Once I had agreed to the match with Shiro-san, I looked for a place where we wouldn’t be in anyone's way and stood by for the start.
Still, this version of target practice felt completely different from the one I knew... Wait, hold on. If I remember correctly, didn't Tre-san play a game called target practice during the White God Festival? How did that work?
I tilted my head, puzzled by the contradiction, but then I remembered my conversation with her.
—You’re really good at target practice. Do you play often?
—No, this was my first time, but aren't I amazing? I'm incredibly good at "this."
...Ah, she never actually said it. Tre-san didn't use the word "target practice" once. She has incredibly sharp intuition, so when I spoke to her, she probably just assumed that "target practice" was what people called that game in the other world and decided not to question my choice of words.
There likely were games similar to the target practice I was familiar with, but they probably went by different names, like Ring Target.
"We will begin in thirty seconds. Please do your best to reach a high score before time runs out!"
Just as I reached a satisfying conclusion to my wandering thoughts, the start of the game drew near. I had done some shooting in video games before, but I wondered what this would actually feel like.
The moment that thought crossed my mind, the scenery shifted. Suddenly, I was high in the air. Whoa—this was incredible. I even felt a genuine sensation of floating. I could tell there was a floor beneath me when I took a step, but since it was completely invisible and I could feel the rush of the wind, the feeling of being suspended in mid-air was incredibly convincing.
My awe at the mysterious sensation was short-lived, as targets immediately began appearing all over the sky. Perhaps because this was the "adjusted version" intended for children, they were quite large and didn't move very fast. Aiming didn't seem like it would be a problem, but I was curious about how the weapon would feel.
I looked down at my hand and realized the simple block of wood had transformed into a sleek, sci-fi-style handgun. For a test, I aimed at a nearby target and pulled the trigger. A magic bullet shot out at a decent speed and struck the 70-point ring.
It flew perfectly straight without any recoil or wobbling. I felt like I could do pretty well with this.
"Then, I shall begin as well..."
With a soft murmur, Shiro-san leveled her gun with casual ease and pulled the trigger. The bullet she fired was drawn in as if by a vacuum, cleanly striking the dead center of the 50-point mark.
Yeah, that made sense. I never expected her to miss. For her, this was only natural. However, the conditions were in my favor—I already had a twenty-point lead, and I intended to keep that momentum going.
With that in mind, I began firing at one target after another... but it didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped. Even though the targets were large and slow, making them easy to hit, their movements were completely random. They would jerk in strange directions without warning. Even when I aimed for a high-score spot, the target would shift at the last second, causing me to hit a lower-point ring. Stacking up points exactly as I wanted was proving difficult.
While Shiro-san was drilling the 50-point mark with mechanical precision, my own hits were all over the place. Moreover, since the targets were so frequent, the points racked up rapidly. Midway through, I completely lost track of what my total score even was.
Based on the ratio, however, it felt like the match was neck-and-neck.
Shiro-san continued to fire away with her usual expressionless face, but I could tell she was actually having quite a bit of fun. She was always surprisingly enthusiastic about joining in these kinds of games, and since I had become quite good at reading her subtle emotional shifts, her enjoyment was contagious. I found myself smiling as well.
At the very least, an opportunity to compete with Shiro-san like this was rare, so I decided to savor every moment of it.
After we had been shooting for a while, a voice announced "one minute remaining," signaling the final stretch. My hits were still hovering around a fifty-point average, making it impossible to guess how the match would end.
"Ten seconds left!"
Thinking this would be my final shot, I pulled the trigger. Shiro-san fired almost simultaneously. But in that instant, I felt a strange sense of incongruity.
It was hard to put into words—perhaps it was just intuition—but I felt like something was "off."
As if to confirm my suspicion, my magic bullet slammed right into the 50-point mark, while Shiro-san’s shot struck the 30-point ring.
"...Eh?"
The sound escaped my lips before I could stop it. Shiro-san hit the thirty-point mark instead of the fifty? She missed? No, that was impossible. It would be one thing if it were me, but for Shiro-san, this was less than child's play. There wasn't even a one-in-a-billion chance she would miss her intended mark.
In that case, did she hit the thirty-point ring on purpose? But why?
While I struggled to make sense of it, glowing numbers flickered into existence before me. They looked like the characters used in Hummingbird messages, displaying our total scores for the round. The same numbers appeared in front of Shiro-san, revealing the final results... I had won by ten points.
While I stood there, stunned by the unexpected outcome, Shiro-san turned to me with a mischievous, satisfied smile.
Serious-senpai: "So this went exactly as Shiro intended?"
???: "It seems she played it straight until that very last shot, where she threw it on purpose. Well, for Shallow Vernal-sama, any outcome would have been 'delicious' anyway."