Still Waters 3 Book 2, Chapter 8.5, Mana's Pactio
I see the demon, exhausted and in pain though she has no wounds, walking through a vast field of faceless corpses. Her clothes are ragged, she carries the hilt of a broken sword in one hand and a small card in the other, and her eyes are ancient, haunted.
Mana Tatsumiya, S. Dream Journal
Saturday, June 27th, Just Before Noon
I have to warn Mana...!
Saga Jin, Yakuza gunslinger and all around badass, dove into the alley for cover, yelping as a flying chip of concrete torn loose by high powered rifle round ripped through the leg of his pants, tearing a ragged, bloody line across the back of his leg. He quickly ejected the empty magazine from his remaining pistol and, frowning, looked at his last one. "Fifteen rounds, great. Juuust great," he grumbled under his breath, favoring his injured leg as he inserted the new magazine and made his way down to the other end of the alley.
A bullet hit the brickwork six inches in front of his face and ricocheted with an angry whine and he yelped again, jerking back out of sight.
Saga Jin was a mess. Nobuo, his longtime friend and underling, had been methodically driven off by the sharpshooter and he hadn't seen him since, his hair, normally slicked back and neat, was wild and full of rock chips from numerous near-misses, he had makeshift bandages tied around his left hand and his right forearm, and his normally clean if sloppily worn suit was wrinkled, torn, and covered in sweat, blood, and grime.
He had really liked this suit.
"Damn it," he muttered under his breath as he checked his pockets yet again in the futile hope that he had somehow missed anything that might have been useful. When his search produced, surprise surprise, nothing, he leaned back against the wall of the alley and took a series of deep breaths to calm his nerves. "Okay. Are we okay? We're okay," he said to himself as he took a longer look around the alley he was trapped in. It opened on a wide open, all but deserted street on both ends, perfect to be sniped in. The alley itself was fairly long, but there were no side alleys, no doors, not even any alcoves; there was nothing but a dumpster. Which, upon closer inspection, would allow him to reach a narrow ledge on the side of the building if he climbed up on it. Hmm.
Jin scrambled up onto the dumpster, taking care to keep to the edges and not step on the flimsy plastic top, and found the ledge well within his reach. He could see a fire escape further along the wall; if he could get up onto the ledge and not fall off...
Several bruises and twenty extremely hazardous minutes later, Jin forced open a window and climbed into what appeared to be a very cheap one room apartment. He opened the closet and found a series of very...loud...Hawaiian shirts inside. Sighing, he stripped off his ruined suit jacket and left it on the back of the room's only chair, tossed a stack of money onto the bed, and began riffling through the absent apartment owner's dresser. A few minutes later he walked out into the hallway feeling more like himself than he had all day in spite of wearing a hawaiian shirt two sizes too big, a pair of very loose jeans, his sunglasses, and a bucket hat. His shoes, absurdly nice compared to the rest of the ridiculous getup he was wearing, completed the image. Jin smiled deviously. With any luck, the sniper would think such a disguise too obvious and not, you know, try to murder him in cold blood the instant he stepped outside.
Mana had been jumpy all day, not that anyone had noticed; her self control was too great. But still...she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up accompanied by the sense that someone was watching her, so she very calmly turned and headed towards the nearest building, which just happened to be the cafe owned by her old classmate Yukihiro Ayaka and run by her other old classmate Murakami Natsumi.
Inside, the feeling of danger was diminished somewhat, but still present.
"Mana! I haven't seen you in a while! Here, take a seat!"
Mana looked up to see Natsumi coming around the counter with a big smile on her face. A pale red dot flashed across the room and Mana took a running dive, tackling Natsumi to the floor just as a bullet shattered against the thick window; Mana didn't even need to check the trajectory to know the bullet had been intended for her old classmate's forehead. She ignored the screams of the other patrons while Natsumi pushed her off and swiftly motioned for the waitresses and customers to go into the back room, away from the windows, wisely keeping her head down the whole time while fishing around in her pocket for her pactio cards.
"Don't bother," Mana muttered. "He's probably after me." She couldn't very well have Natsumi go after the sniper; there might not be enough left to question afterward. No matter how indecisive and shy her old classmate Natsumi might appear in everyday life, when swift action was called for, Natsumi was always one of the first to react.
