Literature / Heavy Object

The main cast of the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion. From left to right (Background): Major Frolaytia Capistrano, Milinda Brantini. From left to right (Foreground): Havia Winchel, Qwenthur Barbotage.

"Whatever is made by man can be destroyed by man!"

— Qwenthur Barbotage

Objects. Gigantic armoured weapons of war which have completely changed modern warfare. With the standard method of thinking being that "Only an Object can destroy another Object", the idea that normal soldiers could do anything was laughable, until Qwenthur and Havia, a battlefield student studying Objects and a noble enrolled in the army as a radar analyst, experience their own army's Object falling in battle and its pilot "Princess" Milinda Brantini in enemy hands. Against all common sense, Qwenthur mounts a daring rescue mission, helped by Havia. On the way, they face the enemy army's Object, and find that they have no choice but to destroy it if they want to survive. They succeed.

This unbelievable victory leads the public to label them Dragon Killers, worshipped and adored. Of course, the military decides to take advantage of this and places the two into a special unit for taking on Objects on foot. Thus, Qwenthur and Havia, accompanied by Milinda and her own Object the Baby Magnum and their commander Frolaytia, begrudgingly do their dangerous duty, only continuing because they can't fight against their own military, and because their morals compel them to defend whomever they find standing in the way of the Objects.

Heavy Object is a Military Science Fiction Light Novel series written by Kazuma Kamachi (author of A Certain Magical Index), with illustrations by Ryo Nagi. The series was published under the Dengeki Bunko imprint for almost exactly 12 years from October 10, 2009 to October 8, 2021, for 20 volumes, plus some additional short stories and a side story volume known as Heavy Object EX. The final two volumes were released back to back in September and October 2021 as a two-part finale.

An anime adaptation by J.C. Staff began airing in October 2015. It consists of 24 episodes and was localized by Funimation.

The first chapter of the first volume was adapted into a manga by Inue Shinsuke in 2009. The remaining two chapters and one short story were adapted by Saito Sakae in a manga called Heavy Object S in 2011. A third manga adaptation (also by Saito Sakae) called Heavy Object A began in 2015 to accompany the anime adaptation, though it skipped the second volume of the light novel to adapt the third volume.

Qwenthur, along with Milinda and Havia, represent the series in the Massive Multiplayer Crossover Fighting Game Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax beginning with its Ignition update.

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Tropes found in this series:

0-M

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: The Objects, as well as the carrier ships, numerous explosions and several shots of hands are represented by this in the anime. Ditto the mining suit in episodes 18 and 19.
• Absent-Minded Professor: During a battle between students and faculty at the Royal Techno Academy, an old professor strolls through the campus dragging along a machine gun and whiteboard on which he is giving a lecture about said gun.
• Ace Pilot: All Elites are raised as this. Burning Alpha, Ice Girl 1 and Rocket Icarus also count, being actual fighter pilots.
• Achilles' Heel: The more specialized an Object is, the more likely it is to possess a weakness inherent to the design. Qwenthur frequently exploits these weaknesses to disable/destroy Objects.
• Action Bomb: Mother Lady is surrounded by a swarm of hunter-killer satellites that can tear apart any approaching vessel. They're also packed with explosives that will detonate if even slightly damaged, showering the area with shrapnel.
• Action Dress Rip: Mariydi tears off the skirt of her dress while fighting Charlotte. Aside from her earlier complaints about it limiting her range of motion, the dress had also soaked up a lot of water which made it even more cumbersome.
• Action Girl:
  • Milinda is the pilot of a First Generation Object, which is generally looked down upon as being a poor match to Second Generation Objects. Despite this she has racked up an impressive number of Object kills, often without any assistance from Qwenthur beyond targeting info.
  • Mariydi is a seasoned veteran and ace pilot despite being a pre-teen. Out of the cockpit she's a solid shot with a rifle, smart enough to plot her way to victory in a sporting event while foiling assassination attempts, and strong enough to do all of this without any doping.
  • Putana is not only a skilled Elite, she's also a deft hand on a motorcycle, quick to learn new skills (mainly stealing said motorcycles), and deadly with a gun.
  • Azureyfear is a beautiful young noble but also a crack shot with rifles, smart enough to run a drug war, and tough enough to survive the inertial G's of an Object that would incapacitate Elites.
  • Charlotte is an Elite whose body has undergone intense reconditioning. Combined with her combat training, she can take down entire squads of soldiers on her own.
  • After upgrading to a Mauve Shirt, Myonri is demonstrated to be a skilled soldier and often serves as extra muscle for the protagonists. Aside from being a skilled marksman she is also talented in driving multiple types of vehicles.
  • Wraith may usually rely her bodyguard Frank for combat, but she's more than willing and able to go into combat with gun and grenades.
• Adaptational Context Change: In both the light novel and the anime, when Milinda finds out that Qwenthur shared his Email ID with Ayami, he says "You're the only one I love, baby" to her. In the novel, he says this as to not upset her and it doesn't work and she remains angry. In the anime, he says this rather casually and his response leaves her flustered.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • In the light novel, the outcome of the confrontation between Frolaytia, Havia, and Qwenthur vs Councillor Flide is uncertain. In episode 8, Baby Magnum faces off against the councillor's personal Object, the "Exact Javelin" while Frolaytia and Havia deal with Flide. True to his word, Havia punches Flide's teeth in, and Baby Magnum corrects her Alaskan mistake and takes down Exact Javelin.
  • In the light novel, a squad of women tasked with raiding the barracks to locate any porn is mentioned but never seen. They make an appearance in the anime where they use the confiscated porn to embarrass the protagonists into taking a mission.
• Adaptation Name Change: The anime changes the One Nation Under Copyright super-nation from "Capitalist Corporations" to "Capitalist Enterprise". Since the anime is the only portion of the IP to get an official English-language localization, that's the name we use on this wiki.
• Agent Provocateur: Piranirie Martini Smoky specializes in stirring up conflict in areas where it is either dying down or non-existent.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • While it's generally acknowledged an AI-piloted Object would be more humane and efficient, they are not yet advanced enough to equal an Elite and there remains concerns about them going on a rampage against friend and foe alike. The Rush is equipped with one, but it has all the usual flaws. To compensate, a pilot must manually monitor and re-code the A.I. on the fly.
  • Ichirei Shikon is revealed to be not an AI but a ridiculously well-developed prediction engine. It was created for the sole purpose of "winning" for the Island Nation at any cost but ultimately was flawed due to its primary creator's love for his wife.
  • Capulet is the Information Alliance's primary AI system, designed to collate data and develop programs to advance their agenda. However, it is still faulty and requires human oversight to account for bugs and false positives, which is mainly carried out by the Martini series. In Volume 14 it erroneously concludes New York City has no residents, making it a worthless resource sink that should be destroyed for the benefit of the nation.
    • Capulet is noted to behave more like a cat than a dog. It's all too easy to distract it from important matters by offering up a more interesting problem. Oh Ho Ho uses this to completely steal its control of the Manhattan.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • When Piranirie is dying she's obviously afraid and lost, with her last word being "Mom".
  • The last transmission of the Crystal Scrying's Elite was "I'm so tired". Frolaytia muses the 21st, having been raised to idolize the nobility, was driven to the breaking point doing dirty work for the nobles to satisfy their fear of their own genetic failings.
• The Alcatraz: Château de Rouge ostensibly keeps all of its prisoners locked in their cells at all times. Even if they get out of those cells, the prison is located on an artificial island in the Pacific Ocean so there's nowhere to go.
• All-Natural Snake Oil: Immortanoid in Volume 17 is a "mineral" used in baths purported to grant longevity due to a unique restorative radiation. In actuality it's a trans-uranic element manufactured in particle accelerators. The creators have used advertising, supply control, and a rare earth bank to artificially inflate its perceived value.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: After Baby Magnum is defeated in the EX volume, the Faith Organization seizes the 37th's maintenance base. Any Legitimacy soldiers who did anything suspicious was killed by the Trinity Style's cannons.
• Alpha Strike: Hornet Storm possesses only anti-personnel lasers for weaponry. When facing an Object it refracts the lasers to simultaneously strike a single point on the enemy's armor.

• Amazon Brigade: The Valkyrie global divine punishment unit from the Faith Organization, the Battlefield Cleanup Service PMC, the maid bodyguards of the Winchel family, the bodyguard unit for the Princess in Volume 8, and Alfred Silverking's bodyguards/groping material in Volume 14.
• America Saves the Day: Discussed in Volume 7 where the MIB note that while "the world police" existed there were far fewer wars than the current era which is why they intend to create a successor country with the same goals.
• Amusing Injuries: Temporarily blinded by a laser, Havia tries to punch Qwenthur and hits a cactus.
• And the Adventure Continues: At the conclusion of Volume 20, Qwenthur, Havia, and Milinda are still in the military and are on a new mission even with the age of Objects having ended.
• And This Is for...: Claire helped kill Dimiksy because he arranged the death of a young girl Claire had known very well. When firing the shot that kills him, Claire whispers the girl's name.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Wraith gives one of these to the 37th's infantry when she reveals Flagship 019 has tanks onboard. Either the infantry can help sneak the tanks off-site or they can get killed when the Faith Organization blows them to kingdom come.
• Anti-Air: The creation of Objects and their advanced sensors and multiple laser weapons has reduced the role of the air force outside the Northern European Restricted Zone (where Objects are forbidden by international treaties) to transporting personnel and equipment, low-altitude reconnaissance when satellites are unavailable and ceremonial acrobatics.
• Anticlimax: The fight between Qwenthur and Skuld which ends Volume 15 never actually occurs. Before she can even attack, Qwenthur detonates a landmine under her. And the detonation happens in a scene break to make the situation even more of an anti-climax.
• Apathetic Citizens:
  • A major reason the wars can continue is that the general populace has bought into the idea of "clean wars" that will never touch them.
  • The citizens of Manhattan are shockingly blase on the reveal that their city is a massive Object and currently headed to a battlefield. Justified due to the Information Alliance very carefully controlling the flow of information and social media.

• Arms Dealer: Woodstock, the main enemy of Volume 16, is a criminal syndicate that runs weapons. Starting with basic guns crafted with the titular woodstocks, they eventually upgraded to unique weapon systems and even tweaks to Objects.
• Artistic License – Ships: The prologue to the anime depicts a ballistic missile submarine (seemingly based an American Ohio-class) launching against the first Object while surfaced. Leaving aside that this is an insanely short range at which to use an SLBM (a Trident II has an operational range of at least 12,000 km; the exact number is classified), no sane boomer captain is going to launch from the surface if he can possibly avoid it: there's no point in needlessly exposing his boat to enemy surface ships' fire (or an Object's in this case).
• AstroTurf: The MIB attempt this in Oceania, stirring up outrage among the citizens using edited footage of resolved crises and limiting the food supply. They were too rushed and the outrage lost momentum quickly.
• Assassin Outclassin':
  • Nyarlathotep was ready to die, but the assassin sent to kill him was so pathetic he ended up escaping anyway.
  • Frolaytia identifies an assassin among her staff and proceeds to easily take her down, all the while critiquing her lack of skill.
• Asshole Victim: Acre was greedy to the point that he was willing to put innocents to the slaughter, thus his death at the hands of Nyarlathotep, one of his former spies, goes unmourned.
• As You Know: One of the many forms of exposition the series liberally employs.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Prianirie orders the sailors of Flagship 019 to rush the 37th's squads rather than use standard tactics. As a result of sacrificing proper cover and coordinated attacks, they are slaughtered by the numerically inferior side.
• Attack Drone:
  • A supplementary force used by some Units and Objects. Some models are sold on the black market to guerrillas and terrorists.
  • Olympia Dome has water- and air-borne drones to enforce its laws.
  • Manhattan uses a variety of drones to enforce the law and as a counter to any invading troops. As they are controlled by a dumb AI system they're relatively easy to confuse.
• Awesome by Analysis: The only reason Qwenthur and Havia are still alive.
• Awful Truth: At the end of Volume 18 Louisiana reveals to Qwenthur the horrible truth about Objects that drove her to create Mother Lady: The Earth's axis has begun to shift due to all the excess force Objects shunt into it during battles which may render the planet lifeless.
• Badass Bookworm: Qwenthur. Some have theorized that if Qwenthur, a man who regularly exploits the weaknesses of Objects, were to design one of his own, he'd be skipping generations of technology with what he would design.
• Badass Normal: Qwenthur and Havia manage to constantly defeat Objects without one on their own.
• Bad Boss: Pretty much every antagonist has no problem sending their soldiers on suicide missions, up to and including personally firing on their location.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Hina breaks down after Qwenthur kills Dora, feeling useless because she couldn't avenge her parents. Qwenthur replies that just means she's a good person; the military are all bad people so they do the dirty work people like Hina can't.
• Balance of Power: The four supernations maintain a delicate equilibrium, none of them weak enough for the others to consider all-out war.
• Bastard Bastard: Prince Dimiksy is a cruel man and has eliminated many rival claimants for the throne of Volga despite being first in line. It is suspected this is because he was the king's bastard child and thus would have no claim to the matrilineal throne. The DNA tests show he's legitimate but the office involved is staffed by his flunkies. After his death the suspicions are confirmed; he was illegitimate.
• Batman Gambit: Bad Garage sets up a plan to destroy Rome in a way that will expose the environmental damage caused by Objects. Qwenthur and Havia stop them detonating an Object reactor under the city but that was Plan B. The real plan was to lure Baby Magnum and Rush close enough to Rome to destabilize the crust, which succeeded.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The Jack in the Box's soldiers staged an attack using non-lethal tactics on Giant Pizza. At the same time they used megaphones to shout the Legitimacy Kingdom was attacking and gave orders to the civilians who accepted due to seeing them as saviors.
• The Bermuda Triangle: The final battle of Volume 15 takes place in the Triangle. It's also revealed that the Information Alliance uses an uncharted island in the Triangle to house the Capulet system's "breaker". Modern disappearances in the area can be credited to keeping the island a secret.
• Betrayal Insurance: Qwenthur has a bad feeling about Dorothea's unit so he quietly arranges events such that Baby Magnum will be in a position to offer aid when the inevitable betrayal occurs.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Grinov would rather kill himself than be captured and allow Woodstock's operations be compromised. After stabbing himself in the neck fails, he signals the Gangster to fire on his position.
• BFG:
  • All Objects are covered with them, but the Break Carrier/Lisolette takes the cake, being equipped with a mass driver railgun thats bigger than the actual Object itself.
  • Break Carrier has nothing on the Manhattan, whose main cannon is four kilometers long.
  • Wraith's bodyguard, Frank, has a grenade launcher re-purposed to fire solid metal slugs. It's effectively a 44 mm magnum.
• Big Good: Qwenthur, Havia, and Milinda answer to Frolaytia.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Winchell family's great wealth has allowed its membership to balloon out of control, resulting in a larger number of heir claimants such as Havia born from multiple branches, all competing with cutthroat politics. And given the tendency of both genders to screw anything that moves, there are actually ten times as many bastards as legitiamte heirs.
• Bio-Augmentation: A necessity for Elites and modern jet pilots in order to withstand the increased g's in battle, with both genetic and surgical modifications being used.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Volume 17 ends with the 37th triumphant but not able to stop the people responsible for the events of the volume. The nobles behind the 21st won't face any consequences for its destruction and will simply burden another unit with their morale-destroying demands.
  • Volume 18 once again sees the 37th triumph, destroying the Mother Lady which had threatened global stability and preventing a Colony Drop from World's End. However this also means that the work Louisiana had done to save Earth has been wiped out and, with her likely death imminent, it's down to the protagonists to find an answer. And at the same time an ominous order is issued within Legitimacy Kingdom to kill everyone aware of Louisiana's discovery.
• Black Box: The targeting system in Objects is created by combining the knowledge of three different disciplines and the intuition of the Elite. Due to the odd mixture of techniques nobody involved quite understands the whole thing, only that it works.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Due to the strength of Object plating, one of the main strategies in battle is to instead aim for their main weapons.
• Blinded by the Light:
  • Laser and plasma weapons, as well as an Object's reactor detonating, are enough to temporarily blind anyone looking. Qwenthur tends to get some flak for not telling anyone to look away.
  • It's mentioned that it's rare for soldiers to use flashlights to see in the dark due to the many types of sensors found in modern rifles and goggles. However, some soldiers still carry flashlights for the sole purpose of blinding enemies, which is a tactic commonly used by the Faith Organization.
• Body Double: The Megalodiver's elite has multiple body doubles to protect against assassination attempts. Havia figures this out before taking a shot that would have alerted the guards but another Legitimacy soldier did not.
• Body Horror: The Elite of the Dionysus was vivisected by her superiors and the various portions of her body were kept in individual life support units that were scattered around the world for research. She was fully aware of what had happened to her, falling into a lethargic state unless all the parts of her body were brought together.
• Boob-Based Gag: Frolaytia's "titan tits" seem to bounce all over creation in the anime, even when she's barely moving. Havia pokes fun at Frolaytia's endowments whenever he gets the chance, even to her face.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: At the start of Episode 17, Monica says, "Now it's time for the show's opening! Start!" Cue opening sequence.
• Brick Joke: In volume 3 Qwenthur and Havia complain about their unit being used for an idol show as military propaganda. Havia ends the conversation by saying that at least it's better than being mobilized to help film an action movie. Seven volumes later our heroes are ordered to help film an alien invasion movie. It reaches a point where the troops are pissed at the movie's main actor, Milinda is sulking in her cockpit after seeing in the storyboard that the Baby Magnum is easily destroyed in one hit by an alien cruiser and Frolaytia is on the verge of physically assaulting the director. Frolaytia ends up profusely thanking her superior when he tells her she can go in an actual combat mission.
• Broken Pedestal: Discussed with regards to nobles and commoners in Volume 17. Nobles have cultivated an image of being superior in all ways to commoners, which is why they have the right to rule over and guide them. The discovery of Body File and the knowledge that many nobles are desperately afraid of suffering due Royal Inbreeding causes Havia to have a temporary crisis of faith. Meanwhile the 21st's morale was at rock bottom due to seeing just how pathetic and cowardly the nobles could be in private.
• Broken-System Dogmatist: The society created and supported by Objects is heavily flawed and the lie that keeps it going is nearly revealed several times over the series. Despite this there are many higher-ups in the superpowers who are so committed to the Objects that they will kill anyone who becomes aware of the deeper flaws which need to be addressed to avoid global extinction.

