HEAVY OBJECT:Volume1 Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Rank and File Soldiers that Tie Up Gulliver >> Battle on the Freezing Alaskan Snow

Part 1

In the end, war was nothing more than battles between Objects.

A flesh and blood human carrying around a carefully-maintained rifle could do nothing.

Even if tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of soldiers gathered or even if tons of tanks and fighters were prepared, that 50 meter monster would casually wipe them all out. Some of them could move around even after a direct hit from a nuke or two, so it seemed insane to seriously try to fight them.

That was why everyone just left the main role to an Object.

By shoving the pain-in-the-ass main role onto the monster, they could leisurely watch from the sidelines.

That may have been why the 800 soldiers filling the base zone, a base that specialized in maintenance, were so relaxed despite being on the front line of a battlefield.

The area was called a base, but all they had to do was efficiently maintain the Object and see that it was dispatched.

The flesh and blood soldiers only had to guard the giant weapon as it was being maintained during the short time it was there and they would be rewarded as heroes who protected their country with no thought to their own lives.

With the Object there, they were perfectly safe.

The Object that protected them was like a tree that grew gold. Just by watching it, it would defeat enemy after enemy after enemy. The soldiers insisted that all that was the result of the entire base zone’s work so they should all be rewarded, and so their bank accounts became overflowing with money paid from the people’s taxes.

In reality, the war was carried out by the Object alone.

As long as it was there, their lives and futures were basically guaranteed.

It was because they felt that way that a panic fell over all the soldiers watching from the base zone in the instant their Object burst into flames and blew up.

In the current age, war was nothing more than battles between Objects.

That meant that the defeat of one’s own Object was always a possibility when the enemy also had an Object.

The white Alaskan snow storm obstructed their view, but they could still clearly see the red flames and black smoke.

The ejection device shot the pilot girl known as an Elite out into the sky, but no one was going to save a now-useless loser.

More important things were on their minds.

To reiterate, in the current age, war was nothing more than battles between Objects. Lining up tanks, fighters, and the other types of weapons used before would only be easily blown away by the 50 meter monsters that were Objects.

Now that their own Object had been destroyed, the enemy’s Object could move about freely.

What that meant was simple.

They would be massacred.

The overwhelming stream of weapons fire would send their flesh, bones, and organs flying into the air in the hopeless and definite massacre.

Nothing was left for them but to flee. Yet even if they unhesitatingly chose to flee, it would be a miracle if even a tenth of the soldiers within the base zone survived. Not a single one of them recalled the most basic of orders within the military – to stand their ground and hold the line.

A hellish game of tag began.

It was a ridiculous game of tag between a monster over 50 meters long and tiny humans.

Part 2

One day prior, a boy named Quenser stood in a snowy area of Alaska. He was within the maintenance base zone for the giant Object. Quenser’s build was different than what one would expect of a soldier. Simply put, he did not have the muscles a soldier needed. He looked more like someone who would be attending a school in a safe country. In fact, he could likely change what sex he appeared to be depending on if he was wearing pants or a skirt.

In reality, that overall impression was not incorrect.

The arms he was using to dig into the snow with a shovel were trembling due to exhaustion and myalgia.

“Dammit!! What’s the point of this work!?”

The person who made that announcement and gave up was the actual soldier who stood next to Quenser. Quenser looked surprised and the soldier boy he had met in the base zone threw his shovel down.

“There are all sorts of different types of soldiers. I was originally a radar analyst that checked the specs of the enemy’s Object to find a weakness. I didn’t join the army to shovel snow!!”

That intellectual soldier was named Heivia. As Quenser did not fit in well with the athletic-minded spirit of the army, he got along with the boy better than the others.

(…Well, we are similar types.)

With that arbitrary thought, Quenser spoke.

“It’s not like there’s any other option. All of the fighting is left to the Object, but the people living in peace back home wouldn’t want to give up their tax money if they didn’t see anyone working at all. I was watching the CS news channel and I saw the people on the Flide council shouting about lowering taxes in order to get votes in the upcoming election.”