"How do you know that?" Natsumi whispered back, her voice showing the steel that had always been hidden deep within her; Mana had recognized it even back when they had first met. Natsumi might appear weak to the uninitiated, but she was far from a fragile little flower; Natsumi could definitely take care of herself.
"I've been busy since graduation," Mana said. She didn't want to take the time to explain anything about the various smuggling rings, slavery rings, and other criminal enterprises she and Ku Fei had obliterated all over Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Natsumi nodded. "Do you think-"
What she was going to ask was forgotten when a man in a bloody Hawaiian shirt and jeans threw himself through the doorway and came up in a rolling crouch, 9mm pistol in hand and pointed directly into Mana's face. Naturally, the barrel of Mana's Desert Eagle was already two inches from the man's forehead.
"Heh...heheh, not a pellet gun this time, huh?" he asked nervously, carefully reaching up to take off his sunglasses.
Mana looked at him for a moment and smirked slightly. "Saga Jin. It's been years. What brings you to Mahora?" she asked in a fairly friendly manner, as if the two of them weren't holding pistols in each others' faces.
"The peace and quiet," he replied, deadpan, smearing blood all over Natsumi's clean floor. "But seriously, do you mind getting that out of my face please? Thanks," he said, lowering his weapon as she lowered hers. Another round hit the window within an inch of the first one, and Jin dove for cover behind the counter.
"The glass is bulletproof," Natsumi said testily, glaring at the damage the two bullets had done. "It's going to cost a lot to replace that..." Even as she spoke, a third, fourth, and fifth round hit the glass, all in the same area; the sixth round actually broke through the damaged part of the window and ricocheted off the floor with an angry whine that had everyone diving for cover again.
"Bulletproof? What kind of cafe is this?" he demanded, flinching as another round came through.
Natsumi gave him the sort of look a manager gives an underling when they've behaved like an idiot. "It's a perfectly normal cafe for Mahora, I don't know what you're talking about."
Jin shook his head and turned to Mana. "Anyway, I suppose I'm too late," Jin said, bleeding all over the tile floor from several bullet wounds. Natsumi frowned at him a moment longer, but quickly got to work bandaging his wounds.
"For what?" Mana asked, hardly flinching as another bullet hit the thick steel which reinforced the counter directly behind her head.
"I came to warn you," Jin said, hissing in pain as Natsumi tightened a bandage around his forearm where a bullet had just barely tagged him. "I came to warn you that there's a bounty out on you. Remember that thing six years ago?" he said, referring to the incident in which several of Mana's classmates had been kidnapped, and also in which Jin and several other groups had been duped into holding the kidnapped students. Mana nodded, so he continued. "Yeah, one of the guys that was involved in that finally found someone crazy enough to hunt you down. He's up on that mountainside with a high powered rifle, and he's good. Shot the pistol right out of my hand after I winged him."
Mana raised an eyebrow. She had known Jin was a good shot, but that good? To score a hit at all at the distance he must have been shooting, using a normal pistol without a scope and with a target likely well hidden and camouflaged... She immediately bumped him up several levels in her mental list of serious threats. "Do you have any names?"
Jin shook his head. "No; all we know is he's some guy from the continent who's got a grudge against you. We already got the guy who hired him, so it's got to be a grudge that's kept him on the job."
"Thank you for the warning," Mana said, thinking swiftly. There were many, many people who hated her; she narrowed this group down to those with military experience as either soldiers or mercenaries. It was still a sizable list, so she narrowed it down further to those with notable marksmanship skills, barely even noticing as another round hit the counter behind her, through the tiny hole in the window. She had it narrowed down to three possibilities now, and two of those could quickly be crossed off the list by virtue of being dead.
