Against a Perfect Sniper (21 page)

“Satomi dear, get out of the wayyyyyyy!” At Miori’s scream, he came back to himself and reflexively jumped forward diagonally to the right.

What happened afterward was beyond the bounds of common sense. The sound of gunshots came from all directions at superfast speeds and went past him, scattering debris from the walls that were hit, splintering them.

Rentaro turned sharply and aimed the muzzle of his gun at the Bit, but the Bit had already disappeared.

He calmed his ragged breathing.
What was that just now?
He immediately looked at the sniper sensor on his smartphone, but the cursor looked like it was confused and was pointing at six random places. No, were these really random?

“I just confirmed it with the Shiba Heavy Weapons satellite. There are five Barrett antitank rifles set up around you, Satomi dear!” The satellite was probably a man-made satellite owned by Shiba Heavy Weapons that could take night images by the gigapixel.

Antitank rifles set in five places, remote-control devices, Shenfield—

After being told this much, even Rentaro understood. Tina used her brain machine interface not just for the Shenfield, but also to remotely control the antitank rifles set up in five places.

Rentaro felt chills suddenly and rubbed his upper arms. That was absurd. Wasn’t ballistic sniping something that could only be done by experts, who could aim in the direction the enemy was heading and control the movement of their arms? Wasn’t it holy ground that only humans could inhabit that machines could not copy?

Why didn’t she use it until now? It was obvious. It was to draw Rentaro in so that he would be caught in her besiegement. Now that he had been seen by the Bit, .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets with terrifying penetrating power would come flying at him from five directions, plus a sixth direction where Tina was.

Though the building had been left at the mercy of time for ten years, just now, Tina’s bullet had penetrated the outer wall and flown right at Rentaro.

In his mind, he could see the vision of himself caught in a spiderweb, struggling. He shook his head gently in despair. It was this. This was what had gotten Enju Aihara.

Rentaro thought he had slipped past Tina’s sniper bullet to get close to her, but that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, she had drawn him deliberately in.

Tina Sprout, a transcendently perfect sniper.

It was a miracle that he had escaped the bullet just now. If another came at him—

Rentaro’s vision darkened in despair, and he shook his head
hurriedly.
Think, Rentaro Satomi. If you stop thinking now, next time, you really
will
be killed!
Anyway, he couldn’t stop here. The Bit had already found him.

Even so, if he left this building with an unobstructed view and went outside, it would be suicide. After being spotted by the Bit, he would be full of holes.

Rentaro turned his head and looked at the atrium that reached the ceiling. His only option was to climb the building. And intercept all the Bits that infiltrated before they could enter his location coordinates.

The Bits were black. They were probably made of Varanium. If he aimed for their hard outer shells, the bullets would just be repelled, and he would not destroy them. His only choice was probably to aim for the camera eye, which was equipped with different sensors. He had succeeded earlier, but he wasn’t sure if he could manage the accuracy needed to hit a moving target so many times. He had no choice but to try, though.

Rentaro jumped out from under the reception desk and started climbing the stairs. As he climbed the sharply turning stairs, he stopped at every floor, hiding himself as he searched for the best floor to fight on.

From the second floor to the twentieth floor, there wasn’t really anywhere to hide himself. Things that could have been used had been stolen long ago, and the floors were mostly empty.

When he peeked into the twenty-fourth floor, he thought,
This is it.
The twenty-fourth floor had been a typical office floor. Furniture that was hard to carry out had unsurprisingly been left behind by the thieves. Rusted steel desks remained, mazelike, wires hung from the broken ceiling, and sand that had blown in through the smashed windows accumulated at his feet. Thankfully, however, it was not lacking in places to hide.

Rentaro stepped quietly and hid himself in the hollow of a wall. He could have hidden under a desk or in a locker, but he decided that places that were easy to hide in would be the first ones to be searched.

Rentaro quieted his breath, pressed his back right up against the wall, and succumbed to an endless stream of introspection. Was the twenty-fourth floor really a good place to hide? If he went to a higher floor, there might be a better structure for him to hide in. By choosing the twenty-fourth floor, he’d abandoned that possibility, hadn’t he?

The small bud of anxiety eventually grew large, and he started feeling like his worries were founded. Just when he’d made up his mind to move from this place immediately, there was the sound of a machine moving, quiet enough that he wasn’t even sure he was hearing it. The normal Rentaro would definitely have missed it.