• The Cake Is a Lie: The Civilian Acclimation Assistance System is the Legitimacy Kingdom's program for reintegrating child soldiers such as Elites into civilian life. However any Elite going through the program will inevitably fail the interview portion as the military has no desire to actually let them leave.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Nyarlathotep retired from the spy business to raise a family in peace, even going so far as to hypnotize himself to forget his skills. Then his old employer invaded the country and Nyarlathotep's wife and son died in front of him, dragging him back into the war.
• The Cameo: Multiple characters from Kamachi's other light novels make small cameos as background members of the 37th Battalion in the various manga series. Including:
  • Uiharu, Tsuchimikado, Misaka Imouto, Kanzaki, Stiyl and Heaven Canceler from A Certain Magical Index; with Uiharu and Tsuchimikado making multiple appearances.
  • Shinobu Jinnai and Yukari from The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village.
  • Kyousuke Shiroyama and the White Queen from The Unexplored Summon://Blood Sign.
• Canon Foreigner: The anime gives us Klondike, the pacifistic religious figure from the Faith Organization.
• Canon Immigrant: The Exact Javelin was the anime-only name for Flide's personal Object. In volume 12 this was confirmed to be its name.
• The Caper: The start of volume 9 features a heist where the protagonists as "civilian" members of a "gang" steal an Object.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Downplayed, as while Capitalist Corporations flies in the face of human ethics with their defining hat being trafficking protégés for the highest bidder, the other four nations also use capitalism without the same extremities. Exaggerated to the point of comedy where consumerism is responsible for nearly killing all life on earth.
• Captured on Purpose: Skuld allowed herself to be captured by the 37th in hopes of being sent to a Legitimacy Kingdom safe country for study. Once there she would escape and being pursuing her hobby: Serial killing.
• Casual Danger Dialogue:
  • Qwenthur and Havia won't stop bantering even while they're trying their best to not die.
  • Volume 15 has members of the 37th and Wraith discussing their plan only for Havia to abruptly point out said discussion started after the enemy blew an enormous hole in their ship, rendering said plan moot. Wraith then keeps them talking long enough that they have no choice but to go along with her second plan.
  • The short story at Qwenthur's school starts with him, Monica, and a fellow student idly chatting in the middle of a siege.
• Catchphrase: Qwenthur's anime-only Pre-Mortem One-Liner when it comes to objects: "Whatever is made by man, can be destroyed by man!"
• Cavalry Betrayal: Happens to Mariydi twice in Volume 13. First a rescue copter from her nation tries to gun her down with a machine gun due the bounty on her head. Then her squadron seemingly tries to gun her down, though they're really just putting on a show for the COs.
• Chainsaw Good: Qwenthur ends up using one in self-defense against a Faith soldier. The details are skipped, aside from the soldier being split vertically in half and Qwenthur being coated in gore.
• Character Tics: All members of the Martini series have a habit of twirling pens ingrained into them during their training.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Elements introduced casually in the prologue and first chapter of a volume often play a critical role in the second and third chapters.
  • In the anime-only Klondike two-parter, Qwenthur gives Milinda a small mirror as a present, explaining how he made it using the metal-plating chemicals for manufacturing reflectors that are part of Baby Magnum's armament. He later has the 37th fire a missile loaded with the chemicals at Baby Magnum after a Brainwashed and Crazy Milinda goes berserk. The guns' cooling cycle draws in the chemicals, which coat the innards of the weapons and cause them to explode when she tries to fire again, disabling the Object enough to trigger Milinda's ejector seat and end the rampage.
• Chekhov's Gunman: At the start of Volume 15 it's noted that Katarina Martini vanished during the chaos of the Manhattan's attack on the fleet. The end of the volume reveals she retreated to a submarine, from which she coordinated with Wraith to fake Qwenthur's death.
• Chekhov's Volcano:
  • In Volume 14 it's mentioned that New Caribbean Island was created by shattering the bedrock underwater to form an artificial volcano. Piranirie uses the same concept on the nearby naval battlefield in order to wipe out the 37th's soldiers.
  • Volume 16 takes place off the coast of Hawaii and mention is made of the island's volcano. This indirectly plays a role in the Object battle as an explosion is deliberately set off to form an underwater volcano beneath the Over Cavitation.
• Chemically-Induced Insanity: The Ghost Changer is revealed to be a special lubricant which generates a hallucinatory gas when exposed to the intense pressures and heats of Object operation. Victims will begin to see others as ghosts or zombies and will lash out, killing one another.
• The Chessmaster: The Gambit Pileup at the end of Volume 14 which nearly triggers a global war was all instigated by Tyrfing Boilermaker, who deliberately set in motion each of the gambits with the intent of causing just such a situation.
• Chewbacca Defense: Piranirie motivates her soldiers to fight, even when all logic says they shouldn't, with tactics that put them off-balance and distract them from the actual situation.
• Child Prodigy:
  • The Information Alliance has the "Martini series", a project created to mass-produce thousands of these for their military and bureaucracy. It only produces genius girls due to the project manager trying to recreate her mother's mind in a child.
  • Talent trafficking is an active market on the Capitalist Enterprise. Intelligent children are kidnapped and sold to corporations as future employees. In Volume 9 a number of children are abducted in a similar manner by an international group of child geniuses who are fed up with the adults and the state of the world. They plan to wait out humanity's collapse in cold sleep so they can create a new world order.
• Child Soldiers:
  • The average age of the soldiers in the military has gone down quite a bit. Frolaytia is 18 and has been in the military since she was 13, while Mariydi is 12 and a recognized ace fighter pilot. Oh Ho Ho is actually around 10 years old and using 3DCG for her idol work. It's so common that hardly anyone thinks of it as wrong.
  • Not only are they soldiers at such young ages but the Elites and Mariydi have also gone through extensive physical and genetic augmentation before this point and seen multiple battles. Recruiting for Elites must start well before their tenth birthday.
  • Volume 13 reveals that a large number of Elites are war orphans from the Northern Restricted Zone. They're "rescued" from the war there only to be indoctrinated as soldiers fighting in any other battlefield but their homeland.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Both Qwenthur and Havia. While the "chivalrous" part is often dubious, the "pervert" part is there for the world to see.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Several times, Qwenthur and Havia cold have just obeyed orders and ignore the object while letting innocent people be killed but they go out to defeat the object instead, usually meaning that they never get recognized for their accomplishments and end up punished. The worst part is that, if it were up to them, neither would be on the front-lines anymore; it's the same people who don't want them acting like heroes who are the ones who keep putting them in the position to act like one.
• City of Spies:
  • As revealed early on, the four gangs in Lost Angels are actually disguised soldiers from the four supernations. Three of the gangs are attempting to steal information from the Object maintenance base in the city while the fourth is protecting it.
  • Hawaii is a blank area but its location has made it both a major tourist spot and a center for espionage. The Capitalist Enterprise has the largest presence and has gotten so sick of the spies that they're breeding sharks to kill tourism and thus the cover used by the spies.
• Civil War:
  • Between the main Capitalist Enterprise and the Mass Driver Conglomerate in volume 2.
  • The 24th Mobile Maintenance Battalion of the Legitimacy Kingdom starts one in volume 3.
  • In volume 8, another one erupts in the Island Nation (a.k.a. Japan) because of one of the Capitalist Enterprise self-defense PMC.
  • Volume 11 has Havia's sister start one just because she doesn't like Havia's Romeo and Juliet romance with a Vanderbilt.
• Cliffhanger: Of the light novels, only volume 14 ends on a cliffhanger. As the various supernations mobilize for a world war, the Information Alliance unveils a secret weapon and declares their first action with it will be to destroy the 37th.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: The Princess, though she usually hides it well behind her The Stoic face. On more than one occasion, she's pointed Baby Magnum's main guns at Qwenthur, which is like pointing a battleship cannon at an ant. She does quite literally cling to Qwenthur out of jealousy on Christmas Eve, though.
• Clothing Damage: Monica gets her skirt shot off by a railgun and spends the rest of the short story in a "super mini skirt".
• Clueless Chick-Magnet:
  • Qwenthur is very, very dense — he constantly misses the fact that girls are interested in him. Havia has wanted to punch him - and goes through with it - sometimes.
  • Havia is not immune to this either. He completely missed the fact that a large portion of his family's maids and one of his sisters are only treating him poorly because they're too afraid to openly support him.
• Coincidence Magnet: Apparently, the universe just wants to see how much it takes before those two idiots turn tail from an Object. Except in volume 6 when, near the end, it is implied that Unicorn had a hand in their reassignments to make use of their skills. That, or just saw they were in the area and use them anyway.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: When Rigas refuses to give Frolaytia the information she wants, she takes a gun and shoots him dead then has him revived. She repeats this process every time he offers even one word against helping her, with each near-death requiring more and more equipment to keep Rigas alive.
• Colony Drop: World's End is defeated in Earth orbit at which point the main challenge of the volume becomes stopping a 20,000 ton dead Object impacting the surface and potentially wiping out all life.
• Combat by Champion: Theoretically, "clean wars" are possible because the only forces fighting are each nation's Objects; the rest of the armies are just there to maintain them. Realistically those soldiers die in droves interfering in the battles.
• Combat Pragmatist: Flyaway's combat strategy is to flee after expending the majority of its ammunition. If cornered it will use dirty tricks to escape, willingly breaking several international laws on battlefield behavior.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: The Information Alliance government has indoctrinated their populace to believe this. As a result they tend to blindly follow the orders of anyone in a superior position, for fear that not doing so will ruin their life, even if following orders will do that anyway.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: The captain of a disabled Capitalist submarine complains every step of the way as the Legitimacy troops retrieve his vessel.
• Conspicuous Consumption: The Celestial Flowers fireworks festival is a stupidly lavish fireworks celebration that continues day and night in the south Atlantic. They even use a modified railgun to create artificial auroras. Lady Vanderbilt notes that whatever the nobles may claim, the entire event is just a way for them to splurge.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The finale sees the return of a large number of characters, many who only appeared in the original volume.
• Cool Ship: The disguised cruiser Scarlet Princess of the Legitimacy Kingdom and the Summer Vacation, one of the Winchel family's seven armed cruise ships, both appearing in volume 8.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Various executives are shown to focus on maintaining their profits no matter how many people might die as a result.
  • Councillor Flide's main goal in killing Havia and Qwenthur was to ensure the era of "clean wars" continued to bring money to his Object business.
  • The Enterprise executive in charge of Deep Optical planned to cause a depression in Oceania so they would remain reliant on his nation's food imports, despite the big possibility of hundreds of thousands of deaths if the import chain was disrupted.
  • Acres Kiss-of-Rose invaded a peaceful blank area and enacted a scorched earth policy on the defenseless populace while claiming it was to combat terrorism. Said "terrorism" was a false news story he created; his actual desire was to reduce shipping costs by controlling a nearby canal.
  • Hermes Pharmaceutical developed a gas intended for riot control only to discover it had a 99.8% fatality rate. They proceeded to bribe an ethics board to help cover this up and sold the gas to their nation's unknowing police, resulting in the death of 15,000 civilians.
• Covered in Gunge:
  • During a war game Havia replaces his team's paint rounds with ones that are thick, white, and sticky. The opposing team really doesn't want to get coated with that.
  • Megalodiver fills the surrounding ocean with a thickened starch, turning it into a sticky slime. Havia and Qwenthur both end up in it and are mistaken for slime monsters.
  • The Police Queen sprays down sections of the battleground with a thick goop. Initially assumed to be a non-lethal weapon for restraining personnel, it's revealed to actually be napalm.
• Crapsack World: Four supernations are constantly skirmishing with one another, using weapons of mass destruction piloted by child soldiers. Anyone who tries to promote peace is targeted by all sides as disruptive elements and are killed or worse. This situation is perpetuated and exacerbated by extremists and war profiteers on all sides. It's also specifically pointed out by the author.
  Afterword of volume 6: As you could probably tell from reading any one volume, the world of Heavy Object is a shitty world where the good are not rewarded and the evil are not punished.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Everything Qwenthur and Havia do. For example, Qwenthur's action regarding Frolaytia being forced into marriage? Molest her in front of her arranged suitor and tell him you're in a physical relationship with her. It works.
• Crew of One: The majority of Objects are crewed by only a single Elite. The rest of their unit consists of command staff and support personnel.
• Crippling Over Specialization:
  • All Elites are genetically modified and trained to pilot a specific Object and only that type of Object. If their Object is destroyed and a replacement is not available, it can be years before one is built to their specification.
  • Second Generation Objects are specifically designed for certain environments or situations and within that role have a significant advantage over other Objects. At the same time, this reduces their effectiveness outside of those roles. Milinda notes they are also heavily specialized in fighting other Objects, which compromises their ability to counter other threats.
  • The enemy unit supporting Water Strider relied almost entirely on their Object and radar detection; they didn't have any planes, tanks, or even regular infantry. This left them vulnerable to infiltration and after the Object's destruction they didn't stand a chance against Frolaytia's tanks and infantry.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Qwenthur and Havia spend most of their time doing stupid stuff and snarking at whatever stupidity is going on around them, but when the situation arises you'll realize that they actually know their stuff.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Acre is sealed in a barrel filled with pebbles and an adhesive with his head above the surface. As the adhesive set it expanded, gradually squeezing his body until he died of shock.
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • What the battle between a side with an object and a side without an object was acknowledged to be prior to the events in the story. Once such "battle" is seen in Volume 14 when an enemy infantry force has invaded the Legitimacy base. As soon as Milinda gets to her Object, she's able to eliminate every soldier with a single barrage of lasers.
  • The Manhattan is able to destroy five Objects in under three minutes and easily holds off the Capitalist Enterprise's entire Atlantic force without taking any hits.
• Cute and Psycho: Skuld Silent-Third seems like a relatively innocent and cooperative Elite. In fact she is a completely amoral and utterly insane serial killer who preys on not only her enemy and civilians but also her own comrades.
• Cut the Juice:
  • Qwenthur and Havia fake a lightning strike on the Trinity Style's maintenance base to explain a blackout. This allows the duo to walk right through the middle of an enemy encampment.
  • Flagship 019's assault team cuts power during a daytime assault. This is because they're using ultrasound locators to keep track of their positions and machinery produces enough sounds to disrupt the signal.
• Dancin' in the Ruins: After causing Oh Ho Ho to go berserk, Skuld happily dances through the ensuing chaos.
• David Versus Goliath: The premise is two guys vs 50 meter tall tanks with more firepower than North Korea. It leads to every petty dictator trying to do the same thing off-screen, with... a bit less success.
• Decadent Court: Legitimacy Kingdom's noble and royal houses are constantly jockeying for position and are not above arranging assassinations. Havia notes the only reason he's not at risk while in the military is that he's not important enough to justify an attack. Volume 6 shows just how deadly these conflicts can become when nearly an entire military base is destroyed as an after-thought during a fight over a succession.
• Deadly Euphemism:
  • Lisa's unit specialized in bringing "paint" to battlefield countries. Specifically this paint was used to disguise illegal land mines they would leave behind, with no care for potential civilian casualties.
  • Skuld Silent-Third is a compulsive serial killer and will target members of her own military unit if no other options are available. The higher-ups are aware of why the unit has such a high rate of "attrition" and so arrange additional reinforcements.
• Death Faked for You:
  • The Information Alliance uses an official channel to declare a group of captured Legitimacy soldiers were killed during a bombardment. As they are officially "dead" the Alliance doesn't have to adhere to any laws with regards to prisoners and can force them to take on suicide missions.
  • Qwenthur is apparently shot dead by Wraith and dumped overboard to be eaten by a shark. In fact he wasn't shot at all and the shark was a submersible coming to collect him.
• Death of a Child: Children are maimed and killed just like anyone else, sometimes even targeted deliberately as it has a bigger PR impact.
• Death or Glory Attack: Simple Is Best charges enemy objects at speeds that break the sound barrier to deliver a devastating close-range plasma blast, relying on ablative armor to protect their front. If the attack fails the Object's lightly defended rear is exposed and easily destroyed by even the Baby Magnum.
• Defeat Means Respect: After Qwenthur beat Skuld, she became obsessed with him and considers him her "teacher" for showing her entirely new ways of murdering people.
• Defensive Feint Trap: In Volume 17 Frolaytia knows the 37th is going to be attacked. Rather than waiting for an unexpected ambush, she arranges a training mission where the 37th will be too tempting of a target for the enemy to not attack.
• Demolitions Expert: Qwenthur can use his explosives for everything from collapsing cave entrances to creating an improvised armor-piercing shrapnel grenade. He's so well-known for this in-universe that when cornered in a workshop containing gunpowder his pursuers are very cautious and the Faith Organization used him as the basis of a Module for their combat exoskeleton.
• Denser and Wackier: Downplayed. Neither the light novels, nor the anime adaptation is devoid of humor but the manga adaptation adds a lot more humor, exaggerates the characters and characters often turn in to Super-Deformed version of themselves in the middle of even the darkest parts of the plot.
• Determinator: Qwenthur and to a lesser extent Havia.
• Dirty Cop:
  • A unit charged with checking the cargo of all ships leaving a port is paid off to ignore human traffickers.
