Against a Perfect Sniper

by Shiden Kanzaki

  He should not have been able to hear it, but Rentaro was sure he heard Tina gasp in astonishment.

  Rentaro activated the range finder in his left eye and had it calculate the position of the shooter from the direction of the shot. The distance to Tina—1.5 kilometers directly in front of him. It was hard to believe how far away she had shot from.

  He quickly took his smartphone out of his pocket and glared at the screen. There was a small golf-ball-size attachment installed on his phone. It was a supersmall sound sensor installed to use with a sniper detection application that Shiba Heavy Weapons had spent an enormous amount of money developing.

  As if confirming Rentaro’s prediction, the cursor indicated a sniper bullet approaching from the front. There was no mistaking it.

  Rentaro put both hands on the ground abruptly and raised his hips, taking a stance like that of a sprinter. He raised his eyes with a roar, glaring at the skyscraper soaring high above its surroundings in front of him.

  Target, 1.5 kilometers ahead—Fire.

  The next instant, the bottom of the cartridge hit the striker of the fake hidden nerve and exploded. An empty cartridge was ejected. The mobility thruster in his leg fired, accelerating him almost to the point of being blown away, and he sprinted forward.

  He didn’t have time to worry about the sniper bullet that flew in at a great speed and gouged out the area Rentaro had just been. In the midst of such strong headwinds that he could hardly open his eyes, he barely evaded the large rocks and cars that were coming at him with terrifying speed, plunging into the crack in the stone wall, dashing into the dilapidated building with a whirlwind behind him.

  The skyscraper grew steadily bigger in front of him.

  There was a faint glimmer of light on the other side of the building, and Rentaro realized that a third shot had been fired. He gave himself another boost by firing off another cartridge in his leg. Immediately afterward, a sniper bullet gouged out the area behind him with a high-pitched screech.

  Rentaro was shocked as he felt intense pain that seemed to rip his body apart. When he used his leg thrusters, he reached a top speed of a hundred and fifty kilometers and could barely even be seen.

  Tina not only followed his movements, but she also predicted where he would be and shot after calculating enough lead time. Rentaro and Tina were both using techniques beyond the abilities of humans.

  There were only six hundred meters left between him and Tina. Rentaro fired a third cartridge and rode it quickly into the skyscraper with violent momentum, but as he got closer, his heart beat hard, recalling a different type of worry.

  When a sniper bullet was fired from a kilometer away, there was about a second between seeing the light of the muzzle fire and having the bullet approach him. He knew this because he had experienced this many times firsthand.

  Up until now, he had always started taking evasive action after seeing the light, but the closer he got, the shorter the time would be between when he could see the muzzle fire and when the bullet came flying at him.

  As if Tina could miss at this distance.

  Just then, he saw another flicker of orange muzzle fire from the roof of the skyscraper and gasped in surprise.

  Shoot, Rentaro thought as it hit his Super-Varanium right arm. He fell from his superaccelerated state and rolled once, getting chills. He was going to be smashed into the wall. Would he be crushed to death? No, he had to stand back up.

  He changed the position of the thruster in his leg so that it stuck out to the side, and fired. Gritting his teeth, he forcefully twisted against the inertia, crossing his arms in front of his head and aiming to crash through the entrance of a nearby building headfirst.

  With a loud crash, he smashed through the glass and rolled a few times on the floor of the entrance before forcing himself to stand up. There was damage to his inner ear that caused him to lose his sense of balance, and his legs danced like those of a groggy boxer. The joints in his body were in pain, and blood spread inside his mouth. Apparently, he had a cut somewhere in there.

  It took some time before he was able to calm his ragged breathing and look around to survey his surroundings. Tilting his head, he could see that even though the building was dilapidated, the atrium that reached the ceiling looked pretty nice. It had probably been a state-of-the-art intelligent building before the Gastrea War. It wasn’t as tall as the building Tina was shooting from, but it was still pretty tall.

  He couldn’t just stay here. She had the Shenfield.

  Rentaro quietly slid under the decaying marble reception desk. Soon after, a fist-size round object turned silently into the entrance. There was no mistaking it; it was a Bit that Tina was controlling. It was his first time actually seeing it, but it must have been what had been observing Rentaro and his surroundings before. It barely made a sound as it flew, and was probably built for clandestine activities.

  The Bit acted like a living thing and floated mysteriously as it scanned the area around it with lasers, investigating the topography. The Bit neared Rentaro slowly but surely.

  As Rentaro carefully pulled his gun from his holster without making a sound, he pressed the safety to be ready to fire. Calming his wildly beating heart, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. As he flew out from under the reception desk, he was caught by the Bit’s sights, and the Bit turned sharply to face him.

  Rentaro fired without missing and shot out the Bit’s camera eye. In an instant, the Bit was flying around lopsidedly. Before long, he had thrown it to the floor, scattering sparks, and after some slight death throes, it ran out of power and was completely silent.

  This was good. Rentaro smiled inwardly. This Bit was Tina’s eye. If he destroyed all three of the Bits Tina controlled with her neurochip, then he would be able to shut down her unparalleled precise shooting. If he destroyed the other two like this, hiding under the reception desk—

  Just then, his breast pocket vibrated, and he pulled out his phone. He was dumbfounded when he saw that the caller was Miori Shiba. What was she thinking? She should have known full well that he was in the middle of a battle.

  No, he reconsidered. She must have thought he hadn’t started yet and had something she just had to tell him. He pushed the button and picked up the phone.

  “Satomi dear, are you alive? I have the results of the analysis of the machine gun!” said Miori’s familiar drawl.

  He frowned, wondering what she was talking about, and then remembered the pieces of the heavy machine gun that were collected from the scene where Enju had been shot. If he remembered correctly, Inspector Tadashima had said that Enju had been shot from four different directions. He knew that one was a shot from Tina. But the remaining three—“Did Tina have help after all?”

  “No! The machine guns retrieved had remote control modules installed. In other words—”

  There was the faint buzzing of a machine operating, and Rentaro looked up with his phone still on his ear. He froze as he came face-to-face with another Bit looking down at him.

  The second one? When did it get here? Rentaro muttered in shock, “This is bad, Miori… It’s found me…”

  “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 st
raight 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.