Kira's eyes remained fixed, unmoving even after the loud sound of the gunshot fired at her head with only a few inches gap.
She had already accepted death the moment the assassins had occupied the amusement park. Her heart was empty, but she wasn't feeling like she was stripped of everything. If she died now, it meant that Vexis the solo assassin would have no business with her family again.
Sacrificing herself to save her entire family was what she deemed as bravery. Not a pointless death.
The wind had stopped blowing, leaving an eerie stillness. Even the distant screams of fleeing customers had faded to nothing, as if the world itself was holding its breath. Kira could hear her own heartbeat thundering in her ears.
'What a strange feeling,' she thought, 'waiting to die while wearing a bunny costume.'
If someone had told her a week ago that she'd meet her end dressed as a cartoon rabbit surrounded by trained killers, she would have laughed until her sides hurt.
The world could be so unpredictable sometimes.
Bang!
The gunshot resounded through the silent amusement park, carrying finality as the gun smoked from the shot it had delivered, creating a haunting echo that seemed to go on forever.
Kira remained standing, unmoved. This was not much of a big deal and was quite a common sight for assassins.
'Those who cling to life so much do not always fall instantly after being killed,' he thought as he retracted his gun into his jacket. 'They always need a moment.'
But something nagged at him.
As he took a few steps, he halted before exiting the podium, frozen in his tracks. He had already finished with Kira, or so he had assumed just now, until something flashed through his mind.
Something that had happened within the brief moment when his bullet traveled through the air, something so subtle his mind had chosen to ignore.
Of course, he couldn't possibly see a bullet moving—no human could, after all. However, he had developed an assassin's instinct over years of killing, and that instinct was screaming that something was wrong.
A tiny metallic "ping" in the millisecond after the gunshot.
'What the hell was that sound?'
Turning around, he glanced at Kira, who was still standing like a statue. The moment his eyes scanned her forehead, he truly realized his hunch wasn't just paranoia.
It was real.
There was no hole in Kira's head where the bullet should have pierced through—as a matter of fact, she was perfectly fine. Not a single drop of blood, not even a scratch on the ridiculous bunny ears of her costume.
"What did you do?" he muttered with widened eyes, his voice carrying a surprise he hadn't felt in years. "How are y—"
*Vwoom!*
The sound of a motorcycle engine roared from somewhere to their left as the rider twisted the throttle in a way that made the machine growl aggressively.
As Kira turned toward the sound, a sleek black motorcycle flashed past her, its rider hunched low over the handlebars. The bike's engine grew in pitch as it decelerated, and she caught a glimpse of the rider's face.
Of everyone in this nightmare scenario, it was the very man who had taken her as a hostage.
The one they called Vexis, the solo assassin.
"You're here," she muttered in bewilderment, her voice barely audible through the bunny head she was still wearing. "How are you here?"
"With the bike, obviously," Vexis spoke dismissively as he brought the motorcycle to a controlled stop.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a dagger, tossing it nonchalantly from hand to hand like it was a simple coin. "You should ask why I'm here."
But before she could respond, the assassin leader's voice cut through the air with renewed anger.
"Vexis!" The man's composure shifted to something that would be best referred to as a mixture of respect and malice. "So it is you after all."
Instantly, with military precision, all the assassins scattered across the field quickly readied their guns, the clicking and snapping of safeties filling the air. Every barrel was now pointing at Vexis, creating a constellation of deadly intent with him at the center.
"I really thought you had slipped right through our fingers, but I guess my assumption was wrong, Vexis," the leader continued, his confidence returning now that he had backup. "You're dumber than I could ever imagine—"
"How long would it take you to die?" Vexis interrupted with a pout, like a bored child.
He reached down and picked up another dagger from the ground right next to Kira and began examining its dented tip with piqued interest.
'When had that gotten there?'
The casual nature of Vexis sent a chill down the spines of everyone present, even though they felt like they had him cornered. Here was a man surrounded by at least twenty trained assassins, all with guns pointed at him, and he was acting like it was no big deal.