“That’s exactly the thing though,” said Heivia. “Even the folks back home can tell that digging up the snow like this to maintain a runway is useless. Knowing it’s just for show makes me want to do it even less.”

“Yeah, a fighter isn’t going to do anything against an Object. In the mock battle, it took out 1500 of them and I’m pretty sure that in reality they just called it there because they were tired of counting.” Quenser stabbed the tip of his shovel into the ground and leaned on it with both hands. “After all, Objects use anti-air lasers that are powered by a high-output nuclear reactor. Fighters may be able to fly at Mach 2 or 3, but they’re no match for the speed of light. The instant the Object gets a lock, they’re already shot down. I’ve heard that the armored units they mention in history classes were saved by dust and dirt and other stuff near the surface refracting the lasers, but the high altitude that fighters excel in is so clear that there’s nothing to obstruct the laser.”

“Those things are 50 meter monsters that can still move around after you nuke them. A fighter’s nothing more than a small bird or gnat to them. Maintaining a runway is a waste of effort.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that the aces from the aviation unit only stay on standby in their cockpits so they can listen to the radio. But I doubt the tanks from those armored units would be of much use either. …And about leveling off this runway. Couldn’t they just put a giant shovel on the front of an armored vehicle and plow it all out of the way in one go?”

“…What the hell are we doing…?”

“Well, I still prefer this to having to fight.”

“That’s not a very soldierly thing to say, but I’ve gotta agree with you,” said the delinquent soldier Heivia in agreement with the boy of civilian origin. “We can just leave the fighting to the Objects. Losing your life on the battlefield just isn’t done anymore. We just have to watch from afar and wait for the Object to bring back its success as a souvenir. People like us fighting is just out of the question.”

“You’re a noble, right, Heivia?”

“Yeah, so I have to go out here and ‘become an honored soldier’ in order to prove my worthiness to become the next head of my family. Basically, if I put up with life in a base for 3 years, I can spend the rest of my life in a giant mansion flirting with my many maids.”

Contrary to his words, Heivia did not look pleased.

He seemed to not be entirely satisfied with that peaceful life.

“It sounds like you have it tough in your own way.”

“Yes. Unlike you, Heivia, I’m a commoner. I have to make sure I can get a job. That’s why I came here as a battlefield student.”

“Are you hoping to be an Object designer?”

“Learning at the actual site is said to be the quickest course to wealth. If I stay here for 3 years, I’ll have gained the best education you can get. Then I can gain money and the privileges of being a ‘saint that helps the heroes’ by manufacturing and selling Objects for those heroes to pilot.”

“Successful battlefield students are so highly praised because of all the barriers in their way. Since they don’t undergo the training of a soldier, I hear they start dropping like flies due to battlefield sicknesses and overwork. Hearing that does manage to remind me that this is indeed a battlefield.”

“Speaking of that, did you undergo training, Heivia?”

“Yeah, I went through the old style of training when I enlisted. It seems they wanted to build up a foundation of muscles and a spirit of camaraderie over a 5 month period, but I ended up like this regardless. Since I haven’t been in a single real battle since being assigned here, even my hand-to-hand combat skills have probably grown pretty rusty.”

“I’m perfectly happy living the kind of life that leads to forgetting how to fight.”

“That’s not a very soldierly thing to say, but once again, I’ve gotta agree with you.” Growing tired of that subject, Heivia moved on to another. “These nutritionally balanced military rations are just plain disgusting. What were the people who developed them thinking? …It’s more expensive than normal meat but tastes a whole lot worse. I just can’t stand it.”

“Aren’t they purposefully making it something with no flavor so the soldiers’ spirits don’t change based on whether they like the food for that day or not? People have different tastes when it comes to food, so they can’t make something absolutely everyone will like.”

“So they feed us something absolutely everyone will hate? Fuck that!”

“The food is paid for by the other people’s tax money, so you really shouldn’t complain. I will admit that capturing a deer and grilling it with some salt would be better though.”

Quenser had made the comment offhand, but it made Heivia freeze in place for some reason.

He turned eyes of pure admiration toward Quenser.

“…That’s a battlefield student for you. You really are a genius.”

“Hey.”

