MM Racing Chapter 39: Headshot - The Mission Ends, But the Beginning is Yet to Come.
Chapter 39: Headshot - The Mission Ends, But the Beginning is Yet to Come.
In the early morning, the air in Central Park still carried the dampness from the rain that had evaporated the night before.
Several people wearing tight-fitting sportswear were jogging slowly on the lakeside trail.
The exhaust fumes and the roar of air conditioning units in Manhattan are blocked by the tree canopy.
This place can be considered one of the few remaining oases in the steel jungle.
Li En walked slowly along the gravel path at the edge of the sheep meadow, his hands in his pockets.
This was his first time in Central Park; he had only seen its outline on a police station's territorial map before.
A rectangular green block, wedged between Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue, is cut into several sections by streets that run through it from north to south.
He roughly estimated that the park was quite large, equivalent to about six hundred standard football fields.
The central sheep meadow was too spacious, with no shelter on any side and not even a single tree to climb.
Setting up guns in this area is like laying yourself out on the ground for everyone to see.
He turned south and walked toward 65th Street.
Near the main street, a children's playground emerged from behind the tree canopy.
The carousel's canopy is painted with red and white stripes, and a dozen or so wooden horses hang on the rusty turntable, their heads upturned and their front hooves dangling in the air.
Next to it is a slide area with a plastic surface, and further away you can see a small ice rink, a climbing wall made of granite, and a model boat pool.
A few withered leaves floated on the water, and the control panel by the pool was locked.
This is a children's playground area.
That's also why this protest was held here.
The fact that the port case involves children, and that the protest was held at the entrance of an amusement park, is ironic in itself.
While other people's children are being loaded into shipping containers and auctioned off like commodities, your children are still here riding a carousel.
Li En stood at the edge of the amusement park for a while, taking in the surrounding buildings.
The effective range of a bolt-action sniper rifle is 1,500 meters, but to ensure a 100% hit rate, it is best to keep the target within 1,000 meters.
The amusement park faces 65th Street on its south side, and across the street is a row of apartment buildings.
He roughly estimated the distance between the residential buildings on both sides and walked westward.
About 600 meters from the amusement park is an apartment building complex, which is part of the Central Park West residential area.
A real estate agent's sign hangs on the exterior wall, displaying the starting price per square foot.
Li En glanced at the number; it was probably enough to pay several years' rent in Clinton Gardens.
He walked to the nearest building and pushed open the glass door.
A security guard sat behind the service desk in the lobby, stuffing a donut into his mouth, the frosting sticking to his stubble.
Li En took his police officer ID out of his pocket and showed it to everyone.
The security guard's gaze lingered on the ID for a moment, then fell on Li En's face to check it against his own, before pressing the access control switch.
The iron gate to the rooftop was unlocked.
Li En pushed open the iron gate. The rooftop was covered with an old asphalt waterproofing layer, with several puddles of water in the corners and a thin layer of dust floating on the surface.
He looked around and saw no water tower, no air conditioner unit, and no obstacles that could block his view.
The low wall at the edge of the rooftop only reaches about waist height.
With a wave of his right hand, a rectangular box fell to the ground out of thin air, kicking up a small patch of dust.
Opening the box, I found equipment purchased from a hotel in mainland China.
A bolt-action sniper rifle, a 6x to 24x variable magnification scope, a box of ammunition, and a dark gray blanket.
He unfolded the blanket and laid it on the edge of the rooftop, then lay down on it, extended the sniper rifle's mount, rested the muzzle against the edge of the low wall, and began adjusting the scope.
The amusement park was still quiet in the magnifying glass.
The carousel hadn't started yet, a pigeon was perched on the slide, and ripples were spreading outwards on the surface of the model boat pool, probably because the drain at the bottom of the pool was still working.
He began scanning the sidewalks and benches around the amusement park.
There are no purple people.
As noon approached, the amusement park began to fill up with people.
A mother pushing a stroller, a child holding a balloon, and a middle-aged man sitting on a bench eating a hamburger.
A father carried his son on his shoulders. The son pointed at the carousel and shouted something.
Li En shifted the focus of the scope from one face to another, fixing it on the pupils and collars of each person, noting the state of the pupils and the degree of occlusion from the collars.
He had seen the purple man's posture countless times in the surveillance screenshots.
But the purple-haired person is not among these people.
