It was another tedious mission. It was forty past two at night. Fuki Harukawa and Sakura Otome, a Second Lycoris who had only recently become Fuki’s partner, were hiding in a dark corner of a park in a rural area outside Tokyo. The park was quite large, but the playground equipment and other facilities were poorly maintained. For a long time, the girls had nothing to do except swat away mosquitoes, which would occasionally fly to them.
“Dunno why that is, but since I got paired with you, I feel like they stopped picking me out for missions so often,” Sakura complained.
“Seems like it.”
Sakura hung her head.
The navy-blue color of Second Lycoris uniforms was modeled after classic Japanese school uniforms. It faded into the darkness, offering good camouflage at night while also working as a disguise for the Lycoris in urban settings. Except that in Sakura’s case, her short hair with an undercut compromised the “ordinary schoolgirl” disguise.
Besides the un-schoolgirl-like hairstyle, Sakura was quite muscular. She had a very sturdy build for a fifteen-year-old and had to take extra care not to appear intimidating. She stood out even more next to Fuki, who was very petite.
Sakura wore uniforms one size larger than her usual clothing size, presumably in order to conceal her muscles…but Fuki wasn’t sure that actually helped at all. Maybe Sakura had been given bigger uniforms in anticipation of her growing into them soon.
“I had it in my head that here, at HQ, in a big city like Tokyo, you guys were dealing with shoot-outs on a daily basis…”
“There is more work here compared to Hokkaido,” Fuki assured Sakura. “But we also have more Lycoris. And since you got paired up with me, you shouldn’t expect to be in action often.”
“You don’t mean more often?! I thought getting buddied up with a First meant we’d be, like, dancing with bullets, fighting real nasty son-of-a-gun types!”
Fuki and Sakura had been partners only for a short time, but Fuki was already aware that Sakura’s abilities exceeded what she’d read about her in the files. Sakura loved action more than low-key jobs. She carried out her tasks efficiently, of course, but she clearly wanted more. And no wonder—her skills were being underutilized.
Sakura had large hands with long fingers, which already put her at an advantage compared to very young Lycoris struggling to hold a gun properly. And Sakura was a good shot, too. Not as good as Fuki’s previous partner, but still remarkable.
Fuki wasn’t sure if it was thanks to being raised in the great Hokkaido outdoors or what, but Sakura was naturally robust, with a dog-like love for being active. As a Lycoris, she was more suited to fighting than assassination.
Which is probably why they assigned Sakura to me, Fuki thought. In missions that did require the skill set of a First Lycoris, a partner who looked harmless but also lacked strength would only get in the way. Partners of Firsts had to be able to fight, even if they were only Seconds.
“We get called only when the shit hits the fan. If there’s no work for us, that means everything’s going well, so be glad for that.”
“Yeah, but I was supposed to contribute something, too!”
“You’re the shooter in normal missions?”
“A trained monkey can do that! I want to do stuff nobody else can…”
“The key to an organization’s success is members who can be relied on to consistently carry out routine tasks without question.”
“So you’re saying it’s the average people pulling all the weight…?”
“You’d be surprised at how rare such members actually are.”
Fuki folded her arms and sighed, gazing at the sky. Her previous partner also wasn’t one of those do-as-you’re-told members. She either refused to or was unable to follow instructions, and she’d do things she hadn’t been asked to… That ultimately made her a liability to the DA. Or rather, she was a liability to everyone around her.
Sakura at least followed her orders even when she wasn’t happy with them, which was something Fuki appreciated even more than Sakura’s competency. What annoyed her the most was people who did what they wanted without any regard for others.
Work was work. Tasks to be completed matter-of-factly. Emotions and personal beliefs shouldn’t come into play. That was how Fuki saw it anyway.
“Meh… Doesn’t sound like there’ll be anything for us tonight…”
On their headsets, they heard the Thirds report to HQ, and HQ responded with more instructions. The mission was progressing as planned, with no surprises.
The target that night was a man in possession of a single-shot homebrew firearm he fashioned out of shotgun parts, so it’d work with shotgun shotshells. Based on that one sentence, it might be inferred that he was a very dangerous type of person, but he actually used the gun only to hunt in the mountains.