“You’re right. If we don’t have any good food, we just need to go catch it ourselves.”

Part 3

And so Heivia threw aside his shovel, grabbed his military rifle, and headed outside the base zone. A conifer forest that seemed to jut out of the white snow surrounded the area. It was an area of nature that seemed like it would have more wild animals than they could ever want.

Quenser had been dragged along, but he put down the rifle Heivia had shoved into his arms.

“Let’s go back. The superiors will get after us if they find out. I can already hear them going on about lacking a love for animals or something.”

“C’mon, I know you’d rather have some juicy meat over those rations that taste like petroleum jelly. And I don’t understand why they praise you if you shoot an enemy soldier, but they get mad if you shoot an animal.”

“That’s because bullets aren’t free. They used the tax money to buy them in order to kill enemy soldiers, so I’m betting they just don’t want us wasting them,” explained Quenser, but Heivia was not listening.

He was heading deeper and deeper into the thick forest, following deer tracks in the snow.

(…I’m not going along with this.)

Quenser picked back up his rifle and sat on a nearby stone.

He looked back toward the maintenance base zone.

However, he was not looking at a line of thick reinforced concrete buildings. The base zone Quenser belonged to was a mobile base, so it was made up of a large collection of vehicles. These base vehicles were much larger than even large trailer trucks. The soldiers’ quarters, the radar control tower, and everything else were located onboard those large vehicles. Even the Object maintenance area was put together by lining up several giant trucks that were dozens of meters long.

That was yet another aspect of the rules of war that Objects had changed.

Rather than fortifying a single defensive position, it was more militarily important to be able to swiftly get the Object to any place it needed to be.

Quenser thought as he stared at that base of the new age.

(My superiors with their military decorations are sitting in a warm room sipping coffee as they wait for the Object to return.)

However, holding a grudge was not going to lessen the Alaskan chill and Heivia was right about Quenser being tired of the bland and tasteless rations.

Quenser dug through the pocket of his military uniform that he was still not used to wearing. He pulled out the survival kit he had been issued along with the knife he did not know how to use. The kit had everything needed to treat wounds as well as tools to start a fire or catch a fish.

(In an age where Objects deal with everything, even this is a waste of taxes.)

When stored, the fishing pole was only about as long as a ballpoint pen, but when extended, it was around 50 centimeters and looked like the kind of pole that would be used to catch wakasagi. However, it was made of a military carbon something-or-other so its strength and flexibility were exceptional. Instead of bait, the kit had a few different types of lures. It seemed they had tried to find a way to allow one to fish without wasting any bait.

Quenser walked around for a bit and found a meandering stream. He broke the ice covering the surface and let the fishing line hang down into the water.

“Ahh, today sure is a peaceful day,” he muttered despite being on the front line of a battlefield.

Part 4

However, an amateur student could not properly use a survival kit so easily. It was unclear if Quenser would even have been able to catch a fish with a proper fishing pole, so it was no surprise when he did not catch anything no longer how long he waited.

He heard intermittent gunfire in the distance.

Of course, it was not enemy soldiers drawing near; it was Heivia chasing deer in hopes of getting one for dinner that night. In that day and age, the idea of flesh-and-blood soldiers attacking a maintenance base zone that held a giant Object was unthinkable. It was like trying to destroy the wall of a nuclear shelter by tackling it.

Just as Quenser was thinking that, he heard crunching footsteps in the snow.

“What is going on?”

He spun around and saw a girl with a puzzled look on her face. The girl looked to be around 14 and looked even less suited for the army than a battlefield student like Quenser.

She had fluffy blonde hair that reached her shoulders and white skin. Rather than a pure blue, her eyes were a light sky blue and she seemed to be staring off into the distance so it was difficult to get a grasp on her emotions.

The delicate lines of her body went beyond merely slender.

Her question seemed to have been in regards to the distant gunshots rather than to Quenser himself.

Quenser gave a blunt response.

“We’re going to have a barbecue tonight. I’m in charge of the salmon and Heivia’s in charge of the deer. I may have been the one to bring it up, but I don’t even know if deer meat is any good. I’ve never had it before, so I’m a little unsure. I just hope it doesn’t taste too strange.”

