The gunshot rang out.
It was so crisp and clean that even the system's prompt stuttered and continued to surface for a second before reacting and getting stuck.
Ichijō Mirai was unfamiliar with shooting, really, but familiar with being shot at, and on the basic principle of having seen a pig run without having eaten it, the shot was taken quite seriously, aimed at the fat officer's forehead.
The bullet hit.
It hit the fat officer's left hand.
Ichijō Mirai: "..."
"I've seen a pig run before I've eaten it," he said in a serious voice, "I've seen too many cases of the police shooting at wall decorations to affect me."
The fat officer let out a scream, covered his left elbow, and fell backward, rolling over on the ground twice like an undefeated bird before belatedly reacting to the fact that he wasn't dead, only injured in his left hand where he'd just reached for his gun.
He got back on his knees as best he could with a full head of sweat, misinterpreting the message, thinking the shot was just a warning, "I didn't mean to resist when I just reached for the gun..."
Ichijō Mirai took a few steps forward to minimize one of the factors interfering with the hit by a few moments and fired again.
"Bang!"
The gunshot rang out again, and the bullet shot out once more, hitting the fat officer with precision.
The fat officer's abdomen.
The fat officer didn't scream out in pain this time, he curled up his body, transforming into a shrimp, and looked up again trembling, "I was wrong, accidentally shooting your mother in the first place shouldn't have gone off, she was only shot in the abdomen, if I..."
Ichijō Mirai took a few steps forward again and placed the muzzle of his gun against the fat officer's forehead, completely removing the distraction of distance.
The fat officer came to an abrupt halt.
He felt the sizzling heat coming from his forehead and saw that Ichijō Mirai's expression had finally changed, no longer a matter-of-fact look of some impatience at listening to bullshit and oozing murder.
A slight, but really rare murderous aura.
"Boom!"
Ichijō Mirai fired his gun, ending the fat officer's life with a single bullet, successfully carrying out the extermination.
He withdrew his gun and said seriously, "Well, one shot kill, not bad."
Never mind the two inconsequential shots in front, just tell me if it was a one-shot kill at the end.jpg.
System: ...
[Detected that the mission 'Finding the Target Person' has been completed, congratulations on getting Low-level Painkillers +3 tablets, Membership in Unknown Organization +1, and Funds +100].
And the most important reward of all: [Archive Function].
Ichijō Mirai scanned over the prompts, his vision fixed.
Without waiting to inquire about exactly how to archive and exercise the player's fine tradition of virtue of caution, immediately archiving a wave, another system prompt popped up one after another.
[When law and justice fail to bring justice, you are justice,] it popped up the prompt for option B slowly, [Congratulations on unlocking the new title [Motherland is Calling].]
Prompts with details of the title popped up in turn.
['Motherland is Calling': You have taken up your mother's sword, and her determination].
The gains were: [Shock +10, with a certain probability of directly crushing the enemy.]
[Mental Stability +10, whoever looks at you will unconsciously feel a certain amount of conviction, and won't care too much about some of your normal actions].
There is also a gain that requires a prerequisite: [Leader: You possess great persuasive power, and others will try to protect you.]
[Notes. This effect requires you to have a certain position in any organization].
'Motherland is Calling'?
The name was somewhat familiar to Ichijō Mirai, and he reacted for a moment, finding familiarity: it was the name of a statue.
It was a statue located in Russia, the largest statue in the world, and had considerable significance, representing victory, remembrance, and vengeance.
System prompt: [You made a choice without any hesitation, and decisively took up the murder weapon to avenge your parents, triggering the CG [Motherland is Calling], which will be automatically played when you log in next time.]
Another prompt again: [The tutorial level has been completed, congratulations on becoming a full-fledged player.]
[[Archiving Function] Assembly in progress, remaining assembly time: 2 hours, 59 minutes, 57 seconds.]
The game pod opens, and Ichijō Mirai opens his eyes and emerges from the egg-shaped game pod.
The egg-shaped game pod was almost filled with a light blue liquid, thicker than water and thinner than blood, like the nutrient solution that appeared in novels and holographic games, able to slowly replenish the nutrients needed by the human body while the player was immersed in playing the game, in order to extend the maximum playable time.
Ichijō Mirai closes the gaming pod, and instead of focusing first on the wet clothes he's wearing, he covers the back of his neck and goes to scan the bathroom.
The bathroom looked new, the toilet, sink, shower, and tub all newly installed, with some uncollected boxes stacked in the corner, and a layer of film on the mirror that hadn't been torn off yet.
It looked as if the owner had only recently moved in, and indeed he had, as Ichijō Mirai had woken up to an auntie named Ishida who had said, 'You just came to see me the day before yesterday'.
But that's not the point, Ichijō Mirai tore off a layer of the mirror's film and looked into it.
The person in the mirror had a slender build, hair a bit wet and messy, and appeared to be about five-foot-eight, twenty-four to twenty-six at the most, his face had matured, the lines had lost the childishness of his youth and were only clean and sharp, and the most noticeable thing was those eyes.
The most striking thing was those eyes. They were red, like blood.
Ichijō Mirai's eyes fell on his face in the mirror, and settled for a few moments: it was his own face.
Unsurprisingly, though, he had surmised something when he heard a familiar voice in the game: he hadn't been resurrected from the dead over the fresh corpse of a stranger but in his own body.
A self that was the same as himself in height, appearance, voice, etc., only living in a world with differences.
This world is a bit more advanced, featuring holographic games that only appear in sci-fi movies.
Only, when logging into the game...
Ichijō Mirai recalled the sudden tingling he felt in the back of his neck when he logged into the game, and raised his hand to the back of his neck, frowning when he felt a slight difference from normal skin.
He turned sideways and looked into the mirror for a moment, noticing a small, fresh wound on the back of his neck that was several times larger than the eye of a needle.
Around the time of the injury, he hadn't wiped the blood in time, and the wound was so small that the blood had coagulated and stopped at the wound, so that an outsider scanning over it without paying too much attention would only think it was a red mole.
Ichijō Mirai frowned and rubbed his finger several times to make sure that there was only a small wound and no foreign body sensation before he lowered his hand and went to explore the unfamiliar bedroom.
The bedroom hadn't changed, Ishida Eiko hadn't helped clean it up, the covers were still on the floor, and a few scattered white pills were lying bright and early on the floor without being covered.
Compared with the wound on the back of the neck, which cannot be examined in detail with bare hands, there is one more obvious problem: "Aunt Ishida seems to be..."
"A little afraid of me."