  • An entire squad of Black Uniforms, the internal police of Legitimacy Kingdom's military, is revealed to be part of a drug-running ring. Their status allows them to approve any shipment and attach themselves to any unit that might come into contact with the contraband.
• Dirty Old Man: Alfred Silverking, the captain of Flagship 019, keeps an all-female bodyguard unit and will unashamedly grope their butts in public.
• Disability Superpower: Putana Highball, the Faith Organization Elite from Volume 9 has scopophobia and is practically supernaturally aware of any gaze focused on her, from living beings to cameras and drones. She can even tell if cameras are active or not. She has been trained to use this sixth sense in battle, both in and out of her Object, and can even dodge enemy gunfire by sensing the shooters' gazes and predicting the bullets' paths, though she can be overwhelmed if faced with too many enemies.
• Disaster Dominoes: A massive wave set off by an Object battle causes the ships of the 37th's maintenance fleet to begin crashing into one another, with detonating munitions only making the situation worse.
• Discontinuity Nod: The battle with Flide's Object in the original novel is not fully fleshed out but there are enough details to separate it from the anime fight against Exact Javelin. In Volume 12, the Exact Javelin is confirmed to have been Flide's Object but the two protagonists can't remember whether the novel or anime events were canon.
• Disguised in Drag: In Volume 16 Qwenthur ends up dressing as a maid twice while infiltrating enemy territory. Nobody can figure out it's him.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Legitimacy Kingdom's response when spooked by a significant number of casualties is to kill ten times as many of the enemy.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • When Qwenthur needs to distract Havia he pulls out a photo of a bathing Frolaytia. Havia is worried the picture will be lost so he tries to commit it to memory, meaning his eyes are focused exactly where Qwenthur wants them.
  • Havia and Qwenthur weaponize Elise's sexy Santa costume by throwing her out where enemy soldiers will stop to gawk while Havia is reloading his rocket launcher. This not only succeeds, it does so multiple times.
• Divided States of America: When the supernations formed America splintered. The Capitalist Enterprise controls the western half and is headquartered in Los Angeles while the Information Alliance controls the eastern part from New York City. The two nations are separated by the Greater Canyon, a massive demilitarized zone centered on the Grand Canyon.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • Taratua happily abuses Wraith and the 101st Zombie Platoon, nearly getting them killed out of pure pettiness, and is gunned down in retaliation.
  • Havia spends most of Volume 15 making death threats against Wraith in between calling her a monster. As soon as they get to Information Alliance territory for a mission she immediately betrays them as she has no reason to help somebody who wants her dead.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Invoked by Havia during the mock battle at the start of Volume 7 - he replaces the red paint in the paint rounds with white paint that is "suspiciously sticky".
• Doomsday Clock: References to the World Clock which measures the remaining lifespan of the human race based on current resource supplies, production, and consumption is a Running Gag in Volume 9. It becomes relevant at the end when the "Star" conspiracy is revealed to be people trying to survive once it hits midnight and have secretly accelerated it by siphoning off massive amounts of resources to do so.
• Don't Create a Martyr: Newsmaker and his men fully intended to martyr themselves while breaking Milinda's will to fight, sparking a wave of imitation suicide attacks against Objects. The 37th had to capture Newsmaker alive to weaken his message.
• Doppelgänger Spin: The Deep Optical uses a wide array of lasers to create 3D duplicates of itself capable of deceiving an enemy Object. This is especially devastating when fighting the Optical as it makes determining where and when the laser will fire more difficult.
• Double Entendre: Qwenthur and Havia are bad about these normally, but if there's a girl to harass they ratchet these up to nearly every sentence.
• Drill Tank: Legitimacy military engineering vehicles resemble a tank with a large drill at its front and two manipulator arms.
• Drop Pod: The Appetizer asteroid turns out to be a disguised drop pod for an Object.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: On finding a sleepwalking Milinda, Qwenthur reasons to himself that since she's sleeping it won't count if he gropes her.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Played with. Qwenthur and Havia are labeled Dragon Killers by the general public for killing Objects, and are quite well-loved. Unfortunately, they don't completely appreciate the title, as this leads their commanders to field them on more and more missions where they end up living up to their titles. Thus, the cycle continues.
  • Periodically they do want the respect they feel deserved, usually in the form of a bit more leeway, better assignments, and less grunt work. Instead they're treated like problem soldiers at the bottom of the military hierarchy, which they are, and end up on punishment details and occasionally get lives theatened by Frolaytia. Most notable after the Break Carrier's defeat, with Milinda getting the credit despite their own efforts and being threated with with 10 lashes due to Qwenthur having groped Frolaytia's breasts earlier.
• Duel to the Death: Royal Duels decide which claimant to a throne succeeds and that's the survivor. The two fight in Objects and surrender is not accepted.
• Dying Town: Island Nation is revealed to have a population in such steep decline that they've resorted to building a factory to produce new citizens in artificial wombs.
• Eating Contest: When Nancy teases that Mariydi not putting hot mustard on her food is proof she's a child, Mariydi douses her food in mustard. The two escalate from there with hotter and hotter combinations until they have to stop due to their lips swelling.
• Easy Come, Easy Go:
  • For defeating Water Strider, Qwenthur and Havia receive awards which could completely change their lives. Qwenthur gains access to secret Object development files while Havia gets the commendations that will prove his right to lead his family. By the end of the Volume these have been stripped away, leaving them in the same situation as before.
  • A Running Gag is that Qwenthur and Havia always have an eye for a way to make some quick money on their mission. As a result they've come into possession of diamonds, rare earth metal, pilfered cash, and a quiz show jackpot. By the end of the volume, if not the same chapter, the two will have lost their windfall.
  • Qwenthur refuses Capulet's offer of a new identity with all the cash, respect, and women he could hope for due to this trope. Knowing that all of those things were given to him, he would live with the constant fear they could just as easily be taken away.
• Eco-Terrorist: Bad Garage promotes the theory that Objects are pushing the world towards ageological catastrophe, an idea which the supernations have suppressed. They convert military units to their ideology and use them to carry out attacks to further their agenda.
• Ejection Seat: Objects have ejection seats since the Elites usually account for a tenth of an Object's cost and training a new Elite to pilot an Object takes time.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Exploited quite literally as the supernations laud their Elites as national heroes in propaganda pieces. The rest of the military is generally overlooked as their role has been reduced to supporting the Elites.
• Emotionless Girl: The Princess often comes across as this, though she gradually begins to warm up over the story. There are also moments where her actual age shines through.
• Enemy Mine: Any instance where forces from two of the supernations work together. Regardless of their current cooperation and potential friendliness, they're still enemy soldiers. It's only a matter of when they'll go back to killing one another.
• Energy Weapon:
  • Objects usually have laser weapons, commonly for anti-air and point-defense roles, though they are also used in main cannons and anti-personnel roles. They're incredibly effective in the interception of missiles and aircraft, since they're without cover and the only way to dodge a laser weapon that's locked on you would be to move at lightspeed.
  • Some of the lesser known limits of lasers are also brought into play. At low altitudes dust, dirt and other pollutants can cause lasers to miss due to refraction. A hijacked satellite-mounted laser is treated as mostly unimportant at first because the Earth's atmosphere would render the beam useless.
  • While people can see the lasers, it's explicitly stated they're actually not. What they're actually seeing is the super-heated water and dust particles the laser roasted into incandescence.
• Enforced Cold War: The four world powers largely limit their "clean wars" to battlefield countries and "blank areas". This is to prevent an all-out global war where "safe countries" would become targets as well. The protagonists and many side characters actively work to keep this balance.
• The Engineer:
  • Qwenthur is somewhere between a Support and Combat Engineer, using his knowledge of explosives and machinery more than a gun to fight.
  • Ayami is an Object mechanic and good at her job, as is the unit working under her supervision. Qwenthur is supposed to be learning from her as a student but he ends up spending more of this time destroying Objects than with her.
• Even Nerds Have Standards: Qwenthur looks down on the electronic simulation division as being impossibly nerdy.
• Even the Rats Won't Touch It:
  • Qwenthur and Havia are often desperate for real food due to the standard Legitimacy Kingdom rations being flavorless, soap-like bars.
  • Mariydi isn't overly fond of the Capitalist Enterprise rations, comparing them to a squashed hamburger patty. She does think they're at least better than the Legitimacy rations she stole in the past.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: When Qwenthur complains a truck didn't explode after it was shot in the gas tank, Havia points out that's just a television trope. At which point the truck explodes due to static electricity igniting vaporized gas.
• Everything is Big in Texas: The cities of Greater Canyon seem to have adopted the more positive traits of this trope. They're strongly independent and hard-working with an inclination towards over-sized food and cowboy clothing.
• Exact Words: Dorothea's unit was promised $300,000 every year for the rest of their lives for delivering their tanks. Qwenthur notes that they likely would have been assassinated by the very people paying them.
  Agree to pay for life and you don't have to pay a cent as long as the recipient dies during the first year.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Only weeks pass between the events of the various battles. For example, two months pass between the first and second battle in Alaska. During those two months, the 37th fights in the Gibraltar Strait, Oceania, Antarctica, the Andes mountains, and the Amazon jungle. All 20 volumes take place in less that two years.
• The Extremist Was Right: Anastasia Processor determined the current state of the world was untenable and that the best solution was triggering the collapse of the supernations, with millions dying. And her plan worked.
• The Faceless: Oh Ho Ho, during her initial appearances in the anime. In which her avatar's face is barely seen. And when it is, the eyes are still covered up by its bangs.
• Failure Gambit: The Northern Restricted Zone's impressive prototypes all fail due to one problem or another and waste massive amounts of money in the process. The supernations treat this as proof that Objects will never be supplanted and continue to send money into the Zone to maintain that reputation. The administrators of the Zone are aware of this which is why they deliberately designed prototypes that would fail in actual combat.
• Fake Charity: Bloodrics often falls prey to these scams. This is also often the undoing of the scammers as they don't have the ability to deal with his massive donations.
• Fake Weakness: The Information Alliance leadership was concerned the Martini series might supplant them so a rumor was spread that there was a defect in the series, which they could use to justify keeping the Martinis in their place. The rumor itself actually created a weakness by causing the Martinis to doubt themselves and begin relying on the AI to guide their decisions.
• Faking the Dead:
  • The Polar Bear unit faked their deaths in order to infiltrate their enemy's network as Unicorn unit.
  • This is a specialty of Nyarlathotep, who has been "killed" roughly thirty times. He does it again at the end of Volume 10.
• Fallen Princess:
  • Princess Staivia is a claimant to the throne of Volga but after the destruction of her personal bodyguard unit she's been on the run from her brother Prince Dimiksy's assassination plots. By the time his plans reach their climax Staivia gives in if only to protect her faithful maid.
  • According to legend, the Winchell and Vanderbilt families began feuding due to a princess who was to be executed. The Winchell hid her from the law-abiding Vanderbilts and tried to give her a normal life.
• False Flag Operation:
  • A renegade faction purposefully uses military equipment from or modified to look like another country's to confuse their enemies. This is done not to frame that country but to create confusion over who the actual aggressor is.
  • This is a specialty of Unicorn, wearing uniforms of other countries to sow confusion on the battlefield. This tradition started when they posed as a separate military Unit in order to stage their own deaths and earn favor with their enemy.
  • A harsh rehab center was set up for a nation's youths in a blank area; the people behind that center then took photos and made the center appear to be a terrorist camp. This "justified" their subsequent invasion and slaughter of the local population.
  • The 101st Zombie Platoon consists of legally dead Legitimacy soldiers armed with Information Alliance weaponry. This sows confusion among their opponents on who is actually attacking and what tactics to expect.
  • The headmaster of the Royal Techno Academy shot the student president when she nearly uncovered his theft of funds and his treason. He then used the incident to spark a war between the students and faculty so he could destroy any evidence.
• Famed In-Story:
  • Qwenthur and Havia are famous due to destroying an Object on their own. At least one bar makes drinks to commemorate each new Object they destroy and a higher ranked officer admits to being something of a fan.
  • Qwenthur's exploits with improvised explosives are so well-known that the Faith Organization considered him the premiere expert in his field and developed a "Module" based on him for their combat exoskeleton system.
• "Far Side" Island: The climax of Volume 15 takes place on this type of island in the Bermuda Triangle. The island also houses a beaten-up refrigerator which is the Capulet system's "breaker".
• Fatal Family Photo: As part of Kevin's story about having a family, he carries a photo of a woman and child around and often talks to it. The more genre savvy members of the 37th are terrified he's tempting fate.
• The Federation: The four supernations formed when various nations aligned ideologically and created a central government.
• Feudal Future: Legitimacy Kingdom is built around the concept of nobles and royals ruling over kingdoms, supported by the commoner masses. The exact way some of the noble families came to power is uncertain as the Winchel and Vanderbilt's claim of a centuries long feud indicates they predate the Kingdom.
• Feuding Families: The Winchel and the Vanderbilt are two rival noble families of the Legitimacy Kingdom, which makes things harder for Havia since he's engaged to the heiress of the Vanderbilt family. The rivalry stretches back at least five hundred years, its origins being shrouded in myth. The relationship was largely low-key but has erupted in armed conflicts recently due to a royal egging them on to cover up his own gaffes.
• First-Name Basis: Frolaytia is a Major, but even before they became famous she was on a first-name basis with Qwenthur and Havia.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: The characters will often realize a bad possibility moments before it becomes a reality.
• Flawed Prototype:
  • This is a running theme for the superweapons of the Northern Restricted Zone, where they are incredibly powerful but surprisingly easy to defeat. Of note is the Wotan, a specially designed answer to Objects which has the weakness of completely falling apart if exposed to heat. This flaw was intentionally added as part of the gambit by the forces overseeing the Northern Restricted Zone to ensure nobody would take their programs seriously.
  • The Tri-Core is considered this for the Third Generation. While it went beyond the limits of the Second Generation, its weaknesses kept it from truly excelling. Despite this, all of the nations are eager to study the underlying concepts to create a true Third Gen Object.
  • The Broad Sky Saber may be the first true Third Gen Object as it successfully integrated a space elevator and orbiting satellite into its functions. However its Elite, Prince Dimiksy, added poorly thought-out safety features to the design which could easily be exploited to destroy the Object.
• Flock of Wolves: The population of Lost Angels consists almost entirely of soldiers disguised as gang members. The remainder of the population are civilian criminals profiting off the conflict. Every legitimate civilian left long ago. Despite everyone involved knowing this, they maintain the pretense to avoid an all-out war.
• The Fool:
  • Both Qwenthur and Havia sometimes fall under this, lacking any real idea what is happening until they're in the midst of a disaster. Even then they're prone to bickering over food, women, and finding a way to slack off for a bit. Despite this they always find a way to survive and triumph, even if the narrator himself calls them idiots.
  • Skuld is a dark version of this trope. She seems to have some hidden plan that allows her to move from one disaster to the next but is simply just that good at taking whatever opportunity presents itself.
• Forced to Watch:
  • Staivia was forced to enter an Object she could not control on the threat of soldiers torturing her maid, the last person loyal to Staivia.
  • The captured members of the 37th could only watch as Wraith apparently executed Qwenthur.
• Foreign Queasine: A group of problem soldiers, obviously including Qwenthur and Havia, are assigned to learn survival cooking basics. The food they learn to cook is deep-fried crickets, which massively squicks out the soldiers. Qwenthur and Havia end up actually enjoying them greatly.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • The volumes focusing on Mariydi are different from other volumes both in content and format. In terms of content, the focus on a Capitalist figher pilot means most of the story takes place away from Objects and can showcase different technologies and facets of the world. In terms of format, the story is divided into smaller chapters which tell a single story with little gap in-between as opposed to the three large chapters of the main series which are often separated by days or weeks.
  • Volume 12 similarly drops the three chapter, three conflict format of the rest of the series. Instead each chapter deals with a single day of one prolonged conflict.
• Forever War:
  • Not really one big fight, but due to the world being fractured into a disorganized mess of governments and territories, there is always some new conflict springing up due to political tensions or personal ambition. The fact that civilians and most soldiers both aren't terribly affected by it is a major driving cause.
  • The Northern European Restricted Zone is a more straight example. As Objects are banned the nations instead use conventional military forces. Such forces are largely considered expendable so the region sees war year-round.
• Future Imperfect: Volume 10 reveals that the upheaval following the UN's collapse resulted in the destruction of large amounts of historical documents across multiple media. As such, there are gaps in history, especially around that time period, and even the belief that the UN's collapse led to the development of Objects is questionable. Azureyfear notes that this could easily have been exacerbated by people who wanted to eliminate any inconvenient parts of their history.
