How far can a normal person jump with a proper run-up? Around six meters—give or take, depending on how much chrome you've got in your legs. And the street Carl now faced? At least eighteen meters wide. Which meant one thing—he wasn't actually trying to jump across to the opposite apartment building. No. Carl was making himself a target. An unavoidable, mid-air silhouette, daring the sniper to fire. Inviting the bastard to recreate the same shot he'd made earlier—mid-air, precision-detonating a grenade with surgical ease.
Every sniper builds a memory of his trigger. Muscle memory. Conditioned reflex. Call it what you want, but the best of the best train until the rifle's grip becomes a limb, the scope an extension of the eye. They act not after thinking—but before. And Carl could tell, even before the barrel of the Nekomata rose—he was facing one of those top-tier shooters. Someone who moved faster than even their own neural feedback.
The barrel lifted. Same angle. Same height. The same instinct the sniper used to pop the grenade just minutes before.
Carl kept his altitude as close to the grenade's former arc as possible. Third floor height. He even slowed his draw—purposefully delaying his own shot. He could've fired first. He'd trained his draw to be faster. He had the edge. But if he fired, and the sniper fired, both rounds would land. Carl might hit the sniper. But the Nekomata would hit him back. One round from that tech beast and his torso would look like spoiled synthmeat.
So Carl gambled. Not on speed. But on prediction.
Same angle. Same line of fire. He just needed to fire where he knew the bullet would be. Not a one-in-a-billion miracle. Not some myth.
And yet... maybe it was.
In 1916's Gallipoli Campaign, there was a story—a miracle, they called it. Two bullets collided mid-air. A one-in-seventy-billion chance. Soldiers swore by it. Historians debated it. But it left behind a warped pair of fused lead rounds, now locked in a museum case somewhere across the Pacific.
But Carl wasn't banking on divine odds. He was aiming at a fixed target. A known point. A muzzle raised at a familiar elevation, waiting to be tested by death. For Carl, this wasn't one-in-seventy-billion. This was binary.
Fifty-fifty.
Hit or miss.
Live... or die.
Kenshin's first bullet left the chamber just as the Nekomata fired. And like steel and prophecy, the two rounds collided in the sniper's barrel. An instant roar of ruptured pressure turned the weapon's muzzle into shredded alloy. The gun flared wide like a peeled can. Metal screamed as it warped. Then came Carl's second bullet—piercing through the now-mangled barrel and punching clean through the sniper's armored helm.
Sniper rifles, especially ones like the Nekomata, weren't built for rapid fire. They needed maintenance. Precision calibration. Their accuracy depended on tight rifling and temperature control. Fire too fast, and even the best-made tech sniper becomes a liability. Not that the sniper would care now.
Carl's Kenshin, on the other hand, was a rapid-firing beast. A precision pistol made to put rounds on target in tight succession. As his second shot snapped out, Carl felt gravity drag at him again.
And then came the landing.
He didn't roll—rolling after a height drop like this would wreck your spine. Instead, he followed the protocol drilled into him during those trauma team simdreams: forefoot impact, heel next. Body angled forward, arms out, hands meeting pavement just before the knees dropped. He let the force ripple through him like a shockwave, then bounced into a low stance.
Pain spiked through his calves and lower back. But he didn't stop.
The moment he touched down, the attackers across the lot snapped out of their daze. Maybe they'd assumed the sniper had him. Maybe they just weren't expecting someone to leap across an open street like a gonzo stuntman on Black Lace. Either way, guns came up. Muzzles flashed.
Carl didn't run.
He didn't need to. Not yet.
The enemy all carried Shingen SMGs—Arasaka-made smart weapons.
[ARASAKA TKI-20 SHINGEN]
Japan's obsession with micro-mastery—bonsai, netsuke—meets Arasaka's lethal engineering. The Shingen crams armor-piercing chaos, smart-targeting rounds, and a reload speed faster than a katana strike into a chassis smaller than your ego. A palm-sized revolution that turns "compact" into a combat stratagem.
Their advantage? Lock-on targeting. Their weakness? They needed a second to lock. Carl gave them no time. He dove behind a nearby car, skidding along synth-asphalt as slugs sparked off fenders and cracked windshields. He was getting better at those rolls.
The car wouldn't last, though. Arasaka or not, even high-grade luxury chrome folds under sustained fire. He had to move. Fast.
That's when he tapped into comms.
"Need some backup!" Carl barked, half desperation, half strategy.
And his crew didn't disappoint.
"I'm here, Carl!" Jackie's voice punched through the comms like a shot of espresso.
From the direction of the building where the sniper had been, Jackie came barreling out—holding a corpse like a makeshift riot shield, pushing forward into the open. "¡Jackie Welles is comin' through, cabróns!" he bellowed, drawing every enemy eye.
The attackers shifted, redirecting fire. But their Shingens couldn't penetrate the limp body Jackie held up. Even after the bullets passed through dead flesh, they hit Jackie's subdermal armor and stopped cold. That armor had its limits—but Jackie wasn't going down easy.
Still, he couldn't hold forever.
That's when Maine entered the fray.
"Hang in there, KK. Got your back." He came charging in from cover with a damn slab of stone—looked like part of a broken sculpture—using it like a riot shield. Heavy. Crude. Effective. He hunkered behind it, absorbing bullets like a chromed bull charging a firing line.
With the distraction in full swing, other mercs began poking up from cover, returning fire. The sniper's suppression had been the keystone—without it, the attackers lost their edge.
"Don't underestimate us, bastards!" someone shouted.
"You think your chrome toys give you an edge?" another spat. "Without your rockets and your sniper, your smartguns ain't savin' you!"
Carl smirked behind his cover. Even amid chaos, there was something satisfying about seeing a desperate plan actually work.
On the streets of Night City, there was a saying—half insult, half bitter truth:
Only cowards who can't aim use smartguns.
And now, it was time those cowards learned what happened when the real killers pushed back.