Fuki still hadn’t heard back from HQ, but they were surely listening in on their conversation… Fuki brought her hand to her ear to touch her earpiece, but it wasn’t there. It must’ve fallen off when that bullet grazed her, or maybe when she was rolling on the floor. Fuki sucked her teeth, annoyed.
“…Fine. Okay, I’m a Lycoris. So? You gonna tell me who you are?”
“The Lycoris are real after all? I knew it. There’s something wrong with how peaceful this country is. Always felt unnatural to me.”
“I asked you who you are.”
“A participant.”
“A participant?” Thrown by his answer, Fuki repeated what he’d said back at him.
“Ah, so you’re here on business? Let me guess, you’ve been marking that guy in the car? When the shooting started outside out of the blue, it really startled me. I thought maybe my watch was running slow.”
While the man talked, Fuki reached behind and got a new magazine out of her satchel bag. Made to hold the Lycoris’ equipment, the satchels had an opening at the bottom, allowing the girls to easily grab a fresh magazine. It was impossible to do that completely silently, but Fuki took advantage of the man’s chattiness to conceal the little noises. Removing the almost-spent magazine from her Glock and inserting a new one would, of course, also make some noise, so Fuki had to keep the conversation going.
“How do you know about us?” she asked. “And what do you mean by being a participant? What are you participating in?”
“Not so many questions at once.”
“Answer the first and the second.”
“What’s this? Am I being interrogated?”
“You wanted to talk.”
When she talked, he listened intently. He’d pick up on the sound of her changing her magazine. She needed to get him talking, and she couldn’t let him get away with a short answer, or he might finish before she was done reloading.
“Okay, for now, just my first question. How do you know about us?”
“I used to be in the Self-Defense Forces. That’s where I heard rumors about you lot.”
“First a cop, now a military guy, huh?”
“What cop?”
“The guy who arrived on the bike, the one who’s lying dead over there. He was a police detective.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Wasn’t he your buddy?”
The guy kept giving Fuki short answers. It was getting on her nerves. She considered chancing it and reloading anyway, but the guy would certainly notice it and take it as a cue to resume fighting, and he was likely holding his gun pointed right at her behind that display board. Visualizing that made her hesitate.
It would take her less than a second to discard the old magazine and stick in the new one, but the more she hurried, the more noise she’d make, alerting her enemy to what she was up to. To change the magazine as quietly as possible, she’d need more time.
In the end, she decided to get the man talking more.
“The dude who got shot in his car was a hunter.”
“A cop and a hunter? That’s funny.”
“I don’t see anything funny in that.”
“The cop… He was using a Beretta? I bet it was confiscated. Not as bad as a New Nambu.”
“Who the hell are you guys?”
The man fell silent. Was he going to shoot now? Fuki put her index finger on the trigger of the Glock in her right hand. She pressed the protruding bit on the trigger—the trigger safety—and started pulling the trigger back, applying the maximum pressure possible before the gun actually fired.
Would that last bullet in her magazine be enough?
“We’re all participants. In tonight’s game…”
At last, the man happily got talking. Fuki reduced the amount of tension on the trigger and listened, with a heightened awareness of the new magazine she was holding in her left hand.
The man told her there was an anonymous community he was a member of: a community of gun aficionados. However, they weren’t the type that discussed in detail the techniques, history, regulations, and ethics of gun use among different organizations. What they were interested in was actually shooting people.
“You’re a secret society of killers who like guns?”
“We are, and we’ve come up with this brilliant solution for our hobby. Nobody lives around here… Nobody to hear gunshots. So we agreed that those willing would come here at three AM on this day and we’d shoot each other to our hearts’ content.”
Fuki had finished reloading her gun, but she still wanted the man to tell her more.
“What a dumb hobby. Why don’t you just shoot yourself in the head?”
“That wouldn’t be any fun at all.”
“At least you don’t just shoot random innocent people.”
If those guys tried that, it would be a major incident for the safe country of Japan. The DA would immediately take action to permanently delete those guys. The official version would be that the guys’ victims had been hit by a truck or something along those lines to keep the public in the dark about the murders.
“You’ve got to be a psycho to enjoy one-sidedly shooting people who aren’t expecting it, or people weaker than you, running for their life… If you’re going to kill someone, it’s got to be someone who’s trying to kill you, too. When it’s a real fight, it’s fun, there’s meaning to it. Does that make sense to you? Everyone who turned up here for tonight’s game thinks this way.”
“It does make sense…”
It wasn’t that Fuki agreed with the man’s logic, but she finally figured out what was happening that night.
It explained why the hunter the Thirds eliminated was so obsessed with hunting bears with a shotgun—it turned him on to kill something that could well kill him, too. He had a burning desire to fight for his life. That was why he wouldn’t use a rifle, which would have allowed him to kill from a long distance, or even a half rifle, which still had a range more than twice that of a shotgun. The hunter would only use a shotgun, with a viable range of fifty meters, to intentionally shorten the distance between him and the bear he was hunting and make the shooting feel less one-sided.