C-Rank Ranked Match — Hide-and-Seek

Two minutes earlier.

Rewind to the moment Shiki and Shiina peeled off to fight their own battles. Shiina had her Thrusters wide open, running flat out to keep the pressure on Ren.

Ren is good at hiding. She’ll have already left her firing position and gone to ground.

Shiina reached the rooftop of the building Ren had fired from, a dome-shaped amusement facility. Ren was long gone, and no matter how Shiina swept her gaze across the roof, not a single trace of her remained.

She’ll have my position marked. Even so, she won’t try anything as reckless as shooting at me.

Sniping a fully alert Shiina was no easy thing. Even from a perfect position the odds of a hit ran to maybe thirty percent, and a miss would only give away her location. Better to stay hidden and keep piling on the pressure than to stake everything on that one gamble. It was the surer play, and the more effective one.

Ren’s read was sound. So long as her opponent wasn’t Shiina.

“Thermal Vision.”

Shiina slipped the goggles on.

Thermal Vision was Shiina’s tenth armament, a pair of goggles that read temperature as color. Put simply, warm spots showed up in shades of red, cold spots in shades of blue. Even inside a smokescreen it could pick out heat sources like body warmth and still let her line up a shot, which made it prized gear wherever visibility ran poor.

Through the Thermal Vision, Shiina looked over the rooftop where Ren must have stood. Faint orange footprints, a touch warmer than the surrounding rooftop, still lingered there.

“No mistake. These are Ren’s footprints.”

Space Girls ran far hotter than humans, presumably because they were built as machines, so anywhere one set foot showed a faint bump in temperature. Flying on Thrusters left no continuous trail of prints, but a landing spot held a denser, hotter mark, from the friction heat and the wash of the Thruster’s exhaust. Thermal Vision could tell those apart. Superb gear, though it naturally clouded her sight, which left it useless behind the wheel.

Trusting the Thermal Vision, Shiina set off after Ren, tracing the line of prints. They led her into an unpaved stretch of dirt, an activity zone called Buggy Run.

A whole fleet of buggies here. No chance she’d use one, though — the engine noise gives your position away, and buggies are slow. A Thruster gets you around quieter and faster.

Off the track it was all tall grass and clumps of trees, poor sightlines everywhere, good ground to lie low in. Was Ren planning to hole up and snipe?

No. That wasn’t it, Shiina decided.

This dirt ground—

Ren’s real aim was plain.

Mines.

Shiina fired her handgun into the ground thirty meters ahead and set off a mine.

Ground the sun’s been beating on all day runs hot. But ground that’s been dug up sits a touch cooler. Your mines are meaningless.

Laying them meant turning over the sun-scorched surface, and that was the very flaw that gave them away. Wire strung through the trees, pitfalls, and the rest had been set as well, but Shiina saw through each one and cleared them clean. The sun blazed too fiercely over this map, fierce enough that wire and soil alike ran hot.

“Found you.”

Three hundred meters out, Shiina finally caught Ren’s back in her sights.

Three hundred meters off from Shiina, Ren wore a look on her face that said, plain as day: ‘Can’t be doing with this!’

“…What in blazes is she?! How does she know where I have laid every last trap?!”

A sniper round came streaking in from Shiina. Ren blocked it with a Shield Piece.

Firing that true on the run?! A shooting sense to put a Sniper to shame!!

Ren fired back, not to be outdone, but Shiina slipped it with ease and kept closing.

To dodge a rifle at this range… an evasion that beggars belief.

Fifty meters. Shiina bore down on Ren with a furious barrage of full-auto handgun fire.

This girl is deft with rapid fire as well! I cannot dodge all of it!!

Ren produced a black attaché case.

“Trap kit!”

The trap kit was an armament that burned EN to fabricate wire, remote-detonated bombs, Grenades, mines, drills, and adhesive right there inside the case.

Ren pulled a heap of black iron spheres from the case, each about the size of a baseball, and scattered them wide. Then she fished out a remote.

Remote bombs. Every last one of those iron spheres blows the moment I thumb the button on this remote in my hand!!

Shiina planted her feet and flung the handgun in her left hand into the air, then drew a Saber terminal from the pouch at her hip.

“High-Output Mode.”

The saber snapped to full length, and in a single second Shiina sheared through every last iron sphere. They blew, hanging a curtain of smoke between the two of them. Ren lost sight of Shiina, but Shiina could still pick her out by her body heat.

“…So you have a hand for the blade into the bargain. Only fitting, for one who once fought alongside Tsubasa.”

Catching the handgun she’d flung skyward, Shiina loosed a quick-draw. Twelve rounds punched clean through Ren’s body.

With no right arm to her name, Shiina had utterly overpowered Ren.

“Still and all — without that railgun, you will never best Tsubasa.”

“…”

“This match is ours.”

Ren dropped out of the match.

And with that, Crimson Wings was down to their last member.

I’ve no way left to crack Tsubasa’s ‘C:Aegis’ now.

If Shiki went down, defeat was as good as certain.

“Shiki…!”

There was no transmission from Shiki, and not a word from Niko or ChaCha either. For a situation like this, she’d told ChaCha and the rest to throw their support behind Shiki, and even so, the quiet was unsettling.

On that other battlefield, right now, something was unfolding. Something that held ChaCha and the rest, the ones supposed to be running operations, frozen, breath caught in their throats.