The red paint exploded.
Ichijō Mirai's forehead felt the coolness of the splash, which quickly snaked down the muzzle, the coolness of water.
It wasn't the flowing texture of ink, but rather the solid pigment added to the water, the ratio of water to pigment was about 70/30.
Even though Ichijō Mirai held the muzzle of the gun to his forehead when he fired, when the bullet exploded, most of the pigmented water seeped out and flowed downward like blood.
Because it was red, it looked a little scary, like a horror movie where a roadrunner NPC gets shot in the head.
It should have hurt.
But Ichijō Mirai didn't feel any pain, only impact and resistance, and he put the gun down thoughtfully, trying to determine how painful this level of impact would be for an ordinary person.
Another smooth lick of the runny pigment water, instantly frowning, "Bitter."
There was a subtle odor spreading in the air.
There was the pungent scent of paint, but not only that, there was also a sweet odor similar to blood plasma, and when Ichijō Mirai moved the muzzle of the gun, a thicker liquid gushed out of the muzzle of the gun, and slowly flowed downward along the area where the paint water flowed through.
It was plasma.
Amidst the pungent smell of paint and plasma, there was a minty aroma.
The scent was not strong, but faint enough that Ichijō Mirai might not have been able to smell it if the paint water had not been so close to him.
He reached up and dipped his finger into the plasma on his forehead and tasted it again, his brow furrowing even further, "Chocolate flavor."
"...Fraud."
It smelled sweet, but tasted bitter!
And, "Bad perfume."
In addition to the taste of pigment water, which adds to the bitterness, and the rich and complex taste, which becomes more and more unpalatable, there's also the taste of bad perfume, which is also bitter.
Bitterness on top of bitterness.
Ichijō Mirai's judgment: a very poorly pigmented bullet.
He sighed in disappointment, casually opened the magazine to check it, scanned the number of bullets in it, slapped it back on, and greeted him without looking back, "You're here, do you have any paper or handkerchiefs?"
The paint was a little sticky.
The paint was a bit sticky. It was a sticky mixture of complex odors, and bitter, and Ichijō Mirai was a bit upset.
He looked toward the entrance of the shooting range.
The police officer who had just blurted out his surprise, who had been too late in showing the way, and who had had to resent his partner for bringing Ichijō Mirai in, was coming in, still happy, with a couple of police cadets in tow.
But that joy was now frozen on his face, his body froze, maintaining a movement of walking while trying to open his mouth to shout, staring blankly at the blood-colored Ichijō Mirai.
Ichijō Mirai thought for a moment and gave him a smile.
The police officer's eyes wavered, the whites of his eyes rolled over a few times like shaking bean curd, and his face turned white as if he had been smeared with a layer of grayish-white paint.
However, he didn't faint, and after meeting Ichijō Mirai's eyes, he took a deep breath and stood up shakily, "Me, Messiah-san."
"Are you testing paint bullets?"
"These weapons were purchased during an army exercise a long time ago, so much time has passed that the quality is a bit poor and unstable."
With a deep breath, the police officer barely regained some semblance of normalcy on his face, and apologized, "Excuse me."
The officer who had brought Ichijō Mirai was also in shock, not having expected someone to dislike a gun on his forehead, even if it was a fake one.
He looked at the gun in Ichijō Mirai's hand with a sense of shock, "Messiah-san, you, you..."
There was a pause as the police officer thought about Ichijō Mirai's crisp, unblinking shooting and swallowed all his words in awe and fear.
He turned to his companion, who was even more unlucky than he was, having been exposed to a horror movie scene as soon as he walked in the door, and wondered, "Hey, aren't you blood-sick? How come you didn't pass out on the spot?"
Then he looked at the police cadets behind his partner, "Are you Messiah's chosen companions?"
"Weapons are here, please select them, if there are any that you want that are not on the table, I will look for them in the vault, if they are not in the vault, I will report them."
The attitude of the police officer was warm, not like a police officer, but like a service person.
As if they were warmed up, the figure at the entrance of the shooting range shifted a few times, and Matsuda Jinpei walked quickly to the table, frowning with a bad face, "Hey!"
"What are you doing?!"
He reached for the gun, his brow still furrowed, "Are you crazy?"
"A paint gun isn't meant to be used directly to the head, didn't you hear what the instructor said!"
Matsuda Jinpei was a police academy student, but not one who specialized in martial arts from a young age, Ichijō Mirai spun the gun and threw it to his other hand, easily dodging it, "I heard you,"
"That's why I wanted to test it, to see how deadly the pigment bullets are."