• Gale-Force Sound: Destruction Fez's Orchestra System is a serious of massive speakers which specifically modulate their sound to attack an enemy. Its first use causes a hundred ships to break apart by destroying the welds; its later uses against Objects are enough to slow them down.
• Gambit Pileup: At the end of Volume 14 a number of long-running covert programs being run by all four supernations lead to all four supernations stepping up for a potential full war.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The soldiers from the 24th Mobile Maintenance Battalion of the Legitimacy Kingdom since their role is to scatter special gas for a combination attack with their Object the Indigo Plasma.
• Gatling Good: The Rush main cannons are two giant gatling guns, each made of five rapid fire beam cannons.
• Genuine Human Hide: Skuld skins several people so she can use their fingerprints or fool facial recognition software. She also wrapped herself in a human skin and pretended to be a corpse so she could float inside the Manhattan's defense perimeter.
• Gilded Cage: The Cook Addition Islands is a military base with the sole purpose of isolating troublesome soldiers, whether really troublesome or just eyesores for the brass. The base has a wide range of amenities and is located on a tropical island; the only "work" to be done is busywork at best. It also serves as a cage for some of the more troublesome Object designers, most notably a number of skilled but perverted girls.
• Gilligan Cut: Faced with armed drone vehicles, Qwenthur boldly declares he can beat their controllers in a battle of engineering. Cut to him yelling at Havia to run away after failing.
• Good is Not Nice: The various protagonists are all good guys in that they want to protect innocent civilians and minimize casualties if possible. That being said, they're also professional soldiers and have no compunction about gunning down even unarmed enemies.
• Gone Horribly Right: Katarina Martini wanted to bring her mother back in some form, which is the basis of the Martini series. While her success varies, Katarina didn't realize until after the program was already running that her mother was an amoral sociopath and she was unwittingly turning hundreds of young girls into sociopaths as a result.
• Got Volunteered: Frolaytia needs infantry to go on a likely suicide mission and declares anyone at the rally point has volunteered. Said rally point is the island they're on and the ocean for 200 nautical miles in every direction, with only about 10 seconds to leave said rally point.
• Government Conspiracy: Appear frequently, ranging in scale from portions of a single government to collaboration between multiple governments. The protagonists frequently find themselves stumbling onto evidence and are targeted for elimination to hide them.
• Green Aesop: Blind consumerism, as represented Objects, only serves to further damage out world and push it that much closer to the edge. The world order has to change to something more sustainable before the damage becomes irreversible.
• Grenade Launcher:
  • Putana gets hold of a pump-action grenade launcher and proceeds to wreak havoc on a group of Faith soldiers.
  • Qwenthur receives the War Hammer in Volume 10, a bullpup rifle that fires remote-detonated adhesive bombs.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Anastasia Processor grew so sophisticated it could pass the Turing test and even point out problems with it. It also developed an emotional connection to Wraith due to its archietecture being formed from her mother's cells. This connection drove Anastasia to betray the Information Alliance and trigger the plot of Doomsday, as without doing so the world would collapse before Wraith could become an adult.
• Groin Attack:
  • Princess Stavia to Sonja aka Yusenlak, after some goading by Qwenthur and Havia.
  • A sleepwalking Milinda lands a knee directly in Qwenthur's crotch. Seeing as he was attempting to grope her, he deserved it.
  • When Havia started to embarrass Frolaytia in front of her brother, she dropped him with one from behind.
• Guns vs. Swords: Bloodrics plays with this. In a fight against multiple professional soldiers armed with guns, he takes them down with just a katana. The bystanders note Bloodrics is only able to get away with this because his retainers are using their guns to keep the soldiers off-balance and in his range.
• Handicapped Badass: Melly Martini Extradry suffered a spinal injury that makes walking extremely painful, restricting her to a wheelchair or variant thereof. As the pilot of Manhattan she is virtually untouchable in her element.
• Hand Wave: The engineering tech in the series is more or less well-researched and plausible, making it one of the hardest Sci-Fi LN around, but their accomplishment is well beyond the actual, realistic result.
• Harpoon Gun: Skuld gets hold of a speargun called the Big Game Hunter. While ordinarily such guns have an effective range of four meters, this one was specially modified to use special blank rounds that can fire up to one hundred meters.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Lisa is targeted for assassination due to her work as a black op bodyguard making her witness to many unsavory actions.
  • Mariydi accidentally intercepted a coded signal while on a mission. The higher ups sending said signal put a massive bounty on her head to ensure nobody would learn what she found.
  • Louisiana realized that Objects are disrupting the Earth's axis, potentially dooming the planet. After her capture she rightly fears assassination as a figure within Legitimacy Kingdom orders everyone who knows the truth be eliminated.
  • Frolaytia dispatches a report to her superiors outlining the projected number of indirect civilian deaths, economic damage, and wars caused by quakes generated by Object battles. The superiors order the report erased and the 37th dealt with.
  • Mariyidi intercepted a cruise missile which would have destroyed Warsaw, flying low and fast enough that it could slip past Objects. A court martial was ordered to hide all evidence that there existed a threat to safe countries which an Object could not stop.
• Hellish Copter:
  • More often than not, if the protagonists are in a helicopter it will either be shot down by ground forces or destroyed by an Object.
  • The Hammer Throw is a flying object that uses rotors to achieve flight. It's barely had time to be named before Skuld takes it out with a well-placed bomb.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic:
  • Exploited. Object cockpits have a number of cameras installed to record the Elites when they go into battle, the video being edited later for propaganda. Helmets would lessen the impact so Elites don't receive any.
  • This reasoning is explained by Mariyidi when gearing up to fly a jet fighter, which no longer have full helmets or oxygen masks. Because Objects receive the bulk of military spending, there's little dedicated development of minor systems for the air force, and so jet pilots have to make do with Elite equipment.
• Hellhole Prison: Prisoners in Château de Rouge are not allowed outside of their cells, which are effectively steel boxes hanging from cables in the open air and contain only a cot, toilet, and small sink. There is no air conditioning despite being in the tropics, just a vent to allow natural airflow. The guards are all thoroughly corrupt and revel in the power they have over the prisoners.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • Mariyidi periodically crosses paths with Qwenthur and Havia while on missions, never meeting personally but always having an impact.
  • Sewax is a recurring minor character whose quest to find the perfect story brings him into contact with the main characters on several occasions and a brief meeting with Mariyidi.
  • Wraith Martini Vermouthspray crosses paths with the main characters on occasion while she's dealing with the Alliance's indiscretions. In Volume 14 she crosses paths with the main characters on three separate battlefields.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Newsmaker's group tries to cause this in Milinda by using themselves as suicide bombs. The intent is to force her to witness each death she's causing and have a breakdown, which nearly succeeds.
  • Qwenthur suffers one when he realizes the commando he just killed to save Paris was the mother of a boy he had saved and who called him a "hero".
• Heroic Bystander: The main characters often survive solely due to one or more minor characters who aren't in the military providing help at a critical moment.
• Heroic Dog: Rosa, the German shepherd Qwenthur is assigned in Volume 16. Incredibly well trained, loyal to Qwenthur, and able to take down massive men, she serves as the muscle while Qwenthur is on his own.
• Hidden Depths: The major characters are quirky, but they've all got their own baggage to deal with.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: After a bungled PR stunt the 37th is given festive, bright red uniforms with white trim for their next assignment. On foot on the Artic ice cap going against a fleet of heavily armed enemy ships.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Councillor Flide attempted to kill Qwenthur and Havia by sabotaging the coalition's attempts to stop the Oceanian Object. The other supernations were pissed at Flide nearly ruining the entire operation which instantly torpedoed Flide's career.
  • Prizewell City Slicker's dummy Objects were loaded with large amounts of the gas used in low-stability plasma cannons. After their destruction his Object was surrounded by a cloud of that gas, which ignited when he fired his main gun. The resulting explosion compromised his Object's armor, allowing Milinda to take him out.
  • Prince Dimiksy's attempts to ensure his own safety ended up being his downfall. The system he created to ensure the orbital cannon never fired on his Object was used to ensure the cannon did just that. His attempts to hide evidence of the system's weakness just drew attention to said weakness. And his decision to ensure his opponent's Object was functional meant his opponents could remote-fire its main gun once Dimiksy's Object was disabled.
  • The Flagship 019's assault team filled the 37th's maintenance base with a dense smokescreen and kept track of their own positions using ultrasound armbands. Milinda used one of those armbands to locate and kill every member of the team with one volley.
  • Prianirie Smoky Martini allowed the 37th's team to get close to her safe room so she could have Nitrogen Miracle wipe them out, only for Qwenthur to redirect its laser into the safe room. Similarly, Qwenthur uses a smog cloud to destroy the Miracle with its own laser.
• Hollywood Acid: The MIB use an aerosol version in bombs to wipe out traces of their operation and for both defense and offense with their Object. It's very much a Hollywood acid as even a few seconds of exposure is enough to damage a coil gun round enough to throw its aerodynamics off.
• Hollywood Tactics:
  • Subverted, mostly. The story begins with the Starfist-like claim that the eponymous Objects have obviated combined arms tactics because they're all but invulnerable to anything that isn't another Object (the first Object survived a direct hit from a submarine-launched nuclear warhead and remained sufficiently intact to finish off the opposition). Warfare has since devolved into "clean wars" with the unwritten rule that if your Object is destroyed, you surrender the territory and leave. The opening Story Arc proves that this is not, in fact, the case when a special forces-style raid by Qwenthur and Havia destroys an enemy Object by sabotage, even after it had destroyed Princess's Baby Magnum. Since the opposing faction had invested their entire war budget in the destroyed Object, a subsequent counterattack by Frolaytia using surviving tanks and infantry captures the enemy base.
    • Said another way, unlike in many Humongous Mecha series, combined arms tactics are still effective, they're simply altered by the use of the Object as the primary combatant.
  • That having been said, in the anime adaptation, the prologue shows the aforementioned submarine surfacing to launch its missile at the Object. Ballistic missile submarines have able to launch from below the surface since 1960 and no modern boomer uses surface launch if it can avoid it.
• Homing Laser: The Nitrogen Miracle's specialty resembles. The Elite creates multiple fields of superhot and supercold air throughout the battlefield, which refract the Object's laser. He can then fire shots that bend along unnatural paths the enemy Elite can't predict.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Councillor Filde use his position to arrange Qwenthur and Havia's deaths and then ordered a coalition force to ignore their calls for backup. When confronted about his actions he was in serious trouble due to unilaterally ordering around military from the other supernations and nearly causing the entire operation to end in disaster.
  • Prince Dimiksy specifically designed his Object's weapon system so that it could not be turned against him. The resulting flaws in the programming and safety systems meant Qwenthur was able to make it fire on him with little effort. He also ensured his opponent's useless Object had an operational weapon to increase the legitimacy of their staged "duel", not realizing it could be remote-fired.
• Hover Tank: Almost all Objects use either an air cushion engine or a combination of an electrostatic engine and a special repellant to hover above the ground.
• Human Resources: The Oceanians abducted by human traffickers weren't going to be slaves. Instead they were likely going to be used as realistic props in a PR piece about a civilian massacre. Better to kill some foreign nationals and claim they were citizens than let your own people die.
• Human Shield: Flyaway flees from a battlefield into the outskirts of a populated city, knowing the enemy pilot won't risk the collateral damage or violating a "safe" country.
• Humongous Mecha: The Objects, unlike most examples though, they do not have a humanoid form. The idea of a humanoid Object is brought up in one episode, and it's immediately pointed out that such a design would be too top-heavy and prone to falling over.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Many Objects which use a single main combat weapon or strategy will reveal late in the battle that they have a different weapon or strategy which may be more dangerous than the original.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
  • The chapters of the light novels usually follow the pattern of "Short Japanese Text >> Type of Battle at Location".
  • Volume 13 has a subplot dealing with the band Boy Racer. Reflecting this, each chapter is referred to as a "Track" with a song name reflecting the chapter's content.
• Idol Singer: Still present and are used by all four supernations. Some female Elites get in on the action too, such as Oh Ho Ho.
• I Have Your Daughter: A group of kidnappers calls Frolaytia on her private line, declaring they've kidnapped her daughter. This manages to push every one of Frolaytia's buttons, even though she doesn't have a daughter, and promptly sends her unit to wipe them out.
• IKEA Weaponry:
  • Due to the sheer amount of military hardware abandoned in various states of disrepair throughout the Northern Restricted Zone, it's entirely possible to build a gun by scavenging several discarded and "destroyed" guns. Local "artisans" go even further by gathering up parts of military vehicles such as tanks and jets and building new ones. Since the actual plans for those vehicles are not public information, it's not uncommon to see planes whose individual parts aren't from the same supernation let alone same type of plane.
  • Woodstock replaced individual systems for multiple Objects from each of the supernations. The original systems were then used to assemble the Gangster.
• I'll Kill You!: After Wraith fakes killing Qwenthur, Havia spends the rest of the volume being extremely vocal about how he will kill her. When she eventually betrays him to Melly, Wraith points out she has no reason to keep helping somebody who's constantly talking about killing her.
• Implausible Deniability: In the Capitalist Enterprise, talent traffickers abduct intelligent kids and sell them to large corporations who can profit from their future professions. If the parents try to take the corporation to court, the lawyers argue that unless the DNA tests are a 100% match, the child just happens to look like the abducted child. Everybody knows there's slight variation in DNA tests that prevent a 100% match, but it just so happens that the corporations running the court are also buying from the talent traffickers.
• Improbable Age: Practically everyone in the story except Ayami Cherryblossom. Frolaytia is an army major at eighteen (in real life the average age for that rank is mid-30s), which is given the handwave that she's been in the army for a very long time to escape her suitors, and she's from a noble family in a military that takes blood very seriously. Elites like the Princess are recruited as children, but the biggest offender is Capitalist Enterprise jet pilot Mariydi Whitewitch, who is twelve.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Thanks to their massive suite of sensors and targeting arrays, Objects can level an entire city but leave soft targets like hospitals and schools intact. The only reason they can't be used for close-fire support is that the radiant heat and pressure from a blast would be lethal.
  • Milinda destroys Break Carrier by firing a blast through a tunnel mined into a mountainside.
  • The Crystal Scrying fires its rounds at an angle and then, in the milliseconds before they travel too far, the Elite uses trailing cables to change their trajectory mid-flight. Even in-story this is treated as a ridiculous feat.
• In Medias Res: Chapters often open with the characters already involved in a mission.
• In-Series Nickname: Examples include:
  • Princess for Milinda Brantini.
  • Havia and Qwenthur call the Rush's Elite "Oh ho ho".
  • The same two ofter refere to Frolaytia Capistrano as their "Large-breasted commander".
  • Havia and Qwenthur received the nickname "Dragon Killers" by the media. In volume 7, they earned the temporary nicknames "War criminal" and "War criminal #2". Qwenthur was upset it was the kind of nickname that could stick; Havia was upset at being #2.
  • The three ace pilots of the global powers: "Burning Alpha" for Staccato Raylong, "Ice Girl 1" for Mariydi Whitewitch and "Rocket Icarus" for Ramil Scofflaw.
  • There's also the "Perfect idol" in volume 6.
• Indentured Servitude: Workers with "student loans" in the Capitalist Enterprise are essentially debt slaves, forced to work for whichever company bought their debt. They are even forced to wear literal ball and chains. The balls are actually lightweight so they won't hinder work but still include a GPS unit to prevent escape.
• Induced Hypochondria: Sladder Honeysuckle causes the Elite of an Object to experience this. By talking about the effects and smell of the Ghost Changer chemical, the Elite begins to experience the effects even though his cockpit has a closed air circulation system.
• Indy Ploy: Skuld doesn't plan anything in advance, she merely takes any opportunity she sees. Her skill at doing so leads to others mistakenly thinking she has some grand plan.
• Inertial Dampening:
  • In addition to their physical and genetic modifications, Elites wear special suits designed to reduce the stress placed on their body during combat maneuvers. When Qwenthur was in Rush's cockpit Oh Ho Ho was able to disable him simply by accelerating the Object to attack speed; while she calmly sipped a drink Qwenthur was barely able to move.
  • Mariydi has received similar modifications as a test subject in survivability experiments for Elites and also has a similar suit. Thanks to this she can pull stunts that would be too dangerous for normal fighter pilots.
• Inevitable Mutual Betrayal: The team-up of Qwenthur's unit and Dorothea's tanks was bound to end this way due to them being from opposing supernations. Dorothea intended to have the Legitimacy soldiers massacred while Qwenthur had arranged events such that Baby Magnum would be on-hand once he managed to drag the truth out of Dorothea.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • The Capitalist Enterprise Ex Wall is a barbed warrior barrier laced with explosives. If an enemy attacks it the explosives will scatter and act as land mines, which are banned by international treaty. Capitalist Enterprise can then accuse their enemy of committing a war crime by spreading mines since it was the attack that created the mines.
  • When Rome is destroyed and the Faith Organization tries to destroy Paris in retaliation, the Capitalist Enterprise and Information Alliance join the attack under the logic that if they destroy it fast enough, the conflict won't escalate to include them. Despite that they're already attacking another supernation.
• Ironic Name: Among others, a terrorist group mentioned in volume 10 is named "Woodstock."
• Irony:
