Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive Page 2

  It was a bullpup-style bolt-action rifle, one whose action—the mechanism that locks and fires the ammunition—was located farther behind the trigger in order to keep the barrel length down while retaining accuracy. It was a low-noise, low-light rifle, using .338 Lapua Magnum cartridges and an attached silencer instead of the usual flash hider. Its beauty lay entirely in its mobility—a sniper rifle not beholden to a single location, like so many before it.

  Class must’ve just begun. From the music room directly below him, he could hear a low, heavy throb against his stomach as a majestic composition began to play. It was “Ode to Joy,” the final movement in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

  Yuga checked the time. Two minutes left. With expert concentration, he settled into a prone shooting position and turned his rifle toward the high-speed train line that deftly tore its way through the tangled mountains on the opposite side of his school.

  Opening the flip-up cover on his optical scope, Yuga unfolded the bipod stored in the far end of the barrel jacket. Then, muzzle still pointed at the rail line, he placed the monopod stored in the shoulder stock on the ground, keeping the gun stable at three different points. Taking a box magazine from the holder attached to the front, he pushed it into the bottom of the action and operated the bolt handle, loading the first bullet into the chamber.

  The scope he peered into presented him with assorted data, from wind speed to shooting angle. A Carl Zeiss company product, it was the newest 2031 model, boasting a calculator that provided real-time ballistic information at a glance.

  The range to his target was 1,200 meters. It was already zeroed in on the right point.

  “Thirty seconds left,” the voice on the phone said, unable to hide its alarm. “It’s coming!” Yuga’s face, meanwhile, was as calm and collected as the mirrorlike surface of a perfectly still lake. The background noise faded away; all he could hear was the loud beating of his heart. With several breaths to prepare himself, he placed a finger against the trigger and pulled it taut.

  —Then he unleashed his cybernetic eyes.

  A spinning geometric shape appeared over both of his irises as the CPU within his pupils came to life. They began to rotate, overclocking the miniature computer’s thought processes to increase their speed by the hundreds. In tandem with this, the world around Yuga seemed to fall into slow motion. Beethoven’s masterpiece became an indecipherable mishmash of bass noise, and the sunlight around him seemed to go two levels darker than before. The flow of all forces in nature slowed for him. Even the black kite bird in the corner of his eye seemed to stop in midair, its wings unmoving, as it lazily cruised the skies.

  On the right edge of his vision, the bullet train sluggishly churned its way onto the scene. Normally it’d be here and gone in a flash, but now he could see everything down to the teeth on every individual passenger.

  His dossier told him that the target would be seated windowside in a reserved seat in row twenty-five, as counted from the front. But if he boarded the train before the one he was scheduled for, that must have changed as well…

  —Found him. Still by the window, but now in row twelve. A bald man, lips gnarled as he chomped at an expensive-looking cigar, a look of clear irritation on his face. Just like in the pictures.

  Yuga’s eyes completed their calculations, providing a formula that guaranteed him a clean hit. Narrowing them, he let the predator in him seize his body as he squeezed the trigger.

  He could feel the spring inside bend, and before long, he had it completely pulled back. The firing pin in the attached bolt mechanism struck the detonator at the bottom of the cartridge, setting it off. A small explosion took place within the action, a dull, muted flash emanating from the far edge of the silencer. At the same time, the Lapua Magnum bullet made its way through the barrel, the internal rifling giving it rotational speed as it smashed through the air toward its target. A blunt firing recoil gradually pounded itself against his shoulder.

  In a world where everything was slowed to near-statuesque proportions, only the bullet proceeded along at high speed. Yuga had given himself enough lead. He watched as the blast penetrated through the train window, broke the glass, and made a clean traverse through his target’s temporal lobe. The target listlessly began to fall to his side and downward.

  Realizing there was no point admiring his efforts any further, Yuga lowered his CPU’s operational speed and returned his sense of time to its normal state. The instant he did, the explosive bombast of “Ode to Joy” thudded against his ears as the remaining recoil force pounded painfully against his shoulder. Before long, the sun grew just as bright as it was before.

