Chapter 4 — Wait There, I’m On My Way
“N-No! Help!”
On the roof of a high-rise in the capital, a man dressed all in black was crying out, lying on his stomach. The image of him looking through the scope of a sniper rifle must have looked bizarre to most natives of that world. Rifles weren’t a thing that existed there originally, so there were few who specialized in their use. But having been given the weapon by the assassin’s guild, the man had been trained to use it effectively.
“Come on, hurry up. Doesn’t it hurt? Don’t you feel like you’re close to dying?” Beside the sniper was a girl in a red dress, wearing red gloves.
“N-No! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
“Yeah, that’s the point. You don’t want to kill your target, but if you want to escape this pain, that’s your only option. That’s what the experiment is this time. What if the person trying to kill him doesn’t want to?”
A device had been planted within the man’s body to inflict pain from a distance. The location and strength of the pain could be freely controlled, as the girl beside him was doing now.
“Y-You don’t have to test that out, do you?! You already know what’s going to happen!”
Up until now, they had picked snipers who didn’t know anything about Yogiri. But this time was different. This time, the sniper was someone of considerable rank within the guild, and he knew all about the situation.
“Yes, but we still need to test it. If we don’t check these things thoroughly, we’ll never find the solution we’re looking for. At any rate, the pain will probably kill you soon enough, so if you’re going to die anyway, why not get on with it and be free sooner?”
As she spoke, she slowly increased the level of pain that he was experiencing. Of course, she had no intention of really killing him, but there was only so much pain he could withstand.
“You’re going to be thrown away like this too! You know that, right? You know why he put all the planning on you, don’t you?!”
“Yes, I understand that. If I try to kill him, I’ll die. But how far does that causal relationship go? Will the person who requested his death die? In the case of a rifle, the one pulling the trigger will die, but if it was a voice-activated robot doing the job, would the robot “die” or the person who ordered it? What about a trap that doesn’t target him specifically, but just kills him by chance? Once we know these things, we might be able to come up with a safe strategy for dealing with him.”
“And...you’re actually okay with that?!”
“Orders are orders.”
Ryousuke Miyanaga, the head of the Dark Garden assassin’s guild, was playing no part in the plan to assassinate Yogiri Takatou. That gave him a bit of a safety buffer. The girl on the roof didn’t feel there was any need for it, since the only ones who were dying were those who attacked the target directly, but the girl had come up with the plan herself and used her own subordinates to carry it out.
The sniper screamed, clearly nearing his limit. Unable to bear the pain any longer, he put his finger on the trigger and then immediately went still.
The counterattack had come. It seemed this method wouldn’t work either. No matter what mental condition the attacker was in, they would die. But she wasn’t disappointed. She hadn’t had any expectations in the first place. This was just another round in a long line of experiments.
She looked down at the target. He was normally alone, but today he was walking around the city with a girl. It almost looked like they were having fun. They were about three hundred meters away. Recognizing someone from that far off with the naked eye was normally impossible, but it was no problem for her. After all, she was a machine created by Ryousuke’s abilities.
The girl began her calculations. There was no point in trying the same thing again. She would have to keep experimenting, attempting anything and everything to take the target down.
“Aim for the girl this time,” she ordered one of the snipers on another building.
In his room on the second floor of the Dark Garden’s flower shop, Ryousuke Miyanaga observed the array of screens surrounding him. He sat at a large desk, the numerous monitors positioned all around. The out-of-place electronics had all been built with his own Gift.
His power was Imitation, so he could produce a copy of anything that existed in his home world. The array of monitors provided a view of the entire capital from a variety of angles. They displayed feeds being broadcast from surveillance cameras around the city.
One of the screens was showing his target, Yogiri Takatou. Although he’d seemed to wander the city alone and without purpose lately, he had a companion today. She was a fairly attractive girl, so it might have been some sort of date. There was still a kind of awkward distance between the pair, enough to appear charming to an outside observer, but Ryousuke could only see their dumb ignorance of the danger they were in.
Ryousuke watched the experiments being carried out by his subordinates, as had been suggested by the client. They had tried taking the boy down with a rifle, but even from an incredible distance, the well-trained assassin had died instantly. Despite lying prone and only seeing his target through a scope, the man had fallen the moment he meant to shoot.
Perplexed by the situation, the reasons for the precautions recommended by the client had quickly become clear. Even at a great distance, Yogiri could tell that he was being targeted as well as strike back. That made him a dangerous individual; one who should be killed if at all possible.
Although he had become engrossed in the mission, Ryousuke strictly ordered his subordinates to investigate. He never told them to kill Yogiri. After providing the rough details, he left it all up to them. Since then, he had simply been monitoring their actions.
Once they found their target, they all died the second they moved to pull the trigger. They didn’t die just from aiming at him. If the sniper was given a defective rifle that didn’t actually work, even if they intended to kill him, pulling the trigger didn’t result in any harm coming to them. If they intentionally shot and missed, they didn’t die either. If the rifle was rigged so that when they tried to shoot something else, they would shoot the target instead, even if they had no intention of killing him, they still died.
