Against a Perfect Sniper (13 page)

There was a sharp smell of gun smoke as papers drifted through the air, and at her feet was a pile of empty cartridges the gun had spit out and a mountain of belt links. A heartbeat later, a Klimt reproduction fell, frame and all, to the ground with a small sound, and Tina could see powdered mortar floating in the air in the diagonal shaft of light shining in from the window.

She was sure that Kisara Tendo had left the world without knowing exactly what had happened. Tina could only pray that the other name for this gun, Painless, was the truth.

Thinking to check the corpse, Tina stepped into the room. Just then, as if waiting for that moment, Kisara rushed out from the side of the ebony table with her hand on the handle of her sword. The cold eyes peeking out from under the long, disheveled hair were like carnage.

Suddenly, Tina’s master’s voice replayed in her head.
Obsessed with revenge, Kisara Tendo madly honed her swordsmanship—

Tina got chills and reflexively bent backward, and there was a high-pitched screeching sound as something scraped right next to Tina at high speed. A lock of Tina’s blond hair that lagged behind was cut diagonally, along with the barrels of the Gatling gun, and there was a loud roar like artillery shells crashing into one another as the whole building shook. Behind her, the wall was split in half vertically. Tina looked at the unbelievable spectacle in shock.

Was she within range of Kisara’s sword attack? Tina thought it was impossible, but the glint of Kisara’s sword had just sliced the wall and a number of Tina’s hairs, and it cut the steel body of the gun like butter. Tina cursed her master who gave Kisara Tendo the too-low rating of a less than 1 percent chance of winning. She felt chills up her spine. It wasn’t a joke. Her abilities were unmistakably at the upper limit of what a human could achieve.

However.

Tina jumped left and right like she was doing a triangle jump and kicked twice, sticking to the ceiling, and then while her vision was upside down, ran past on the ceiling. She saw Kisara glare as her sword-drawing technique started to go out of control. Right after, the two sword-drawing attacks she unleashed as quickly as meteors landed far behind Tina.

They were too slow. Tina, who was looking down at the inside of the office upside down, ran until she was right above Kisara Tendo and kicked the ceiling, falling inverted down on her.

Kisara’s face paled, and she slid backward, but that was all within Tina’s predictions. Tina brought down the Gatling gun that weighed a little over twenty kilograms. She wasn’t aiming at Kisara but at the floor. The blunt and heavy steel weapon that was brought down with the fierce power of an Initiator destroyed the flooring. Not only that, but it also easily shattered the concrete block with a 24-Newton force, shattering the fragments and making them explode into Kisara.

To Kisara, it was like being shot with a shotgun. Even though she quickly raised her arm to block, she was showered with blows to her stomach and chest, and dropped her sword, thrashing against the wall.

Without hesitating, Tina calmly calculated the most efficient way to destroy the swordswoman in front of her and used the superacceleration of an Initiator to ram against her shoulder. With a roar, the wall collapsed, and Kisara was drained of strength against the wall. It was still.

This was it.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Tina swiped the sweat from her brow. Then her eyes became as cold as ice, and she decided to do what she had to do. She took the body of the Gatling gun that had turned into a soldering iron from all the shots it fired and pushed it against the limp Kisara’s stomach, forcing her awake.

Kisara let out a painful groan and brushed back her hair. Grinding her teeth, trying to bear the pain, she opened her eyes in slits and looked at Tina. “Who…are you?”

“There is no need for you to know.”

“Why is a child like you…?” Kisara started.

Tina’s thoughts were troubled by the anxious look in Kisara’s eyes. Even though Kisara had suffered serious damage, why was she concerned about Tina?

Tina was deeply irritated at the incomprehensible girl and made a hard fist, putting her face close to Kisara’s. “You will die soon. That has nothing to do with you. You are about to die. You will disappear from the world without becoming anything; you will not leave anything behind. I will now kill you in such a way that even those who love you will not be able to tell that the pieces are you. Do you understand? You are going to die now!”

Kisara shook her head slowly with a tired look on her face. “You are afraid to kill people, aren’t you?”