Rentaro poked his face out from the hollow in the wall and then hurriedly pulled it back in.

A Bit had infiltrated through the crack of a broken window. As Rentaro calmed his pounding heart, he peeked into the room again to see what was going on. The Bit floated carefully as it scanned under the desk and in the locker. If he had hidden there, it would have been over in an instant. His instincts hadn’t been wrong, after all.

As he held his XD and tried to find the right timing to jump out, another Bit suddenly came from an unexpected direction and cut in front of the hollow in the wall. Surprised for the third time, he hid his body inside the wall. The other Bit had come up in a pincer attack, from the stairs Rentaro had climbed.

The Bits seemed to be whispering to one another as they communicated. They looked like they were asking one another, “How about it? Was he there?”

Rentaro wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and took a deep breath. It was all or nothing as he jumped out and fired continuous shots.

Before the Bit on the left could figure out what had happened, its camera eye had been destroyed by a .40-caliber bullet. However, the Bit on the right was hit on its shell and repelled the bullet. It bobbed as it lost its balance, but quickly righted itself and found Rentaro with its camera eye.

He didn’t even have time to regret his mistake, but jumped forward with all of his strength.

The next instant, there was a barrage of gunfire. Rentaro grimaced as a hot bullet grazed his side, but he wasn’t going to let it get away, and grabbed the Bit, rolling on the floor as he shot at it. There was a loud crash as he smashed it against the wall.

Then, the Shenfield was silent. A silence that hurt his ears returned to the dilapidated building.

As he sniffed the gunpowder smoke, Rentaro pressed his right side and stood up. He felt an upsettingly slippery substance, and when he
looked at the palm of his right hand, there was dark red blood on it.
Damn it.
He was lucky to be alive, but if he’d had his way he would have preferred to avoid taking any damage that would hinder his movements before his final battle with Tina.

He injected a small vial of morphine into his stomach. He didn’t have the AGV test drug that regenerated his wounds this time, like he had when he fought the demon, Kagetane Hiruko. It had a side effect that made twenty percent of the test subjects into Gastrea, so when he told Sumire that he had used all that she had given him, she gave him a good scolding. Besides, this time, he and Sumire had parted with a fight, so either way, he couldn’t count on getting that drug.

He thought about what he should do next, but before he knew it, he had started walking upstairs for some reason. He wondered why, but since he had no plan at the moment, all he could do was rely on his instincts.

When he arrived at the iron door to the roof, he finally understood what he had been trying to do. First, he opened the door quietly with his back to the wall. After confirming that there was no sniper bullet being shot at him, he looked at the skyscraper standing tall before him.

There was no sign that she was going to snipe him. She might have lost his position after losing all the Bits. That would have been great for him.

Going through the door, he was hit by strong eddies of wind blowing around the building and had to hold down his hair. He walked over to the fence that came up to his hips to prevent falling and peeked down. The ground was dizzyingly far away, and it looked like it was opening its mouth wide like the bottom of Hades. The faraway building Tina was in was easily two hundred meters away.

Cold sweat ran down his cheek. Was he really going to do it? It was crazy. However, he was resolved to do this. In order to hold his own against someone with the superhigh ranking of 98, he had to take some risks.

Rentaro let go of the handrail and went to the handrail on the other side. There, he fixed his eyes straight on the skyscraper and started running. He started slowly, at a walking speed. Slowly approaching the edge of the building, he started running full strength, as if tripping, and kicked the ground, flying over the whole fence. There, he
fired a cartridge in his leg. The cartridge fired with a
Bam!
and ejected. Immediately afterward, Rentaro’s body was flying toward the skyscraper through the sky so fast that he couldn’t even open his eyes. He fired off cartridges in his leg in rapid succession.

Tina had noticed. He thought he saw an orange flash of muzzle fire, and then a bullet whooshed toward him with a screech and grazed his side. This was her sniping without the Shenfield. However, her precision was as threatening as before.

Tina fired her antitank rifle repeatedly. From the short intervals between shots, Rentaro could tell that Tina was also flustered.

Each time Rentaro fired off a cartridge, he changed the angle of the thruster in his leg slightly to slip past the fatal sniper bullets one after another.

The skyscraper got bigger before his eyes.

Slipping past two more of Tina’s sniper bullets, Rentaro fired his last leg cartridge. “Goooooooooooooo!” he yelled.

