Black Bullet - Volume 5 - Chapter 1.01

BLACK BULLET 5

CHAPTER 01

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.

Which meant—

Rentaro and Tina looked at each other and shouted in unison:

“They’re stealing our bounty!!”