The most probable reason was that Yuga was taking an anti-Hotaru approach to the fight, and that was what the shot had been. Yuga was so intent on facing off against Rentaro that he used that first shot to get rid of any outside elements as soon as possible. That was the only valid explanation.
In other words, he had a way all along to kill her for good—
Rentaro closed his eyes and let out a heavy sigh. He knew what he had to do.
“Rentaro, am I…?”
Hotaru’s eyes were open but groggy. Her lips were purple and shaky, but apart from that, it was like she had just woken up from a dream. He gripped her hand and looked straight into her eyes.
“It’s nothing serious. You’re gonna recover from it. You’ll be fine.”
Hotaru let out a relieved sigh. Apparently she was already beyond the point where she felt pain. Her expression was calm.
Slowly, she raised a shaking hand. Following her fingertip, he saw it was pointed at her M24 sniper rifle, scope mounted. He realized what she meant.
“I… No.” He retreated. “I can’t.”
Hotaru smiled. “Please. Just do it. If you don’t, the Gastrea are gonna…be sent all over Tokyo Area. If they do that…”
Hotaru, you have no idea how poorly trained I am at sniping. I really could just…never. I had my enemy one hundred meters in front of me on Tokyo Tower, and I missed twice. Meanwhile, my enemy can headshot a man riding a Shinkansen train from 1,200 meters away. We could hold this face-off a thousand times, and the outcome would be obvious. Every single time.
But the girl’s earnest eyes were still filled with the light of trust.
Rentaro closed his eyes, then opened them.
“All right.”
Rentaro picked up the sniper rifle again, taking it by the handle and removing the safety.
“I promise I’ll kill him and blow up the lab. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“But…”
Rentaro gently cut her off.
“This is the ‘savior of Tokyo Area’ you’re talking to. Don’t you believe me?”
Hotaru’s face grew more serene. She haltingly shook her head.
“The, the next time I wake up… I think I can be nicer to you next time, Rentaro.”
“Yeah.”
“I think…I’ll have more courage than I used to. And when I do, there’s something I want to tell you.”
“Uh-huh.”
The tears at the far edges of Hotaru’s eyes fell out in a thin line.
“I finally managed to protect my partner. Now I don’t have to have that dream bother me anymore. I’m not afraid of dying any longer. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Rentaro hung his head down, shaking his head silently.
“Thank you, Rentaro,” she continued. “You helped bury the loneliness for me. You taught me the meaning to my life.”
She turned her eyes toward the wide-open blue sky and squinted.
Her outstretched hand soon lost its strength and fell.
She never moved again.
“Thanks, Hotaru.”
There were no tears. He knew full well what had to be done.
“Thanks for believing in me. Thanks for fighting with me.”
If he had the time to let his eyes get clouded with tears, he had the time to defeat his enemy. He had the dreams and hopes of far too many people on his back to do anything else.
He opened the flip-up cover as Tina’s advice from a bygone day echoed in his mind:
“You can’t kill another person unless your own soul dies, too.”
No. You’re wrong, Tina. That’s how a monster does it.
The path to justice is fraught with danger. It’s too easy, too sweet and tempting, to let it turn you into a monster. But I can’t beat him that way.
Rentaro stood up, revealing himself on the top of the hill—easily within enemy range.
Bringing his right hand up to the front stand, he stabilized the position of his gun and placed the glass-fiber stock on his left shoulder. His eye peered into the scope.
“I’m saying you need to find a reason for yourself. One that’ll make it seem worth taking another person’s life.”
Because I want to protect. Protect Tina, protect Kisara, protect Enju. I want to save as many people as I can. With my own two hands.
And if this is what it takes—
His heart calmed itself. All was clear and serene now.
He took a breath and gradually let it out.
His eye activated.
Rentaro’s line of sight expanded as his formerly closed left eye began to function. A richly colored, almost spicy taste ran across his mouth. The nano-core processor began to operate at superspeed, the iris spinning in a dazzling array of geometric patterns.