The man had been a hunter for more than a decade. His friends tried to persuade him to just use a half-rifled shotgun with sabots or just a plain old rifle, but he was an oddball who wanted to use shotgun slugs to hunt bears solo.
While making a gun at home was already breaking the law, the man didn’t fit the profile of someone likely to cause trouble, so the DA just kept him under observation. If the hunter suddenly got some crazy idea and tried to shoot a person rather than a bear, or rather, if his actions indicated that he might be so inclined, Lycoris agents would be deployed to deal with him.
And in fact, out of the blue, something made the man leave his house in Saitama and travel to a rural area outside of Tokyo, bringing his homemade gun with him. Hunting was, of course, not permitted in that area.
The DA promptly took Fuki and Sakura off the mission they were on and dispatched them as well as two Third Lycoris, whose names Fuki didn’t know, to deal with this emergency.
The target had stopped his car in a parking lot five hundred meters from where Fuki and Sakura were on standby and turned his engine off. The parking lot wasn’t supervised. It was outside a public facility, disused for many years. Weeds were growing through cracks in the asphalt, and the entrance had been blocked with “no entry” tape and long-neglected road cones. Judging from the dilapidated look of both the parking lot and the park, they had probably been under the same management.
With woods around and fields empty but for rows of polytunnels, this was the perfect place for someone who was up to no good. Perhaps the man wanted to try out his DIY gun, but it would be a rather strange choice on his part to bring a gun for hunting big game in the mountains to an abandoned place outside a big city, considering the risks involved. Fuki’s higher-ups reckoned that the man was planning to kill someone, destroy something, or sell the gun, which necessitated that the Lycoris get involved. Fuki and Sakura were ordered to take positions in the park adjacent to the parking lot, where they had a good view of it, while the Thirds dealt with the hunter.
Ambushing a target sitting in his parked car was a job Third Lycoris could handle on their own, but if the hunter was going to sell the gun, whoever arrived to buy it off him would have to be taken care of, too. Potential additional targets, wary and arriving in their own cars, would have been too much for Third Lycoris to tackle.
New orders came in. It wasn’t the comms officer this time, but Commander Kusunoki herself.
“Get in position. Don’t let the target open fire. Eliminate him while he’s still in the car. Leave the body inside the car and tow it away.”
The Thirds quickly acknowledged the orders.
“Commander, do you have any orders for us?” asked Fuki.
But it was the comms officer who responded to her.
“We haven’t detected any other cars heading your way.”
In that case, there was no point in continuing to watch the parking lot entrance.
“Understood. We will move to a better position to support the Thirds.”
“Affirmative,” said Kusunoki this time.
Disliking inefficiency, Kusunoki always issued orders directly instead of having the comms officer relay them like a game of telephone.
Fuki signaled to Sakura with her eyes, and they started walking. There was probably nobody around who would’ve seen them, but they kept to the shadows nonetheless, heading to the rusty signboard by the entrance to the parking lot, behind which they hid. There were no streetlamps around, but the light of the moon was enough for them to scan the area when they peered from behind the signboard. Fuki could just about make out the front of the hunter’s car in the dim light. The distance between them and the car was less than a hundred meters.
The target’s car was a well-used kei-class Suzuki Jimny, a very common model. Based on the tires and suspension, it hadn’t been modified to be bulletproof, which would’ve greatly increased the vehicle’s weight.
The Jimny was parked facing the parking lot entrance, with a dilapidated building behind it, as if the hunter had looped around the lot before parking the car, which begged the question: Why? Fuki tried to think of a reason why he’d do that. To make it quicker to exit? But his car was the only one in this spacious parking lot. Also, the hunter would need to turn the steering wheel first to drive out of the lot, so it didn’t really save him any effort to turn the car toward the exit when parking.
“Huh,” said Sakura.
Fuki looked at her partner, who was staring at the car with one hand over her eyes, as if she were shielding them from the glare of the sun—pointless given that it was the dead of the night.
“We’d better be careful, Fuki. He’s in the driver’s seat, holding a gun… I can see the stock, so it’s either a rifle or a shotgun.”
Fuki couldn’t see those details, but she trusted Sakura, who had excellent eyesight, maybe because she grew up in the countryside.