Fuki sprang into motion. She didn’t dodge to the side or backward. What she did instead was to charge right ahead, toward the rider and his gun, pointed at her. She crouched low to the floor and lunged at him headfirst. It looked like she was going to crash onto the floor, but just before she did, she pushed herself off with her left hand and kicked with her feet to accelerate in that position as she charged at the enemy. She closed the distance of about seven meters in the blink of an eye.
The man hadn’t fired again at her yet.
Fuki twisted around, hitting the floor with her right shoulder first. She slid on her back in between the enemy’s legs, and as she passed under him, she fired twice. The second bullet missed, but the first pierced his right thigh.
“Aaagh!” he groaned. He collapsed onto the floor, blood gushing from the wound.
Fuki had slid past him, letting the momentum of the movement carry her for a while before she rolled back to standing. She ran back toward the rider, who had his back to her.
Still sitting on the floor, the rider, with a Beretta in his left hand, twisted around to fire several rounds behind him, where he expected Fuki to be, but she saw him turning and moved slightly to his left to stay in his blind spot. She got right up next to him and fired two shots at his back.
The man groaned and started to fall forward, but since he was sitting with his legs in front of him, he sprang back like a wind-up toy, ending up on his back instead.
Fuki thought she could see the man staring right at her from behind the helmet’s visor, but that only lasted a moment as she stomped down on the visor with her standard metal-reinforced Lycoris loafer, crushing the man’s face. At this point, the enemy was defenseless. She fired several rounds into his chest.
The body armor he was wearing was just regular motorcycle gear. The bullets penetrated it easily, and blood sputtered out of the holes as the man shook violently. Fuki had won this battle.
Fuki pulled her foot out of the man’s broken helmet and pointed her gun toward the corridor, wary of the other guy coming after her. She took a deep breath in and let a deep breath out.
The encounter with the biker lasted mere seconds… She managed to survive. The man attacked her when she least expected it, which had put her at high risk. His timing couldn’t have been worse… But it wasn’t just that. He had managed to get to her from the first floor without her noticing—that was the problem.
She looked at his shoes and immediately understood how he pulled that off.
“Ah… I see…”
He’d wrapped towels around his shoes. The soft fabric muffled his footsteps, even when he was walking on that broken glass. That was why she hadn’t heard him.
Looking more closely at his clothes, Fuki noticed that the man had used vinyl tape to secure the straps of his body armor and any metal parts that might have clinked against each other so that he wouldn’t make a sound as he moved. He had been prepared for fighting in the darkness of night.
Fuki couldn’t help wondering who the man might have been, but the most important thing to do then was to report to HQ.
“I encountered the rider. He attacked me, so I terminated him… What’s Sakura’s status?”
“We cannot locate with our drones. She’s not responding.”
The operator relayed to Fuki that there was an explosion as soon as Sakura opened the door to the third floor. Flames rose out of the building. The fire died down quickly, but they lost sight of Sakura.
Fuki sucked her teeth. As she suspected, there had been a booby trap at the other end of that corridor, too.
Lycoris agents were only taught the skills needed to assassinate targets in calm everyday settings in Japan. Even Second Lycoris weren’t prepared to deal with having to storm a target hiding inside a booby-trapped building.
“Fuki, can you show us the target’s face? Send us a photo so we can ID him,” requested Commander Kusunoki.
“It’s a bit crushed… But sure, I can take a picture.”
Fuki wanted to rush to the emergency staircase to look for Sakura, but her commander’s orders took priority. If Sakura got injured in that explosion, Fuki wouldn’t be able to tend to her anyway with an enemy nearby… It made more sense to just go with the orders, Fuki reassured herself.
The rider had died still clutching the gun in his left hand. Fuki took it off him, just in case. When she touched the man’s fingers, she noticed something unusual. The man was wearing fingerless gloves. His exposed fingertips were strangely hard. Fuki pinched one of his fingers to investigate.
“…Is this guy for real?”
The man had coated his fingertips with glue or something. Fuki guessed it was so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. It made her wonder if the man was wearing full-body motorcycle armor not so much for protection but to ensure he wouldn’t even leave a hair behind on the crime scene.
What didn’t add up was that, despite the meticulousness of his prep for this raid, the man was using a battered old Beretta without a suppressor. It was a Model 92F…no, Model 9. Intrigued, Fuki took a better look at the gun. She held it to the moonlight so she could read the inscription on the slide—U.S. 9MM M9. It was a model used by the US Army, unavailable to the general public.
Fuki cast the gun aside. She kept glancing toward the corridor as she removed the rider’s helmet. His nose was broken, and his face was all bloody, but he was clearly Asian… In fact, he looked like an ordinary Japanese guy. What convinced Fuki that the man was Japanese wasn’t even his facial features as much as the fact that he had judo ear. Also known as cauliflower ear, it was a condition often seen in people who did judo for a long time. Repeated bruising and rubbing caused irreversible swelling. This condition was also seen in people doing other contact sports, such as wrestling, but an Asian man in Japan with cauliflower ear was most likely to be a Japanese judo practitioner.