The glass window approached with terrifying momentum, and Rentaro drew his gun and fired twice into the window as he plunged in. With a shrill sound, Rentaro broke through the glass and was thrown over ten meters as he rolled on the floor. Putting both hands on the ground, he forced his body up. As he did so, drool dripped onto the floor. His ears were ringing, he was nauseated, and he felt strange chills. He was blacking out after being exposed to extreme g-forces.

But—he had finally made it. He was probably about ten floors down from the roof where Tina was at that very moment.

Rentaro thought as he stood up. Looking behind him, he saw the roof he was just on far away. He still couldn’t believe he’d flown that distance to get here. However, if he hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t have been able to even get close to Tina.

Since Tina was a sniper, she probably would not like to be approached from underneath, where she could not shoot. There were undoubtedly plastic explosives and antipersonnel land mines on the first floor of the skyscraper, and there was no doubt that the minute Rentaro stepped inside, he would have been caught in a trap that could blow him to pieces.

However, Tina could not have predicted that a normal person like Rentaro would approach her in this way.

Rentaro looked at the ceiling. Round two was about to begin.

Rentaro took four cartridges from his artificial arm and used them to refill his artificial leg, which had heated up. He changed the magazine of his XD gun. He pulled the SureFire military flashlight from his waist and held his XD in his right hand and the flashlight in his left. Crossing his arms, he climbed the stairs with the backs of his hands together.

Of course, there was no electricity, so he could not use the elevator. Even if there
was
electricity, it was unthinkable to use something that would ding and report his arrival to his opponent. Climbing the stairs cautiously, he reviewed what he knew in his head.

Tina Sprout was an Initiator with the Owl Gastrea Factor. The majority of owls are nocturnal, but good night vision is not their only distinguishing characteristic. What was to be feared even more is their keen hearing that can pick out even the faintest sound from the movement of their prey. It was completely natural to imagine that Tina’s hearing was also very good. From here on out, he would have to do his utmost to not make a sound.

The moonlight shone on the bluish-white world, the air on his skin was chilly, and it became silent.

Being careful as he stepped, Rentaro muttered to himself that this was the first time he had fought this way, now that he thought about it. Both Kohina Hiruko and Enju Aihara were the straightforward martial artist types who didn’t use a lot of tricks. Compared to them, the person Rentaro was facing now, Tina Sprout, was a soldier type, like him. Someone who used guns to get around traps and was good at handling explosives. This was an enemy who would do any kind of sneak attack to win. If he let his guard down for a second, he would be killed.

He was carefully keeping his footsteps silent as he made his way to the roof, but when he got there, all he saw was an abandoned antitank rifle and empty magazines scattered around it. There was no sign of Tina. She must have hidden on one of the floors.

First, he would go one floor down to the floor he had just passed.

The floor was divided into three rooms. The instant he got to one of them, Rentaro sensed that something was off and stopped. It was dark. It was too dark. It wasn’t that his vision wasn’t working, but that
there wasn’t even moonlight shining in. All the windows had probably been sealed. Why? It was obvious. His opponent had night vision and keen hearing. She could move perfectly fine even in the dark.

There were two shell casings lying on the ground at the entrance to the floor. Under normal circumstances, he would be convinced that Tina was concealed here. But Rentaro wasn’t sure after he saw them. Why would she leave shell casings on the floor on purpose? It was as if she was advertising her presence.

If that was the case, then he would have to work out a Plan B.

Rentaro fished around in the pouch around his waist and pulled out a bundle of something made of carbon. Rentaro pushed a button to make it return to its original shape, and what had been a folded frame instantly took on a ball shape, and a sensor inside it activated.

It was a pocket sensor package he had gotten from Miori. It had a thermal sensor and motion sensor, and if there was anything moving inside other than Rentaro, it was linked to Rentaro’s smartphone and would send an alert with the enemy’s position.

Rentaro threw the pocket sensor inside. He waited for a while, but there was no response. But with just that, he was still nervous about rushing in.

Rentaro pulled out a stun grenade and pulled the pin out with his teeth. Concealing his body against the wall, he waited for the sound and light of the explosion to pass and then went in. Using his flashlight to look around, Rentaro cursed involuntarily. It was spacious inside, and there were stone pillars in a few places, but like on the roof, Tina was not there.

