I'll Assist in Combat

"I don't recall issuing an order to act."

"My deepest apologies, my lord. At the time, we judged it to be the best opportunity." The agent reporting while retreating sounded tense. He desperately hoped to earn Lord Akechi's forgiveness.

"Our original plan was to precisely strike the suspected Militech contact in the mediastinum—being hit there would immediately render them unable to act without killing them on the spot, while making it look as though their heart had been hit. We calculated that after creating the illusion that the contact was dead within Militech's line of sight, we could capture the target amid the chaos—the target who might possess intelligence on the New American President."

The agent swallowed. "But we never expected that Militech commander to react so sharply. The instant before our sniper pulled the trigger, he moved to evade as if he had foreseen the danger, allowing the target we should have hit to dodge the shot. That was completely beyond the tactical projection. To avoid injuring the target and cutting off the intelligence, we were forced to cease fire."

Militech captain Yarman had completely misjudged the situation.

The reason the Arasaka agents had fired only one shot was neither to leave themselves an escape route nor because they feared the sentries he had deployed—their objective had never been to kill the contact.

If only five Arasaka agents dared to tail Yarman's elite squad of thirty, why would they care about those obvious sentries?

A living contact was an invaluable source of intelligence worth fighting over, but a corpse was meaningless.

When deaths occurred, preserving themselves was the better choice—this was the Arasaka agents' operational logic.

Their plan had been laid out in an orderly fashion, and the predetermined chaos gave it a high chance of success.

By creating