He casually spun the gun and pointed it at Matsuda Jinpei's forehead, "But it was a mistake..."
Without feeling the pain, it was impossible to estimate the lethality of the gun on an ordinary person, a police officer without body armor, or a police officer with body armor.
"Try it."
Ichijō Mirai carelessly mimics the sound of a gunshot, "Boom."
He pulled the trigger and fired.
The sound of the gunshot was almost identical to the real one, "Boom!"
As the two gunshots overlapped, Matsuda Jinpei's pupils dilated, and he closed his eyes, receiving a faceful of red paint, as if he had been hit in the face with a rose from a rose magic gun.
"Not against the forehead," Ichijō Mirai said briefly, "you'd have surrendered,"
"Well, it didn't hurt, did it?"
Matsuda Jinpei: "..."
The Painkillers were still in effect, so of course he felt no pain!
But that doesn't mean that paint bullets are harmless and can be shot with the muzzle of a gun pressed against the forehead, but they're more dangerous.
Humans don't feel pain, so they can't accurately estimate the extent of their injuries.
Matsuda Jinpei opened his eyes for a moment, then immediately closed them again, shook his head to get rid of the paint on his eyes, and gritted his teeth a little, "You bastard..."
"Couldn't you have said something in advance?!"
Ichijō Mirai: "..."
Isn't that a load of crap?
Matsuda Jinpei doesn't shoot with the gun pressed against his forehead because he'll instinctively disarm, and he shoots without warning because he'll instinctively dodge the bullet.
Matsuda Jinpei understood that, and that's why he gritted his teeth even more.
"Uh-huh, uh-huh," Ichijō Mirai responded perfunctorily, casually nudging Matsuda Jinpei's shoulder to turn him to face the rest of the class, and whispering, "We don't feel any pain, and that's dangerous, what if it's pain that's too much for a normal person to bear?"
No one meant to pass a handkerchief or paper, so he obediently lowered his head, naturally wiped his face a few times with Matsuda Jinpei's shoulder, raised his head even more naturally, pretended he didn't use his classmates as towels, and said in all seriousness, "We're going to pick another unlucky person who's willing to try it."
And picking the toughest one, "Morofushi-san, please come over here."
Morofushi Hiromitsu was supposed to be in the front.
He was walking a bit faster than the police officer who was leading the way, but the moment he saw the situation inside the shooting range, he stopped and didn't take another step forward.
The police officer who was leading the way and the others who had subconsciously taken a few steps forward to stop them, but realized that the guns were not real, passed them and left them almost at the end of the line, with almost no presence at all.
Ichijō Mirai didn't look back before, but he could tell by the sound of his footsteps.
Morofushi Hiromitsu stepped out from the back of the crowd at the sound of his name being called, and his expression was unchanged, with none of the subconscious frowns that the others had, except that he wasn't smiling any more, which was much better than the others whose faces were a bit hard to see.
His footsteps were steady, heavier than usual, and he walked steadily to Ichijō Mirai, reaching for the gun, "Doesn't it hurt?"
"Haven't you already tested it?"
Morofushi Hiromitsu's eyes passed over Matsuda Jinpei, who had a somewhat depressed expression on his face, and he didn't find any reaction of pain, then he dropped his eyes to Ichijō Mirai's face, and he didn't find any expression of pain either.
All he found was a dirty face, and a face that had been scrubbed a few times, barely less dirty, but more blood-scrubbed.
Ichijō Mirai handed the gun over, casually stating a reasonable explanation, "When robbing a bank, we're going to be going after the general public 100% of the time, and as the red side, we need to know exactly how powerful the bullets coming out of these guns are."
Before Morofushi Hiromitsu's hand receives the gun, but he spins the gun and moves away a bit, "Can you?"
"Shall I help you?"
Not everyone has the courage to shoot himself, even with a fake gun.
Many people would hesitate for a moment before pulling the trigger on an unloaded toy gun, let alone a paint-bullet gun that looked almost exactly like a real gun, only with different bullets.
Morofushi Hiromitsu's fingertips brushed against the grip of the gun, but failed to grab it.
He sighed, still looking calm, not looking at Ichijō Mirai, "No, I'll do it."
With that, he held Ichijō Mirai down with one hand and took the gun with the other.
It was a police pistol with a magazine that could hold seven bullets at a time, and there were still five bullets in it.
