Black Bullet - Volume 5 - Chapter Pr

PROLOGUE THE QUICKENING NIGHTMARE

The beautiful soprano’s voice, one with a wide, emphatic range used to sing professionally, is a portrait of constant change—sometimes high, sometimes low—as it exploits the finely tuned acoustics of a wide, expansive theater.

Kenji Houbara, reclining in his dimly lit seat in the audience, held his breath as he stared transfixed upon the sight before him. The players, dressed in the traditional seventeenth-century Scotland garb, sang their speech in a recitative manner as they pranced up and down the stage. To the side, a digital lightboard occasionally came to life, providing subtitles for the lyrics being performed. The intensity onstage was contagious, infecting the audience until both parties felt connected by a taut, groaning rope of emotion.

Kenji was taking in the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, an 1835 work by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. It tells the tale of Lucia Ashton and Edgardo di Ravenswood, two star-crossed lovers caught in a bitter feud between their respective families. Despite their attempts to quell the feud, Lucia’s brother tricks her with a letter purportedly proving that Edgardo has another love, forcing her to agree to an arranged marriage to a rich nobleman instead. Edgardo, not knowing this, is so enraged at the news that he appears at Lucia’s wedding and gives her a very public rebuke.

This causes Lucia, already brought to the mental brink, to finally go mad and kill her bridegroom, ultimately dying herself soon after. Learning the truth at last, Edgardo swears to follow her to heaven as he stabs himself in the heart.

When it came to classical opera, Kenji was strictly a Mozart aficionado. However, Donizetti—and Lucia di Lammermoor in particular—was one of the few exceptions he was willing to make. He could no longer count how many times he’d watched it, and he could now recite the plot just as surely as Lucia and Edgardo themselves, but time and again, he always found himself at another performance.

Reflecting for a moment, Kenji couldn’t help but notice that most operas that stood the test of time seemed to be tragedies. Even true love’s firmest bedrock could be quickly eroded away by tiny cracks of jealousy and suspicion.

Although he knew it was improper, he looked at the audience members seated next to and behind him. He made a glum expression. The New National Theater, with a capacity of 1,800, had failed to fill even a third of its seats. But perhaps it was unavoidable, he thought. Ten years ago, the Gastrea War had robbed the world of so much promising talent forever—both in film and in live performance.

Then he felt someone sitting down next to him. A sweet scent filled his nostrils as the sight stunned him into silence. A middle schooler, perhaps? Her wide-brimmed straw hat kept her face hidden, and a thin, shimmering dress accentuated her chest area like a stage light cast through a scrim. What stood out the most, however, was the pink teddy bear she had in her hands.

There are a million other seats in this concert hall. Why did she pick one right next to me?

Just then, with a thunderous percussion, the orchestral accompaniment burst into his ears. Lifted up by its ominous clamor, the soprano playing Lucia began to sing the so-called “Mad Scene” aria. He had been so lost in the performance that only now did he notice they were already into the third act. Lucia, blood-spattered and raving after killing her would-be groom, had suddenly thrown herself back into her own wedding ceremony from stage right, a blank look on her face as she began singing a fearsome, maniacal song. The bloodstained knife was still in her hand…

Then, Kenji’s body reeled from a sudden shock, intense pain running across his body. He felt something foul well up from the pit of his stomach—and the moment he did, he began to spew blood profusely. Looking down, he found an unbelievable sight: a knife stuck into his own chest.

He had no idea what just happened.

Groggily turning his head around, he realized the hand around the knife’s handle belonged to the girl in the straw hat next to him. She must have hidden the weapon in her teddy bear, the knife she had so adeptly just slipped between Kenji’s ribs, piercing and ultimately destroying his heart.

“Wh…wh…?”

Why? Before he could ask, Kenji felt a hand over his mouth as the girl brought her face closer. “Ssssh,” she said, her index finger at her lips. She was like a slightly miffed arts patron, enjoining a nearby stranger to mind his manners while the performance was still underway.

His consciousness began to ebb away. Unable to even groan in response, Kenji slumped in his seat, then quietly expired.

The girl, her attention still focused on the opera unfolding before her, picked up Kenji’s arm, making sure there was no pulse before standing up.

The final scene had just begun. With the orchestra playing solemnly behind her, she left the auditorium. The moment she left the climate-controlled theater, the sun’s powerful rays began to beat angrily down upon her. In the distance, she could see hazy air drifting up from the cooking asphalt.