“…You’ll come to an early death if you have a barbecue with no vegetables.”

The girl gave a sigh with the expression of someone who had opened a box and found something uninteresting inside.

Quenser looked away from the fishing pole that showed no sign of a bite no longer how long he waited.

“Where are you headed, princess?”

“Are you trying to provoke me to anger?”

The girl’s expression usually remained relatively unchanged, but she looked slightly offended there.

However, Quenser and the girl were barely acquainted and he was unsure what to say. She had likely only spoken up on a whim. He doubted any situation would come up where he would need to communicate with that girl.

After all, she was an Elite, a pilot of the giant weapons known as Objects.

While he had helped out at the Alaskan maintenance area, he had exchanged simple greetings with her, but he doubted that was enough to create any kind of friendship. Their positions were simply too far apart. He was a dime a dozen student and she held a position that very few had even within a single nation.

Unlike Quenser and the others, she wore an outfit exclusive to Elite pilots. The suit was rather difficult to describe. It was clearly different from a normal military uniform. It was a mainly indigo blue skintight suit that started at her neck and covered even her hands and feet. The boots and gloves seemed to be detachable and they were connected on with fasteners.

Over that, she wore a black armored vest to protect her torso and a type of pocket that spread out like a miniskirt. Apparently, the bottom of the vest and the top of the pocket attached when she was piloting the Object. In what may have been a military tradition, the neck of her suit had a sailor uniform collar attached that somehow looked like part of a school uniform from a safe country.

The suit was highly water resistant so it could be worn while working underwater and it would even stop blood from flowing to her lower body to preserve the functionality of her brain just like air force suits did. The special suit was very Object-like in the fact that it outdid each of the previously existing branches of the military.

Quenser recalled being surprised when he had first seen her light sky blue eyes in the maintenance area. At first he had thought they were truly glowing, but he had been wrong. When piloting the Object, weak infrared rays were used to allow even the movements of her eyes to act as an input device. Long exposure to that laser had lightened the original blue color of her eyes.

That lightening was not an unwanted destruction of the functionality of her pupils’ lenses by the laser. Instead, it was an advancement allowing the laser to be even more effective, so her eyes would not grow any lighter once they reached a certain point.

The girl turned those light-colored eyes that were the sign of an Elite toward Quenser and spoke.

“The Object is being serviced. I had nothing to do, so I was wandering around outside. That was when I heard what sounded like gunfire.”

“…Oh, crap. You could hear that back at the base? We probably have a lecture waiting for us then.”

“And the old lady chief was yelling something about ‘that stupid kid’ running off and wasting a perfect chance to learn something since the Object was undergoing maintenance.”

“Oh, crap! This is worse than I thought!!”

He started running back toward the base zone, but then…

“…No, wait. Even if I run back now, I’m still going to get that lecture, so my options here are really to get yelled at empty handed or to get yelled at after catching some salmon. …I see, I see. I’m not going back until I catch at least one even if I die first.”

“If you acted more maturely and did not do things like that, they would not get mad at you so often.”

Quenser returned to the fishing pole mostly out of escapism and the girl looked at him with a shocked look in her eyes. Either she truly had nothing better to do or she was not used to someone who was not a proper soldier (to the soldiers, piloting the Object was a matter of life or death, so they tried to keep their distance from the Elite girl to make sure nothing unexpected happened) because she continued to hang around. This was unlike when he helped out with the maintenance because then they would only exchange a few businesslike words.

(…Could it be that this princess is also tired of the rations, so she’s interested in the salmon?)

Quenser did not dare speak that thought aloud because he was sure it would make her most displeased.

He continued trying to come up with something to talk about, but the girl continued speaking before he could come up with anything.

“You came here to study the Object, correct?”

“Yes. If I can survive helping out with the maintenance here at the base for 3 years, nothing but success awaits me when I return home.”

“Why this base?” asked the girl curiously. “You know what kind of Object I pilot at this base, don’t you?”

“It’s a Composite Multi-Role Object. …In other words, it can be freely used in any environment on the earth and in any weather conditions. It’s the most standard type of the giant weapons. It’s fine on land or in the sea.”

