“Interesting!”
Chisato was taking it all in with evident excitement, but to Takina, who didn’t know the first thing about manga, it was as if they were speaking a foreign language. She stood quietly in the corner of the room so as not to get in the way, but as Itou kept humoring Chisato’s endless questions with thorough explanations, she eventually lost patience.
“Can we talk about what you need us to do?” she interrupted.
Itou and Chisato looked at her in surprise, shaken out of their bubble.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I haven’t had a proper conversation with anyone in a while, and I got a little too into it! It’s so fun talking to you. You’re really a gifted conversationalist!”
“Aw, thank you! And you’re so friendly and easy to talk to, Ms. Itou. I wouldn’t expect that of a manga artist!”
“You’re too kind! Also, the stereotype of most manga artists being cheerless introverts isn’t actually very accurate.”
“What, really?!”
“I’m in the minority, working alone. Popular manga artists hire assistants, so they have to know how to get along—”
Takina couldn’t help raising her voice.
“Your deadline’s approaching, isn’t it?!”
Itou sat down on the floor with her legs tucked under her, back straight.
“Yes, sorry again.”
Chisato sat down on the floor behind her, looking just as contrite. Takina ignored her.
“So what do you need us to do?”
“I would like to humbly request that you be the models for my characters. I have indeed modeled them after you to begin with. I simply require you to pose for a scene that I am having difficulty with, and allow me to take photos.”
“…What’s with the mega politeness?”
“Hmm, it just seemed right…”
“Can you describe the poses?”
“Okay, so, you’ll be holding guns, like this… Wait a moment. I’ll get the replica guns and my rough sketches to show you!”
Itou hurried out of the room, leaving Takina alone with Chisato. Takina put her hands on her hips while Chisato looked down at the floor.
“Chisato.”
“Yes?”
“We haven’t come here just to hang out. We have a job to do, and that’s it.”
“Okay, sorry.”
“Sorry for the wait!” Itou returned with two guns she had fetched from the closet.
The first one was a small five-shot revolver of an unknown make. The second was a Kalashnikov with a stylish polymer handguard, grip, magazine and buttstock, a red dot sight, and an enlarged charging handle. It was a custom modernized AK.
Itou was carrying the rifle by the handguard in a strange way, but Takina was far more concerned about how she was holding the revolver with her finger on the trigger. She had to fight the urge to say something because she didn’t want to be a nag. But when Itou tried to point the revolver at Chisato when showing her the gun, Takina reflexively got ready to push Itou’s hand away, only for Chisato to make the first move.
“Ah, so I’ll be taking the revolver?”
Chisato put her hand over Itou’s and nimbly snatched the revolver from her before the muzzle pointed her way. The way she did it looked perfectly natural.
As a Lycoris, if you accidentally pointed your gun at someone during training, the instructor would either immediately knock you down or yell at you to drop your gun—at gunpoint, of course. Getting shot in that sort of situation would be completely justified.
It didn’t matter that Japan was a low-crime country, that they knew Itou well, and that she claimed the guns to be harmless replicas—every gun had to be treated with the same degree of caution as a real gun in the hands of an enemy.
There wasn’t a single country in the world that was completely free of guns, and there had been instances in the past where real guns had been mistaken for mere toys. When guns were involved, an innocent mistake could cost lives.
There was a saying: “Think of the gun as if there were a lethal beam coming from the muzzle at all times.” This mental exercise was meant to reinforce the rule to never point a gun at anything you didn’t intend to shoot, and Takina fully agreed with it. An accidental discharge could always happen, no matter how careful you were. It could even happen to a well-maintained gun with brand-new cartridges. Guns were tools for killing, so it was vital to take into account the ever-present possibility of something going wrong, be it a mistake or a freak accident.
“Yes, you’ll be a slightly eccentric assassin using a revolver,” Itou said.
She didn’t seem to have registered that Chisato had disarmed her. Chisato did it with such skill, it was like a magic trick. Not only did she do it without hurting Itou, but the movement was also so seamless that as far as Itou knew, she had voluntarily passed the gun to Chisato.
“And Takina will be using this AK.”
The magazine was already seated, and the selector was set to automatic fire, which again set off alarm bells in Takina’s head… However, she had managed to not say anything earlier, and she wasn’t about to start now. She quietly took the rifle from Itou.
The AK had a good weight to it and felt just like the real thing, but when Takina removed the sleek, modern magazine, she confirmed that it was the sort used in air rifles. She pulled back the charging handle and peeked inside the chamber. At a glance, it was apparent that, despite its realistic appearance, it was constructed in a way that made it impossible to fire bullets.
Chisato was also examining her revolver. She removed the cartridges, making sure that both the gun and the ammunition were fake, but it was the way she did it that deserved a special mention—she was chatting away, looking at Itou, not the gun, and swiftly carrying out the inspection by touch alone.
Chisato was a natural at blending Lycoris tasks into everyday life. She got the job done, and outsiders were none the wiser. She was truly a master of the trade, concealing special ops work within the comforting casualness of ordinary situations.
As for Itou, she didn’t remark on Chisato’s gun inspection—in fact, it had seemingly gone completely unnoticed. Itou was too busy explaining the story setting.
“Chisato, your character in the story is called Chise. She’s a teenage ‘cleaner,’ a contract killer, with a strong sense of justice. One day, she accepts a job that has her sneak into the hideout of arms dealers, taking advantage of lax surveillance in Japan. Her target is the ringleader. She shoots a dude who looks like he might have been the boss, but it turns out it probably wasn’t him, so she starts searching around and comes across a beautiful young lady who looks totally out of place. Assuming the girl is a hostage, Chise puts the search for the gang’s boss on hold to help her escape, and then…this happens!”
Itou fetched her tablet from the desk and showed it to the girls with a completely innocent look on her face.