Based on Purple Man's behavior on West 38th Street and in Times Square, this person has absolute confidence in his abilities and would not easily choose to disguise himself.
But that's not necessarily true. This is the perfect prey he found after a long time. Perhaps in order not to scare her away, he will suppress his aesthetic preferences.
Li En expanded the scanning area from inside the amusement park to the surrounding residential buildings.
The scope swept across the windows of the apartment building across the street, floor by floor.
On the fifth floor, a woman was watering flowers on the windowsill.
On the third floor, an old man sat in a rocking chair watching TV.
On the seventh floor, the window was closed, and the curtains were only half drawn, making the room very dark, but there was something on the edge of the windowsill.
Li En shifted the focus up a notch.
A small part of that thing peeked out from the gap in the curtains—the muzzle of a gun.
Sniper rifle!
He zoomed in the scope by one more stop.
Behind the muzzle was a human silhouette, lying on the windowsill, face pressed against the butt of the gun, a faint light reflected from the scope lens.
The opponent's gun was pointed directly at the amusement park, exactly in line with his aim.
Li En shifted his focus away from that window and continued scanning the surrounding rooftops and windows.
The initial scan only detected the two snipers in the building next door.
Could it be a backup plan prepared by the gang?
The four major gangs are going to negotiate in Central Park today, most likely near the amusement park.
This area is the most crowded part of the entire park. Talking in the crowd makes it less likely to be spotted, but it also means that if something happens, no one can escape.
His target was not these snipers.
As long as they don't interfere with sniping the purple-haired guy, I can't be bothered with them.
A yellow school bus slowly pulled up to a stop on 65th Street.
The car door opened, and a group of high school students filed out of the car.
Some people carried backpacks, some held rolled-up banners in their hands, and some turned around to talk to the students behind them as they got off the bus.
A boy wearing glasses walked in the middle, wearing a slightly worn dark blue sweatshirt, with his backpack strap only hanging on one shoulder.
He was rather thin and walked with a slightly hesitant gait. After getting off the bus, he stood at the edge of the sidewalk, looked around, and scanned the surrounding buildings.
Li En's gaze had initially swept over him, then stopped.
This boy looks familiar.
He zoomed in with the scope again, focusing on that face.
He wore glasses, was rather thin, and had hair that fell down from behind his ears, covering half of his forehead.
Peter Parker.
Spiderman.
Lee removed the gun from Peter.
The moment his finger loosened from the trigger guard, Peter in the scope suddenly stopped, frozen in place.
Then he started turning his head, glancing around at the surrounding buildings, looking for something.
Spider-Sense.
Lee lowered his body even further, completely deflecting the gun from Peter's direction.
The last girl to get off the school bus was Jessica Jones.
Black hair, tied in a ponytail, with the ends draped over her shoulders.
She didn't carry a backpack or hold any signs; her movements as she got off the bus were clean and efficient.
Several female classmates gathered around and talked to her. She nodded, a small smile appearing on her lips.
Lee En focused the scope on Jessica, his index finger resting on the outside of the trigger guard.
Purple Man's target is Jessica; as long as you follow her, you'll eventually find Purple Man.
A group of high school students, led by their teacher, unfurled a banner and stood outside the amusement park entrance.
The banner read "Stop Child Trafficking," and the letters were painted in red spray paint, with the last letter trailing off a bit.
Students started chanting slogans, their voices interspersed between the carousel music and children's laughter in the amusement park.
The TV station's interview vehicle was parked on the side of the road, and a man carrying a camera jumped out of the back of the vehicle, pointing the camera at the crowd.
The reporter stood in front of the camera, holding a microphone in one hand and pointing to the amusement park behind him with the other.
A tall, thin man squeezed through the group of high school students.
He was wearing a gray trench coat, unbuttoned.
Her hair wasn't styled with hairspray; it just fell naturally over her forehead.
He held up a sign in his right hand that read, "Children are not commodities."
His left hand hung at his side, his fingers gently tapping his thigh in rhythm with the chants.
He chanted slogans with the high school students around him, at a moderate volume and in sync with their pace.
Purple Man!
Lee En's scope locked onto the back of his head.
But Zi Ren was surrounded by students.
After the bullet pierced the purple man's skull, the remaining kinetic energy was enough to continue flying for several hundred meters.