  Standing up as he watched the bullet train motor along at top speed, he tilted his head toward the blue sky.

  “You get him?”

  “It hit home, yeah.”

  He even managed to camouflage the muffled gunshot in the overlapping sounds of “Ode to Joy” and the passing train.

  Yuga sighed. “…So, Dark Stalker to Nest. Mission complete. Awaiting further—”

  “—What…what was that just now…?”

  Yuga whirled around, only to find a student—a girl—standing dumbfounded, clearly unable to believe her eyes. It was Yoshiko Kamuro. The wide-open metal door behind her instantly told Yuga why she was here. Maybe he was near the time limit and didn’t have any wiggle room to work with, but he cursed himself for not even bothering to lock it back up.

  Yoshiko, engaged in her usual boycotting-class habit whenever possible, must have noticed the half-open door and thought it was her golden opportunity for an hour or so of freedom. Not even realizing it’d cost her her life.

  “You saw it, huh?” a detached Yuga said as he took a deliberate step toward her. Yoshiko took a step back.

  “Wh-what the hell is up with that huge gun or whatever? Like, that’s just…totally nuts!”

  If she could’ve kept her legs from shaking, the half smirk she employed to accentuate her act just might have seemed convincing.

  Yuga kept approaching Yoshiko silently. She continued to step back. Before long, she was against the metal fence that edged the roof.

  “Are you, like, a hit man?”

  “Nope. I’m an avenger.” Yuga shrugged and looked up into the air. “Sorry, but if I let you live, that’s gonna leave a black mark on the whole operation. I really feel bad, saying this to you after just three months—but die.”

  There was no excitement or passion—nor any advance warning—behind the heel of Yuga’s palm as it hit home against her chest. The moment it did, there was a sharp crack as her torso cavity caved in upon itself.

  It was a perfectly timed move, one that took every field of human anatomy into consideration as it so expertly destroyed the body before him. It was at a zero-degree-impact angle, working its way through her pectoral muscles as it shattered her ribs, ensuring the ruined fragments embedded themselves deep into her heart. Instant death.

  What could have run through her mind during that one final circulatory cycle, the last time her doomed heart gave its mighty heave? He doubted her brain had enough time to comprehend her unsteady feet entangling themselves beneath her, or the meaning of the fresh blood bubbling into her mouth.

  Catching her as she fell, Yuga spoke into his headset.

  “Nest. Sorry, but I got an unexpected corpse here. I’m gonna sneak it into my locker on the stair landing, so make sure you have someone pick it up before the janitor finds it after school, please.”

  “Dehhh! This always happens with you—”

  Yuga cut off the link before he had to listen to the rest. He laid down the girl’s body, already embarking on its transformation into a cold lump of meat. Then, from the Nukagari High School roof, he took in the vista that unfolded below him. As the summer wind beat drearily against his cheek, he peered into his palms.

  “I have all this strength. So why am I such a failure all the time…Professor?”

  BLACK BULLET 5

  CHAPTER 01

&nb
sp; RENTARO SATOMI, FUGITIVE

  1

  The monster loomed large in his optically magnified vision. The single Gastrea, clambering an almost sheer vertical wall, looked like a crustacean-type at first glance—one with octopus-style tentacles growing out of it.

  Its form, replete with a seemingly endless supply of sucker-laden feet, was clearly a walking mollusk. Its base core, however, was covered in a thick, almost helmetlike shell. Its head was directly attached to its chest area, making it impossible to tell exactly where its eyes or brain were, and as you went down the gentle plane of its back, you eventually came upon a long, sharp, spiked tail.

  Just then, the Gastrea used its tentacles and arms to take another step forward, straight up the building, its entire body tensing itself at the effort. The sun, now halfway up the sky, kept it brightly lit as large droplets of sweat spilled from its eyebrows and down its cheeks. Its piercing, insectlike cry was extremely annoying to all who could hear it, and its skin was tanned so deeply that it seemed ready to catch fire under the sun’s rays at any moment.

