26. Shooting

What is the running jump distance of a normal person?
The answer is six meters.
Then, how wide is this street?
Visually estimated to be no less than eighteen meters.
Therefore, Karl was not attempting to jump to the apartment building across the street; rather, he was issuing an inescapable invitation for the sniper to take a shot.
To fire the very shot that had detonated the grenade mid-air just moments ago.
Every sniper possesses a specific set of shooting memories, which can be categorized as muscle memory or a conditioned reflex drilled into their very marrow during training. The more exceptional the sniper, the more instinctive this reaction becomes, and the person Karl faced was clearly a sniper of this caliber.
Even faster than the speed of the optical prosthesis feeding data back to the brain, the sniper had already raised his weapon and squeezed the trigger toward Karl.
And the angle at which he raised his rifle differed in no way from the angle used to detonate the grenade previously.
To hit a target at the exact same elevation using a firearm, the height to which a sniper raises the weapon remains unchanged. The grenade had been detonated when it reached the height of the third floor, so the point from which Karl leaped was also the third floor.
Karl intentionally maintained an altitude roughly equal to that of the grenade while slightly delaying the timing of his own shot.
Karl had the initiative over the sniper; if he wanted to shoot, he could have fired first. However, the moment his bullet struck the sniper, he would simultaneously be hit by the Nekomata in the sniper's hands. Whether the sniper would die or not was uncertain, but Karl himself would undoubtedly be dead. Therefore, he chose a far more hazardous alternative.
The raised angle of the barrel was correct, and the muzzle pointed to the exact same position.
Then, it was confirmed.
The moment the bullet from the sniper's Nekomata left the chamber, Kenshin's bullet was already waiting along its trajectory.
During the Gallipoli Campaign in 1916, a miracle occurred when two bullets collided mid-air. What was the statistical probability of that happening?
Seventy billion to one.
Karl knew he did not possess such extraordinary luck, so he chose to shoot at a stationary target instead.
Was a muzzle whose elevation and angle were already locked in—awaiting only a life-or-death verification—anything other than a stationary target?
To Karl, this was not a chance of seventy billion to one, but fifty-fifty.
Guess right, live; guess wrong, die.
It was as simple as that.
Fortunately, Karl's luck with fifty-fifty odds remained decent; he always managed to guess correctly, and facing a stationary target, he could find no reason why he would fail to hit it.
One bullet intercepted the Nekomata round halfway out of the chamber, causing the two bullets to detonate inside the sniper rifle's barrel. The resulting shrapnel and fragments blew the muzzle of the sniper's Nekomata open like a flared trumpet, and then another bullet passed through the shattered rifling to strike the sniper's head.
Sniper rifles are rarely designed for continuous fire. Historically, this was because residual gunpowder in the rifling would affect shooting accuracy; nowadays, it is because rapid firing easily leads to structural damage and calibration drift in precision sniper rifles. This is especially true for the Nekomata, a weapon that constantly requires meticulous maintenance.
Unlike the technological sniper rifle Nekomata, the Kenshin in Karl's hand was a pistol capable of continuous fire. The moment the first bullet left the barrel, the next one was already chambered.
"A head shouldn't be as hard as the body."
Clinging to this thought, Karl began to disperse the momentum of his fall.
Jumping down from a height, one must not simply roll, as the spine cannot endure it. The proper method is...
Recalling the instructions of Trauma Team from the braindance, Karl landed on the balls of his feet, followed immediately by his heels, then pitched forward, relaxing his body, bracing his hands against the ground, and using the rebound force of the knees to spring back up naturally.
Having completed this sequence of movements, Karl successfully shed most of the kinetic force from the high fall, though his entire body ached as if it were falling apart. Yet, he could not afford to stop.
When Karl fell from the heights, the attackers were momentarily caught off guard—or rather, they had left Karl to be dealt with by the sniper. But once Karl landed safely, even the dullest among them realized they needed to train their muzzles on him.
A human cannot outrun a bullet, or at least Karl could not do so yet, so he had never intended to run in the first place.
The attackers' weapons were clearly identified as Shingen. Smart weapons are wonderful, except for one small flaw: they require a lock-on before guided fire can commence.
Executing another roll, Karl ducked behind a car, feeling that his rolling technique was becoming increasingly practiced.
From his current hiding spot, now that the opposite apartment building had been cleared, no attackers could directly draw a bead on him. However, a car would certainly not hold out long as cover, so in this critical moment, Karl resorted to his ultimate trick.
"Help!"
Karl transmitted a plea for help to his companions over the comms.
And they did not disappoint him.
"I'm coming, Karl!"
Jackie burst directly out of the sniper's apartment building, using a corpse as a human shield.
"Jackie Welles is here!" he bellowed, drawing the attackers' attention.
Jackie remained the reliable teammate who could always take the brunt at the forefront to draw enemy fire.
The moment they laid eyes on Jackie, the attackers immediately pivoted their muzzles toward him.
Yet the bullets from their firearms, after piercing the corpse Jackie held before him, simply spent their kinetic energy against the surface layer of his subdermal armor.
Because smart pistols are so technologically dense, more than half of their internal volume is dedicated to smart-targeting hardware, leaving very little room for the mechanical components of the gun itself. This results in relatively poor penetration. While certain smart pistols can bypass obstacles to strike enemies behind them after precise lock-on and guidance, they fundamentally lack the raw power to punch through heavy defense.
In other words, Jackie could hold the line for a while.
It was only for a while, because they were still machine pistols; sustained volume of fire would eventually tear Jackie apart.
Fortunately, Jackie was not alone.
"Don't worry, you'll be fine, KK."
Mane actually emerged carrying a large, grooved stone slab as a shield. Bolstered by the two of them, the rest of the mercenaries—who had previously been pinned down by sniper fire and dared not raise their heads—seized the opportunity to launch a counterattack against the attackers, whose suppressive fire had begun to slacken.
"Don't underestimate us! Did you really think you'd be a match for us?!"
Mercenaries who had survived the blood and fire of the streets still possessed tactical acumen; they all recognized this as the prime window for counter-offensive.
"Without a rocket launcher and a sniper pinning us down, you thought you could trade blows with us using just your smart guns? As if!"
On the streets, there was a popular saying that was half-jealousy, half-truth:
"Only cowards who can't aim their gun barrels use smart weapons in a firefight."
Given the choice to use more powerful kinetic or tech weapons, who would ever use a smart gun?