If the bullet deviates from its trajectory after penetrating the target, even by just a few degrees, it will hit someone next to him.
Li En placed his index finger on the trigger, lowered his breathing rate, and followed the movement of the purple man with his crosshair.
Shall we take action?
The purple-haired man squeezed through the crowd and moved toward Jessica.
He slipped between two boys who were chatting, his shoulder brushing against their collars.
He was getting closer and closer to Jessica, about ten meters away.
Li En's finger began to press the trigger.
The firing pin has already traveled a little further; if you press it down a little more, it will strike the primer.
boom!
Gunshots rang out from the seventh-floor window of the apartment building next door.
The warhead tore through the air at an initial velocity of over 800 meters per second, flying over the amusement park.
The bullet struck the head of a man in front of the carousel, passing over the signs held aloft by the protesters.
The man was standing up from the bench, still holding half a hot dog in his hand.
He leaned to the side, his gaze fixed on the child playing on the rocking horse.
"Frank!"
His wife screamed in anguish and rushed over.
"Get down!"
Two sounds rang out almost simultaneously with the gunshot.
Peter Parker was the first to react, switching from a standing position to a prone position.
He moved quickly through the crowd, and as he passed by, the students who were still standing there in a daze fell down one after another.
Some were knocked down by his elbow, some by his toe hooking their ankles, and some by his push on their shoulders from behind.
Everyone fell in a different direction, but the place where they fell was exactly below the trajectory of the bullet.
From a distance, he appeared to be stumbling and running around aimlessly, his hands covering his head, his shoulders hunched, each step teetering on the edge of falling.
Li En could see everything clearly through the magnifying glass.
In less than three seconds, this bespectacled boy pushed all seven or eight classmates around him into a blind spot.
The technique was clean and efficient, always moving along the blind spot of the ballistic trajectory.
Jessica's reaction was completely different.
When the first gunshot rang out, her body made a judgment before her brain.
He stretched his right hand to the right and grabbed the shoulders of the two female classmates next to him, pressing them down.
At the same time, he reached his left hand to the left, spread his fingers, grabbed the back of the collar of another boy who was screaming, and pulled him behind him.
The three men were pinned to the ground almost simultaneously, their knees hitting the concrete with several dull thuds.
She crouched down in front of them, using her body to block the view between her classmates and the playground, her gaze sweeping from left to right.
boom.
A second shot rang out.
Lee pulled the trigger.
Peter was to Jessica's side.
His spider senses flared up for the second time, this time even stronger than the first. His scalp tingled, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
He could sense the direction of the threat, but before he could shout, he swept his right leg across the ground, delivering a sweeping kick to Jessica's shin.
He used at least 60% of his strength in that kick.
But Jessica didn't budge.
She only felt a dull pain in her shinbone.
She looked down and saw the bespectacled nerd squatting at her feet, one of his legs wrapped around her calf.
Just as she was about to ask him what he was doing, a sudden surge of air pressure swept over her head.
The airflow was fierce, but its coverage was extremely narrow, barely enough to brush past the hair above the back of her head.
A few strands of black hair were cut off by the airflow and fell onto her shoulder.
Immediately afterwards, warm liquid splashed from behind, splattering on the back of her neck, shoulders, and cheeks.
The liquid was very viscous, hotter than bath water, and had a strong rusty smell. It flowed down her neck and into the collar of her sweatshirt.
Jessica's vision was filled with red.
Her body froze on the spot, her hand instinctively reaching out in front of her, her fingers spread wide.
The back of my hand was covered in dark red droplets, which were still dripping down between my fingers, past my nails, and onto the cement floor.
She slowly raised her head, and a tall, thin man was falling towards her.
His face was rotten; the top of his skull had been ripped open from the inside by something, with bone fragments and some grayish-white tissue mixed together and bulging outwards.
The eyeball is still intact, and the pupil is slowly dilating, but the structures around the eye are completely distorted.
The only recognizable features on that face were its chin and lips.
His lips were still twitching slightly, and a very soft hiss came out of his throat.
He fell on top of her, and Jessica instinctively reached out and caught him, placing her hands on his chest.
The fabric of the gray trench coat was wet, and blood was gushing out from the collar and flowing down the inside of her forearm.
She looked down at the blasted face, at the lips that were still twitching.
"ah!!"
Jessica screamed, let go of her hands, staggered back a few steps, bumped into a classmate who was squatting on the ground, and tripped over herself.
