Fuki was retrieving her satchel when she heard the rhythmic whir of a helicopter in the distance. It was probably reinforcements from HQ.
“I told them we could handle this without help,” Fuki said to herself. She suddenly remembered Sakura. She didn’t know if her partner was dead or alive. She’d have to go looking for her. More work for Fuki. Her new partner sure was a headache…
Grumbling, Fuki detached the bulletproof airbag from her satchel and left it on the floor. She put the satchel on her back, feeling how much lighter it’d become, and hurried out into the dark corridor, heading for the emergency staircase on the east side of the building…when a hair-raising chill ran down her body. Acting on reflex, she threw herself onto the floor. She felt a blast behind her, and something grazed the top of her head.
“Did I get her…?” a woman whose voice Fuki didn’t recognize asked.
Fuki planted her hands on the floor and pushed herself up to look behind her, toward the voice. In the faint light coming in through the windows, she saw a woman in her thirties. The woman was holding a large revolver. She was dressed like the ex-military guy: in a boiler suit with a holster at her gun belt. The revolver was a Super Red Hawk made by Sturm Ruger.
“Tsk! Nothing but nutjobs today… Based on your kit, you’re a friend of the ex-SDF guy?”
Fuki tried to sound confident, but she’d broken out in cold sweat. She didn’t think there’d be another participant in the killing game, but now that she thought about it, nobody said there were only three of them that night.
But Fuki wasn’t sweating just because it turned out there was one more enemy to deal with. She had her gun in her hand…but the magazine was empty. She was going to grab a new magazine from her satchel and reload her gun while searching for Sakura, but the enemy found her just as she stepped out of the room after putting her bag on.
It was common protocol to reload before proceeding to the next task, but Fuki hadn’t done it this time. It was a shock for her to realize that. Had she been unconsciously impatient to find Sakura? Was that what made her rush out without proper preparation? She might’ve been more worried about her partner than she was willing to acknowledge to herself.
The woman at the other end of the corridor sighed. Fuki was watching her. The distance between them was ten meters, a bit too far for Fuki to charge at her. It was the ideal distance for her enemy to shoot her. The corridor was straight, so they were directly opposite each other.
“Did you kill him?” the woman asked. Her tone made Fuki suspect that the ex-military guy had been her boyfriend.
She remembered that the guy said at one point that only one or maybe two people would make it out alive. That should have struck her as odd. Their game was to kill everyone else, which would mean one survivor at best. Now she understood why the man said there might be two victors—he had a partner. Maybe that was his trick for winning the game several times: The others “played” solo while he didn’t.
“I asked you if you killed him.”
Something told Fuki that her answer would decide whether she lived or not.
“Yeah, I did,” she admitted. She moved to stand up, but the woman immediately shot at the floor next to her feet, so Fuki froze. The gunshot echoed through the building, followed by silence, in which the distant sound of the helicopter seemed louder than it should have been.
“Stay where you are. And throw your gun away. You’ve no bullets anyway.”
The slide lock on Fuki’s gun was open, a dead giveaway that the magazine was empty. Feeling annoyed, Fuki obeyed and chucked her gun away. She slowly sat on the floor with her legs crossed. The lady seemed okay with that.
It was quiet and still inside the building. The helicopter could be heard outside. The lady was watching Fuki, her Super Red Hawk aimed at the girl.
“Whaddaya want?” Fuki asked in an annoyed voice.
“Was he happy in his last moments? You shot him, didn’t you?”
“I did… He seemed satisfied, yeah.”
“That’s good. He wanted to die in a gun fight… I could’ve given him that…”
What sort of relationship did this woman and the ex-military guy have? Fuki had to resist the temptation to wonder about that. It was irrelevant to her current situation, and thinking about those people’s personal lives wouldn’t help her in any way. It would be a waste of energy.
The woman stood there in silence for a while, thinking about something. Fuki listened carefully to the sound of the helicopter. It was getting closer but was still some distance away. She might get shot at any moment. The reinforcements weren’t going to arrive in time. But then she heard another sound. It wasn’t entirely unexpected.
“…It’s over, huh?” Fuki said with a sigh. Still remaining seated, she put her hands on her hips to signal she was reluctantly giving up. Like a capitulating general, she thought.
“You accept defeat?” the woman asked.
Fuki noticed something twinkle in the woman’s eyes. Perhaps she was crying. The woman let out a long sigh, too. Throughout this, she didn’t take her eyes off Fuki even for a moment. She, too, must’ve undergone some sort of battle training…which was working to Fuki’s advantage.
“Shall we end tonight’s game?”
“Yeah, let’s end this… Aim above the stomach.”
“Fine… You know, with you sitting like this, you look like a samurai about to be executed.”
So not a capitulating general. The pose did in fact look a bit like that of a samurai awaiting beheading…but a samurai would sit formally with his legs tucked under himself, not crossed-legged. It amused Fuki how she couldn’t help focusing on such meaningless details, and a little smile appeared on her lips as she stared at the woman. Noticing this, the woman stared back at her.
“I like the look in your eyes. You’re fearless, more like a boy than a girl…”
In a dangerous situation, people instinctively stared back when they felt an intense gaze on them. Perhaps the function of that was to judge whether the other was about to attack. In any case, it suited Fuki to have the woman stare her in the eye…because she wouldn’t notice the slight movement of Fuki’s left hand.
Fuki almost imperceptibly changed the position of her hand, which had been on her hip, to slide her fingers into a pocket of her skirt. Inside the pocket was the flashlight she’d been using earlier.
“Shoot!”
Fuki pulled out the flashlight, switching it on so it beamed at the woman’s eyes. The light was very bright, and the woman screamed, bending away from it. There was a gunshot… Or rather, there were two, the loud shot of the revolver masking the quiet shot of a gun with a suppressor. More of the quiet shots followed.
It looked as if the woman was performing a bizarre dance. Blood spurted out of her body with each backward step until she fell over onto her back.
Fuki switched off the flashlight and picked up her Glock from the floor before turning around.
“You’re a good shot, Sakura.”
At the other end of the corridor was Sakura. She struck a victorious pose and then trotted over to Fuki like an excited puppy.
“We’re finally together again!”
“Wouldn’t have taken so long if a certain idiot hadn’t fallen into a trap.”
Sakura scratched her head and laughed. She smelled of smoke.
Thinking about it, the game the people who turned up there that night had been playing was about shooting people dead, and using a trap to take out some of the other participants would reduce the number of precious few targets. The ex-military guy’s traps were likely intended to alert him to an approaching target by making noise or to shock a target, stopping them in their tracks. The trap Sakura triggered used only gas, no shrapnel or flammable liquid. It wasn’t designed to kill, just to scare with a momentary explosion and flashy flames.