"So I was right all along," the assassin leader said, his voice gaining strength as he pieced together what had happened. "Something truly did deflect the bullet I aimed, and it was your dagger, you—"
"Enough." Vexis's voice cut through the air like a blade, and he began scraping both daggers together, sending sparks flying in the air. "You speak too much for an assassin, and now you're making me talkative."
"I can assure you, your assumption was right about people not dying too quickly if they were clinging to life too hard," Vexis continued conversationally.
Vexis then made a casual gesture toward the man's chest with his dagger with the dented tip he had picked up from the ground of the podium.
The assassin leader, with his gun still pointing at them, slowly turned his gaze downward toward his chest. It was only then that he realized what had happened.
*Thwack*
Blood spilled from his mouth in a rush, spraying across the ground. As his eyes focused on his chest, he saw the neat, round hole that the bullet—his bullet, the one that was supposed to have drilled into Kira's head—had somehow drilled into his own torso instead.
"What the hell!" he exclaimed, his hand trembling as he tried to process the impossible. The gun fell from his trembling fingers, clattering against the wooden platform of the stage.
Kira watched in horrified fascination as the man who had been ready to execute her moments ago now stood swaying, his blood pooling at his feet.
Part of her felt she should be horrified, but mostly she just felt numbness in her emotions. After everything that had happened today, her capacity for shock seemed to have reached its limit.
"I'll explain everything before you die," Vexis said patiently. "Don't bother with stupid questions."
"You see," Vexis continued, still casually tossing both daggers this time, exchanging them like he was juggling. "Just as you were about to pull the trigger, I threw my dagger between the bullet's trajectory and this lady's head."
"With proper calculation, it didn't simply protect her from the bullet—it deflected the bullet back to you," Vexis went on, then raised the dagger with the dented tip as evidence.
"You are already a dead man," Vexis concluded with mock sympathy. "You are simply clinging to life too tightly; that's why you are still not completely gone after being killed. I wish I felt sorry for you."
"You..." More blood spilled from the leader's mouth as he glared at Vexis with fury. His legs began to shake, and Kira could see him fighting to remain upright through sheer force of will.
With tremendous effort, he raised his hand to a small device in his ear—something that looked exactly like the Shadowbud that Kira still wore. His voice came out raspy, but it carried clearly across the silent amusement park.
"Riflemen," he screamed into the device, spraying blood droplets with each word.
Kira's eyes went wide as she remembered the red laser dots that had been on her body earlier. She had completely forgotten about the snipers in all the chaos.
Her head moved frantically, searching the rooflines and elevated positions around the park for any sign of the hidden assassins, however...
"Fire!" the assassin leader completed his order, then stood waiting with his last breaths for the inevitable rain of bullets that would end both Vexis and his hostage.
...
...
Nothing happened.
"What do you think I've been doing all this time since I left the amusement park?" Vexis asked with a yawn, his tone sounding like this whole situation was becoming boring for him. He walked over to Kira and began unzipping her bunny costume casually.
"I never actually left," he continued, his hands working at the costume's fastenings. "I simply moved to your blind spots and took down those riflemen who would have been a pain in the ass."
As the ridiculous bunny costume came off, Kira felt the cool evening air hit her sweating body. For the first time in hours, she was taking her first fresh, unobstructed breath.
Looking around, she quickly realized that Vexis wasn't bluffing. The red laser dots that had been painting her body like a deadly light display were gone. Every last one of them had been extinguished.
'How many snipers had there been?' she wondered. 'And how long would it take to hunt them all down from multiple different vantage points?'
It was all hard to believe. While she had been standing here accepting her fate, while the assassin leader had been gloating and the ground team had been positioning themselves, Vexis had been systematically eliminating an unknown number of hidden riflemen and marksmen.
The assassin leader fell to his knees, his vision going blurry as he pointed his gun at Vexis with a trembling hand and his last bit of consciousness.
"This is your chance, children," Kira spoke desperately to the kids who were still clinging to her legs, but managed to force a smile that she hoped was reassuring. "Run to the exit now!"
However, the children were too scared to move. They had witnessed true violence firsthand, heard gunshots and seen blood, and their young minds had simply shut down in the face of trauma no child should ever experience.