Morofushi Hiromitsu checked it briefly, raised the pistol, and raised his eyes to meet Ichijō Mirai's. He put the muzzle of the gun against his own.
He placed the muzzle of the gun against his forehead, calmly, breathing steadily, without a single tremor in his fingers, seemingly unconcerned with the pistol loaded with pigmented bullets, not as if he was 'shooting himself in the foot', but as if he was aiming the gun at Ichijō Mirai.
Ichijō Mirai raised his eyebrows.
That's what it looks like.
But in 'Disguised Criminal', he was emotionally unstable after accidentally shooting an enemy in the head.
Sniper rifles are different from handguns in that the range of the latter is so short that when a shot is fired, the shooter can clearly see the blood splattering out of the victim, die incredulously, and perhaps hear the gasping breaths and see tears in the eyes of the shooter.
But in the former case, because the distance is too great, everything can only be contained in a small lens, just a little avert your eyes, you can indifferently miss the death of a human being, not to mention the sound of struggle and the possible existence of the sound of survival.
There's a difference between seeing a humanoid struggling, even if you don't look away, and seeing a human being die right in front of you.
Even a sniper's rifle kills an enemy in one shot, let alone pointing it at you.
If it's really clean...
Ichijō Mirai and Morofushi Hiromitsu stare at each other.
In the unknown seconds of their silent stare, Morofushi Hiromitsu coldly pulled the trigger.
"Boom!"
Red paint exploded and snaked down the muzzle of the gun.
Even before the gunshot, Morofushi Hiromitsu frowned, he lowered the pistol, wiped off the thinner paint water with his sleeve, and wiped off the somewhat thicker plasma portion, and didn't say anything at first, slowing down for a few seconds before he said, "No way."
His brow was furrowed, "We can't shoot other people in the forehead when we're on the move," he said.
"The impact was so great that it was like the sharp part of the back of a knife had struck the forehead, and the whole head seemed to vibrate with a buzz,"
"It's okay if it's a police officer wearing a helmet, but not an innocent hostage."
The average person without specialized training can't tolerate this kind of pain.
And what's more, it's not toughness, it's the fact that the average person's body can't handle being shot in the head with a paintball gun.
If they were unlucky, one shot would send them to the hospital with a concussion.
Morofushi Hiromitsu looked to Matsuda Jinpei and Ichijō Mirai, "Are you dizzy?"
Matsuda Jinpei was a bit surprised and incredulous.
Partly because Morofushi Hiromitsu was so determined, and partly because, "You actually listened to this guy?"
He casually wiped away the sticky red water that was blocking his view, "This guy has a lot of bad taste."
Aren't you afraid that you're being seriously teased?
Morofushi Hiromitsu replies, "If it were you, would you shoot?"
Matsuda Jinpei: "..."
Yes.
Maybe not so decisively, maybe he would have glared at Ichijō Mirai a few times before shooting, suspiciously threatening, but he would have done as he was told and shot.
Ichijō Mirai got the answer from Matsuda Jinpei's abrupt silence, and he was even more surprised: Huh, so these two students are so good?
They could shoot themselves if they were given a good reason to do so?
"Good boy," he said, taking the gun from Morofushi Hiromitsu's hand and tossing it to Date Wataru, "Your turn, Date-san."
"Please shoot two knuckles from your forehead."
"Is that okay?"
Yes.
Date Wataru hesitated for only two or three seconds before firing.
When he fired, his expression struggled, but his hand was firm.
The bullet hit his forehead, splattering red paint.
Perhaps because of the distance this time, there was plenty of room, and the red liquid wasn't thin or thick, but more balanced.
Wataru Date frowned, "...I don't think it's quite right, should we go further?"
I can't believe he's actually doing what he's told.
There's a difference between 'Shoot yourself' and 'Step forward three paces, crouch halfway down, wait for the shot, 3, 2, 1, shoot'.
Ichijō Mirai wiped the paint off his face with Matsuda Jinpei's other clean shoulder, pretended not to hear the protests of his wounded black towel classmate, and eagerly named him, "Furuya-san?"
"One finger, okay?"
Wataru Date handed over the gun, Furuya Rei took it, pointed it at his forehead, and fired when the distance between the muzzle and his forehead was about one finger, "Boom!"
He subconsciously closed his eyes, then frowned and wiped off the paint, thought hard for a moment, and said succinctly, "No, it needs to be farther away."
Ichijō Mirai again called out, "Kenji-san,"
"One hand, okay?"