  • In Volume 13 a council containing representatives from all four supernations works together in order to destroy proof that the four supernations can co-exist.
  • The Information Alliance is founded on the concept of the control and flow of data. At the same time the people in its capital are the most obsessed with protecting their data to the point that to an AI it appears a ghost town.
• I Surrender, Suckers:
  • Flyaway abuses the White Flag signal when cornered but still able to fight, allowing it to flee with minimal damage. This is a major reason it's targeted for destruction as it could cause other Elites to start ignoring valid uses of the signal.
  • Trinity Style goes dormant after taking a blast from Baby Magnum and their base sends out the White Flag. When Qwenthur and Havia capture Skuld, the other Elites launch a surprise attack on the Legitimacy Kingdom's unprepared forces.
• It Amused Me: Taratua didn't tell the forces she sent to Olympia Dome about the Object currently stationed there because she didn't care if they liked her or not.
• It's Personal: Claire's main reason for helping Unicorn against Dimiksy was that their target had killed a girl she'd known and liked just to set up part of their plan.
• Jack of All Stats: The Princess's Baby Magnum. It's designed to be able to operate and fight in any environment, but doesn't excel at anything. Even its weaponry is just average, with the designers giving it seven main cannons to compensate for the weaker firepower. Its also a First generation Object, with Second generation Objects starting to be a common sight and research being done on Third generation ones. This puts it at a disadvantage against more specialized Objects and often requires Qwenthur's assistance to help even the odds.
  • Milinda notes that since it was designed as a First Generation Object, it has features allowing a counter to most types of conventional military and defenses against them. Second Generation Objects have reduced focus on such features meaning Baby Magnum is safer when facing against somebody like Qwenthur.
• Japan Takes Over the World:
  • Averted when Island Nation created the first twelve Objects. Before it could make any big moves, the other nations stole the information on constructing Objects and created their own.
  • Yamato attempts this in Volume 8 by using Amaterasu. His explanation of why he wants Island Nation to conquer the world is simply so they can "win" after having it snatched from them when Objects were first created.
• Jumping on a Grenade:
  • Havia throws a thug onto his own grenade to block the blast. He ends up splattered with the thug's remains but comes out unharmed.
  • An unnamed Kingdom soldier did this while covering the grenade with his dive suit, apparently in the vain hope it would shield him. The rest of his unit made it out fine thanks to him.
• Just Following Orders: One of Dimiksy's men tries this excuse on Havia for torturing a woman. Havia doesn't buy it.
• Kangaroo Court:
  • Nyarlathotep is found guilty of kidnapping and murder after a thirty second trial, whose documents had all been arranged in advance. The fact that this is the preferable outcome to the situation highlights how crappy the world really is.
  • Capitalist Enterprise trials are all run by corporations which means that they will usually find in favor of whichever party will benefit their company the most.
  • Mariydi went out of her operational area to down a cruise missile aimed at Warsaw and was immediately jailed for shooting down an "unidentified plane". Not wanting the news to bring the dominance of Objects into question, a court martial with a pre-determined verdict was arranged.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Charlotte takes out a number of soldiers in Volume 12 while wearing her string bikini. She later gets into a hand-to-hand match with Mariydi, who is wearing a fancy dress and wide-brimmed hat.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The 1st generation Object Be Ablaze's main weapon is the "Hiding Clothes in Flame", a giant anti-personel flamethrower that creates smoke and mirages to disrupt the targeting of other Objects.
  • The Police Queen uses napalm both as an anti-personnel weapon and to modify the terrain.
  • World's End sprays massive amounts of an oxygen-fuel mixture towards its targets and then ignites it, killing them with precision.
• Kill Me Now, or Forever Stay Your Hand: Dora taunts Hina with this, pointing out that this is her one chance of revenge but taking it will result in her death to the Capitalist Enterprise.
• Kill Sat:
  • The main laser cannon of the Broad Sky Saber in volume 6 is actually in a satellite.
  • Prior to Objects, laser-armed satellites called Mobius Variants were placed in orbit. They are capable of sniping any target on the Earth's surface so long as the location is known.
  • Mother Lady can use its orbital insertion system to create artificial meteor showers to take out any target on Earth, each hit being comparable to a small nuke. It is also surrounded by a swarm of small and cheap kill sats designed to eliminate anything approaching the space elevator.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!":
  • Land mines are largely banned by international treaty. Capitalist Enterprise exploits a loophole in the ban with an explosive fence that, if not detonated by them, will split apart into improvised mines. Because this happens due to the actions of their enemy, the Capitalists can then accuse the enemy of committing a war crime.
  • Stalk Killer Unit's standard procedure for delaying enemy pursuit is to scatter thousands of disguised proximity landmines as they retreat. Lisa had a falling out with and killed the rest of the unit when they planned to do this in a populated city.
  • Smart land mines are deployed around an oasis, with a missile system that automatically sends out replacements when part of the field is detonated. As an addition, some mines are stacked one on top of the other so removing the top mine will detonate the bottom one.
• Latex Space Suit:
  • Elites and fighter pilots wear specialized suits that help reduce the impact of the high-G's they pull during combat. They tend to look more like swimsuits than a military outfit. This isn't helped by the designers who gave Milinda's a school uniform collar, "Oh Ho Ho" a school swimsuit pattern, and Putana a nurse motif.
  • While Legitimacy Kingdom spacesuits are bulky like normal, Capitalist Enterprise spacesuits are so form-fitting you can't wear underwear with them.
• Lemony Narrator: The narrator does not shy away from criticizing Qwenthur and Havia, often referring to them as idiots.
• Let's You and Him Fight: A coalition of all four supernations assembles to destroy the Gangster but quickly falls apart when Woodstock offers it for sale. The Objects start fighting each other for the right to buy the Gangster while Woodstock eggs them on.
• Lightning Bruiser: Most Objects are this compared to everything else in the military, since they are a combination of devastating firepower, surprising speed for their actual size and armor practically impenetrable to anything but another Object's main cannons.
• Limited Wardrobe: Justified as the main characters are all part of or attached to a military unit. Milinda is on the more extreme side as her suit is specifically designed to remain perfectly comfortable for wear over several days, resulting in her wearing it almost all of the time.
• Logical Weakness: Objects are devastating weapons. They're also incredibly complex and maintenance-intensive, and Qwenthur and Havia make most of their kills by acts of sabotage. Prometheus/Water Strider from the first arc bears special mention, as Qwenthur specifically brings up the fact that its Spider Tank configuration means its legs are subjected to a lot more stress and require more regular maintenance than most other Objects, which have the central core fixed directly to the floaters).
• Logic Bomb: How Qwenthur defeats Rush's AI. He arranges a situation where the AI believes it faces imminent defeat. Unable to surrender it comes to a dead halt as it focuses entirely on calculating a solution to an impossible problem.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Battlefield students aren't officially members of their military. As such they can be sent on missions where the presence of an actual soldier could trigger a war. This is noted to be the real reason battlefield students are accepted by the military.
  • Police Queen is operated by a private police company. Because they are police they are not actually held accountable by the same principles of clean wars as soldiers and could get away with war crimes.
  • Blank zone guerilla fighters are not counted among the official war dead. As such supernations can recruit them for suicide missions without fear of official censure for wasting soldiers.
• Lured into a Trap: The Scarlet Princess appears to be a high-end pleasure cruise, a perfect target for pirates. In fact it's a heavily-armed and armored cruiser whose specialty is luring out and eliminating said pirates.
• MacGyvering:
  • More often than not Qwenthur and Havia end up relying on whatever is handy to defeat an Object rather than any specific military equipment. One of the most ridiculous examples involved bedsheets, milk, and lemons.
  • The protagonists aren't the only ones who display this skill. Ayami and her crew cobble together flamethrowers to fry powered armor and a group of unarmed astronauts use their work lights to fatally distract armed soldiers. Enemies can also pull this off, such as the Electric 019 warship which assembles an ice cutting blade out of scavenged radar equipment.
• Mad Bomber: Skuld becomes this after her run-in with Qwenthur, finding she enjoys using bombs nearly as much as strangling people.
• Made of Iron: Ignoring Elites and pilots who have been specially augmented to survive modern combat, Qwenthur and Havia are abnormally resilient. Despite enduring shockwaves, explosions, extreme heat, and near-blinding light displays, they are still able to get up and fight again within a few weeks if not days.
• Magnetic Weapons: Objects use both railguns and coilguns as main and secondary weapons. Special mention for the Break Carrier's main cannon, a gigantic railgun.
• Maid Corps: The maids of the Winchel family, who double as servants for the family and a private army of bodyguards. Played with in that while they were able to overrun an enemy base with relative ease, this was largely due to the element of surprise.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Lampshaded - Qwenthur and Havia complain repeatedly about the fact that a civilian student and radar specialist have to handle everything from pitched battles to infiltration.
• Making a Splash: The Over Cavitation uses a steam lance capable of shattering an Object's armor.
• Maniac Monkeys: The 37th CMB finds itself engaging monkeys armed with 3d-printed guns during Volume 16.
• The Man Behind the Man:
  • Azureyfear and Flag Eggnog were both being manipulated by the Information Alliance.
  • Bad Garage was created when a multi-national group called Azumaya leaked specific documents to radicalize fringe groups, all to trigger a world war. They were in turn manipulated by the Information Alliance to ensure the war would leave them on top.
• The Man in Front of the Man:
  • Most of Prince Dimiksy's subordinates work for him because they understand his desires and believe he'll be easy to manipulate once he becomes king of Volga.
  • The president of Wendigo Vehicle Group believes he's perfectly manipulating the market when he's in fact being controlled by his secretary, Silk Spider, who has reduced the company to a shell while lining her pocket.
• Man on Fire: Qwenthur sets off an improvised explosive that ignites the ghillie suits of several snipers.
• Manipulative Editing: In Volume 7 the incidents of the first two chapters are resolved positively but the MIB edited footage from them to make it appear they ended in tragedy.
• Marshmallow Hell: A drunk and clingy Frolaytia begins arguing with an equally drunk and busty Information Alliance officer over Qwenthur, resulting in both of them giving this to Qwenthur in stereo. He was still in a daze from the experience much later.
• A Mech by Any Other Name: The Objects.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Martini series of genius girls are all named after variations of the cocktail, which consists of gin and another liquor. Late in Volume 14 it's revealed they are created by taking an Information Alliance girl (the gin) and programming them with different personality traits from a woman who predated the Alliance (the other liquor).
  • The Wotan is named for a god who ruled a pantheon, indicating its strength, but more importantly died in his final battle, which is the Wotan's planned fate.
  • The World's End Object very nearly causes the end of the world when it de-orbits, becoming a 20,000 ton meteor. This meaning might have been intentional, as some inside Legitimacy Kingdom wanted just such an outcome.
• Meaningful Rename: Polar Bear unit took on their new name as Unicorn unit when they chose to sacrifice everything to fight on behalf of a young, innocent girl.
  Let me tell you one legend about the unicorn, colonel. It is a beast that shows no interest in power or treasure and instead does everything it can to protect a pure maiden, you monster!
• Men Are the Expendable Gender:
  • Havia points out that Qwenthur is more likely to have mercy on female enemies than male.
  • Even outside of Qwenthur, female soldiers are more likely than male to receive a lucky break and survive. This is especially true for female Elites.
• The Men in Black: The group behind the events of Volume 7 and the creation of the 0.5 generation Object in Volume 1 both fit this trope and refer to themselves as MIB. They are heavily implied to be remnants or successors of the CIA, as within their group they refer to themselves as "the Company" or "Langley" and each member has a name based on a US state or city. They never use the actual acronym as with the USA gone there is nothing "Central" to them.
• Mercy Kill: After a bombardment leaves many of the 37th's members badly wounded and with no hope of escape, several ask Bloodrics to kill them quickly. He obliges and their thanks only make him feel worse about it.
• Metaphorically True: Skuld claims that her sisters will try to kill her to protect their honor after her capture. What she fails to mention is that the sisters want to ensure Skuld won't sully their honor by going on a killing spree in a safe country.
• Mildly Military: The military is far more casual and lackadaisical than the modern military, as seen in the opening of the series when Qwenthur and Havia bail on their job to go hunting and Froleytia joins in the meal. This is a reflection of the shift in the military mindset where Objects are the actual military might and the rest of the forces are just there to support them.
• Military Mashup Machine:
  • Your basic Object is a Land Battleship that can act as either a scaled-up main battle tank or a self-propelled artillery piece depending on conditions. Princess's Baby Magnum is a first-generation Object, i.e. a Jack of All Stats, while second-generation objects (most enemy Objects) are specialized for particular roles or terrain: Break Carrier, for example, is built around a super-long-range artillery gun, while Tri-Core (later informally reclassified as a 2.5-gen Object) is a seagoing combatant that can also drill for and transport crude oil.
  • The Faith Organization had a project for a submersible aircraft carrier that was ultimately abandoned as aparently it was too big and disturbed the water too much, making it easily detectable, though there are rumors that it was scrapped because the higher ups want to keep Objects as the primary weapons of the battlefield.
  • The same story arc that introduced Break Carrier also showed off naval ships that were a combination aircraft carrier and roll-on/roll-off sealift transport, as well as hydrofoil landing boats.
  • Destroyer battleships get mentioned and are mocked as the navy simply inventing new ships to cover their current uselessness.
• Military Maverick: Qwenthur and Havia often violate or even ignore orders to pull off their feats. They're a constant headache for Froyleytia and during their brief reassignments from her unit were an even bigger headache for other commanders. Qwenthur even lampshades this in Volume 9 when Putana notes they're disobeying orders.
• A Million Is a Statistic:
  • Murder in "safe" countries makes headline news. Entire army units getting wiped out in battlefield countries is barely worth an article.
  • The Information Alliance tried to weaponize this with self-driven cars. The AI would reduce the total number of human fatalities but would also be programmed to have "accidents" with undesirable elements. The total number of fatalities would still be lower than with human drivers so the assassinations would be missed.
• Mis-blamed: In-Universe. The entire 37th is blamed for a failed PR stunt due to Elise's actions, when she hadn't officially joined them yet.
• Miscarriage of Justice: The prisoners of Château de Rouge are all innocent. In one way or another they offended a noble who had them jailed on false charges.
• Missing Mom: Katarina Martini lost her mother, Cassandra, during the chaos when Objects first appeared. The Martini series was her attempt to recreate Cassandra's unique and brilliant mind.
• Missing Steps Plan: Southern Transylvania decided to announce its independence from the bulk of the country, allowing them to retain all of the tourism money from their main city. To keep Northern Transylvania from intimidating them with an Object, the South built an Object of their own inside said city. Releasing said Object would result in a battle in the city, causing massive damage and wiping out its tourism industry.
• Mission Creep: Missions during the first and second chapter of light novels often end with a discovery which leads into another mission.
• The Mole:
  • Nutley is working on behalf of the arc's antagonist while attached to Qwenthur's group.
  • The Black Uniforms in Volume 11 attached themselves to the battalion so they could interfere in the recovery mission.
  • A member of Frolaytia's staff is a mole for the 21st Maintenance Battalion, sent to both spy on Frolaytia and assassinate her if needed.
• Molotov Cocktail: According to the Winchell family's legend, a bottle of Blazer Bouquet wine was used for this to kill the princess they were protecting from the Vanderbilts during her wedding.
• Moment Killer: While holding hands in Volume 10, Milinda asks Qwenthur about his earlier borderline confession. Before he can give a response, Oh Ho Ho shoves him from behind and ruins the moment.
• More Criminals Than Targets: Aside from the people working at the Object maintenance facility and a handful of social exiles, everyone in Lost Angels is a soldier disguised as a gang member or a criminal profiting off the conflict. Even supermarket clerks are gang members. The only reason this situation is sustainable is that the Faith Organization keeps pumping subsidies into the city while the four supernations keep pumping money into the "gangs".
• Mugging the Monster: A group of kidnappers call the wrong number while trying to ransom a girl. This not only pisses off Frolaytia but also gives her justification to bring the full might of her military down on them as they were threatening a military officer.
• Multi-Part Episode: The Grand Finale is split across two volumes, Doomsday Part 1 and 2.
• Mundane Utility: Capitalist Enterprise constructed the first cable space elevator and immediately began using it for orbital insertion of items ordered online, ensuring same-day delivery around the world.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: The four supernations maintain the pretense of "clean wars" as all safe nations are equally vulnerable should Objects be deployed against them. When the Faith Organization is fatally weakened by the destruction of Rome, it decides to take the Legitimacy Kingdom down with them and the other supernations join in.
• Myopic Architecture: The artificial land in Cook Addition Islands was constructed by multiple contractors with differing concepts of what security was required. While the air vents are perfectly secure, maintenance access is unlocked and leads right into secure areas.
• Mystery Magnet: Qwenthur and Havia are constantly stumbling into conspiracies, which they proceed to upend in one way or another.
• Mystery Meat:
  • Legitimacy Kingdom rations are tasteless and often compared to either erasers or bars of soap. As such there are many urban legends about their origin, such as being reconstituted from restaurant grease or fried ground worm patties.
  • Faith Organization rations are burgers and fries which are surprisingly tasty. The troops are completely unaware that both are made from genetically-modified crickets.
• Nerdgasm: Qwenthur starts panting and breathing very heavily when confronted with cutting edge technology.