Tina’s eyes opened wide, and before she knew it, she was strangling Kisara’s thin neck. Her fingers sank delightfully into the girl’s smooth, white skin, and Tina could almost hear the grating of her bones.

Kisara shook her head slowly left and right without a sound, a sad expression on her face, but soon her expression turned into a grimace. Her body started to convulse, and her consciousness clouded. She squeezed her voice out forcibly through lips that had turned purple. “Help…me…Satomi… No……”

Tina was so surprised that the force in her hands let up for a second.
What? Who’s Satomi?

“Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 16—!” Suddenly, just as she heard a voice that could barely contain its anger come from the side, something rushed into her with the force of a bullet.
“Inzen Kokutenfu!”

On instinct, she let the top half of her body spring backward, and immediately after, there was the sound of a roundhouse kick grazing her cheek. She jumped aside with a backflip.

Backup?
Tina thought. She made sure to get enough distance between them and, with her hand still on the ground, lifted her face.

—And then, her world froze.

“No way…” Between the space between her cracked lips, a hoarse voice that didn’t sound like her own slipped out. “No way… No way, no way… No……… There’s no way…” Tina shook her head slowly and moved backward. The connections in her brain were shorting and getting ground down, and inside, her feelings were a stirred-up mess. Her legs shook, and feeling sobs about to leak from her throat, she hurriedly held them back.

Since he showed up at this time, she had no doubt that it meant that the enemy in front of her was the civsec officer employed at this agency who had interfered with her sniping. His compact and toned body was covered in a school uniform that looked like a black suit. Behind that brusque attitude was a stupidly honest person who was sincere and good at taking care of others. She had learned this from her short acquaintance with him.

She had liked him. She thought he was a good person. She had trusted him.

Tina ground her teeth in frustration as she held back her tears and screamed, “Why…! Why, Rentaro?!”

Rentaro was just as shocked.

The dark rage scorching his chest collided with the momentary charm and stopped Rentaro’s movements. “Why are you…?”

Tina looked down and shook her head, murmuring like she really did not want to say. “Because you will get in the way of my assassination.”

“I see, so you’re the……” Rentaro bit his lip hard and closed his eyes. And then he asked himself what he should do. He slowly opened his eyes.

Tina also looked like she was smiling and crying at the same time as she desperately put both hands on her chest. “But Rentaro, I……”

Rentaro used the Tendo step to close the gap between them and unleashed
Homura Kasen
, a straight punch with all his strength behind it. It scraped the shaken girl’s cheek. There was a short scream, and a sharp, cutting pain welled up in Rentaro’s chest.

However, Rentaro did not listen to Tina’s scream. He couldn’t listen to it. He thought he should take the Gatling gun she held and grabbed at it, but she resisted half-reflexively and pushed Rentaro away with the tremendous physical strength of an Initiator. The momentum pushed the trigger button, and the body of the Gatling gun pointed at the sky exploded. It took everything he had to suppress it.

In the midst of the sound of gunfire, Rentaro ground his teeth and screamed behind him. “Kisara! The floor… Cut it………!”

He could sense Kisara behind him suddenly leaping to action with the sword in her hand. “Tendo Martial Arts Sword Drawing Third Style, Number 8—” Her deep exhalation made the air in the room tense in a second.

With all the noise from the gunfire, he shouldn’t have been able to hear it, but Rentaro was sure he could hear the clear sound of steel sliding out of the scabbard. “
Unebiko Yuusei
—Go swiftly, Yukikage!”

The calamity that occurred immediately afterward could scarcely be called a physical phenomenon. It felt like Rentaro’s field of vision was cut into a number of pieces, and along with the cracking sound of an icicle being cleft in two, all around the room were cuts carved in every direction.

Suddenly, the world tilted in a way that made it impossible for him to continue standing. The floor had been cut off. Along with the nauseating floating feeling was a destructive collapsing sound. Bodies pulled by gravity, Tina and Rentaro were being dragged down as they grasped each other.

Seeing that Tina seemed confused about what had just happened,
Rentaro saw his chance and positioned himself above her, keeping her below him as the floor of the next floor down approached with tremendous speed, slapping her down on it.

