And Tina was an Initiator with the Owl Factor. She probably already had eyes that could see well at night, and her vision was probably much better than that of the average person. It was possible that Tina didn’t even use the optical scope essential for a sniper rifle when she operated hers.
The reason she was so tired when he saw her during the day was that she had a nocturnal animal factor in her body. There was no mistaking it. Everything made sense now, and all the mysteries were cleared up at once.
Rentaro finally understood. This was the ability of Tina Sprout, the superstrong Initiator specialized for sniping people at night.
“Research like this was being done almost ten years ago…?” he asked.
“I was also surprised when I heard about the sniper from you,” said Sumire. “Because I thought Shenfield was an obvious failure.”
Rentaro looked at Sumire, surprised. “What do you mean?”
Sumire frowned. “I mean what I said. This was a failure. The neurochip implanted in the brain gave off a large amount of heat and burned the inside of the subject’s brain. The man in the video also died in the end. Ain, you bastard, don’t tell me you completed Shenfield…”
“Doc, how many Bits can be manipulated at once?”
“Three. More than that and the brain is overloaded and the operator can’t handle it.”
Three… Rentaro crossed his arms and rested his chin on his hand, stroking his chin in thought.
Sumire sat down in a chair somewhere and narrowed her eyes dangerously. “Rentaro, what are you thinking about?”
“How to beat Tina,” said Rentaro.
“It’s impossible. Stop it.”
“Why?”
“Those with ranks under a hundred have sold their souls to the devil. It’s no exaggeration to call them monsters. It’s too early for you to overtake the hundreds.”
“Doc, that’s stupid! You didn’t say anything during the Kagetane Hiruko terrorist incident!”
“Of course not.” Sumire put her elbow on the armrest and put her chin in her hand, sighing. “During that incident, all the lives in Tokyo Area could have been lost. This time, it’s different. It might sound bad, but there would only be one life lost.”
“It’s not a matter of number!”
“It is a matter of number. It’s true that the Lady Seitenshi’s life is hard to replace with another, but even so, it’s not something that can be compared to all the lives of Tokyo Area.” Seeing Rentaro hesitate, Sumire tried to talk to him in a way he could understand.
“Rentaro, let’s do a simple calculation that even you can understand. Let’s assume that my New Humanity Creation Project and Ain’s NEXT have the same amount of hidden power. If we subtract the abilities of a mechanized soldier from you and that assassin, what do we have left? The unsurpassable wall between a human and an Initiator. Can a human beat a gorilla? Think about it carefully. Rentaro, just stay on the sidelines this time. There’s no need for you to take any more risks than you already have.”
Rentaro ground his teeth as he made a shaking fist. “Still, I…”
“Rentaro, science can make the impossible possible, but it’s not perfect. Science is the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that humans ate that became the original sin, and we humans are descended from Cain, who was the first to stain his hands with murder. I am a doctor as well as a scientist, and I am proud of that, but I think scientists are the most sinful humans.
“Even I had a period when I thought to fill the world with peace and happiness with a bright flame. However, when my lover was killed during the Gastrea War, I fell easily to the path of demons. I didn’t know that humans could hate something so deeply. And the result of that was that I killed many patients to create an enhanced soldier like you. Rentaro, do you know why Varanium is black?”
“No…”
“My loathing has stained it black.”
Rentaro shook his head. “That’s not scientific.”
“But I believe it even now. And I sent you all into the world with the intent to slaughter and massacre. However, you alone I raised in a completely different way. Outwardly, your tone is sulky, but you are straightforward. That was when I realized it—My soul had been saved by your growth. When I had cried out after losing everything I had in the world, I was still connected to the world through your existence. When I hold the banked fire of that shining passion from that time, it is very warm. If you die, I will return to the darkness. Rentaro, don’t take the light away from me.”