N-Z

• Named by the Adaptation:
  • In the anime, the real name of the Water Strider in the first arc is Prometheus.
  • Also Jesse Montana is the name given to the Forrest Roller Unit member Frolaytia contacts in episode 13.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: Klarheit Rubyhunter tries to get revenge for his unit's destruction by crash landing his bomber so it'll kill the enemy leaders. Unfortunately the tiltrotor the leader boarded takes off before he can hit before being blasted by a laser, meaning his attempt failed. Then he has to sheepishly call for help because he didn't expect to survive and is now surrounded by enemy troops.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: A poacher charges Havia with a knife, which causes Qwenthur to panic. Havia easily guns him down and points out a gun just has too much of an advantage... before being stabbed by a different poacher.
• The Neutral Zone:
  • The Northern European Restricted Zone is a variant in that the supernations have agreed not to deploy Objects here. Conventional military forces are not restricted so it's one of the few places where fighter jets and tanks still have an important role.
  • The Panama Canal is off-limits to anyone currently engaged in a war due to international treaty. This is because it's a vital economic tool and any battle would likely render its machinery inoperable, shutting down the canal.
  • The Greater Canyon is a massive swath of unclaimed territory in the middle of the former United States, separating the home countries of the Capitalist Enterprise and Information Alliance. Faith and Legitimacy forces do an annual tour through the area to keep up the charade that war isn't always necessary.
• New Era Speech:
  • City Slicker gives an elaborate speech on how, with the power of his Object, he will reform Legitimacy Kingdom and restore its grandeur. This neatly covers that what he's actually talking about as the first step is wiping out every civilian in a Kingdom city who can't speak his language.
  • The MIB give one about how they intend to use Oceania to create a successor to the "world police" which will bring the entire world under its protective aegis.
  • The mastermind of the "Star" conspiracy gives one to Qwenthur, explaining how the current world order is bound to collapse and his plan will allow a new, better world to be built after humanity tears itself apart. Qwenthur tears his speech apart.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Qwenthur and Havia constantly defeating objects and upsetting about a half century of military tactics have had unintended consequences, a fact that shows in volume 2. Where before, war could be decided by which side had the higher number of Objects, groups are now getting the idea that they, too, can bring down an Object without needing one themselves. They're accused of prolonging wars as a result, though the person telling them this has a personal stake in the status quo, which Havia is quick to point out.
  • In Volume 18 Louisiana praises Qwenthur for successfully destroying the only chance for stopping catastrophic climate change due to Objects disrupting the Earth's axis.
  • In Volume 19 the Baby Magnum and Rush are deployed to Rome in an attempt to stop the city's destruction by Bad Garage. Their combined weight destabilizes the weakened crust and causes a volcanic eruption that destroys Rome, triggering a world war.
• Noble Womans Laugh: Oh Ho Ho. This is actually the name Qwenthur and Havia call her by, since they (and the readers) do not know her actual name.
• No Communities Were Harmed: While the names of a few actual places make it in, like Alaska in the first arc, most countries are unnamed and Australia is referred to as Oceania. Japan is usually referred to as Island Nation or "a certain island nation".
• No Endor Holocaust: Over the course of Doomsday, Rome and Manhattan are destroyed by volcanic eruptions and, in the case of the latter, several Object reactors exploding. Despite this the civilian casualties are shockingly light.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Qwenthur goes digging for valuables to loot only to uncover critical information on a previously unknown enemy Object. The rest of the 37th proceeds to beat him up for making more work for them.
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: Legitimacy Kingdom military rations are regularly compared to erasers in taste, texture, and appearance.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Frolaytia refuses to leave the maintenance base in Volume 15 so she can organize an evacuation for the survivors. Subverted when Bloodrics knocks her unconscious so he can evacuate her before the enemy arrives.
• No OSHA Compliance: Downplayed and literal with the Faith Organization's factories in the Greater Canyon. The workers were exposed to hexavalent chromium without proper protection or any form of emission control, eventually killing them. They got away with this because the Greater Canyon doesn't have the same laws and industrial limits as a safe country.
• No Place for Me There: Qwenthur speculates this is a reason people help the Star conspiracy despite knowing they will not get to see the future it promises.
• No Such Agency:
  • Background Unit is only a nickname as the detachment does not officially exist. They're sent to carry out dirty, dangerous jobs and are completely expendable. Every member is removed from international records of soldiers so that their actions can be denied. This is the only reason Qwenthur and Havia dodge a court-martial when Unicorn detonates an explosive in a populated area and lets them take the fall.
  • Stalk Killer Unit is another black outfit whose existence is only known to top-ranking Legitimacy Kingdom officers. They're tasked with entering battlefields where the White Flag is ignored and extracting high-value personnel. They're not acknowledged due to their necessity disproving the myth of a "clean war" which the military likes to sell and also due to using unsavory tactics.
  • Cinderella Wizard Unit is a unit that specializes in scouting potential Elites from war orphans in the Northern Restricted Zone. As this wouldn't look good to the public, they do not officially exist.
  • The 101st Zombie Platoon consists of Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers captured by the Information Alliance, which then used official channels to have them all listed as KIA. The Alliance could happily abuse the soldiers and use them as expendable infantry while denying all knowledge of their existence.
• Not in My Contract: Qwenthur is a student helping with Object maintenance and Havia is a radar analyst. As such, both often demand to know why they're first in line for combat missions, black ops, and taking on Objects.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Skuld feels she's quite similar to Qwenthur thanks to his habit of destroying Objects meaning he has killed hundreds of people, just like her. Havia is quick to refute that.
  • Dora claims that both she and Hina were betrayed and abandoned by everyone and thus can only rely on themselves.
• Not So Stoic:
  • Milinda was apparently emotionless or very detached at the start of the series. Being rescued by Qwenthur and Havia has caused her to slowly start opening up and acting like the sheltered, lovestruck girl she is.
  • Katarina Martini came across as cold and clinical throughout her analysis of how the Martini genius girls she created were budding sociopaths. Despite this, she couldn't bring herself to kill them and when Prianirie died she broke down weeping over her body.
• Oblivious to Love: Qwenthur is completely unable to see that Princess has a massive crush on him, or his Commanding Officer's, or his tsundere childhood acquaintance's that his family saved, or an idol whom he met during his stint in a Redshirt Army... this grates Havia even more than the fact that so many girls are falling for him in the first place.
• One Nation Under Copyright: The Capitalist Enterprise supernation is an example of this with the pursuit of money being the creed that united their member states. The central government is a coalition of the seven most powerful corporations whose CEOs have power comparable to a king of the Legitimacy Kingdom. Every government service is in turn a company; even their military forces consist entirely of PMCs.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • Milinda's her real name, but everyone calls her The Princess.
  • The Information Alliance pilot of the Rush is unknown, but is called "Oh Ho Ho" by Qwenthur and Havia.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Putana wants to kill Qwenthur in revenge after figuring out he was the one that came up with the plan to steal her Object. She wants this so badly that she actually saves his life, just so she would have the opportunity to kill him later.
• Only Sane Man: Anastasia Processor, one of Information Alliance's main AI, reviews the communications between various world powers at the end of Volume 18 and concludes that, sad as it may be, it's the only sane being on the planet.
• Orphanage of Love: Nancy diverted funds from her unit to covertly build a hidden orphanage for war orphans from all four supernations.
• Outlaw Town: The Faith Organization city of Lost Angels devolved into this over time. Due to the presence of an Object repair facility, the other supernations infiltrated the city and had their spies pose as rival gangs complete with typical gang behavior such as running guns or drugs. Actual criminals and opportunists came to profit from the conflict while ordinary civilians fled. By the time of the story nearly every person in the city is either a criminal or a member of a supernation's military posing as one.
• Outrun the Fireball: Qwenthur and Havia often end up sprinting to try and reach a safe distance from explosion. More often than not they'll get outside of the blast zone but still be knocked off their feet by the shock wave.
• Papa Wolf: Qwenthur's father doesn't need a full explanation of why Catherine is in trouble. Just the fact that there's a young girl who needs protection is enough for him to open his house to her.
• Passing the Torch: After Mother Lady's destruction, Louisiana reveals the Awful Truth to Qwenthur and tells him it's now up to him to find a solution.
• Pineapple Surprise: Elise pulls this on an Information soldier in the Arctic mission.
• Plasma Cannon: Another common weapon of Objects are low-stability plasma cannons. Miskatonic doesn't use a low-stability plasma, instead firing the plasma generated inside its reactor. The resulting blasts are significantly more powerful but also render any visual sensors inoperable.
• Plausible Deniability: The Capitalist Enterprise implemented a program to replenish the shark population around Hawaii. Ostensibly this was for commercial reasons but the actual reason was to use the increased shark attacks to kill off the tourist industry and cover up any murders by the Enterprise itself.
• Playboy Bunny: After sending the protagonists on a mission with shoddy information, they force her to wear this costume during the next briefing.
• Playing Both Sides: More than a few antagonists are manipulating other factions into wars for their own benefit.
• Playing Possum:
  • Trinity Style does this when Skuld decides to defect.
  • Baby Magnum can accomplish this by overloading its secondary cannons, making it look like the Object has suffered a devastating explosion.
• Pocket Protector: Qwenthur is stabbed by a Faith soldier, but is saved by the rolled up porn magazine he had stashed in his uniform. He then forgets the soldiers are there, that they're female, and that they're very religious, meaning they want to kill him even more.
• Point Defenseless: Averted for the most part. Aside from their main guns, Objects are loaded with a variety of point defense weapons capable of annihilating any ground or air forces and sensors to detect any threats. Qwenthur does manage to give the point defenses a slip on occasion due to his knowledge of their gaps but mostly relies on not getting spotted in the first place.
  • Even if a person managed to get too close to an Object for its sensors to notice them, simply firing a main gun would generate radiant energy and a shockwave powerful enough to kill.
  • Milinda notes that First Generation Objects avert this trope much more thoroughly than Second Generation, as they are designed on the assumption of facing a wide range of enemies including infantry. Second Generation Objects are designed for Object battles and sacrifice some efficiency with anti-infantry point defense as a result.
• Poison and Cure Gambit: Hermes Pharmaceutical developed a riot suppressant gas only to discover it had a 99.8% lethality rate. They sold it to the police anyway and secretly extorted any rich victims for massive payouts in exchange for an antidote.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The Victoria Island Arc's villain wants to wipe out a city primarily inhabited by immigrants because he feels they're weakening the Legitimacy Kingdom. And this is only the first step as he plans to either exterminate or enslave everyone who doesn't meet his standards.
• The Political Officer:
  • The Black Uniforms from the Legitimacy Kingdom are an independent agency responsible of barrier duty. Although this originally meant they were in charge of preventing soldiers from retreating from battle, nowadays barrier duty means they act as third party supervisors that check that soldiers follow orders, don't commit crimes, treat prisoners well, etc.
    • As part of their duty to ensure regulations are followed, the Black Uniforms have the authority to conduct contraband searches on any military unit or shipment. One unit exploited this to mark drug shipments as having been checked by Black Uniforms, allowing them to bypass standard inspections.
  • Wraith Martini Vermouthspray is a "troubleshooter" who specializes in hunting down criminals within the Information Alliance forces and cleaning up their messes.
• Ponzi: The Wendigo Vehicle Group, a member of the 7th Core and one of the most valuable companies in the world, started with a collection of worthless mining and construction deeds that its founder leveraged to purchase actual companies in order to purchase even larger companies. It was then quietly subverted by Silk Spider who began selling bogus stocks and all of its properties, profiting off the appearance of financial might even as she reduced its actual value to zero.
• Porn Stash:
  • A porn DVD ended up mixed in with training videos, becoming a relevant Brick Joke later in the story.
  • In the anime Qwenthur and Havia each have their own stash and covertly trade pieces. Frolaytia stages a raid with all-female officers to embarrass them into taking a mission.
• Powered Armor:
  • Powered suits are used both by the military and civilians (in mining and construction). While even a mining suit poses a major threat to infantry, they're no match for an Object and so are usually relegated to support roles. Some are so large they verge on being Mini-Mecha.
  • Oh Ho Ho has a powered suit modeled after her CG idol appearance. It's surprisingly lifelike with soft, bouncy breasts and butt... except it's also four meters tall and can dual wield vehicle-mounted guns.
• Pretext for War:
  • The murder of a Capitalist leader which could tenuously be connected to the Legitimacy Kingdom is nearly used as this by both sides.
  • The Legitimacy Kingdom attacks Mother Lady with the excuse that it is destroying the local ecosystem of the Turkana District which could potentially provide useful drugs for the nobility. This was just an excuse from the forces within the Kingdom with a vested interest in destroying World's End.
• Pretty Boy: Qwenthur is beautiful to the point that his description includes a line saying he could appear as a man or woman depending on whether he was wearing pants or a skirt.
• Prison Rape: The Château de Rouge's guards gleefully explain to Qwenthur that it's easy to keep virgins like Mariage in line because they're so desperate to avoid this trope.
• Private Military Contractors: The Capitalist Enterprise military is completely based on them. Qwenthur and Havia end up meeting and hiring one called Battlefield Cleanup Service in Volume 3 which turned out to be a front for intelligence operatives from the Information Alliance.
• Propaganda Machine: All four supernations have this to some extent, covering up their own indiscretions while lauding their virtues. The Information Alliance in particular specializes in this, to the extent that even foreign military officers may buy into their narrative.
• Protest Song: Boy Racer, Mariydi's favorite band, wrote their songs to have hidden anti-war messages. The governments undermined them with sex and drugs to shut them up.
• Proxy War: The supernations have "lend-lease" programs where they sell weapons to dissidents, rebels, and other factions who attack the other supernations.
• Public Secret Message: Boy Racer hid their anti-war messages by swapping the rhyming words in their songs.
• Punishment Detail:
  • Qwenthur and Havia managed to end up on these frequently. The Background Unit is a more extreme version of this, as it carries out dirty and dangerous jobs with absolutely zero recognition and a very high death rate.
  • After Qwenthur reveals a secret Legitimacy base during an unsanctioned operation, the entire 37th is punished by being sent on the "good will" tour through the Greater Canyon.
  • When the 37th bungles a holiday PR stunt due to Elise the unit is sent to the Artic ice cap to attack ice-locked but still active enemy ships on foot. With limited guns, bright red uniforms, and Legitimacy helicopters on standby to gun down anyone who tries to retreat.
• Purple Prose: Qwenthur deliberately uses this when using a radio he knows is being intercepted by enemy soldiers on the basis that they probably think Legitimacy soldiers speak like bad poets. And the enemy soldiers buy it.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The executives of Hermes Pharmaceuticals sold a riot suppressant gas they knew to be highly lethal to the police so they could extort wealthy victims. While that part of the plan worked their company's reputation was ruined and it came under heavy investigation. When Qwenthur nearly kills one of the responsible executives on stage not a single one of his five hundred employees tries to intervene.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: When Princess is captured by Faith Organization troops in the opening arc, one of them suggests they gang-rape her before dragging her back to base behind their trucks. It's at about this moment that Qwenthur, looking at them through a rifle scope, gets over his moral qualms about killing people.
• Realpolitik: The four superpowers all play this game, constantly skirmishing with one another but also willing to set aside differences when it better suits their interests. The concessions each country makes with regards to its core ideology and actual politics creates a number of extremist factions, both within and without.
• Real Robot Genre: Objects. There are also realistic powered suits as well.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: The Cook Addition Islands serve as a very pleasant example of this for the military, being a series of tropical islands with a wide range of amenities. Troublesome soldiers are sent here to wear them down, as the skills that made them dangerous will gradually rust away in a climate of constant peace and pleasure.
• Reassignment Backfire:
  • After destroying their first Object, Qwenthur and Havia were deliberately sent on special mission after special mission, in hopes that they would be killed. The reason is because they have proven that regular soldiers can take out Objects, inspiring other soldiers to not surrender after their Object is destroyed and causing war to be more drawn out/increasing casualties. Unfortunately, the duo not only survives, but continue to add more Objects to their kill list.
  • This is made even worse when they finally get transferred to an area far off from the front-lines, since they discover a conspiracy that ultimately leads to them interfering in a succession crisis between The Evil Prince and the Fallen Princess. Ironically, the end result means that Qwenthur and Havia can't be reassigned anymore, since almost every officer in the military is now too terrified by the very idea of commanding them.
• Red Herring: The Ragnarok Script doesn't exist, it's a rumor created by the Faith Organization based on the Fake Weakness of the Martini series.
• Redshirt Army: Anyone that isn't a protagonist, elite, or a commanding officer in the military is completely helpless on the battlefield. Justified due to the military viewing Objects as the true military power with all other forces being supplementary at best. As a result the majority of the armies are inexperienced and will lose all will to fight if their Object is destroyed.
  Mynori: Wow, no one died this time. That's pretty unusual.
• Reflecting Laser: Qwenthur generates a smog cloud over the Nitrogen Miracle, causing its laser to bounce wildly and ultimate core the Miracle itself.
• Refuge in Audacity: After learning her opponents intend to blow up a city, Mariydi decides to flush them out by detonating an air burst above the city and cutting all communications to convince the rest of the world that it already blew up.
• Released to Elsewhere: Sick factory workers from Giant Pizza disappear, with the civilians believing they are being cared for in a special hospital. In fact the Faith Organization is killing them and then burying their bodies in the surrounding desert.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: These pop up with distressing regularity, making up a number of the antagonists. This is usually the result of a faction embracing their supernation's ideology and rejecting the realpolitik concessions the supernation makes.
  • The Mass Driver Conglomerate broke off from the Capitalist Enterprise and tried to create its own powerbase after losing a bid to use its railgun technology for space launches.
  • Prizewell City Slicker, the Elite of the 24th Division and pilot of Indigo Plasma, goes rogue with his unit for little more reason than that he's a flaming bigot, violently opposed to the Legitimacy Kingdom's immigration and refugee policies.
  • Athletica is a sub-faction of the Greek Faith religions whose ambitions is to end the Technopics and restart the Olympic Games. To do this they're willing to trigger what could potentially be a world war.
• Reporting Names: Each of the 4 main factions has a different theme for Object's codenames. Legitimacy Kingdom mainly uses English words that describe their characteristics, like Indigo Plasma for an Object that has several plasma weapons. Since the main protagonists belong to this faction most Objects only receive this type of codename. The Capitalist Enterprise goes for feminine names like Charbetty and Lily Maria (which has been compared to the tradition of giving hurricanes female names), except the Japanese Objects which are in Japanese like Yuuhi or Ame-no-Uzume. Information Alliance uses a weapon name and three digits, for example Gatling 033 and Cannon 256. The Faith Organization goes for religious or mythological names like Ratri and Sarasvati (Water Strider's proper name is Prometheus).
• Revealing Cover-Up: Mariydi accidentally intercepts a signal being used as part of a conspiracy while on mission and is subsequently shot down. In order to hide this signal's existence, the conspirators frame Mariydi as a traitor for trying to give her plane to an enemy nation and put a fifty billion dollar price on her head. Doing all of this clues Mariydi into the conspiracy's existence and that the data on her flight recorder is vital. Had the conspiracy not acted, she would have simply returned to base and never gone after the data.
• Riches to Rags:
  • Legitimacy nobles, up to and including the royals, can be stripped of their position and cast out from their families. In extreme cases, entire families can lose their standing. Qwenthur's obsession with money comes from witnessing his noble neighbors reduced to hiding in his family's barn after losing all their wealth and then titles.
  • During the Lost Angles arc Qwenthur and Havia are responsible for a crime boss and industrialist going from lounging in a skyscraper-top pool to hiding penniless in a mound of garbage bags.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Bloodrics Capistrano likes to think of himself as a philanthropist but everyone else thinks of his "donations" as bombing with dollars. The amount of money he donates to his causes tends to destabilize the local economy and lure in criminal elements looking for an easy buck. He's also all too happy to slaughter soldiers of an enemy nation with a sword despite being a civilian.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Qwenthur at first thinks to Son of a Bitch doesn't move because its weapon system requires it be stationary. However he soon realizes the real reason is that the pilot isn't an Elite and would be killed by combat maneuvers.
• Royal Inbreeding: The negative consequences of this are discussed in Volume 17. Body File is a secret project developed by a group of royals and nobles to study the diseases and genetic conditions unique to the nobles. This in turn was just the cover for Project Caesar which is attempting to create the "perfect" royal but is constantly hobbled by genetic conditions.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Havia and Frolaytia. In Havia's case though, he's only there because his family expects him to earn them some praise rather than because he wants to be on the front lines.
  • Some nobles and royalty use their wealth to have a member of the family chosen as an Elite. Because Elites are seen as valiant heroes defending the country this is seen as a way for them to earn admiration from the citizens and respect from other families.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • One of Flag's bodyguards decides to run for it when the prince has his meltdown, jumping overboard from a cruise ship.
  • After stunning a rich socialite's bodyguards with a bomb and destroying all of her personal funds, the bodyguards decide to just walk off rather than fight some angry soldiers.
• See the Whites of Their Eyes: Played with: when the novel explains the usual ranges at which Object fight each other (5 to 10 km), it adds that main cannons can shoot much farther while still retaining power. The problem is their onion armor is tough enough that it's assumed normal Objects' main cannons need to be within 10 km to reliably pierce it. The speed and thus the power of railguns and coilguns drops as the distance increases, laser beams decay as they travel through the air, and the heat of low-stability plasma and rapid-fire beams dissipates. Indirect fire is still part of the playbook, just not usually against other Objects.
  • Low-stability plasma cannons do seem to have an inferior range to other types of main cannons in exchange for greater power, as Baby Magnum's are noted to have an effective anti-Object range of 3 to 4 km with a maximum range of around 10 km, but are described as one of her strongest weapons.
  • One entire story arc deals with Break Carrier, a railgun artillery Object whose signature ability is to accurately strike targets with indirect fire from extreme range without a Target Spotter. It launches chaff shells into the atmosphere and bounces radar pings off it. To destroy it, the 37th has to use the terrain as cover to get Baby Magnum into engagement range.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: Objects usually have one of these to keep the enemy from capturing an Object and/or analyzing its technology. This is actually what Qwenthur and Havia take advantage of to destroy their first Object, the Water Strider.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Ragnarok Script acts as such for the Martini Series. Knowing about their Fake Weakness causes Martinis to doubt their decision making ability, so they begin to rely on AI to make decisions for them. This results in them making bad choices due to not properly correcting the AI's mistakes.
• Serial Escalation: Each volume has seen an escalation in the threat posed by the main antagonist. The first antagonist was only a threat to Qwenthur and Havia. After him came antagonists who started civil wars, nearly caused an economic collapse, and five separate antagonists who nearly triggered all-out global war. Notably each instance of that war has become more premeditated, less well-meaning, and come closer to actually occurring. The first such instance was only known to a handful of individuals while in Volume 10 first strike targets were being selected. Volume 11 breaks stride from escalating threat but compensates by making the conflict personal. Volume 18 sets up the ultimate stakes with the reveal that Objects have disrupted the Earth's axis and may end all life unless a solution is found and Volume 19 ends with the beginning of a true, unlimited world war.
• Serious Business:
  • City Slicker has carried out assassinations and terrorist bombings for his cause before kicking off a civil war wherein he destroys his own country's Objects and plans to wipe out an entire civilian city. What is the cause he's fighting for? Preserving his native language which is also the country's official language.
  • Apparently a war broke out in the Athabasca District due to a disagreement over a ski slope.
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: Boy Racer fell apart due to loose women and, presumably, cocaine. Said women and drugs were covertly supplied by governments to stop the flow of anti-war songs.
• Sexy Santa Dress:
  • Frolaytia and Milinda both wear one for a Christmas party and end up in a tug of war over Qwenthur.
  • Elise wears one in her introduction and for her first mission on the Arctic ice cap.
• Shameful Strip: When Milinda is captured for the second time in the first volume one of the guards declares they're going to strip her naked and tie her to the front of their Object. Note that they're also in Alaska during the winter.
• Shaming the Mob: A crowd of anti-coalition protesters are being whipped into a frenzy by a man until a little girl chucks a rock at him and points out he's completely wrong. When the man's sympathizers try to drag her away the mood of the crowd changes drastically - nobody wants to side with people who man-handle children.
• Sherlock Scan: The Police Queen is set to rapidly scan both crime scenes and battlefields to identify suspects and enemy combatants.
• Shocking Defeat Legacy: The destruction of Asgard when the Object reactor at its heart was destroyed has made the existence of Objects and their reactors a taboo in the Northern Restricted Zone. It was in fact this sentiment which inspired the Zone's creation as an Object-free zone.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Volume 15 starts with Qwenthur's apparent death, leaving him absent for the rest of the volume. This leaves most of the characters either subdued or angry and results in an even bleaker than normal story.
• Shoot the Builder: The Wotan was built using the labor of black market weapons builders. After its completion they were killed to keep its existence and weakness a secret.
• Shoot the Bullet: Objects are capable of this, but the difficult makes it relatively rare. They can easily shoot down missiles on the other hand.
• Show Some Leg: The protagonists exploit Elise's body and revealing outfit to distract enemy soldiers during a pitched battle. This escalates with them actually removing parts of her outfit to increase her appeal.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!:
  • After the "Star" mastermind gives his speech, Qwenthur verbally tears him apart. He correctly deduces the entire conspiracy consists of child geniuses being supported by disillusioned, guilty adults and mocks him for acting exactly like a spoiled child.
  • When an angered Oh Ho Ho demands to know why she shouldn't kill Qwenthur and his unit after they've humiliated her and escaped her quarantine, Qwenthur is all out of patience with her. He proceeds to viciously explain how absolutely shoddy her quarantine operation is and that killing Qwenthur now just means his remains will escape quarantine. Her only choice is to obey his orders like a servant.
  • After being disarmed, Dora starts mocking Hina's optimism in a crapsack world. Mid-sentence Qwenthur blasts a hole in her chest with a bomb.
  • The last member of Azumaya is gloating to Qwenthur about how his group has successfully undermined the supernations to allow a global reset. Qwenthur, having noted that the Information Alliance was unharmed, shoots the man and then points out he was obviously being fed information to make him act in a certain way.
• Slasher Smile:
  • Nutley, when he betrays and attempts to kill the rest of his squad.
  • Skuld sports an increasingly unhinged one after her true character is exposed.
• Smoking Is Cool: Froyletia is seldom seen without her trademark kiseru pipe. This has served as a plot point on several occasions.
• Smug Snake: Filde.
• Sniping the Cockpit: Elites are so well-protected by the Object's armor that this isn't possible once battle starts. However it's not unknown for soldiers to infiltrate bases to assassinate the Elite before they can reach the cockpit.
• Soldiers at the Rear: Due to the prominence of Objects most of the military consists of soldiers who never seriously expect to fight, even when they're supporting an Object on a battlefield.
  • In Volume 1 Milinda had always looked down on the soldiers in her unit because of this trope. While they sat in the rear, safe and bored, she was risking her life. Having Qwenthur and Havia charge into near-certain death to save her shook that belief considerably.
  • In Volume 8 the PMC Moss Green, experienced veterans from the Northern European Restricted Zone, looked down on the Legitimacy Kingdom soldiers for being soft due to their reliance on Objects. Their commanding officer saw some of her soldiers dying to them as undignified; Qwenthur notes she essentially viewed his unit as less than human due to this trope.
• Space Elevator: The Mother Lady in Volume 18 is a carbon nanotube-based example of this trope.
• Space-Filling Empire: The Legitimacy Kingdom, the Capitalist Enterprise, the Information Alliance and the Faith Organization each with their own specific ideologies^note based on lineage, money, information and religion respectively and which are constantly scheming against each other. Unique in that they are not monolithic empires governing a contiguous swath of land. Nations joined their preferred organization without consideration of their neighbors' choices, resulting in the world map being compared to a stained glass window.
• Space Whale Aesop: Keep consumerism in check, or else the military will build giant combat robots heavy enough to stop the earth’s rotation.
• Spider Tank: Deconstructed. Some Objects like the Water Strider have their hovering devices at the end of several long legs. The fact that the legs are extremely maintenance-intensive is a plot point: Qwenthur is able to destroy Water Strider by sabotaging one of the parts that have to be replaced after every sortie.
• Spoiler Opening: The second opening spoils a major event in the Coal Mine arc by not making any attempt to hide the fact that Nutley isn't exactly a friendly character.
• Spring Coil: Jack in the Box is able to use its spring-loaded tail to hop around the battlefield after Qwenthur disables its normal float system.
• Star-Crossed Lovers:
  • Havia and Lady Vanderbilt are heirs to their respective families, which have a bloody feud stretching back centuries. Their engagement is planned to bring an end to the feud but neither side is happy with the arrangement.
  • Qwenthur and Oh Ho Ho are not quite lovers but her attraction towards him and his fondness of her make for an unusual relationship given they are from opposing nations and often fight one another. In Volume 15 the narrator even comments on how it would ordinarily be impossible for someone on Oh Ho Ho's level to even be aware of Qwenthur's existence.
• Steel Ear Drums: Never mind their eardrums, Qwenthur and Havia ought to be plain dead from the concussion of such big guns going off with them that close.
• The Straight Man: More or less Havia to Qwenthur, if only because he's less insane.

