The door opened, and Hatoyama dragged several large delivery boxes into the house with difficulty.
He knelt in front of the boxes and used scissors to cut open each one.
The first box was filled with sawed-off steel pipes, each forty centimeters long with a diameter of fifteen millimeters, cut directly from water pipes.
The second box contained pitch-black heavy-duty tape. He tore off a strip and pulled it hard; the tape barely changed shape.
The third box contained electric ignition devices. To prevent any one type from failing, he had ordered several kinds online in one go, buying a large pile of each.
The fourth box contained steel balls—the raw bearing-steel balls purchased from a bearing factory. The small packets of steel balls gleamed under the light.
The fifth box contained chemicals and raw materials for firework gunpowder. When ordering online, he had prepared identification proving he was a chemical laboratory worker, but the quantity he bought was probably small enough that he had managed to purchase them without even showing his credentials.
As he opened the boxes one by one and gathered all the raw materials, Hatoyama got to work. He bundled two steel pipes side by side with heavy-duty tape, added a toy-pistol grip, and attached the electric ignition device.
After a long while, the first prototype was finished.
Hatoyama held his creation up to the light and examined it.
It looked crude and rough. Cheap black tape wrapped around cheap steel pipes without the slightest aesthetic appeal, a short section of the electric ignition device's thin wire was still exposed, and the long wooden mounting frame beneath the barrels looked even more clumsy.
But it was still a Double-Barreled Pistol.
Toyama Medical headquarters.
At eight in the morning, the tide of employees surged through the