"Anton Karlsson," she said aloud. The man had had the bad luck to be part of one of the first slavery rings she and Ku Fei had taken apart, and it had cost him his entire fortune. He had been arrested, broken out of jail, arrested again, killed several police in his second escape, and promptly joined another slavery ring where he worked for three weeks before she and Ku Fei shut it down as well, this time resulting in his face being plastered across every television set in Europe as a known fugitive. Several run ins later, and his hatred of Ku Fei and Mana in particular had reached insane levels; the man was incredibly dangerous. 'He must have thought the festival would provide ample cover for his attempt,' she thought. Anton, if he truly was the sniper up on the hillside, had certainly done his research. Gunfire in the background was a common thing during the Mahora Festival. She looked at Natsumi and Jin. "Stay here." She took a quick look around Natsumi's cafe and darted out through the front door before anyone could stop her.
Jin sighed as he watched her go. "I hope she doesn't get herself killed..."
Natsumi gave him an incredulous look for a moment and shook her head. "You don't have to worry about her; just worry about how you're going to pay for the cleaning crew to get rid of the bloodstains all over my new floor," she said, tugging the most recent bandage tight enough to make the veteran yakuza gunslinger wince.
When Mana left the building, Anton reacted immediately; the first shot whizzed by Mana's face, taking several strands of hair with it, but she kept going, ducking and darting around in an unpredictable zigzag, and though several shots came close, none came as close as the first one had. 'Anton never was good with a moving target...' Mana thought as she ducked between two buildings and paused to take stock of the situation. While she was by no means a bad shot, she doubted she could reenact Jin's amazing pistol shot with her Desert Eagle; she was good, but she wasn't that good, not with a pistol. If she tried to close with Anton, he'd see her coming a mile away; he'd pick her off before she was halfway up the mountain. She needed a long gun, but her own stash was in her new place halfway across town, and most of it wasn't ready for use yet. "Tch."
So that left...what? Anton had no problems shooting those around her to drive her out of hiding, so she had to move fast, whatever she did. A bullet struck the brickwork six inches from her head, spraying her face with tiny, jagged shards, one of which drew a ragged line across her cheek.
She eased further along the side of the building. Who else would have a weapon she could use? Saga was out of the question; while he and his men never went around unarmed, he had been down to one gun and two rounds of ammo when he found her, and his men were nowhere in sight. Yuuna, perhaps? The girl often carried more weaponry than some militia groups, but there was no telling where she was right now. She had no way of communicating with anyone else except for her cell phone, which, sadly, had been crunched when she took a rolling dive to evade a bullet earlier. Which left just one choice...
She knew where she had to go, but the problem was how to get there while keeping the largest number of people out of the line of fire. Perhaps along the river? She ducked out from behind the building and ran into a small, mostly deserted park, forced to duck and roll from tree to tree to keep from acquiring a few new holes. She paused for a moment to catch her breath and plan her next move, but a bullet driving itself through the tree trunk two inches from her head forced her to move. She ran to the edge of the park, hopped the fence, and took a running dive into the narrow drainage canal that ran alongside the park. She wormed her way into the tall grass that grew along the sides and paused to take stock of her situation and catch her breath. Anton had stopped shooting, which meant he was moving into position to get a better view. She had perhaps five seconds.
Half a second later, a bullet clipped her shoulder and she shot up and took off running down the canal at full speed until she came to a bridge for one of the many footpaths that crossed it. She jumped, grabbed hold, and scrambled up onto the bridge, wincing at the wound in her shoulder and narrowly avoiding another shot that pulled at her pant leg. She took off running toward the place she thought he would be: the World Tree Plaza. But first, if she recalled correctly, her one chance was currently attending a wine-tasting event near it.
A round struck her upper arm and she staggered, tripped, and hit the ground on the side of the path, tumbling down a narrow ravine until she struck hard against a tree at the bottom. She jerked away a second later, just in time to avoid another shot, and staggered away into the undergrowth, her expression grim. She paused for a moment to catch her breath and check her wounds, and set off down the ravine at as fast a pace as she could manage.
Mana burst out of the ravine onto the campus at a dead run, her clothing ripped and muddied and bloodied by her wild run through the woods. She barreled over a girl she had seen several times around town and vaguely recognized as an oni in Negi's class as she crossed the path, muttering a quick apology as she went, though she knew she was already too far for the girl to hear her. She ran up another hill as fast as she could manage with her wounds, the sniper's rounds narrowly missing her, and finally spotted the wine-tasting club's tent.