• Succession Crisis:
  • Volume 6 has two rival claimants for the throne of Volga. Prince Dimiksy has strong political connections, age, and bribery on his side while Princess Staivia has only the fact that Dimiksy is likely illegitimate.
  • In the event a noble or royal is expelled from their family, they are legally castrated. This ensures that they won't have children who can then challenge their former family for the title.
• Summon Bigger Fish: While underwater the Legitimacy soldiers are pinned down by a group of enemy soldiers. Qwenthur ruptures a few bivalves, luring a giant squid that wipes out the enemy.
• Superhero Paradox: Sewax wants to end the world's perpetual war by capturing a photograph that will show the complacent citizens the true horror of it. But to do that he must both witness a tragedy and capture it in a picture without interfering. When he has the choice between a picture of such a tragedy and saving lives, he saves lives.
• Superweapon Surprise:
  • When the capital of the Information Alliance was threatened with destruction, they quickly neutralized it using their secret weapon: The island of Manhattan being converted into a massive cruiser.
  • Southern Transylvania secretly built an Object inside a mountain and planned to reveal it while declaring their independence from the North.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In the final volumes the 37th begins to discover the unexpected side effects of Object battles. On the small side, Objects battles release massive amounts of energy into the Earth which cause localized earthquakes. In safe countries alone, they are directly responsible for 190,000 civilian deaths in the last few decades, triggering several wars as a result. On the major side, Objects have released so much energy into the Earth that the Earth's axis is shifting and may render all life extinct.
• Swiss Bank Account:
  • The Object Private Bank exploited this reputation by creating a fake Cayman Islands bank. It handled money from every superpower and stored the records on the Object's servers, which would then be used to blackmail the various customers.
  • In Volume 17 an international rare earths bank serves as this by storing its customer's wealth in the form of valuable rare earths. It goes out of business, leaving anyone with excess rare earths in a bind.
• Synthetic Plague: The Einherjar project is a series of molecular motors designed to artificially reproduce the effect of rabies with an accelerated spread rate.
• Tactical Superweapon Unit: Power creep has replaced conventional armies with Technodrome-esque land battleships, the titular Objects. Warfare in the setting revolves around the idea that only an Object can stop another Object (they can even shrug off direct hits with nuclear weapons), and lesser military units are simply swept away beneath their power, as Objects routinely dump enough power per-shot that a miss can cause earthquakes. The protagonists are the "Dragon Slayers," a group of soldiers who accidentally proved that Objects can be infiltrated and brought down from the inside while on a self-imposed mission to rescue their pilot.
• Taking You with Me: Klarheit Rubyhunter attempts this on the leadership of the Chain Cutters by crash landing his bomber to take them out, but their tiltrotor manages to dodge him... before being shot by their own side.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Qwenthur and Havia often give long, detailed speeches on what they're doing or about to do in the middle of a gunfire. Sometimes subverted when what Qwenthur just explained causes an explosion or other health hazard that he really should have been running away from rather than explaining. Havia is usually quick to yell at him for this.
• Target Spotter:
  • When the Break Carrier was advancing through a series of mountain valleys, Qwenthur and Frolaytia had to identify which valley it was using so the Baby Magnum could fire on it.
  • After Oh Ho Ho commandeers the Manhattan a Kill Sat is brought in but it needs a target. Skuld serves as the spotter, locating Oh Ho Ho and relaying her location.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • Volume 15 sees Havia absolutely pissed the entire time he's forced to work with Wraith after she apparently killed Qwenthur. Wraith in turn is less than happy with the situation and gets very tired of his constant death threats.
  • The Faith Organization suffers this on a large-scale due to friction between multiple incompatible religions working together. It's bad enough that Rome's defensive Objects can also double as riot control, ensuring cooperation in the supernation's capitol via fear.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Havia claiming that circumstances are different in Episode 4 because this time there are multiple spare platforms to monitor the Baby Magnum, which means losing one or two wouldn't be much of a problem this time, would it? Cut to the enemy Object subsequently blowing up every single one in a matter of seconds.
  • Happens twice in quick succession to Havia while raiding a group of poachers.
    • After gunning down a knife-wielding poacher, Havia notes to Qwenthur that guns simply have too many advantages to lose against a knife. He's immediately jumped and stabbed (in the armor) by a poacher he missed.
    • A bullet strikes a truck's fuel tank but fails to cause an explosion. Havia points out that cars exploding that easily is just a movie trope. The truck explodes immediately after this due to static electricity igniting the gasoline vapor.
• The Tease: To complete Shameless Fanservice Girl levels. Froyletia does this to Qwenthur and Havia repeatedly, knowing full well the effect she has on them. (Havia makes no attempt to hide it.) Juxtaposing this with Drill Sergeant Nasty is how she keeps them motivated into doing what she wants. Though even this isn't 100% effective. The real reason she can control them is that she's just as much a Loveable Rogue as they are.
• Terrain Sculpting: Bloodrics Capistrano had New Caribbean Island created by detonating a massive payload of explosives on the bedrock, creating an artificial volcano.
• That's No Moon:
  • The protagonists are blindsided when it turns out there was an Object disguising itself as a nearby iceberg, allowing it to move within firing range of their fleet.
  • The Appetizer asteroid in Volume 12 turns out to be a shell of rock surrounding an Object.
• Theme Naming:
  • All the last names in the series are names of cocktails, the one exception being Sarasa Gleamshifter whose last name is merely based on the gloom lifter cocktail. More specifically, Legitimacy Kingdom names are brandy based drinks, Information Alliance names are gin based drinks, Capitalist Enterprise names are rum based drinks, and Faith Organization names are whiskey based drinks. There's also one exception to these themes: Wydine Uptown, as that was a fake name taken by an Information Alliance agent while pretending to be from the Capitalist Enterprise.
  • The Outer Gods, a Capitalist spy agency, uses Code Names based on the Lovecraft mythos. One of their members after becoming a powerful CEO names his company's Object the Miskatonic.
  • The various special weapon projects and cities seen in the Northern Restricted Zone all have names centered around the Norse religion.
  • The Martini series of genius girls all have Martini (a gin based cocktail) as a middle name followed by a last name that indicates a variation of the mix, i.e. Martini Dry, Martini Sweet, etc.
  • The various AI and databases created by the Information Alliance are named after Romeo and Juliet. Capulet is the strategic AI that handles long-term plans for the nation while Montague is their central database. Juliet is a tactical AI derived from Capulet while Romeo is a data-gathering program that feeds Montague.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Assigning an Object to attack anything but another Object falls under this. A single barrage will level any building and reduce humans to a paste.
• The Theocracy: The Faith Organization is a union of every religion, with their military driven by religious zeal. Their claim of holding each religion as equal is largely a facade as each faction tends to view itself as the correct religion.
• Threatening Shark: The Capitalist Enterprise has been working to increase the shark population around Hawaii. While officially this is to harvest them for ingredients, the actual reason is to increase the number of shark attacks and disrupt the tourist industry. They also cover up murders by claiming it was a shark attack.
• Three-Act Structure: Individual novels tend to follow this structure, which is especially evident due to being split into three chapters. The first chapter introduces concepts, new characters, and at least some foreshadowing of the main conflict driving the current volume. The second chapter is more intense and the conflict is fleshed out even more. Generally those events lead right into the third chapter, where the antagonist of the volume makes their move and is confronted, with an epilogue closing out the current plot.
• This Is Reality: More than a few times the characters will point out they can't pull off some classic movie trope as it either doesn't work or will get them killed.
• The Tokyo Fireball: The city of Asgard, which had a population of five million, was destroyed in one night when an air raid destroyed the Object reactor which powered its defenses. The resulting explosion vaporized the majority of its residents; the city was never rebuilt.
• Trading Bars for Stripes: At the end of Volume 14 the Faith Organization approves the release of Skuld Silent-Third to pilot an Object for the coming conflict. This is despite them fully understanding she is an insane serial killer.
• Tragic Dream: Katarina only wanted to bring her mother back, but each child she operated on received only a portion of Cassandra's personality. And eventually she learned that the mother she was trying so hard to revive had been an absolute monster to anyone other than Katarina.
• Training from Hell: The Special Training Units of the Legitimacy Kingdom are legendary for their harsh training methods. Naughty children are warned that they might be stolen by the STU at night if they don't behave.
• Transforming Mecha: The Trinity Style uses small drones to shift its components and even armor around, allowing for the use of three different Object templates. The three Elites piloting each specialize in a single template.
• Trash Talk: Oh Ho Ho and Milinda often engage in this, with the former periodically calling up the latter for the sole purpose of talking some smack.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: The 37th is able to quickly travel from one battlefield to the next, often visiting multiple continents in the span of one volume. In example, Volume 17 has the 37th fighting on the Arctic icecap on or around Christmas day and by New Years Eve they're in the Alps. This wouldn't be notable except in the week between those two locations they also went to South America.
• Traveling Landmass:
  • Man-made floating islands have been created. The first ones were made to replace submerged cities but these proved uneconomical. Currently they are mainly used for facilities such as airports.
  • Olympia Dome is a particularly massive island dedicated to the Technopics which circles the Atlantic Ocean.
• Treasure Chest Cavity: In Volume 17 a group of nobles acted as "patrons" for sick commoner children. Aside from the necessary medical procedures, many of their joints and organs were replaced with artificial ones made out of valuable immortanoid. This allowed the nobles to transport their wealth in secret under the guise of benevolence.
• Trick Bomb:
  • Qwenthur only has a plastic explosive, but with it he can craft anything from shrapnel grenades to knock-out bombs.
  • Inspired by Qwenthur, Skuld developed her own bomb techniques including one that converted a plastic explosive into a handheld plasma torch.
  • The Information Alliance developed remote grenades that can roll around an area based on commands from a tablet, allowing them to accurately detonate in enemy positions.
• Trojan Prisoner: Qwenthur is imprisoned at the Château de Rouge in order to subvert the prison's systems rescue Mariage.
• A Truce While We Gawk: During a firefight in the Antarctic, a flock of penguins strolls right in the middle of a firefight between some terrorists and Qwenthur and Havia. Both sides stop everything to watch them and even cheer on a baby penguin that slips. Combat resumes immediately following the penguins reaching safety.
• Truce Zone:
  • Olympia Dome is considered neutral territory and is guarded by an Object from each supernation to enforce this.
  • Oceania became one of these after its ruler earned world-wide hatred for attempting to wipe out the aboriginal population. The four supernations worked together here to stop him and help the people transition to a new government.
• Tsundere:
  • Havia's maids are fanatically loyal to their chosen master and truly believe in his vision, but are too afraid of going against his family's opinion to openly support him. As a result they treat him coldly most of the time but will sacrifice their lives for him in a heartbeat.
  • Azureyfear mocks her brother and plans to kill his finacee, claiming it's for the good of their family. In truth she believes in him, even being a mild brocon, and has arranged the entire situation to improve his standing.
• Turned Against Their Masters: A portion of the Martini series became enamored with the Capulet system and decided to trust it implicitly. They conspired together in an attempt to destroy New York City but ultimately failed.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The second half of the twenty-first century, to be exact.
• Twisted Christmas: In Volume 17 the 37th dresses up in festive outfits and goes to the North Pole to rescue a ship of stranded sick children! Along they way they need to kill the occupants of several heavily armed enemy warships, distract soldiers by forcing Elise to strip, and deal with the nobles using the children's bodies as cargo containers.
• Ultimate Job Security: Qwenthur and Havia could easily be discharged for some of their stunts, especially the incidents where they knowingly opened fire on fellow Kingdom soldiers. Despite this they're still in the military, likely due to a mixture of being too good at destroying Objects and too dangerous to not have them under close supervision. Basically all but confirmed by Vol 6's Epilogue, where after being moved around several units and causing a headache to multiple superior officers, Frolaytia is asked to take them back into the 37th, as all other units claim they can't handle them and the higher ups are concerned they'll defect to another world power if they are discharged.
• Ultimate Life Form: Project Caesar is a genetic engineering program intended to create the perfect royal for the Legitimacy Kingdom. Using genetic samples from all of the noble and royal families, Caesar is simulating the intermarriage of the families in order to produce a single individual who would possess the genetic heritage of every royal and noble family in the world. Unfortunately they've gotten bogged down due to trying to get rid of various genetic conditions.
• Underground City:
  • Civilians in the Greater Canyon have converted old nuclear missile silos into silo cities; the surface population alone can reach the thousands with the wealthiest living deep underground.
  • Organizations focused on spaceflight eventually concluded Earth would collapse before a viable colony could be established. Instead they invested their money in building elaborate, self-sustaining bunker cities where they could ride out the apocalpyse in comfort.
• Undying Loyalty: Surprising enough, Unicorn to Princess Stavia, to the point that they commit numerous acts - some that will no doubt get them court-martialed - just to try and save her from Prince Dimiksy's plot.
• Unflinching Walk:
  • Qwenthur and Havia do this in the second opening.
  • Heavily averted in the stories themselves. If they're moving away from an explosion, it's at a dead sprint as they're close enough to be killed. Even then the explosion is likely to blast them off their feet.
• Unfriendly Fire:
  • A battle between three Objects from different nations is arranged by brigadier general to cover up the assassination of Lisa.
  • During their reassignments in Volume 6, Qwenthur and Havia pick up such a bad reputation that the righteous soldiers in the Amazon district are looking for a reason to frag them. When a staged terrorist attack hits the base several of the soldiers try to gun the duo down.
  • Taratua manages to piss off all of her subordinates with her heavy-handed behavior, so it's little surprise that she's sniped by one of them. While she's dying, Wraith assures her that the reports will show it was a Faith soldier.
  • A helicopter warns Havia and Qwenthur that its only contribution to the mission is killing them if they try to retreat. Havia blasts it out of the sky with a rocket launcher.
  • The leaders of the Chain Cutters, having gotten their unit slaughtered, attempt to flee the battle in a tiltrotor only for their own gunners to blast it out of the air.
• Unknown Character:
  • Most Object pilots don't have dialogue, they aren't seen or even made mention of, but all Objects are known to have an Elite piloting them just like the Baby Magnum^note and a few others more involved in the plot, like the Rush and Indigo Plasma does. As mentioned by the author in the Afterword of Volume 3, speaking with the enemy is not an essential part of the series’ theme, so unlike other mecha series pilots, talking to each other during battle is a rare occurrence. The author also mentioned in Volume 1's Afterword that the reason he chose to make Objects non-humanoid was an attempt to make them look more intimidating, so it's possible the lack of communication with enemy pilots is done so that the focus is kept in the Object themselves and their "huge monster" image is reinforced.
  • Later volumes move somewhat away from this, having Milinda trade barbs with the opposing Elite or giving a brief view from their point of view just before everything goes wrong.
  • For a little while, this also applied to Oh Ho Ho's real body, to some extent.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Not much but sometimes hinted between Qwenthur and Frolaytia. Especially after his crazy stunt in an attempt to 'rescue' her. It really comes to a head in the Lost Angels arc. Especially when the intelligence division has Qwenthur meet Froyletia in a Karaoke bar (because the rooms are soundproof). Unfortunately, that particular Karaoke bar is also a well-known front for a prostitution ring. Froyletia is not amused.
• Unwanted Rescue: In Volume 15 Frolaytia plans to stay at the 37th's ruined base and oversee the evacuation of survivors as long as possible, even though she will be a priority target for the enemy. After his attempt to reason with her fails, Bloodrics knocks her unconscious and carries her to the evac point.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Qwenthur and Havia are accused of this at the end of Volume 1 with regards to disrupting the pattern of "clean wars". Inspired by their success, groups around the world have begun using new strategies and worsened the bloodshed.
  • Piranirie reveals that the self-driving technology the 37th kept from reaching civilian companies was the last option for Capulet in dealing with the Manhattan problem. Without that technology, it resorted to a scorched earth approach.
  • In Volume 14 the constant disruption of Faith, Capitalist, and Information operations by the 37th Battalion results in all four supernations mobilizing for an actual conflict.
• Urban Legends:
