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Dasa rushed toward them.
She was carrying Red Chili. She had prepared Derrringer as well, but presumably the shot had come from this “sniper handgun.” Derrringer was powerful, and accurate over long distances, but it wasn’t built to track a moving enemy at close range.
Yukinari and Hatsune’s hand-to-hand battle had probably left Dasa without a shot until that moment. But then Yukinari had fallen down, and Hatsune had stopped moving. It wasn’t what Yukinari had wanted, but it gave Dasa an opening.
“Yuki... Are you all right...?!” She came to his side and reached out to help him up.
“Yeah... Mostly. I think.”
The wounds caused by the Blood Rose were slow to heal, but even so, they got better much faster than those of a normal human. At least, so he expected—he would have to use his angel powers again to be sure.
“You saved my neck. I was hoping to finish things by myself, but...”
“S...orry,” Dasa said, eyes downcast.
“Don’t apologize. You really saved me. I appreciate it.” Without Dasa’s sharpshooting, Yukinari would probably be dead right now.
“Hatsune...” He turned to the shattered shell of his sister. He had made Dasa shoot her. He had made Dasa kill her. That much, he deeply regretted.
Dasa had declared that she would kill Hatsune for her own reasons, but Yukinari presumed she had said this in part so that she couldn’t go back on her word. By saying it to him, she firmed up her own resolve. In a different sense, Dasa probably didn’t hate Hatsune enough to genuinely want to kill her.
Dasa wasn’t very expressive, nor always socially adroit—but she was kind at heart. Yukinari knew that well.
Yukinari had said that he would be the one to kill his sister, but when it came to it, he couldn’t deny that he had felt some hesitation. As flawed as Hatsune’s logic had clearly been, she was still his sister and had still loved him—enough to want to die with him.
But that was all the more reason why it should have been Yukinari who finished her off.
After all, Yukinari had been part of the reason Hatsune broke. He had loved her as well, so much so that it wasn’t clear which of them had sought the other first, and once he had accepted that they were something more than brother and sister to each other, Yukinari bore at least half the blame. It should have been his to finish what he had started.
And he had left Dasa to do it. It was pathetic, and he felt terrible.
“Is it... over?” Dasa asked, looking at the fallen Hatsune.
“Yeah. A shot through the brainpan? I’m pretty sure...”
Unlike a sword, a wound from a bullet did more than simply disrupt bodily systems with a foreign object. Particularly with the sort of soft-point rounds loaded into Red Chili, the bullet dispersed its kinetic energy by shattering. The tip of the bullet was hardly larger than the tip of a pinky finger, but a direct hit to the skull could effectively produce a fist-sized hole. It would be more than enough to shred the brain within, leaving nothing intact to direct the body.
“Oh, hey. I guess Angela’s still chained up, isn’t she?” Yukinari said. He needed something else to think about right now, desperately, or he would only sink deeper into depression.
He held Dasa’s shoulder—or rather, leaned on her for support as they returned to the sanctuary.
“Let’s grab her and go home. Friedland’s waiting for—”
That was as far as he got.
He thought he saw something move at the edges of his vision, but when he glanced over his shoulder, he didn’t see anything in particular. There was nothing there.
There was nothing there.
Including Hatsune’s body.
“H-Hatsune...?”
“Are you surprised?” she asked. She was sitting amongst the branches of a large tree nearby.
She was no dream and no illusion. Her plain dress was spattered with blood—or rather, Holy Oil. Dasa’s shot had obviously landed. In the head, most likely. Otherwise, why would she have collapsed?
Yukinari gulped. Hatsune’s face—there was a gunshot wound in her forehead. It was unmistakable. There were even traces of Holy Oil dribbling from it. And yet Hatsune was alive. She was moving and talking.
What was going on here...?
“I knew you use guns, my dear Yuki.” Hatsune smiled as if she were revealing how to do a magic trick. “So I replaced the bones in my head with titanium.”
“Defensive plates...?”
Titanium alloy was a metal originally prized for its superb defensive properties. It was light, resistant to damage, and due to its combination of rigidity and viscosity as a metal, it did well dispersing the impact from gunshots.
It was unlikely that Hatsune was aware of the precise protective qualities of titanium, but its lightness and ability to endure harsh environments led to its frequent use in strengthening human internals—for example, in the form of pins used to hold together broken bones. Perhaps she had figured that if it was good enough for a bone, it was good enough for an entire skull.
Yukinari really had been naïve. His opponent was the same as he was, in every possible way. Her abilities as an angel, her knowledge from their previous world—Yukinari and Hatsune had no equals except each other. In other words, the superiority Yukinari had possessed before was now gone.
But...
“Here,” Hatsune said. “You should have aimed here.” She was pointing at her eye. She was right: a bullet to the eye would have had a good chance of destroying the soft flesh and reaching the brain behind it.
“You’re right,” Yukinari said. He gave a little push, hefting himself off Dasa’s shoulder. He took a wide stance as he looked up at Hatsune. “I was naïve. I underestimated you.”
“Yuki? What’s wrong, dear brother?”
“On top of that, I let Dasa do my dirty work.”
“Yuki...?” Dasa looked at him in surprise, but he was focused entirely on Hatsune.
“This time I’m coming at you with everything I’ve got. Get ready, dear sister.”