“Doc…”
“Rentaro, what is happiness, anyway? I’m sure even you know that it’s not to be rich. If wealth and authority were the conditions for happiness, a multimillionaire wouldn’t take a gun and shoot out his own medulla oblongata. Rentaro, I believe that you are someone who knows your own happiness. And a person’s worth is decided once their coffin is closed. It’s not like you can’t see Enju and Kisara crying if you die, right? I would be sad, too, and regretful. Rentaro, you have it good. There’s no reason for you to speed up your death.”
Rentaro shook his head. “You’re a coward, Doc. You’re too good at persuading other people.”
Sumire smiled suddenly. “Yeah, it’s something I’m secretly proud of. Then—”
“No, even so, I have to go.”
“Wha—?” Sumire stood up as she braced herself, and yelled in a voice filled with anger. “What are you, a child?!”
“Then is giving up what it means to be an adult? Let me tell you, Doc. You’re wrong!” Rentaro stretched his right arm straight out and made a fist. “I want to prove it. I want to prove that this arm I got from you is to save people!
“Doc, I once saw hell. Ten years ago, on that day, mankind was eaten by Gastrea, devoured, torn to pieces, and if you climbed a small hill and looked around, the sky was burning no matter where you looked. It was a scene I’ll never forget. I kept trying not to remember it, trying not to think about it. But I can’t do that.
“Even if I am at the heights of happiness with Kisara in my left arm and Enju in my right, I’m sure I would keep remembering that hell and agonize over it. In order for me to put an end to that nightmare of despair, all I can do is to protect the Lady Seitenshi, defeat Tina, raise my rank, and bring to light the mysteries of this world. I can’t run away…!”
Rentaro fell silent and turned around, walking forward.
“Where will you go?” Sumire asked.
“Forward. Doc, I’m going.”
“You’re going to be killed… There’s no doubt about it. You will be killed! Hey!”
Rentaro didn’t stop his feet anymore as he left the basement room behind him. Sumire’s cries of “You will be killed!” echoed through the basement, following Rentaro until he left the university.
It was night outside. The cold air on his skin cleared his head.
Rentaro pushed buttons on his cell phone and when the person on the other line picked up after a few rings, Rentaro said, “The enemy can hit a target a kilometer away a hundred percent of the time with a sniper rifle. I can’t win the way I am now. If you know of some way to deal with an enemy like this, tell me!”
The person on the other line was silent for a moment.
Rentaro held his breath, shutting his eyes tightly in prayer as he waited.
Finally—
“Well, it’s not like I don’t have anything.” On the other end of the line, the daughter of the CEO of Shiba Heavy Weapons, Miori Shiba, laughed bewitchingly.
4
“Motion Reality Prism Battle Simulator Version 10.0 activated. Data card reading completed. Welcome back, Rentaro Satomi.”
A synthetic female voice read his name smoothly, and the words HELLO, WORLD appeared in the space about a meter in front of him. Alice and the White Rabbit holding a watch from Alice in Wonderland started chasing each other around the words.
It was probably just the programmer having fun, but the issue was the level at which this was reproduced. Both the blond girl in the
apron and dress and the rabbit with his nose twitching looked like the real thing. Rentaro got close to them and leaned over, stretching his hand out slowly, but right before he could touch them, they disappeared.
Rentaro was surprised and stood up, lifting his face. He was in a white room. A really big one. It was empty inside, and it was swept so clean that there wasn’t a speck of dust, but the light shining from far above filled the white room with a diffuse light that made it so bright, he had to squint.
“How is it, Satomi dear?” asked Miori.
Rentaro said, “I can’t tell my right from left or front from back in this space, as usual. My brain is starting to hurt.”
As Rentaro gave noncommittal grunts to Miori’s voice over the headset, he looked around him. It was the fifth floor of the basement of the Shiba Heavy Weapons building. Rentaro was inside a space called the VR Special Training Room, a gigantic cube about a kilometer around.