It had been a decoy after all. With the explosion just now, Tina definitely knew which floor Rentaro was on. Rentaro started to feel like he was suffocating. With Tina’s specially evolved sight and hearing, a stun grenade, which spread sound, light, and pressure, would have been perfect to use against her. But he had just used it up.

Now that he thought about it, Rentaro realized that he had not seen Tina once since this battle started. Was Tina Sprout really in this building? The sudden horrifying thought clouded his mind, and he shook his head. No way, what was he thinking? His mind was filled with anxiety and fear and wasn’t thinking straight.

Amazed at how the darkness that prevented him from seeing was
able to take away a person’s reason and presence of mind, Rentaro went down to the next floor. Its layout was exactly the same as the floor above, with the same forest of stone pillars in the sprawling space. Holding his gun ready, he hid himself behind the pillars, carefully examining the whole floor.

Just then, he was startled by the sound of an alert on his phone. Hurriedly pulling out his phone, he saw that the pocket sensor he had thrown earlier had picked something up upstairs. A chill went down his spine. It was impossible. Even as he tried to make himself believe that it had picked up a mouse or something else that just happened to pass through, the alert continued to ring noisily, as if screaming.

He was sure that Tina had not been in that room. Unless Tina was able to appear and disappear like a ghost?

Then, he saw the emergency exit out of the corner of his eye and suddenly understood. That should connect to the outer stairs. Of course, the outer stairs of a skyscraper would get a lot of wind, and in order to prevent falls, it would be strictly locked. It was probably never used by anyone other than the building manager and the janitors. However, what if Tina had unlocked it ahead of time? What if she had escaped out the emergency exit to the outer stairs when Rentaro threw the stun grenade inside, waiting for the opportunity to return?

Instantly, he pulled out his spare XD and held both guns, with his left hand pointed at the outer stairs, and his right hand pointed at the inner stairs he had just come down. His breathing got shallower and shorter, and he almost screamed in fear. The alert grating his nerves would not stop. It was as if it was saying, “Run away! Run away!”

Suddenly, the sound broke off, the sensor stopped ringing, and a heavy silence fell. The tension left his shoulders. It was some kind of animal after all, right?

Holding one of his guns with his teeth, he used the freed hand to pull out his smartphone and looked at the screen. He saw the words
SENSOR CRASH
in big letters across the screen and felt a chill down his spine like he had been put into a block of ice. The sensor had not stopped ringing, it had been destroyed. That meant that Tina was—

Just then, he heard a noise. He turned his head up quickly toward it, and a Rank 98 battle demon rained down with pieces of concrete. Rentaro looked at the scene in despair. It was unexpected revenge for
the move Kisara had used to destroy the floor during the shooting incident at the Tendo Civil Security Agency.

Even as Rentaro paled, he put all his strength into his roundhouse kick that was aiming for Tina’s neck to use as a spring to escape. A terrifying faint buzz passed near his ear, and he started pouring cold sweat. He rolled forward like that a few times, pulling the triggers on the XD guns in both hands, firing as much as he could to shower Tina in bullets.

Tina held out a one-touch unfolding polycarbonate shield and took the whole barrage of twenty-four bullets.

Both of Rentaro’s XDs ran out of bullets at the same time. Tina must have decided that was a good time to throw away the cracked shield and plunged toward him with the speed of a bullet.

In the civsec officer combat manual, they were told to avoid a close-in fight with an Initiator at all costs. Rentaro abandoned his XDs and gritted his teeth. He dropped his hips to intercept Tina. His artificial eye gave off heat as it spun, calculating at superspeeds. The moment Rentaro saw the reflection of the moonlight on the dagger in the darkness, he pulled back his right arm.
Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 5—
At the same time, a cartridge spun and was spit out, and the smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils.
“Kohaku Tensei!”

There was a screech. Tina’s flash like lightning and Rentaro’s superfast thrust clashed, and there was an explosion at the point of impact. The sand that had accumulated on the floor was blown away, and the shock wave shattered all the windows.

Both of them left skid marks on the ground as they were thrown back. Rentaro jumped for the XD that had fallen to the ground and reloaded it, pointing the muzzle at Tina, but that was when he gasped in surprise, realizing she had disappeared.

Rentaro cautiously held his gun ready as he stepped backward and hid behind a pillar. This was bad. The darkness was on her side. Her owl eyes could amplify the light and see into the darkness, and in the worst-case scenario, her owl ears could probably even pick out the sound of Rentaro’s breathing. How was he going to crush her advantage?