“Guh…” The air was knocked out of Tina’s lungs, and Rentaro readied a fist in order to knock her unconscious.

But his enemy was not one to go down easily. Just as he saw her leg spring up, he felt a sharp pain in his lower jaw, and there was a ringing inside his head as his vision started to black out.

He stumbled for a few steps, but then shifted to step firmly. Not yet.

“Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 14—”

“Listen to me, Rentaro!”

“—Inzen Genmeika!”

He repeatedly aimed sharp kicks where he predicted she would move to avoid him. The kick that got a clean hit on the arm the girl put up to block blew the small girl away, and she broke past the window behind her and fell from the second floor.

Tears fell from Tina’s eyes, and they glittered, reflecting the glass of the window until they finally disappeared.

Rentaro drew the gun at his hip, not letting his guard down as he approached the side of the window. He looked down timidly but did not see any sign of her save the small dent on the hood of the car parked in front of the building.

She appeared to have run away.

“Satomi, did you win?”

Looking back, he saw Kisara in the midst of the thick dust, holding a handkerchief to her mouth as she climbed down to the second floor. Rentaro looked away from Kisara and looked once more past the broken window. A crowd had gathered nearby, and the police would probably show up soon.

“I didn’t win. She ran away from me…”

“I see…”

Kisara came to stand next to Rentaro and followed his gaze, then looked sideways at him anxiously.

“Did you know her?”

“Yeah…” Rentaro remembered Tina’s face when she was almost crushed by self-denial, and his chest tightened.

From the looks of it, she had not known who he was when she
approached him. However, if she was the assassin after the Seitenshi, and if she was trying to take the life of the president of the Tendo Civil Security Agency that was trying to stop the assassination, then there was no room for discussion.

Assassin and bodyguard. Two absolutely incompatible positions. Despite that, Tina had obviously been trying to talk to him. And the one who had pushed away her outstretched arm and forced their parting was none other than himself. Rentaro gripped his XD with both hands and shut his eyes hard, holding it and praying.

How long did he stay like that? He tried to force himself to switch gears by surveying the damage inside, and then he scratched his head. “What are we going to do about this, Kisara?” Looking up, he saw a large hole providing nice ventilation between the second and third floors that couldn’t possibly be fixed. On top of the concrete dust irritating his throat, there was also the smell of paint thinner coming from somewhere in the building, which was starting to make his head hurt.

When Enju came back and saw that the office had turned into Swiss cheese, she would surely be surprised.

Fortunately, the cabaret on the second floor still had some time before they opened, so no one was around, but the proprietress would be coming in soon to get ready to open. Rentaro had no confidence that he would be able to explain the situation well. He shot Kisara a critical gaze that said, “You didn’t have to destroy everything so thoroughly.”

Kisara blushed, put her hand on her hip, and looked up at him through her lashes. “What? You’re the one that said to cut it, Satomi!”

“That’s true, but—”

“D-die, you scoundrel!” Suddenly, yakuza with long daggers in each hand rushed in shouting, nearly blowing Rentaro away.

When he looked carefully, Rentaro saw that they were the yakuza from the loan shark upstairs, Kofu Finance.

Looking left and right and seeing no sign of the enemy, they became restless and looked very strange. They must have been very confused, because some of them were using the lid of a pan as a shield, and some were even wearing the pot itself on their heads. All of them had shaking knees. The reason for their late appearance could be deduced somewhat by that attitude.

A representative came over to where Rentaro was, scratching his head in confusion. It was Abe, who had a surprisingly comical face when he took off his sunglasses.

“R-Rentaro, bro, Tendo, sis, what’s goin’ on here? It’s not a raid?”

Kisara took a step forward and spread her arms levelly. “This has nothing to do with you guys. I believe the police will come soon, so you should put away whatever you don’t want them to see. Come on, hurry on home now!” She clapped her hands, and the members of Kofu Finance reluctantly headed out the door, looking at one another.

Yakuza being pushed around by a high school girl. It was a strange sight.

“Satomi…” Saying that, Kisara, whose back was to Rentaro, suddenly leaned toward him as if about to fall.