  Even in this tense environment, though, Rentaro Satomi found a very different stress placed upon him. The Gastrea was climbing straight up Tokyo Tower’s proud, bright-red iron frame.

  “Big Brother, the wind’s blowing at ten to thirteen kilometers per hour from six o’clock.”

  Rentaro pulled his face up from the scope on his sniper rifle to stare quizzically at the blonde girl next to him, lying prone on her stomach. This was Tina Sprout, and just like Rentaro, she had a sniper rifle loaded and ready, ignoring said “Big Brother” as she kept a watchful eye down her scope. The Bits that formed part of her aiming system flitted at regular intervals between her and the target Gastrea. Those were the infantry of sorts for her Shenfield, a thought-driven interface that, like so many buoys strewn across the sea, transmitted wind speeds and other pertinent sniper information directly into her brain.

  She and Rentaro had set up shop atop a building not far from the Tower. Although he had a wet towel wrapped around his head, the punishing sunlight crashing down from above made him feel like he was taking a nap on a frying pan. Wiping the never-ending torrent of sweat from his brow, he tried to fight off the heat, strong enough to make his vision twist and warp.

  But despite the clear afternoon weather, Tokyo Tower and the area around it was bereft of its usual activity. There were no resting children, nor any elderly dozing off into an afternoon nap. That was only to be expected, given how police had cordoned off the entire area, and every street around the Tower was crawling with patrol cars. A virtual army of officers sat resolutely at their positions, shotguns pointed upward.

  Yet they didn’t seem poised to take action. Ever since Gastrea-related crimes sent the police’s line-of-duty death rates through the roof, responsibility for Gastrea incidents fell somewhere in between the police and self-defense force, right into the hands of the civil security agencies.

  For a change, Rentaro and Tina were the first civsec group on the scene, earning the right to take out the Gastrea latched on to Tokyo Tower from their sniper nest’s vantage point. He peered back into his scope. One hundred meters between him and the target. No sweat for any regular sniper, and the low wind speed worked to their advantage as well. He could get away with ignoring the wind effect on his shot if that kept up.

  But despite all his efforts, Rentaro’s vision kept blurring and falling apart through his scope, robbing him of any decent trigger chance. The sense of impotent irritation that resulted did nothing to calm his thoughts.

  “Big Brother!”

  The voice came tumbling in from behind him, pushing him to act. Throwing caution to the wind, he squeezed the trigger.

  He felt a sharp kick at his shoulder. The Varanium bullet flew up and to the right, missing the Gastrea and pinging against the metal of Tokyo Tower.

  There was no time to gnash his teeth in regret. The Gastrea, now on high alert, opened up its head/torso and deployed wings it had kept under wraps before.

  —Oh, great. It’s gonna fly off on us.

  Quickly, Rentaro pulled the handle to load the next shot. Rapidly, he fired again and just barely missed, the bullet aimlessly flying through the Gastrea’s former location.

  Just as the monster was about to penetrate the police perimeter and make Rentaro question why he woke up this morning, there was a loud crack as a bullet cut through the Stage Two beast’s core. It fell into a tailspin in midair, crashing helplessly to the ground.

  Cheers erupted from the police officers nearby. It wasn’t dead yet, but thanks to the Varanium bullet blocking its regenerative abilities, it was no longer in any shape to fight.

  Rentaro looked to his side, noticing a wisp of smoke from Tina’s Dragunov sniper rifle. She kept her eyes closed for a beat or two, perhaps so she could take in the remaining vibration from her gun, but a moment later, she looked up from her infrared-detector scope and wiped away the sweat with her arm.

  “It’s all right, Big Brother,” she said. “That’s how it is for everyone at first.”

  Rentaro hung his head in defeated shame. The nicer Tina acted around him, the more it seemed impossible to be around her a second longer. But he’d sound like a spoiled brat if he ever let that get out.

  As both a gunman and a Tendo Martial Arts practitioner, Rentaro was just as much a close-range specialist as his Initiator partner, Enju Aihara. He felt it was his duty to provide some mid- to long-range cover when Enju’s skills weren’t a good match for the fight. As far as mid-range went…well, his pistol skills were good enough. But what about beyond that?