"Hmm...it's nice, I think. Not quite full-bodied enough for my tastes, but then again—wah!" Eva said, staggering back out of the way as something that looked suspiciously like a blood-covered, week old zombie ran into the tent and shoved past her, accompanied by startled shouts and screams from the other patrons.
Kamo looked up from his conversation with Chachazero just in time for the long-haired apparition to grab him by the tail and vanish through the opposite end of the tent from which it had entered.
Silence descended on the tent a moment later as those inside started to calm down and look at each other in confusion.
"What was that?"
"Did you see it? Was it a...a bear or something...?"
Eva cocked an eyebrow and looked at Chachazero, whose perpetual grin somehow gave the impression that she was more than a little ticked off.
"How rude!" Chachazero said, throwing down her wine glass. "And just when I thought I was finally getting somewhere...damn."
Eva shrugged and drained her wine glass.
"So if you're not going to kill me, care to tell me what this is all about?" Kamo asked as dryly as he could manage while hanging by his tail from Mana's fist as she ran. He yelped a second later as his hair was neatly parted by a bullet.
"Does that answer your question?" Mana asked, her voice unruffled as always. "Someone wants me dead; I think you know what I want," she said, darting behind the first available building in order to catch her breath, heavily favoring her side which, now that he looked at it, was covered in blood.
Kamo, naturally, took the opportunity to scramble up onto a more manageable position on her shoulder. "I gotcha. Do you know where he is?"
Mana nodded. "Come on."
Kamo barely had time to open his mouth before a bullet hit the wall across from them and ricocheted back into the wall they were leaning against, pelting him with chips of brick. He yelped as Mana took off again.
She ran up the steps to the World Tree Plaza, spotted her quarry and, ignoring the bullet that hissed past her ear, took up a classic American Football player's pose and threw Kamo in a perfect arc which only ended when he smacked face first into the back of Negi's head.
Negi sat up, rubbing the back of his head groggily as he watched Kamo scrambling to draw a pactio circle around him. "Wha...?"
"No time for explanations, aniki!" Kamo said, then looked back in the direction from which he had been thrown and scrambled out of the way.
Negi turned to see what had frightened Kamo, and his eyes locked on Mana's as she came diving in. They collided and he was driven hard to the ground. Mana sat up, straddling his hips, and pulled him up to a seated position, dimly aware of the startled cries of those nearby who had witnessed the spectacle.
"Sorry, sensei," she said as she grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him toward her. Their lips met, the pactio circle activated with a flash, and a moment later Mana pushed him away, holding up a card as she staggered to her feet.
"Adeat."
It was huge; a six foot barrel, precision scope, ergonomically designed...Mana grinned wickedly as she sat behind the enormous gun and sighted in on her target. Anton Karlsson's shocked expression on that distant mountainside at the sudden change of fortune was priceless.
She pressed a button on the side, and an electric hum filled the air. A digital readout lit up, showing the words 'Charge 100%'. She checked her aim one final time, reading Anton's lips with ease even at this amazing distance as he started to mouth the words "Oh sh-", and squeezed the trigger.
The sound was terrific, a great whump that rattled windows all around and raised dust from the ground; the projectile reached Anton's position before he could get much further than "-it!".
The impact was tremendous.
Negi sat up a moment later, looking at the smoking crater on the far mountainside, plainly visible even from this distance. "...what just happened?"
Mana observed the mountain's new crater through the scope of her railgun for a moment, and started to smile. It was quite a smile; wider and far more real than Negi had ever seen her smile before.
"Abeat."
She turned to Negi, still smiling as she held up the pactio card and began to sway woozily. "Thank you sensei; I will treasure it forever..." Her eyes rolled up in her head and she fell forward.
"What...hey! Mana-san! Someone, help me please!" he cried out as she collapsed into his arms, falling unconscious from blood loss.
Author's Notes: Sorry for the delay in updates; please bear with it a little longer.
*"-not a pellet gun this time, huh?" This line is a reference to the time Saga Jin and Mana first met resulting in a massive shootout, during the rescue mission in Chapter 18 of Still Waters 2.