She rolled over, bracing herself on the concrete floor with her palms, her nails digging into the cracks in the tiles, burying her head in the ground, her shoulders contracting sharply.
"Ugh!" she vomited out in large gulps.
Vomit splattered on the cement floor, mixed with blood.
On a bench opposite the amusement park entrance, the second-in-command of the Mexican gang, who was eating a hot dog, pulled a pistol from his jacket and pointed it at the gangsters across the street.
"Fuck! You motherfucker—" He didn't finish his sentence.
A young man in the direction of the Irish gang was reaching into his coat, his wrist not yet fully raised.
Another member of his Russian gang had already fired the first shot at the Irish gang.
The shot missed; the bullet hit the metal armrest of the bench and bounced into the fountain.
Then gunfire erupted like fireworks.
The Irish gang member drew his short-barreled shotgun and fired a shot at the Russian gang.
The bald black man pulled a pistol from under his arm and fired two shots at the middle-aged Mexican man who was playing with prayer beads.
Gang members engaged in a shooting frenzy at the children's playground.
"Waaah! Mom!"
The carousel music hadn't stopped when a child, riding on the horse, hugged its head and cried.
A mother pushing a stroller fell to the ground, the stroller tipped over beside her, and the baby inside was crying.
A father was running towards the woods with his two children under his arms when he was shot in the shoulder. Blood flowed down his shoulder blade, but he did not let go and kept running.
A teacher was hit in the right leg and fell to the ground on the concrete. The megaphone in his hand was smashed on the ground, producing a piercing feedback whistle.
The ground in front of the amusement park was covered with people lying haphazardly.
Some were still struggling, crawling in pools of blood, their fingers gripping the cracks in the cement tiles, their heels scraping the ground as they tried to stand up.
Some were completely still, lying on the ground in the exact same position as when they fell.
The carousel is still spinning.
After seeing the purple man's smashed head on the rooftop of the apartment building, Li En slowly exhaled.
He tilted the muzzle of his sniper rifle a few degrees to the left, locking the seventh-floor window of the building next door.
The curtains were still swaying gently, and he couldn't see the sniper.
But it's impossible for that sniper to completely escape from the window in less than two seconds.
Unless he exited from the direction of the corridor, in which case he would have to pass between the window frame and the corridor, through that unobstructed wall.
The wall was framed in the very center by Li En's magnifying glass.
The corner of the curtain curled up slightly.
The sniper's shoulder peeked out from behind the curtain.
He was retreating deeper into the room, moving quickly, but not faster than a bullet.
Lee En pulled the trigger.
boom.
The bullet pierced through the double-glazed window, shattering the glass into more than a dozen pieces that flew into the room. The bullet continued flying forward through the broken glass and struck the sniper in the temple.
His body bounced backward from the edge of the windowsill, crashed into the wall of the room, and slid to the floor.
The curtains were torn from the window frame and covered his face. The white fabric was quickly soaked with blood, leaving a blurry human silhouette.
Without stopping to confirm, Li En turned the gun back towards the amusement park.
Those gangsters down there are turning this amusement park into a leaky shooting range.
The crowd was running, gun barrels were chasing, and every second bullets hit people who shouldn't have been hit.
He saw Peter Parker.
The boy was moving quickly toward the amusement park entrance when, as he passed by, a gang member suddenly fell down, his gun stuck to the ground by something.
He navigated through the chaos, using various obstacles to get close to an Irish gang member who was pointing a gun at the crowd from the side.
With a flick of his right hand, a white silk thread shot out from his wrist, stuck to the man's gun barrel, and with a pull, the gun flew out of his hand and smashed into a pillar of the carousel.
Spiderman.
Li En removed the scope from him and began eliminating the gang members.
boom.
A member of a Mexican gang was firing at the fountain, and the bullet entered his temple.
boom.
Liam of the Irish gang was approaching the carousel with a shotgun in hand when a bullet struck him in the back of the head. He fell to the ground.
boom……
In one minute, all twenty gang members were killed by having their heads blown off.
Li En straightened up.
He twisted his neck, making a cracking sound.
He disassembled the sniper rifle into three parts, placed the parts one by one into a long box, and locked it.
Fold the blanket neatly, stuff it into the backpack, zip it up, and put it back into the storage space.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked downstairs.
……