CHAPTER 12
The Debate According to a Sniper and a Bomber
Fourth Friday of July
It happened three days ago.
When she’d told him, to his face, that snipers were old news.
“……”
Chimitsu Sunazara, who did sort of make a living as a hired sniper, could do nothing but keep his mouth shut. But as he cleaned the barrel of the last bit of soot, the woman kept on going.
“And doesn’t sniping have a lot of unnecessary bits? Aiming for someone’s head or chest, using five-millimeter bullets or seven millimeter or what have you—isn’t that just a waste of time? I think it is. A little unaccounted wind and your bullet goes astray, too. Target sneezes, bam, mission failed. They wear bulletproof gear, you might not land a killing shot. It’s all so unnecessary.”
“……”
The woman was tall—even taller than Sunazara, who had a well-built physique. And she was thin. One might say she had the body of a model, and she was certainly beautiful, with pretty features to match. But that wasn’t very compatible with this job—too much conspicuous beauty tended to be a liability when it came time to lie low.
Hiding didn’t only mean wearing camo in the jungle and holding your breath, after all. For sniping jobs in large cities, for example, it was critical to blend in with the crowds while en route to a vantage point. And after the job, it was just as important to slip back into the crowds and leave quietly. She—Stephanie Gorgeouspalace—was not meant for such things.
Sunazara figured she should quit being an assassin and climb up onto a stage where she was supposed to be.
“Hmm? Sunazara, you’re not sulking, are you?”
“…No, I am not,” he replied idly. “But as someone in the same line of work, let me ask you. Could you do this job without sniping?” He gestured with his jaw at the map laid out on the table as he reassembled the cleanly wiped gun barrel. Before them was the layout of stereotypical villains and the bodyguards predictably surrounding them.
“These idiots engaged in supernatural ability fraud with the Kakyoukei Group,” he said. “If I recall, they were raking in money from all over advertising that if someone would just pay them, they could get a supernatural Ability Development organization up and running that worked differently than Academy City. How would you plan to take this guy out?”
They weren’t the type of group you could handle by just charging in with a knife, and they weren’t stupid enough to let someone plant bombs on their vehicles. Sunazura thought the quickest way about it was to exploit the ten or so seconds it took them to go from exiting a building to climbing aboard their bulletproof cars to put a lead bullet right between the target’s eyes…
“You have it all wrong. I’m not saying everything about sniping is anachronistic, okay? All I’m saying is that using a sniper rifle the way you do is old-fashioned. I wasn’t trying to completely reject the utitity of sniping as a concept.”
“……”
“You are sulking, aren’t you?”
“I am not,” said Sunazara as he put the dust cover on the exposed frame. This time he reached for the aiming mechanism.
As she watched Sunazara go about it, Stephanie said, “Just because you’re going to snipe someone doesn’t necessarily mean you have to use lead bullets, does it? We have all sorts of weapons in this day and age—wouldn’t it be better to put them into your plans somehow?”
“What is it you’re trying to say?”
“To be frank, wouldn’t, like, a missile launcher or something be easier?”
“……”
“Whoa! Sunazara, you’re making a face like I just committed a cardinal sin!! But really, though—wouldn’t that be way simpler, though? When you’re sniping, you’ll fail if you miss a vital spot by even the tiniest of margins. But if you land a missile anywhere in the general area, they’ll just blow up, and boom, target dead, right?! And it doesn’t matter if they’re wearing armor, either! It’s gotta be way easier!!”
“…Hmph.”
“Did you just snort at me?! You can only reach out to about a thousand meters with a rifle if you really tried, right? Couldn’t you reliably hit targets five times that distance with a missile? Wouldn’t it mean you could handle way more kinds of missions?!”
“Fine, then. It’s your job. If you can do it with what you’ve procured yourself, all will be well.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice!!” said Stephanie, her breath wild as she took out a missile launcher that looked brand-new. It was the kind that fired from the shoulder, and she seemed to have chosen a surface-to-air launcher, rather than an anti-tank one… Even though she was attacking a ground target.
“Speaking of cardinal sins…”
“It’ll be fine! As long as it kills the target!!”
That was the entire conversation they’d had three days ago.
Currently, Stephanie Gorgeouspalace was sobbing to herself in front of Chimitsu Sunazara.
“…You failed.”
“No I didn’t!”
“…News programs are calling it a miraculous survival against all odds.”
“I’m telling you, I didn’t fail!!” Stephanie jumped at Sunazara in an attempt to snatch the TV remote away from him. “I’m sure I blew him off the face of the Earth with that missile! Even his bodyguards got blown up!! And I made double sure they couldn’t escape, either!! They must have hidden the corpses and the fact that the target died, and now they’re reporting a cover-up!! Isn’t that unfair? Now I’m not getting paid—isn’t that a breach of contract?!”
“…This is why I told you not to use a messy method like missiles.”
“You never said that! You never said anything like that to me even once!!”
Sunazara, dodging around Stephanie as she lunged at him, used the remote to change the channel. Every news station was basically reporting the same thing.
“Blowing them all up at once was your downfall. If you’d quickly presented them with a single corpse, they wouldn’t have had any way to deceive everyone.”
Sunazara sighed, tired.
“From your client’s point of view, it didn’t matter whether or not the target actually lived or died. Right now, the rest of society considers the guy to still be alive. That’s why all our clients demands assassins have the skill to kill cleanly and with certainty.”
“…Urp.”
“Why else would we go to the trouble of infiltrating heavily guarded police parades to put a bullet right between the target’s eyes in front of a huge audience? It’s better to trade some damage for not letting them make excuses. Seeing a target’s head blow up, especially, is the easiest to understand—that’s why it’s effective. The reason old-fashioned methods are still appreciated in modern times is because they’re just that reliable. Unlike this utter foolishness.”
Sunazara tossed the remote aside. He pushed away Stephanie, who was clinging close to him, and asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“…You failed in a spectacular manner. In this situation, it’s going to be extremely hard to rekill a target who is, from society’s viewpoint, still alive. In a way, you’ve created an even worse situation than when the guy was alive. That’s more than enough reason for your client to resent you now.”
“Geh.”
“Didn’t you think this through? You’re beyond foolish—you’re an idiot.”
As he watched Stephanie start to fidget and panic, Sunazara finally sighed. And then he grabbed the sniper rifle case from on the table.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Huh? Are we going on the lam?!”
“Your client was the Kakyoukei Group—national borders don’t matter to them. If you want to survive, you’ll just have to rekill the target.”
“?” Stephanie angled her head.
Sunazara poked his jaw toward the TV screen. “I’d initially thought this was something a journalist drafted as a cover, but it’s too believable, considering what we know about the target… I can only assume he’s alive after all.”
“Huh? But…”
“Did you witness the exact moment the target exploded? And if it had, it might have been a body double. In any case, he probably took advantage of all this chaos to convince others in the underworld that he’d died, and now he’s likely trying to prevent any follow-ups.”
“Umm… Does that mean…there’s still a chance?”
“Yes,” answered Sunazara. “Good thing, too. Your incredibly shoddy, inexperienced skills have given you an opportunity to make it out alive. Assassins who can’t provide evidence of their kills are even lower than housewives angrily swinging around ashtrays under assumptions of cheating. If it were me, I’d never die from explosives, no matter what the situation.”
“Woooow!! Sunazara, you’re being unusually scathing today!!”
Of course I am, he thought bitterly.
After all, he had to help clean up after the mess this idiot caused by blowing her shot. And this sniping job would be pro bono.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login