The inside of the room was made completely of a special rubber that allowed one to use anything from real bullets to different types of explosives. It was one of the few advanced virtual combat training facilities in the world. It was often used by the self-defense force and special police, civsec officers, and even rich hobbyists, and apparently, it was booked up a year in advance, but Rentaro was able to use it as a special favor from Miori.
Living in a shabby eight-tatami-mat apartment, Rentaro sometimes forgot that this was the year 2031, but seeing such futuristic equipment, he remembered.
“Miori, sorry to jump right into it, but please start now,” he said.
“Oh my, Satomi dear, you’re so impatient.”
As he started to retort back, “Why do you always have to make everything sound so perverted?” the scenery around him twisted.
The next thing he knew, Rentaro was abandoned in a desert. Twisting his neck, he could see the sun shining furiously in the middle of the sky, and hot wind and sand hit his body, making him damp and sweaty.
Astonished, Rentaro went to the top of the sand dune in front of him and looked around. Under the clear blue sky was desert as far as he could see. Rentaro was bewildered. His body was definitely in that white room. This room was just a virtual reality. It was not as if he had been transported to an actual desert by a warp from a science fiction movie.
Even though he knew the sweaty temperatures and wind were created by an air-conditioning unit, he couldn’t tell what this hill he was standing on was.
He thought the ground was made of some kind of turgor pressure material that was making instantaneous indentations, but then when he saw the dilapidated pillbox shelter in the distance, he wasn’t sure what was going on again. It wasn’t possible to create such a complicated building out of turgor pressure material.
“Miori, I think this every time, but what principles are at work here?” Rentaro asked.
“It’s a bottom-down system for the 3DCG and a top-down system for the reality capture combined with some other stuff. In other words, it’s a business secret,” she replied teasingly.
When Rentaro scooped up the sand on the ground, the hot sand spilled from between his fingers. It was definitely real—at least, that’s how it felt to him.
“Satomi dear, what do you want to do with the pain level?”
“Set it to max. If not, it won’t be training. Also, give me another of the XD guns that I use.”
Just then, almost ten holodisplay panels popped up in front of him. They were clauses regarding life endangerment saying basically, “We take no responsibility if you die.” Rentaro pushed the AGREE button without really reading them, and the windows closed.
Rentaro put his left hand in the air. A moment later, he caught the XD gun that rained down from the sky.
“Now, let’s get started. I’m looking forward to seeing you get serious, Satomi dear.”
“About that, Miori. For the simulator, just release my left eye. I can’t refill the cartridges in my right arm and leg, so I want to save those for when I fight Tina.”
After mollifying Miori by promising to go all out for her sometime, Rentaro pulled his own XD gun from his waist and waited with both guns out.
A countdown like one from an old movie appeared in front of his eyes—10, 9, 8—flickering inside the black circle surrounding it. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and closed his eyes quietly as he heightened his concentration by paying attention to his breathing.
“Mission start!” the synthesized voice said, and with the sound of a fierce wind on the battlefield, he started hearing the rolling words of a foreign language that sounded Middle Eastern. There must have been terrorist-type enemies positioned in the battlefield.
Rentaro quietly opened his eyes wide.
Artificial eye, activate.
The nano-core processor made using graphene transistors activated and started operating. Geometric patterns emerged on the spinning iris of his eye. His field of vision expanded and the colors became brighter.
Slowly, he inhaled, then exhaled. “Let the battle begin. I will now eliminate the enemy.”
“No way… What is this……?”
Watching on a monitor in another room, Miori Shiba was so shocked, she couldn’t speak. The name of the stage Rentaro was in was Impossible.
Thirty enemies consisting of militiamen in turbans were positioned in this impenetrable stage. Immediately after it started, the militiamen attacked with assault rifle cross fire, so there hadn’t been a single person who had cleared this stage before. The other day, the top ten members of Japan’s Special Assault Team attempted this stage as a team, and they were all kicked out after being judged DEAD.