“Time to end this for good…Yuga Mitsugi.”
Rentaro’s presence in his line of sight, of course, registered as an image in Yuga’s electronic retinas. Yet, at first, Yuga thought it was some kind of mistake.
“Standing up…and shooting with his left eye?”
Unlike firing from a kneeling or prone position, remaining on your feet made it extremely difficult to keep the gun steady, boosting the difficulty of landing a hit from far away to astronomical levels. If hand shake resulted in even a millimeter’s worth of difference, there would be no way to recover from as little as two hundred meters out. And since he was using his artificial eye to aim, that meant he had to be using his left hand to pull the trigger—his nondominant hand.
It looked like suicide to Yuga—from a common-sense standpoint, that was. But then, the war pyre in his mind burned brighter than ever. Rentaro was there, on the same stage as he was. It made his chest burn.
All right, then. What I have to do doesn’t change. One shot is all it takes.
His eyes revved up even faster, throwing off an intense heat. It was Yuga’s first experience with “overclocking” his own hardware. Time passed slowly as both of his eye sockets burned. The eyes completed their ballistics and landform calculations. He rested his finger on the trigger of his DSR rifle.
Not lagging behind a single moment, his opponent fired simultaneously.
There was a crack. The recoil kicked against his shoulder.
Then came the shrill sound of glass breaking. The figure in the scope fell to his knees and disappeared behind the hill.
Yuga didn’t remove his eye from the scope. But he could tell that Rentaro’s bullet had gone through the window next to his. He had gauged it wrong. He operated the handle and loaded the next round.
It was a hit. But he still twisted his body a moment before. It wasn’t lethal.
“Nhh…graaahh!”
Rentaro dropped his rifle. It kicked up some dust as he fell to his knees.
The sniper bullet had dug into the side of his stomach, delivering a second blow to the Vairo-orchestration wound. Blood seeped between the fingers of both hands as he tried to block the wound, now dripping into the grass. The greasy sweat running down his face disappeared into the dry earth.
Half-crazed from the pain, he pulled his jaw back and thrust his forehead against the ground. Then another time, then another. The skin on his forehead broke open, spitting blood.
His breathing was raw and animal-like in the gaps between his gritted teeth. Spittle flew out of his mouth.
Just stay down. Next time you bring your face up, it’s gonna be gone.
Shut up. I have to do this. For Hotaru. For Suibara. For everyone who’s had to die so far.
Rentaro’s sixth sense told him Yuga’s eyes were heating up. He could feel his own speed toward oblivion as well. It was like coevolution—two animals affected by each other as they evolved over time.
100x, 200x, 300x—it kept ratcheting up. He felt like his eye was catching on fire.
He raised his head and gently shook it. The world was bending around him, like a video dropping frames. Time seemed to go faster and faster.
The air grew viscous, the sun losing it
s shine and going ever further toward darkness. It felt like being dragged alive to the bottom of the sea; the sound around him grew low, heavy, and monotone, losing all meaning.
Rentaro crawled forward to keep from falling into range, scrambling to pick up his sniper rifle again. He operated the handle, ejected the cartridge, and loaded in the next one.
Still on his knees, he steadied the gun barrel on the hill and looked into the scope. He aimed.
The enemy was quicker this time, too. He had a hunch, and nothing but a hunch. But that was why he pulled the trigger and rolled.
A sniper shot ripped through Rentaro’s former location. The dirt it kicked up hit him in the face. He readied himself again, face covered in dirt and mud, and gritted his teeth while he peered into the scope.
This time, he could not fall back. He could not get scared. The speed of his thoughts now extended past 1500x. Still faster, faster. His body felt so much slower in comparison, desperately trying to respond to his thoughts. It frustrated him.
Now past 1900x. His eyeball felt like it would scream, or evaporate into thin air at any moment. Sparks ran across it as it wore itself out.