  That was what drove him to ask Tina for a little instruction. Which was fine and all, but—and it really did hurt him, deep down—he wasn’t progressing nearly as quickly as he had hoped.

  Rentaro shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I have the worst time trying to focus on just one single thing like that.”

  And look at what just happened, besides. One more mistake, and that Gastrea would have gotten away. Who knows what kind of disaster that could’ve caused?

  “Big Brother,” Tina replied, “why did you want to master sniping in the first place?”

  The force of her pure, emerald-green eyes overwhelmed him. “Because I thought I needed to,” he said, averting his gaze. “I mean—I don’t know. I just feel like I gotta make myself stronger.”

  “That’s exactly it.” Tina lifted a finger into the air. “You want to get stronger, Big Brother, but you can’t clearly articulate why. And that’s what’s showing up in your marksmanship. It’s making you hesitate.”

  “So you’re saying it’s all in my head?”

  Tina nodded. “You’ve noticed it, too, haven’t you? What being a sniper is all about?”

  Rentaro groaned. That hit a little too close to home.

  She was right, of course. As he had learned the hard way through training, shooting a pistol required a completely different skill set than firing a sniper rifle. There were the distances involved, of course, but more than that, a sniper had to reap his target’s life before he even realized he was being targeted. To Rentaro, it felt a little too much like premeditated murder to wrap his head around.

  If they were debating a gun battle between two hostile, engaged foes, he could at least explain that as a case of justifiable self-defense. But snipers didn’t work that way. Rentaro still didn’t know how to approach the connection between his pull of the trigger and the death that ultimately resulted.

  This was somewhat doable with a Gastrea, at least. But Rentaro couldn’t keep himself from thinking about it: Could I will myself through the sniper process if this was a human opponent?

  “Can…can you deal with that?”

  The platinum-blonde girl nodded brightly, eyes still on him.

  “Sniping is the entire reason I exist. If I couldn’t master this skill and manipulate this Shenfield the way I can, Professor Rand would’ve branded me a failure and I’d be disposed of like yesterday’s
garbage.”

  “Disposed of?”

  “Yeah… Well, I heard all kinds of rumors, but I still don’t know exactly what happened to the children who couldn’t adapt to their machine bodies. If anything saved me, I think it’s the way I shut off my imagination. That kept me from thinking too much about the future. That’s how I mastered all the skills granted to me in pretty quick time. You can’t kill another person unless your own soul dies, too.”

  “But that’s not the way a person lives, Tina.”

  Tina fell into a shamed silence.

  “Are you saying I need to kill off my own emotions if I want the strength to pull the trigger?”

  “No, Big Brother. I’m saying you need to find a reason for yourself. One that’ll make it seem worth taking another person’s life. And that’s something I really can’t help you find. Or, really, unless you do find it, all the practice in the world isn’t gonna make you any better, Big Brother, so you should probably give it up sooner than later.”

  When it came to this subject, at least, Tina wasn’t one to mince words. For a few moments, she and Rentaro were silent, merely staring into each other’s eyes. The lukewarm wind blew across the roof, gently tossing their hair around. Rentaro was the first one to speak again.

  “You’re a real slave-driving teacher, Tina.”

  Tina smiled through the sweat covering her face. “You’ve been teaching me this whole time, Big Brother. I’m just glad I have something to teach you back.” Then she hefted up the Dragunov rifle and pointed downward. “The Gastrea’s still alive. Let’s finish it off before it hurts any citizens.”

  “Yeahhh!” a joyful voice bellowed out from below. “You did it, you bastards!!”

  Startled, Rentaro and Tina tracked the voice to its source. At Tokyo Tower’s base, they noticed a familiar civsec pair, both bedecked in some pretty authentic hardcore-punk fashion. It was Tamaki and Yuzuki Katagiri, two old comrades they had fought alongside during the Third Kanto Battle; they had already set upon the Gastrea Tina had shot down. It was clear their foe didn’t have long to live.