana and Elina. And all four world powers had been behind that decision. That meant Frolaytia’s 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion had been stabbed in the back by the Legitimacy Kingdom.

(They want to eliminate anyone who questions the clean wars. In that case, they might see the 37th as a target too.)

Being so stupidly honest in the report she had sent to her higher ups weighed heavy on her now. Doing her job properly had only made things worse. Apparently, she was a little too used to her role as a civil servant.

But if they were a target, there were ways of using that.

At the very least, she had to consider it a good thing that she had confirmation and wouldn’t be foolishly attacking her higher ups based on delusions or misplaced frustration.

The next step was to counterattack.

Frolaytia Capistrano was not obedient enough to just accept this situation and die needlessly.

“Quenser. Heivia too. I want to corroborate Elina Silverbullet’s claim. You were there, so I want your help.”

“What exactly do you want?”

“First, tell me about Unit X at the log cabin. Elina says they were former Faith Organization soldiers. As you could guess from the Capitalist Corporations sniper rifles - and the winning Technopics model at that - they’re an illegal organization that needs to hide its identity. They call themselves a mercenary company, but there is no real word for them other than terrorists. They were kicked out of the military for promoting the theory that Objects are destroying the environment, so they plotted this mission to have their revenge.”

Frolaytia could not hide her irritation and gnawed on the mouth of her kiseru. She hadn’t known what she was doing when she submitted that report, but she felt like she was viewing the future of her own battalion.

However, there was one crucial difference between the 37th and Unit X.

Quenser picked up the explanation for her.

“Unit X used to be the Electric Drills, an unofficial internal auditing division of the Faith Organization military. They would correct any misdeeds discovered in the military and ‘drill holes’ in the figurative rotting walls…but their name is suspiciously similar to the Chain Cutters who caused us so much trouble in the Legitimacy Kingdom. I didn’t notice it before since they were only working behind the scenes.”

“That’s probably how they do things,” said Heivia. “X has secured forces all around the world to fight back against the joint will of the four world powers, but they don’t train up their own soldiers and send them in undercover. They remotely corrupt a unit that’s already established in enemy territory and reeducate them. They’re online terrorists. As long as they’re clever with words, they can inject their ideology in people and gain an endless supply of active-duty soldiers, so they can gain a top-rate fighting force a lot cheaper and faster than building their own training ground and training their own professionals there. They can also skip the process of sneaking their people into the enemy country and setting up fake identities and lives for them. …The Electric Drills were just one such group that was discovered in Faith Organization territory and had to leave.”

The Chain Cutters had readily attacked civilian doctors to cut off the shipping routes. That might seem horrific at first, but they may have had their own justification for it. Maybe they thought it was necessary to cut off the supplies and thus end all Object activity in an area with a vulnerable tectonic plate.

Not that it mattered.

Not even the greatest justification would bring the dead civilians back to life.

Frolaytia breathed out some sweet smoke.

“X. Or as they’re also known, Bad Garage,” she said.

“They apparently contacted Elina because they wanted scientific backing of their claims,” said Quenser. “The environmental destruction by Objects theory can still be found in certain corners of the internet, but someone out there has been ensuring it’s only seen as some crackpot theory. So Elina said they wanted to ‘rebut the rebuttal’ with actual numerical data and a scientific paper to back them up.”

“Would the world powers really just give up after that? Like with the Chain Cutters and Electric Drills, Bad Garage had infiltrated the militaries to set up their own people in enemy territory, so they were clearly planning something bigger than that.”

With that, their busty silver-haired commander tossed an investigation report from the intelligence division onto the table and fanned out the pages.

“This is what the criminal underworld has been up to lately. There’s the usual best sellers like drugs, weapons, and slaves, but something curious has jumped to the top of the list: counterfeit IDs. Some idiots have been buying up a massive amount of top-quality counterfeits at the asking price. They’ll be entering the country as museum curators in the name of restoring damaged artwork.”

“Are you saying we know Bad Garage’s next target?”

“They made a mistake trying to enter the country disguised as a group of government workers. Citizen’s groups always go over government spending with a fine-toothed comb and government workers wouldn’t split their group up over different trains and cars. That would have raised some alarm bells. So the key to all of this is a large bus belonging to Zodiac Tourism.”

“So you’re saying we just have to track the bus they rented in order to disguise themselves?”