Just then, something bounced on the floor with a clang, and a round green object rolled before Rentaro’s eyes. All the hairs on
Rentaro’s body stood on end—it was a fragmentation grenade. His mind went blank, and he kicked the hand grenade and then jumped to take cover.

There was an explosion. A number of fragments bit into his skin, tearing it away, and the intense pain burned into his brain. He had no time to writhe in agony. His brain was screaming that he should not be here.

Forcing all his muscles to move, he promptly rolled to the side, and the next instant, Tina’s kick fell right where Rentaro had just been, smashing the concrete road and all. Rentaro gave a roar and swung out to trip her. He got her, but Tina acrobatically put a hand on the ground and quickly backflipped to escape.

Tina reached her hand into the hem of her dress and threw out a round black object. After the faint activation sound, it floated with its single eye flashing and then headed toward Rentaro at full speed. There was no doubt about it. It was definitely a Shenfield Bit.

A fourth?
Why would a scout approach him?

For some reason, he got terrible chills, and as he stood, he shot his gun a few times, but the Bit skillfully avoided all the bullets and closed in on him. Realizing that he was in trouble, Rentaro promptly pulled the pin of an incendiary grenade to ignite it, but the enemy was overwhelmingly faster. The single camera lens stared him in the eye, and the soulless machine seemed to smile creepily, narrowing its gaze.

Rentaro didn’t have time to be surprised before the Bit self-destructed at his chest. Thrown back by the large explosion that burned his skin, his body bounced on the floor before being thrown into a pillar, back first. He was in so much pain that he gritted his teeth until a molar splintered, and his vision started to go black.

Rentaro gave a sickening cough, and blood started to overflow from his mouth without stopping, the warm blood wetting his chest. Fluttering his heavy eyelids to look in front of him, he saw that Tina had two more Bits deployed around her, on guard against him.

Right between Rentaro and Tina was the incendiary grenade that Rentaro had pulled out. The ignition pin had been taken out, and the safety was off, but it didn’t explode no matter how much time passed. It was a dud. In the end, even luck had abandoned him. In any case, the range where the thermite reaction from the combustion of the
incendiary grenade would have caused heat damage was too far away from Tina to do any good.

His clothes were scorched in the fumes of the explosion and gave off a terrible smell. Three large pieces of the Bit were stuck in his chest, like a grotesque art piece. He could not move another finger. Rentaro quietly shook his head left and right, and sighed shakily, enduring the pain in his injured lungs. She was too strong. Blood that wouldn’t stop flowing was dripping to the ground from different places of his body. Even though his skin was burned and blistered, because he was losing blood by the minute, his body started to feel frozen with cold.

Was he about to die? In a place like this? It didn’t make sense. His vision blurred, and his consciousness started to fade. In the back of his mind, memories of fun times flowed like a slideshow.

Suddenly, he remembered a movie he watched with Enju at a repertory cinema called
Barry Lyndon
. Apparently, it was made by a director named Kubrick, and after the movie was over, right before moving on to the credits, on a completely black screen, a written epilogue suddenly appeared.

G
OOD OR BAD, HANDSOME OR UGLY, RICH OR POOR THEY ARE ALL EQUAL NOW
, it had said. If that was the enlightenment reached by someone who lived many times what he lived, then it was too sad. It was too terrible a nihilism. He felt like he was getting sucked into the bottom of a dark hole.

It was cold. It was dark.
Damn it.

Jeez, I’m dying.

“Rentaro.”

A familiar girl’s voice suddenly flowed into his slowly fading consciousness.

Just then, there was the sound of a sudden explosion. A thermite blaze shot up between them, and an inferno manifested. Rentaro was struck dumb. Was it the incendiary grenade?

Normally, it took only a few seconds between throwing the grenade at the target and the detonation.

If it were a very defective product, it could take dozens of seconds before it exploded. Something that didn’t explode after that was a complete dud. According to his body clock, it had been about a minute
since he dropped the incendiary grenade. There was no way it would suddenly explode—

When he looked, he saw Tina with her arm raised covering her eyes. Doubts were raised in his head. Why? It was true that there was faint moonlight here, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t see anything. But looking at the struggling Tina covering her face, barely able to stand, let alone walk, it was as if she could not see anything at all.

Realization dawned on him. She actually could not see anything. Her owl night vision must have backfired, letting in too much light at once with its light amplification abilities, clouding her vision completely white.