“Standard is another way of saying old-fashioned.” The girl sighed. “The second generation Objects are not so greedy as to claim to work anywhere. An Object developed to fight in the desert without any thought to fighting anywhere else will outdo a normal Object in a desert battle.”

That was a theory that had started to gradually spread throughout the Object manufacturing industry.

When the first Objects had started appearing on the battlefield, a composite Object that could fight the same in any battlefield in the world was a king of beasts with no natural enemy. However, when multiple Objects started popping up in the various battlefields across the globe, the situation had changed.

A composite model that could be freely used anywhere had no real weaknesses. However, this also meant that it had no real strengths. When the situation had changed from an Object crushing normal weapons to an Object fighting an Object, the question of how to make one’s own Object stand above the rest came to the forefront.

One suggested answer to that question was to create an Object that had definite strengths even if that would destroy the even balance of its functionality. Afterwards, that Object would have its activities kept to the environment it excelled in, giving it an advantage over other Objects when it fought.

“Here in Alaska is the same. We have a normal Object with no disadvantages and they have an optimized Object with definite strengths. In this snowy area, my Object may not be able to win.”

“But you’ve continued to use that Object, right, princess?”

“…I have no choice,” the girl known as an Elite said with some hesitation.

All the previous giant 50 meter weapons had become “old generation models” due to the latest weapons, but not just anyone could become an Elite that piloted those Objects.

They were the people who met every desired condition under a search carried out using the army’s flowchart of conditions.

Also, a human only became a terminal that controlled an Object after they had abilities developed that easily overcame those of your standard genius by having their nature artificially honed, refined, and improved by chemical and electrical means to match an individual Object.

Once an Elite was developed so utterly, their fate was linked with that of their Object.

Elites could not pilot just any Object. They could only pilot the Object they had been fine-tuned for. In fact, it might not be wrong to think of an Elite as someone who had their brain fine-tuned for a specific Object.

Elites could only pilot the Object developed for them or an Object further developed from that one that used the same tree diagram.

In that case, what would it mean if the type of Object you used was becoming obsolete?

“I might not be able to win,” the Elite girl who piloted the invincible Object said suddenly. “I might not be able to keep up.”

That girl had had her brain fine-tuned for the sole purpose of piloting that Object.

“As someone who has actually worked on the maintenance of the Object rather than just believing in it, you should know. So why did you come here?”

“Because I value things differently,” responded Quenser after thinking for a bit. “Only the soldiers get so obsessed over what is strong and what is weak. I’m a student. If I don’t stay with an Object with academic value, I won’t gain the knowledge and skills I need.”

“…?”

“If I learn about a standard, basic model, I can use that knowledge anywhere. On the other hand, if I study a model that has already been optimized in one direction, I can’t use that knowledge anywhere else. For a battlefield student, your Object is the best option.”

His opinion did not take any of the serious issues like winning the war into account, but he could say that kind of thing because he was not a soldier.

“If you try for too much on the battlefield, you will not live long.”

“True, and that’s why battlefield students have such a low survival rate. But I’m butting in here on the battlefield in the hopes of getting rich quick, so I won’t complain.”

Hearing Quenser say that, the girl who was a veteran of many battles tilted her head in puzzlement like a normal girl.

“So you’re prepared.”

“Yes, well, I hate slowly working through normal schoolwork, so I’m desperate for this chance to skip ahead. I need to be prepared for whatever it takes.”

“Hmm,” said the Elite in a reaction that gave the impression that she was a little slow.

And then…

“Really?”

“?”

This time Quenser was left staring at her in puzzlement. However, it seemed the girl had no intention of continuing the conversation. She turned around and left that forested area of Alaska, leaving the boy with his rifle and fishing pole.

In real life, people often did not think back on strange things that happened.

In just such an example, the reason that Elite girl had spoken to him like that was something Quenser probably should have thought back on a little more.

After all, Objects were synonymous with war and flesh-and-blood soldiers had no value.

However, that also meant that just thinking about it may have been pointless.

Part 17

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