“Exactly. They must want to show as many people as possible that the Objects really are destroying the earth’s environment. And if possible, they want to ensure not even a joint effort by the four world powers can cover it up.” Frolaytia spoke in a singsong voice as she looked ahead to the next battlefield. “So their best bet is to deliver a devastating blow to the world powers in the process.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I can’t imagine I’ll like the answer.”

If having a bad feeling come true made you a prophet, then the entire human race was made up of prophets.

So Heivia’s displeased look was answered with a nod from Frolaytia.

“The Tiber District. Rome.”

“…”

“Needless to say, that is the Faith Organization’s home country. If a devastating disaster hits that densely-populated city where you can’t take two steps without running into a cross, the people will have no choice but to believe in the environmental destruction by Objects theory, the higher ups won’t be able to cover it up any longer, and the collusion between the world powers will be torn to shreds. …No phrase has torn apart friendships more than this one: why should I be the only one to suffer?”

Intermission

Once the ingredients arrived, the rest was easy.

The process was not all that difficult.

“Hm, hm, hm, hm.”

The Princess hummed quietly to herself while she worked.

The Pilot Elite living quarters were kept separate from the general barracks. She had a bathroom, bath, and kitchen here. But she had never been picky about food, so she had mostly just used the freezer and microwave.

But today she had courageously chosen to take a step outside her comfort zone.

The recipe sites had all tried to scare her by talking about how difficult the process of double boiling was for homemade chocolate, but she had discovered they made a convenient product that did it for you. It looked like one bowl sitting inside another and you only had to pour water in between the two bowls and plug it in. Then the heating element would heat the water to the perfect temperature. It was a cheap-looking set made of plastic which reminded her of a hand crank ice cream maker. It looked kind of childish, but when there was a safe and easy walking path up the mountain, there was no need to grab your ice axe and scale the sheer rock face.

Three cheers for online shopping.

She had pretty much everything she might need, from the ingredients to the tools.

She couldn’t believe the package had arrived on the designated day way out here in the remote Tunguska District of Siberia. The delivery man’s dedication to his work was truly impressive.

(I arbitrarily decided on chocolate ice cream, but is that really the best choice?)

She thought on that for a while, but that was just one of her many ideas. It wasn’t something she had dedicated herself to doing.

In the Island Nation, it was apparently important to give a present of chocolate on February 14.

She had lost a lot of allies during the battle against the Retro Gunner…or against the Ghost Changer really. But it wasn’t the 37th’s style to let that get you down. Mourning the dead was fine, but carrying that weight around would only get you killed as well. So to keep yourself in top mental condition, it was important to enjoy some cheerful events during difficult times.

The double boiling set had come with a few different molds. The heart shape was too embarrassing for her, but the square made it look too much like a piece of an industrial chocolate bar, which brought into question why she had bothered making her own. She expressionlessly groaned in thought before grabbing one of the plastic molds. It was an ordinary circular one, but it looked vaguely Object-ish to her.

Cuteness was all about curves.

Chicks and kittens were mostly round.

“Quenser is always breathing heavily when he stares at the Baby Magnum, so he must like round things too.”

While guessing at his tastes on a level as generalized as “do you prefer the north pole or the south pole”, she placed the chocolate-filled mold in the fridge. According to the manual she had found by scanning the 2D code into her mobile device, the device was made to cool the contents to the entered temperature as efficiently as possible.

It would take time for the chocolate to fully harden.

She had prepared a few different types of wrapping paper and ribbons, but the different combinations would provide very different impressions. She could use this time to think through all of them one by one.

She felt like she was making good use of the limited free time she was given between missions.

(I should go check on Quenser. That might give me a hint for the wrapping.)

That sounded like a good idea to her.

So Milinda Brantini exhaled through her shapely nose and left her special living quarters.

However.

She came to a stop in one corner of the maintenance base.

She hung her head all alone as she heard the words spoken on the other side of the door.

“The environmental destruction by Objects theory can still be found in certain corners of the internet.”

The words were spoken by Quenser Barbotage of all people.

Intentionally or not, he had never mentioned that topic when she was around. Now that kindness stabbed cruelly into her like a knife.

Yes.

That meant the theory had to be true.

“But someone out there has been ensuring it’s only seen as some crackpot theory. So Elina said they wanted to ‘rebut the rebuttal’ with actual numerical data and a scientific paper to back them up.”

Her entire life was built on a lie.

That harmful lie was the only thing giving her a place in this world.

“…”

She stood there thinking.

She bit her lip.

And she silently slipped away.