Kira sighed deeply and knelt down, wrapping all six children in her arms at once. The bunny costume's padding that was separate from the costume made her movements awkward, but she managed to gather them close.
"I promise you," she said softly, her voice taking on a gentle tone, "we're making a new hero movie. Go get some popcorn from your parents—you'll watch me on your TV at home, I promise."
It was a desperate lie, but sometimes lies were kinder than truth.
The children's eyes finally began to gleam with something other than fear. Kira's conviction, her absolute certainty that they would all be watching her heroic shows from the safety of their living rooms, was successfully changing their mindset.
Children wanted to believe in happy endings like every other kids' show, and she was giving them permission to do so.
"Do you promise us?" one of the little girls asked, her voice small and hopeful.
"You have my word, little girl," Kira replied with the most assuring tone she could muster at the moment. "The word of a hero."
The children all nodded and, with the remarkable resilience that only the very young possess, began to scurry away toward the park exits.
Just as Kira had gambled, the assassins surrounding the field didn't pay the children any attention. To professional killers, civilians—especially small ones—were not worth their time unless they were tasked to murder them.
'What a relief,' she thought, watching their small forms disappear from her sight.
"We were given the request to restrain you and bring you back to the Elite Assassin Organization alive..." the dying leader began, his voice growing weaker with each word.
His hand pressed against his bloodstained chest, trying futilely to stem the flow of life from his body as he continued.
"But I'm going to die either way, so what's the point of refraining from killing you?" the man continued, his voice gaining a manic edge that suggested his brain was starting to shut down from blood loss.
He raised another gun he had pulled out from his jacket with tremendous effort, the barrel wavering as he tried to aim at Vexis's torso but then—
*Thud.*
The assassin leader fell to the ground face-first, finally dead. His second gun clattered across the wooden platform, joining the first one.
"If you had pulled the trigger instead of spouting nonsense, you would have stood a chance of taking me down," Vexis said, approaching the body with a casual pace. "However, you died while talking."
He knelt beside the corpse and, in a gesture that seemed genuinely compassionate, reached out to close the dead man's eyes.
"Rest in hell, amateur," he said quietly.
The moment of peace lasted exactly three seconds.
*Bang.*
Vexis tilted his head just an inch to the side with the fluid grace of someone who had done this exact movement a thousand times before. Almost immediately after, a bullet whizzed past his ear, so close that it displaced the air next to it.
One of the assassins among the group that had circled the podium—a young man who looked barely out of his teens—had finally decided to make a move. His face was twisted with rage and grief, and his gun was smoking from the shot he had just fired.
"Hey, peasant!" Vexis called out to the shooter, his tone carrying the kind of casual disrespect that was purposely meant to provoke. "You're not supposed to kill me. Did you forget your orders?"
"You killed our squad leader!" the young assassin screamed, his voice cracking with emotion. "I don't think we'll be following orders anymore, screw it!"
The declaration seemed to infect the other assassins. One by one, their faces hardened with resolve, and Kira could see the exact moment when they collectively decided to throw their mission goals out the window.
"We don't care about the bounty anymore!" another assassin shouted, his voice echoing with equal rage.
All the assassins in the field, at that moment, were inclined to agree with their colleague's words.
Simultaneously, they pulled back the hammers on their guns with a series of metallic clicks, and then aimed every barrel at Vexis.
A smile crept across Vexis's face as he gently stretched his hand toward Kira's. "Ready to dance?"
"Follow my instructions and you won't die," he added, his fingers intertwining with hers.
His hand was surprisingly warm and steady as a rock as Kira offered him hers. There was no tremor of fear or excitement—just the calm confidence he had always possessed, even in the face of a pack of angry men armed with guns.
"Die!" The assassins screamed and they all opened fire at the same time.
Twenty guns fired in a barrage.
The bullets, which were clearly too fast for Vexis or any other human to trace with their eyes, sliced through the air with deadly intent. Twenty separate trajectories with different firing times, all converging on the exact spot where Vexis stood.
However, Vexis's confident smile suddenly shifted—it shifted into a cold smile at the corner of his lips. He was still acting like the predator even though he seemed like prey.
"Collapse!" came his first order to Kira.