Then she set off, tapping a number into her cell phone.

“This is Hummingbird. Mission complete, Nest. Awaiting further orders.”

In Saya Takamura’s world, every day began by waking up her still-sleeping husband and son. She would always let the oak floors creak under her weight as she climbed the stairs, entering first her child’s, then her husband’s room, both adjacent to each other.

She was dealing with a couple of well-trained sleepers. A quick shake or two wasn’t going to be enough. There was a certain trick to it, and that was to rip the comforter off the futon and leave the doors open. Once she left them alone and began making breakfast, her husband and son would jump out of their respective coffins, lurching like zombies toward the fetching aroma. Neither resembled the other very much, but this shared habit was all the evidence needed to prove they were family.

This morning she was mixing cheese into omelets, pairing it with some curried lamb mince from last night, along with toast. She spotted the rest of her family creep toward the kitchen table, then in time sent her husband off with a box lunch of salmon onigiri rice balls, and helped her son climb onto the kindergarten bus.

Now the real battle began.

Tying her apron tight behind her back, she checked the weather forecast as she dumped a nearby pile of dirty laundry into the washing machine, pushed the START button, and put on a pair of rubber gloves. Today, her main goal was to remove the mold staining the grout between the bathroom tiles, a task she had a tendency to put off for as long as possible. If she had time afterward, the toilet area could use a touch-up as well.

Despite her worst fears, the tile work actually went fairly easily. The high temperatures must have caused the dirt and mold to float to the surface. Kneeling there, spraying the walls with bathroom cleaner and scrubbing away at the grout lines, she couldn’t help but notice how joyous the whole process was.

It was obvious that she cared for her husband and son. It was a given that she did chores like these. Ten years ago, a portrait of happiness she never could’ve hoped for was right here, before her eyes, between the tiles.

She stood up just in time for the washer to buzz its confirmation that the laundry was done. Both hands carrying damp clothes, she used a leg to open the sliding door leading to the rear balcony. The sky was an indescribably fetching shade of blue, liberally decorated with silent, puffy white clouds. The sun shone brilliantly upon her.

From this vantage point, Saya could only barely hear the front doorbell’s chime. She hurriedly tossed the laundry on the floor and dashed for the front door, wiping her hands dry on the apron.

“Hello!” she said as she opened the door. Then she froze.

A man was standing there. An intimidating one. He was easily over 190 centimeters tall, and despite the summer heat, he was wearing a long trench coat. A short, well-maintained beard was visible below his round sunglasses. It was immediately clear that he wasn’t visiting on any kind of legitimate business.

“Um…”

“You Saya Takamura?” the man intoned.

A miniature snowstorm of paper scraps flew toward her before falling to the ground. She lifted her arms up in self-defense before realizing she was “attacked” by several dozen photographs.

She was the subject of each picture. Hidden-camera photos, all of them.

“……!”

The moment she recognized what they were, Saya took a Glock pistol out from deep within an apron pocket. But the next instant, a gunshot sent her body reeling toward the wall behind her.

“Nhh…”

At some point, the man had readied a shotgun in his hands. A ribbon of hot, white smoke drifted out from the muzzle. The barrel and stock had been cut off, an aftermarket modification that made it compact and easier to hide.

Saya brought a hand to her stomach. The anti-personnel bullets had ripped through her lower torso, fatally wounding her. She let the handgun fall through her fingers and raised her face up high.

“Who…are you?”

She was answered by twin shotgun barrels placed between her eyes.

The man pulled the trigger and delivered a second salvo.

Not bothering to watch Saya’s body as it slumped to the floor, which left a vertical blood smear on the wall, he hid the shotgun back in his coat and briskly left the home.

Some neighbors, noticing the gunshots, were already out scoping the scene by the time he closed the front gate behind him. Making sure he was a safe distance away from the scene, the man took out his cell phone.

“Swordtail to Nest. Mission complete. Awaiting further orders.”

“So, like, getting back to the singles meet up I went to last night… Right when we were all about to head out and pair up, the guys were all like ‘You mind if we go Dutch on this tonight?’ I mean, hell-oooo? They were all, like, ten years older than us! Can you have any less of a clue?”

A cacophony of unflattering laughter ensued, vulgarly echoing its way across school grounds through the wide-open classroom windows.

The place stank of perfume. Anyone could tell that someone had applied far too much. Whoever came up with the expression “too much of a good thing” must have been imagining this exact sort of confab. I really don’t like where this is going, thought Yuga Mitsugi in a corner of his mind, but he shook it off as he approached his seat.