—Then Rentaro’s world went into whiteout. Sound, life; all the pressures upon him vanished.
For a moment, before he realized what had happened, he thought he’d been hit and died. But that wasn’t it. He was definitely conscious. The effects of the adrenaline made it so that he was temporarily numb, but the gunshot wound in his stomach was definitely still there.
He brought his left hand up to his face, opening and closing his fist a few times. He looked around. It was a bright, pure shade of white. The battle simulator in the Shiba Heavy Weapons basement was like this—an otherworldly shade of white.
But this wasn’t the VR room. Wait. This is—
“…The terminal horizon?”
“There’s a limiter circuit in your eye that ensures its processing speed doesn’t go above a certain level.”
Sumire’s cynical voice echoed in his memory.
“…you’d see too much. It probably feels like time’s slowing down for you as your eye calculates the enemy’s range and future position, but it can still go a lot further than that. We transplanted a version of your eye without a limiter into several patients, but none of them ever came back.
“…a second of real time slows down to what feels like two thousand to you. That’s the terminal horizon. All the patients who crossed that never came back. Their brains were completely fried.”
So this was the “horizon” all those patients saw, then? Or am I looking through the eyes of God at the moment?
Those trivialities didn’t matter. His enemy was seeking him.
A figure bathed in light appeared about ten meters in front of him. It gradually formed itself into Yuga. He was in sniper position at a hill in the middle of a conical valley, so he should have had his gun pointed downward—but there he was, staring right at him. They were over two hundred meters away from each other, but now he was so close, he could see the expression on his face.
Yuga was glaring at him, dour and concentrated. But Rentaro had the impression that his focus wasn’t quite on where he was kneeling.
But that didn’t matter. He planted the M24 against his shoulder. Yuga, a beat later, took his own stance.
He squeezed the trigger.
I won.
Just as he thought that, he heard the roar of a collision like never before. Sparks flew into his line of sight.
It was a scene no regular person could have ever comprehended. But Yuga, with his overclocked eyes feeding information to his overclocked brain, could.
“No…”
With a sonic boom, two faster-than-sound shots surged through the air. Their positions were millimeter-perfect. They collided in front of his face, sending the shot he knew was destined to kill Rentaro away from its target.
“Bullet to bullet…?”
This was nothing anyone could do on purpose. The entire philosophy Yuga brought to his sniper duties screamed it to him: No one could trigger this on purpose.
His eyes remained wide open in shock. But his hands kept going, moving like they were a different creature. Release the empty cartridge. Load in a new round. Take aim. Apply ballistics correction with his eyes, and fire.
Another sharp sound. His opponent didn’t fall, and neither did he. All that remained was the echoing sound of the gunshots.
Yuga’s entire body shook. It…it wasn’t a coincidence. He was pulling off the superhuman feat of stopping his bullets in midair with his own gunshots. How could that possibly ever work? I have two cybernetic eyes. The Professor told me himself—I am the most gifted user of these eyes the world has ever known.
“…That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit!!”
Compared to the enraged Yuga, Rentaro was in a state of transcendent bliss.
If both sides’ abilities granted them perfect accuracy with each shot, the common-sense rules of sniper combat—shoot, then run away—no longer applied. There was no longer any reason to use them.
The moment Rentaro pulled the trigger, his breathing didn’t even stop. He was firing without bothering to adjust for the difference in height and zeroing range between them. But he was hitting.
His eye, directly connected to his mind, took over full control of his muscular system, including the motor area of his brain. Rentaro’s entire body was transformed into a self-sufficient sniper system.
Yuga had aimed at him several times. His opponent hadn’t even pulled the trigger yet, but Rentaro could already see the bullet’s arc in the air.
Rentaro tilted his head slightly to dodge the projected trajectory, then fired. A rough, curt blast erupted from his muzzle, the bullet crashing through the rifling and into the air at supersonic speed. Yuga’s bullet whizzed near his ear, scraping him.
The sonic boom cut by Rentaro’s cheek. Blood flew.