Miori thought it would be satisfactory if Rentaro took even one of the enemy with him and threw him in this stage half-maliciously. However—
Miori’s face was almost touching the monitor. Her gaze was glued to the young man in the monitor wearing a suitlike uniform.
Rentaro Satomi had the strength of a demon.
Immediately after the battle began, Rentaro ran down the slope of the sand dune with fierce momentum. Sand pillars rose from the gunfire around his feet like explosions. Not even bothering to hide in the shadows, Rentaro charged into the enemy camp.
As he ran, he fired warning shots from his two guns. Slipping through the gunshots of the militia hiding behind a wall of sandbags, he jumped and kneed one of them in the face, jumping into the middle of the sandbags. He shot and killed a militiaman he knocked out at close range. Stealing a grenade from the fallen militiaman, he pulled the pin out with his teeth and threw it into the pillbox shelter. The sound of the explosion and the enemy’s screams came at almost the same time.
Turning toward violent engine sounds, Rentaro promptly rolled out of the way and a truck passed by with a roar, trying to run him over right where he had been. Moreover, there was a heavy machine gun installed in the bed of the truck. With a deafening explosive sound, the heavy machine gun spit fire. A second before the heavy machine gun caught Rentaro and blew him to smithereens, Rentaro rolled onto the sand and fired two shots rapidly, laying low.
The first shot was at the shooter of the heavy machine gun on the truck bed, and the other went through the head of the truck driver, killing him. The truck lost control and spun on its side, exploding and spitting up a pillar of fire.
Even as this was happening, the numbers of the remaining enemy were going down ridiculously quickly.
“The 21-Form Varanium Artificial Eye. That is the true form of what is in Satomi’s left eye.” When Miori looked back, there was Kisara, brushing back her hair, her crisp footsteps sounding against the floor.
“Kisara… What is that?” asked Miori.
“Inside his left eye is a high-performance computer with a CPU that uses a graphene transistor wrapped in a Super-Varanium shell. Miori, would you believe me if I told you that people feel the passage of time differently?”
“Huh?”
“As a child, one day feels very long, but when you become old, a day g
oes by in an instant. Have you ever heard that? For example, assume that as a child, your brain can think about a hundred things in one minute, but when you become old, of course your brain function declines, and you can only think about ten things in one minute. If that’s the case, then what do you think happens?
“Don’t you think that a day for a child would feel ten times longer than a day for an elderly person? Time stretches and shrinks depending on the person. In addition to having various sensors, Satomi’s artificial eye is equipped with a multiplier function that overclocks the brain’s thought frequency thousands of times, so apparently time passes very slowly in the world Satomi sees. That’s why the enemy’s bullets don’t hit him.”
“B-but, that’s different from his body becoming faster, right?”
“Of course. But according to Satomi, it doesn’t work after the bullet has been fired, but figuring out a safe position based on the trajectory of the bullet before they pull the trigger isn’t that hard.”
“Is that even possible…?”
“It is. That is the true power of Rentaro Satomi, called the greatest masterpiece of the godlike doctor, Sumire Muroto, head of the New Humanity Creation Project.” However, instead of looking proud, Kisara, who was watching the monitor with her arms crossed, looked at Rentaro with sad eyes, murmuring.
“We’ve kept this from Enju, but when Satomi doesn’t unleash the power of his left eye, he can only see out of his right eye. His artificial left eye is set up to move the same way as his right eye, so no one can tell that he can’t see out of it.”
Miori was at a loss for words as she looked at the soldier on the monitor.
“But it’s not all bad. Satomi’s artificial limbs have pain sensory nerves made of carbon nanotubes, so they’re pretty much the same as a normal person—”
“Wait a minute, Kisara. There’s only one enemy left.”
This time, it was Kisara’s turn to tilt her head in question. “He’s almost cleared it then, right? What are you worried about?”
Miori tilted her head at Kisara and said each word slowly and distinctly. “The last person is a sniper.”
Against a Perfect Sniper Page 16