“Hey.”

“Uhhh, yeah?”

He was greeted by the unruliest one of all. She was a second-year student here at Nukagari High School, and while her collar was folded down, it was badly bent out of shape, and her hair, which she swore to her teachers was real, was dyed a light blond. She always put her earrings back on whenever they were on break, and once the warning bell went off, she always took them off and pretended nothing was amiss in front of the next teacher. She didn’t respect the rules—and in ways that did far more to annoy than actually cause any harm.

Yoshiko Kamuro, he thought her name was. If any girl in her school year crossed her, she and her clique would surround the offender, drag her into the bathroom, and conduct their so-called “punishments,” one after the other. That the characters in her name literally meant “good child” was simply comical.

“Uh, that’s kind of my seat.”

“So?” Yoshiko replied, her ample rear end parked on Yuga’s desk as she swung her legs in the air.

“Would you mind moving a sec? I can’t get my textbooks out.”

The request made the air in the classroom frigid. The boys and girls surrounding her swiveled their heads upward at him, eyes engorged with hostility. Yoshiko joined them, glaring silently at Yuga, then moved exactly half her rear off the desk. And no more. This was all she was willing to concede.

With some difficulty, Yuga proceeded to remove the textbooks he needed for the next class. He then left without another word, figuring a “thank you” for allowing him access to his own desk would be silly. When he made it to Shingo Kuromatsu’s desk, his friend gave him a clearly concerned look as he waved.

“Oof. Not cool, Mitsugi.”

“What’s not cool?”

“What do you mean, what…?”

Kuromatsu gaped at him for a moment before sighing, realizing there was no saving him now. “Mitsugi, it’s been three months since you transferred to this school, right? And we’re friends, right? So I hope you’ll take this the right way when I say, like, you gotta try harder to adapt to this place a little. I dunno what kind of social life you had over at Seishin High, but hell if I could imagine it.”

“……”

Okay, so what was I supposed to do over there? He was putting forth at least a modicum of effort to act like any other student around here, but something about Yuga’s behavior led the others to find him abnormal. And even if he revealed to his well-meaning friend that he had never set foot once in Seishin High School and that his presence there was strictly in name only—and even then those records were faked—it wasn’t like that’d help solve the problem at all.

Besides, his past three months as a transfer student was all for the sake of today’s mission. So maybe it didn’t matter anyway.

“Mitsugi, look. I really hope I don’t piss you off when you hear this, but sometimes you act like…you’re really far away from us, y’know? Like you’re a space alien from another planet and you’re here to observe what life on Earth is like.”

“Wow. That hurts.”

“Huh?”

He laughed at his suddenly concerned classmate. “I’m just joking.”

Then Yuga’s cell phone rang. Here we go. Yuga pushed his biology textbooks against Kuromatsu’s chest.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Kuromatsu, but can you take these to bio class for me?”

“Huh? Uh, sure, but…”

Before he had time to hear Kuromatsu’s full answer, Yuga turned around and left the classroom, running past the rooms that lined the hallway and into an inconspicuous teacher’s bathroom. There he pushed a hands-free headset into his ear and poked at his smartphone.

“Hey. This is Dark Stalker.”

“Bad news. I got word that your target boarded the bullet train before the one in the plan.”

Yuga’s brows twitched a bit. He looked at his watch. “How long ago?”

“Twenty-five minutes. You got just five minutes until the train passes by you. Get to your post immediately.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. Flying out of the bathroom stall, Yuga clambered up the stairway next to the teachers’ offices. At the landing, he made a quick twirl, one hand still on the safety rail. In an instant, he was behind the locked door leading to the rooftop. Taking out a previously made key, he stuck it into the hole and threw the metal door open.

Despite having “physically weak due to childhood illness” written in the special-comments section of his transfer certificate, Yuga had traversed the fifty or so meters from his classroom to here without so much as quickening his breath.

The warning bell rang just then. He could hear the students scurrying to and fro below him.

The door’s hinges creaked as he opened the door, revealing bright light and seemingly boundless sky before his eyes. Yuga made a beeline to a spot behind the rooftop water tank, pulling out the thin attaché case he had stashed between the tank and the safety fence on the roof’s edge. With another key, it was open, revealing a single rifle and the scent of gun oil—a DSR No. 1 sniper rifle, manufactured by AMP Technical Services.

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?”