He twisted the handle back to eject the cartridge. The empty shell flew through the air as he loaded another Lapua Magnum round.
Yuga, through Rentaro’s scope, held his mouth open, eyes like saucers. He could see his tongue fly up to the roof of his mouth to form the Nnn sound, then his lips rounding themselves into an O.
It’s over, Yuga Mitsugi.
He pulled the trigger. The firing pin struck the bottom of the cartridge through the sear and bolt. The sound of a gunshot. The kick of the rifle against his shoulder.
Yuga made no response to the death-dealing bolt coming his way. Right up to the bitter end, his face belied his attempt to deny everything in his mind.
4
Crushing pebbles under the soles of his shoes, Rentaro came in from behind the pile of chalk construction material. The facility was silent.
Opening the door, Rentaro cut across the C-shaped corridor and walked straight ahead. After a while, he stopped. “Yo.”
“Hey.”
Yuga lay flat against the floor, arms and leg stubs splayed across it. His DSR sniper rifle had slid across the room, abandoning its master for the last time.
“How did the battle turn out? Why…? Why did I…?”
He used his barely functioning head to look at the blasted-open mess that was his torso. “Ahh…,” he groaned, a mix of astonishment and resignation apparent in his breath.
Rentaro had trouble figuring out what to say. This was the man who killed Hotaru. He should have been cursing him. All the hate in the world wasn’t enough for him.
But at the same time, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was that man. Lying down there was a cybernetic-eye user, someone who had to undergo torturous limb upgrades at regular intervals. Someone shunned by his peers.
“If we didn’t have to meet like this, maybe we coulda been friends, huh?”
Yuga closed his eyes, in a comfortable state of repose. “That’s a pretty pointless what-if… But I wouldn’t have minded it.”
“Were you in that white space, too?”
“White space…
? No. What are you talking about?”
“…Never mind.”
“Both of my eyes,” Yuga continued, guessing at the portent of Rentaro’s question, “made it up to 1800x. I heard that my eyes could use all my emotions as fuel. They’d rev up and go down, depending. Anger, sadness, hatred, cursing, hope, happiness… But I guess my hatred and feelings of inferiority weren’t enough to outclass your emotions. What did you use to go faster than me?”
“I cared about other people.”
“Well…that’s out of my ballpark,” Yuga chuckled derisively to himself, whispering the words into the air. “No wonder I couldn’t beat you. That last shot… I couldn’t even see your hands between ejection and reloading. That’s how fast it was.”
“…So that’s how your eyes saw it.”
Rentaro decided to change the subject.
“Yuga, what’s the Five Wings Syndicate?”
“It’s an international, cross-political movement. We’re everywhere. There’s no guarantee the people you trust aren’t part of it, either…heh-heh.”
“…You mentioned how the wings around the pentagram on your arm indicated your rank. You had four of those wings, and they took two away from you. What’d you do?”
Yuga emptily chuckled again. “Nothing,” he wheezed. “Like I told you, I was Professor Grünewald’s favorite son up to that point. I got to work by his side. But there was a single confrontation—a single one—and I lost it. They took the wings away, and I was no longer the Professor’s favorite.”
“You lost it? You?”
“Yes. To another Tendo user.”
“Wha…?”
“Remember? ‘I can’t lose to the Tendo style…again’? I wanted to beat you because…well, okay, there was probably some personal emotion there.”
“…What kind of Tendo skill? Sword drawing? Aikido? Divinity? There’re a lot of different types.”
“The same as yours.”
“Martial Arts? You’re kidding me…”
Had anyone else taken on the successor role? He couldn’t think of anyone.
“It took just twelve seconds,” Yuga said with an ironic smile. “I don’t even know how he got close to me. I looked up, and there he was, in point-blank range. Within the first three seconds, he knocked my artificial right arm off and broke my leg. It was all him from that point forward. His martial arts were a lot like yours, too…or not. His were a lot more…sinister.”
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