Land mines that he stepped on didn’t explode. The person who set them up didn’t die, but the land mine itself stopped functioning. Attempting to attack him from various angles simultaneously ended with every single attacker dying.
If they tried to use magic, those who needed an incantation would die just before they finished chanting, and those who used a staff would die the instant they sought to activate it. Those who didn’t aim at the target specifically but tried to catch him in a large area of effect spell died too, whether or not they knew about the target. If they strapped an explosive to a random person and had them get close, the bomb wouldn’t go off.
They had tried dropping buildings on him, but he would simply flee from areas where the structures were compromised. If they timed the building’s collapse so that he couldn’t escape in time, he would effortlessly dodge the falling rubble anyway.
Poisons, likewise, had no effect on him. He noticed and avoided any poisoned food presented to him, and somehow rendered poisonous gases inert.
At first, Ryousuke had hypothesized that their target was reacting to killing intent, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The boy was simply aware of any possibility of his own death, and anyone or anything set up to bring it about would either die or stop working.
It seemed safe to say that his counterattack against long-ranged assaults was effectively automatic. They hadn’t tried close-range attacks yet, but the results would likely be the same. If the boy had a corpse to investigate, the chance of tracing the attacks back to the guild would increase, so Ryousuke had instructed his people to avoid that possibility as best they could.
While they were testing their target’s ability to sense danger, they were also investigating methods to protect against his Instant Death power, but they had made no effective gains on that front. Neither legendary-grade equipment from this world nor anything from Ryousuke’s home world had any effect. Whether they used magic to increase the attacker’s defense or Instant Death resistance, or prepared a substitute body to absorb the attack, the result was always the same. The attacker just died. They showed no visible wounds, and there was no obvious cause of death.
Truthfully, things weren’t going well at all, but Ryousuke remained optimistic. No matter how much of a monster his target may have been, there was no way for the boy to reach him. No matter how many people the target killed, he didn’t seem to have any idea where they were. While he seemed to be able to figure out the general direction the attacks were coming from, the distance between the attacker and himself gave the assassins plenty of time to clean up the scene before he arrived, leaving Ryousuke’s involvement untraceable. So, even in the worst-case scenario, he had the option of running away.
Of course, Ryousuke couldn’t say he was totally without worry. But that anxiety wasn’t something he could freely admit to himself. After all, he had started working as an assassin because everything else had been too boring. He would kill those who couldn’t be killed. If he was willing to give up on that source of excitement and look for something else, that would just be running away. Even if no one else saw it that way, that’s how he personally felt about it, and no matter the excuse, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So he hid his unease behind his curiosity, telling himself that this was exactly the kind of excitement he had been looking for.
“Now then, what are they up to?” Ryousuke flipped through the screens to follow the duo’s movements. One of the monitors was constantly showing the boy thanks to a small drone that had been set to follow him. In order to avoid notice, it had been placed at a high altitude, and followed all of his movements.
The two of them were heading towards the scene of a mysterious disaster. The number of burnt-out and destroyed buildings around them was growing. The pair eventually came to a stop in the center of the area, where there was nothing but rubble left. Cameras had been in place there as well before, but of course there was no way they were still functional, so Ryousuke had only the drone as a source for his video feed now.
“Aim for the girl this time.”
He heard a voice come from nowhere in particular, meaning it must have been broadcast over the wireless communication network.
“Right, we haven’t done that yet, have we?” Up until then, they had tried attacking others near him in order to catch him in the explosion, but they had never tried attacking someone nearby with no intention at all of harming him. Would he still be able to sense that killing intent? Would he be able to counter-attack? There was a possibility they would uncover some difference there.
One of the assassins fired his rifle. The target responded, hugging the girl close and protecting her from the bullet. Ryousuke checked the monitor displaying the sniper and saw that he was still alive. In short, the target had detected the attack coming for someone near him, but hadn’t struck back.
“I suppose we should follow this line of — wait, what?!” Ryousuke doubted his own eyes as he watched the screen showing the sniper who’d fired. A ninja had suddenly appeared there. Wearing bright red clothes, she snuck up behind and easily restrained the mercenary.
“No way!” Ryousuke jumped to his feet in a panic. The ninja couldn’t possibly be there by chance, meaning the sniper’s position had been revealed...but how?
He supposed there was always the possibility of tracing back the path of the bullet. In which case there was no need for him to be afraid. There was no connection between Ryousuke and his subordinates. They didn’t know anything about him — they didn’t know his name, his face, or even about the flower shop. At worst, they would catch the android girl currently executing the plan, but as a robot and one of his own creations, she would never give him up.
Ryousuke finally decided to pack it in. It was frustrating to have to back out now, but there was nothing else he could do. There was no point in continuing if there was even the slightest possibility of his own identity being revealed.
Calming himself down, he returned to his seat, where he soon realized something else was wrong. He was being watched.
The target was looking directly at him through the monitor. The only camera showing the target was the high-altitude drone, meaning the boy had discovered its presence in the sky above him.
“Wait there. I’m on my way.” After picking up the target’s voice, the screen abruptly went black.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login