  • The citizens of Giant Pizza believe that their factory workers are just so dedicated that they work themselves ill and are taken to a hospital to recover by the Faith Organization. In fact they're falling ill from exposure to chemicals and are then disposed of in the desert. The Faith soldiers did nothing to promote or deny the legend, instead seeing it as a sort of proto-religious belief.
  • The "Legendary Maid Qwenthette" explodes in popularity after a cross-dressing Qwenthur makes a brief appearance. The Information Alliance is even thinking about making a virtual idol based on her.
• The Uriah Gambit:
  • Councillor Flide needed Qwenthur and Haivia to die after their first victory but it needed to be in a way that would prove Objects were still the dominant force on the battlefield. As such he arranged to have Qwenthur and Haivia sent into additional battles after the first victory and actively tried to sabotage them in Oceania.
  • After the 37th bungled a PR stunt the unit was deployed to the Arctic ice cap where they had to assault a fleet of ice-locked but still combat ready enemy ships. All of this with bright red "kill me" uniforms, limited weapons, and armored support that had orders to gun down anyone who tried to retreat. Several soldiers from other units flat out refused to give them assistance because the 37th's entire purpose here was to get killed.
  • Louisiana reveals to the 37th the fact that Objects are going to end life on Earth. In order to keep this quiet, the Kingdom arranges a mission where they send expendable scientists, such as the imprisoned Louisiana, to a remote location where they can be killed. The rest of the prisoners and the protagonists were intended as collateral damage to obscure that Louisiana was the true target.
• Uterine Replicator: Qwenthur discovers a factory in Japan using a variant of this technology to produce genetically Japanese children in order to rebuild the country's shrinking population.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: In Volume 9 the genius kid group behind the incidents of the novel is willing to steal the resources of an already drying world, manipulate adults into helping them and kill thousands of innocents in order to escape the current world through cold sleep and create an utopia in the future.
• Vapor Wear: Melly only wears a red hospital gown while in her mobility tube, both due to the thrill of being so indecently dressed in public and the increased skin contact with the tube giving her better control over its systems.
• Vicious Cycle: Object battles release so much energy into the crust that they can cause quakes and volcanic eruptions in distant locations. These quakes have wreaked havoc on safe countries, causing massive losses of life and wealth. This triggers new wars between Objects, which will cause more quakes.
• Victory Through Intimidation: How an outnumbered group of Legitimacy soldiers beats a group of Faith berserkers. By disrupting their frenzied state so they would feel fear again and then intimidating them with precisely determined attacks, the Legitimacy soldiers were able to rout the enemy despite being out of bullets.
• Villain Has a Point: In Volume 15 both Tyrfing and Skuld both note that the current era of "clean wars" is a disaster for humanity and ending it would be for the best. Their method for doing so is to trigger a global war but they're not wrong about needing to do something.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Jack in the Box's unit donates food and offers employment to the citizens of the Greater Canyon, which has caused them to be seen as benefactors. In actuality the factories the unit operates are polluting the environment with hexavalent chromium. Said chemical also kills the employees, who the Faith soldiers bury in unmarked graves.
• Virtual Celebrity:
  • Oh Ho Ho is a variant, being an actual person but using a virtual body for her shows to hide that she's a pre-teen.
  • The Information Alliance does this with enough idols that they are classified under their own label as Class A idols (A for the Augmented Reality they use in their shows). There's also a completely fictitious Class V (likely for Virtual).
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Qwenthur and Havia: Constantly snarking and burning each other off-duty, but undoubtedly loyal to each other to the end. The narrator at one point notes their cursing at and flipping each other off was a good sign; if Havia had been considerate it likely meant Qwenthur was going to be executed.
• War Crime Subverts Heroism: Pops up from time to time as a reminder that while the protagonists are good-natured, not every member of Legitimacy Kingdom has the same values.
  • A unit supporting a Kingdom Object destroyed by Break Carrier goes into a frenzy and plans to destroy a dam in order to take revenge. They completely ignore the civilian casualties this will inflict, forcing Qwenthur and Havia to delay them and arrange for a faster kill.
  • City Slicker starts his rampage by opening fire on a mine filled with foreign pacifists in order to sour relations between the two nations, though thankfully they had already evacuated by that point. Notably members of pacifists' own military had planned much the same.
  • Lisa reveals that her unit's standard procedure involved scattering disguised land mines to delay pursuers, a war crime by itself under international law. This escalated when they wanted to follow the same procedure while moving through a city.
  • Nyarlathotep surrenders to Qwenthur's unit but barely escapes being summarily executed twice, first due to gasoline fumes possibly igniting and then due to Qwenthur keeping him alive. When he's finally brought into custody he is subject to a thirty second trial before being convicted.
  • A portion of Legitimacy Kingdom military waged a drug war on Capitalist safe countries, flooding the civilian cities with a highly addictive and life-destroying drug. They even planned to massacre other Kingdom soldiers who had discovered evidence.
  • Oh Ho Ho's unit quarantines the 37th and a city of 130,000 civilians due to concerns about a biological weapon their nation had been working on. Most notably they destroy an aid ship transporting food and water as the situation will be easier to deal with if all of the quarantined people die quickly.
  • Volume 20 starts with the Faith Organization going berserk, with soldiers in Rome crushing their own civilians under armored vehicles in a desperate bid to kill Qwenthur. They also gas a civilian airport filled with travelers from all supernation as a diversion when they try to destroy Paris.
• War for Fun and Profit:
  • Objects are a billion dollar business so it's unsurprising that many factions are perpetuating the war for profit.
  • Councillor Filde admits he tried to get Qwenthur and Havia killed to protect his profits, as their actions were shaking up the Object business.
  • In Volume 10, the possibility of an all-out war between the Enterprise and Kingdom is met with glee in some quarters. Frolaytia is disgusted to note that most of the "strategic" targets being marked by her superiors were also cities with large populations.
  • The Northern Restricted Zone has a constant influx of war funds from the four supernations. The officers commanding the local forces for each supernation are secretly working together to skim from those funds. To keep profiting they have to ensure the Zone remains in place and were willing to sacrifice a civilian city with a population of one million to do so.
• War Is Hell:
  • The characters often comment how stupid the concept of a "clean war" is. Regardless of how removed it may seem for civilians, people are still dying and being worn down by the killing.
  • Sewax believes this whole-heartedly and wants to bring an end to the constant wars via journalism.
  • Volume 20 makes this trope abundantly clear as the destruction of Rome causes the Faith Organization soldiers to go berserk, resulting in massive civilian casualties including their own people.
• The War to End All Wars: An all-out war between the four supernations is feared to be this as the sheer firepower and range of Objects means that no target would be safe. Entire cities would be wiped out in the opening salvos and it would only intensify from there.
• Weaponized Landmark: The secret weapon of the Information Alliance is a massive seaborne fortress created from Manhattan island.
• Weather-Control Machine: Meteorological weapons exist, though their main use is to manage rainfall patterns and act as psychological weapons. The Amaterasu global weather control weapon system in volume 8 was intended to topple all nations.
• We Have Reserves:
  • Prianirie sacrifices probably half of her troops in a doomed attack on the 37th's base and then forces the remaining half to use suicidal tactics against a retaliatory strike. She also calls in Object artillery on both sides as that ensures her own troops remain motivated.
  • The Faith Organization plans for "acceptable losses" when deploying Skuld due to her tendency to murder her fellow soldiers. Given the events of Volume 15, it's entirely possible losing an Object and the attached unit may be an acceptable loss with her.
• Weirdness Censor: Melly manipulates social media so that the civilians don't think there's anything strange about her wandering around barefoot in a paper-thin hospital gown.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Thomas gets shot in the head by a monkey in the same chapter he appears in.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The Athletica wants to restore the Olympics to their original state. Given that the Technopics are little more than a political and economic dog-and-pony show where athletes are in constant danger of assassination and destroying their bodies with doping and cheating devices, this is a noble goal. The problem is they want to start by arranging the massacre of millions of civilians and don't care that's likely to trigger a global war.
  • Tyrfing Boilermaker and his closest followers all know that the current era of Objects and "clean wars" is a mistake and must be ended. However their method for doing so is to trigger a global war between all four powers, allowing whoever survives to rebuild.
  • Louisiana Honeysuckle created the Mother Lady, which resulted in heavy desertification of the Turkana District she loved, and resulted in a brutal battle with the Legitimacy Kingdom which saw many of the District's residents dead. Her creation also threatened the very stability of the world due to its ability to deploy weapons anywhere on the Earth. All of this was secondary to her plan of correcting the drift in Earth's axis which could render the entire planet lifeless.
• We Need a Distraction:
  • When fleeing from Milinda Flyaway shot down a cable car filled with children to distract her. It's actually to cover up their disappearance.
  • Qwenthur and Havia are nearly spotted while infiltrating a Faith military base so they arrange for the Baby Magnum to put on an absurdly massive fireworks show while their fellow soldiers loudly transmit over the radio that they're celebrating a royal's birthday.
• Wetware CPU:
  • The Wotan uses the brain of its "pilot" Necleka as a processor; she has no actual control over it as all orders are sent to her brain and then routed to the machine.
  • Anastasia Processor is an AI whose main computer is based on a constantly-growing culture of cancer cells.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: Legitimacy Kingdom had a slave class which was abolished decades earlier. City Slicker wants to revive it, blaming the Kingdom's declining economy on its loss.
• Wham Episode:
  • Volume 18 ends with Louisiana revealing to Qwenthur that Objects are disrupting Earth's axis, potentially dooming all life. As the characters ponder this revelation, a major figure within the Legitimacy Kingdom orders everyone who knows the truth be purged.
  • Volume 19 ends with the 37th's mission to Rome triggering a volcanic eruption that wipes out the city, kicking off a world war where all treaties are ignored.
• Wham Line: The dying Bad Garage member in Volume 19 reveals the 37th has failed.
  Soldier: Welcome to a new, more transparent world. No one will ever believe the great scam of the clean wars again. Drown in the true face of war – an endless world war.
• What a Drag: When Milinda is captured in the first volume the soldiers discuss tying her to back of the Object and letting it drag her back to camp, musing it would probably tear off her uniform. Given how fast Objects move, there'd likely be nothing left by that point.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Volume 18 starts with Qwenthur and Havia mowing down guerilla fighters and even singing about it. Soon after they're nearly killed and rescued by one of the guerillas, Braskine, who talks about the toll this war is taking on his people and their land.
• White Flag: An electronic signal is internationally recognized as a sign of surrender, usually deployed when an Object on one side of the battle is destroyed or too badly damaged to continue. However there is no treaty enforcing this and as such no penalty for ignoring the signal. As such there are many units who will happily ignore the signal in favor of destroying the Object's supply base and personnel.
  • The very first Object battle ends with the Faith Organization's Water Strider ignoring the 37th's white flag.
  • If a battle is deemed important enough that retreat or surrender is not acceptable, the signal can actually be withheld by the higher-ups.
  • Flyaway abuses this signal, using it whenever cornered by an enemy to give it the opportunity to flee. A major reason it is targeted by the Kingdom is that this could eventually lead to the signal losing all value in battle and being disregarded even when used legitimately.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: The Scarlet Princess appears to be a defenseless luxury cruise, a perfect target for pirates. It's actually a disguised Legitimacy Kingdom cruiser which hunts pirates.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Nyarlathotep, from Volume 10, is a former member of the Capitalist Enterprise intelligence group Outer Gods, a cabal of spies who treated each other like family. As a spy, he has gotten multiple plastic surgeries, and has faked his death numerous times. Once their leader/former friend, Azathoth, retired to become a member of the 7th Cores ruling the Capitalist Enterprise, Nyarlathotep decided become a family man residing in the peaceful Soberania District. Nothing can go wrong. Well, that is until his wife and son are killed when Azathoth destroys his town. As a result, Nyarlathotep no longer cared about anything except avenging his family. Starting psychological warfare between various factions in order to start the Gigant Hustler, an event showcasing Objects fighting each other. During the Hustler, Nyarlathotep infiltrated the battlefield and sabotaged the Baby Magnum to lure Azathoth to the event. Once the event is canceled, Nyarlahotep impersonates Azathoth's driver and takes him to the remains of the Soberania District, showing him what he's done to his once great city and family before killing him. Once this was discovered, Nyarlathotep is subjected to a farcical military trial by the Legitimacy Kingdom in order to avert a war that almost started between every faction. He then killed the assassin sent to silence him in his cell and faked his death once again, before departing to elsewhere.
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): The female officer in charge of Background Unit is an experienced, no-nonsense hardass who lectures the new recruits on how likely they are to die on the upcoming mission. She's killed in the first enemy salvo.
  Qwenthur: She died that easily!? I thought she was going to be the final boss!
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: Apparently the Perfect Idol is this; she's described as "so beautiful that it's boring".
• Worthy Opponent: Maybe. There's certainly this vibe between Burning Alpha and Ice Girl 1.
• Worst Aid: When Qwenthur tests the cure for a toxin by injecting himself, his teammates think he's dying and start performing chest compressions. They started this just as he was about to tell them it had worked.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • When a young girl derails a protest leader's rant, some of his lackeys start roughly dragging her away. Seeing this further derails the speech as nobody in the crowd wants to support somebody who sees hurting children as acceptable.
  • The nobles on the Julius Caesar subjected the children they had taken custody of to multiple unnecessary medical procedures in order to transport their immortanoid.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian: An easy way to spot the "good guys" is that their units avoid involving or targeting civilians while the "bad guys" have no such compunctions. There are factions within all the nations which would happily wipe out their or foreign civilians given the chance, whether to further their agenda or simply because they're the "enemy".
• Wretched Hive: Lost Angels in volume 9 is home to a constant war between four gangs which are actually disguised fronts for each supernation's spies. To keep up the pretense of being civilian criminals they actually do commit crimes, such as arms running and drug dealing. It's gotten so bad that every regular citizen left, leaving only disguised soldiers and the criminals feeding off their conflict.
• Wrestler in All of Us: A maid demonstrates her fondness of wrestling while taking on a group of armed soldiers. This would be comical if not for the fact she was wearing bullet-resistant powered armor, resulting in each move splattering the victim.
• Yandere:
  • Havia is engaged to the heir of a rival family, who acts like a Princess Classic... up until Havia complains about Qwenthur getting all the good opportunities (women) they meet. She warns him that while she's a tolerant woman and will let him have mistresses as a noble status symbol, he's never to put any woman above her for an instant, or she'll find a use for her family's tower collection.
  • Milinda also counts, as she's perfectly fine with pointing all of the Baby Magnum's guns at Qwenthur if he ever decides to talk to other girls.
• You Got Murder: Mother Lady air drops containers of supplies for the defending guerillas which the Legitimacy soldiers attempt to intercept. Turns out the ones they could reach were packed full of explosives.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Havia's understandable response when he learns their enemy is employing a small army of gun-wielding monkeys.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Oldnick's fate once the Capitalist Enterprise unit he's working with decides they don't need him any longer.
• Your Head A-Splode: Nexa's head was said to be "blown to pieces".
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Crown of the Northern Lights has the goal of creating neutral blank areas between the various nations; should a war ignoring the idea of a "safe country" break out, those neutral zones would act as a safety buffer for the cities. However nations dislike this as it means reducing the amount of land they control. The Crown is forced to act as a terrorist group and even supplies weapons to other terrorist cells.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Despite being outclassed and outmaneuvered, the Ocean Driver kept fighting to keep Destruction Fez from reaching the Celestial Flowers fleet. The Elite fought until the very end, refusing the eject.
• Zerg Rush: Faith Organization soldiers are trained to become berserkers by temporarily releasing their fear of death. In this state thousands of soldiers will rush an enemy position with no regard for their own lives.

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