A Stark Difference
I drew a breath, and the acrid sting of gunpowder stabbed at my nose.
The ventilation fans and air purifiers roared loud enough to rattle the room, but the burnt smell that had soaked into everything refused to be hidden, no matter how hard they tried. The vest they'd handed me for safety was a little worn — no surprise, given how many people had used it. The fact they were still issuing it, though, meant it had no problem stopping a bullet.
Following the range officer, I arrived at Lane 1, where the AR-15 I'd picked out earlier was waiting. The odd part was that the front of the rifle was locked down tight with a padlock. I could still shoot, but swinging the muzzle off to the side would be impossible. A safety measure, most likely.
"Have you done much shooting before?"
"A little."
"Is that so? These days, you know... a lot of people come in through games. Maybe that's why we get so many who just start blasting away without thinking."
There was a vaguely complaining edge to his tone. I answered with an awkward laugh and picked up the rifle in front of me.
I gave the slide a light tug to check the chamber, ran through a quick inspection, then set the weapon down with the muzzle pointed downrange. I'd done it thousands of times — tens of thousands. It was second nature.
A gun was a weapon for killing the enemy, and at the same time a lethal instrument that could injure its wielder. Respecting the firearm was secondary. You had to be obsessive about safety, almost pathologically so.
"You're pretty practiced. I'll load the magazine for you, then. It's loaded with ten rounds, so keep that in mind... You can check the target on the monitor to the side."
The target was the usual bullseye type, with the score climbing toward the center.
"What's the high score here, if you don't mind my asking?"
"If I remember right, it's 97."
"Then I might just set a new record."
"Haha. I'll be cheering you on."
With that, and the faint smile still on my lips, I took the loaded rifle. A crisp click as the slide lock released, and a round slid into the chamber. I was ready to fire.
The distance to the target looked to be about twenty-five meters. Not exactly close, but not so far that you'd miss, either. My body settled into a standard combat stance from memory. I aligned the rear sight and front sight carefully, but quickly.
Bang!
The trigger broke without hesitation, and the first round punched clean through the 8-ring. It had landed well off my point of aim, but I wasn't disappointed. This was my first time shooting in a woman's body, and the recoil had shaken me. On top of that, the zero wasn't perfect. But my body still remembered the old zero. In a pinch, you sometimes had to hold off-target and still get the result you needed.
I stared a hole through the paper. After confirming the result of that first offset shot, I gauged how much more correction I needed. A little more tension through my frame. Aim just slightly to the right. I had the feel of it now.
The second shot, perfectly compensating for the recoil, punched the 10-ring as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The third was no different. Rounds sucked into the 10-ring without a hint of deviation. It didn't take long before the neatly perforated sheet was in my hands.
I checked the chamber inside the locked-back slide, demonstrated a dry fire to show the magazine was empty, then set the rifle down. A familiar residual echo spread softly through the air, as if announcing that the shooting had just ended.
I'd been worried that changing bodies might have erased my old skill. Aside from a slight discrepancy, there was no dramatic drop from what I used to be able to do. If anything — maybe because I was younger now — my aiming had become even cleaner and more precise.
"...Wow. That's impressive."
The man muttered as he looked at the target displayed on the monitor to the left. Except for that first round that had clipped the 8, every remaining bullet had hit the 10. He stared at the results with a dazed expression, as if he'd never seen anything like it. I was satisfied with the result myself. Of course someone else would be even more so.
"Ah, sorry. Would you like to shoot again right away?"
"Yes, please."
The completed target was cleared and a new one hung. While I waited for a magazine swap so I could fire again quickly, the man handed me a magazine and asked,
"Want to load it yourself?"
"Is that allowed?"
"Normally no, but you seem pretty experienced. This much should be fine."
"Then I'd be happy to."
I slotted the magazine in with practiced ease, sent the slide forward, and started shooting again in that same clean stance. At regular intervals the report thundered through the entire lane, spent casings arcing into the air. But there wasn't a hint of extra movement — just stable, controlled fire.
About halfway through, I changed my stance. I gripped as close to the muzzle as possible and kept firing. It made recoil control easier, though it was uncomfortable to hold for long stretches. Not something you needed to worry about at a shooting range.
"You know your shooting stances, too. Most people just stick to the basic one."
"I picked up a bit of this and that."
Unpleasant memories flickered for a moment, but I forced them aside and focused on shooting. It had been a long time since I could handle hundreds of different firearms like they were parts of my own body. Simply changing bodies, or having bad memories surface, wasn't enough to make the skill disappear.
"Man... that grouping is ridiculously clean. I thought the last one was the record."
I checked the target myself and smiled, satisfied. Except for one round that had barely clipped the 9, every bullet had punched cleanly through the 10. Not a bad result for getting my feel back.
Chamber check, dry fire, then I stepped aside. The twenty rounds I'd paid for were all spent. Next up was pistol shooting.
As I vacated the lane, the man carefully took the firearm, ran through the same safety checks, set the AR-15 I'd just used to one side, and handed me the next gun.
A Glock 17. A pistol so common it was harder to find a range that didn't have one.
I let out a short breath and picked it up. The distinctive plastic feel of a Glock came through the contact surfaces. The design was so simple I was more than familiar with it by now — I could close my eyes and draw it from memory.
People commonly thought pistols "just don't hit." The sight radius was shorter than a rifle's, and recoil was harder to manage effectively. But I considered all of that nothing more than excuses from people who couldn't shoot.
A weapon's performance varied wildly depending on who was using it. In old movies, there were soldiers who carved through enemies with nothing but a single blade, weren't there? Just because a weapon dropped lightning or spat fire didn't make it strong. Those kinds of weapons only existed in fantasy and games, anyway.
With those idle thoughts running through my head, I calmly squeezed the trigger. The report came with the pistol's recoil, but as expected of a 9mm, it wasn't that heavy.
I considered trying one-handed shooting, but figured I'd get called out for safety reasons, so I dropped the idea. Accuracy and stability dropped significantly when aiming that way, too — it was a stance more about looking cool than being practical. More importantly, I could strain my wrist if I wasn't careful. A Glock might be fine, but once you moved up to larger-caliber pistols, a broken wrist was nothing to laugh at.
Still, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. Even if I'd ended up in a woman's body, the memories of my past were intact. If that had been the end of it, the disappointment wouldn't have lingered like this.
There was something people commonly called talent. The knack and ability needed to do something — the innate capacity an individual was born with. Like a friend who seemed to do nothing but eat, shit, and play, yet scored several times better than you on a test. Or someone who'd only just started working out casually shattering a record that even a person who'd trained for ten years struggled with.
Honestly, I wasn't that fond of the word. Except for overwhelming, once-in-a-generation talent, most talent was more or less the same. What always mattered was where you set the baseline. Set the bar too low, and everyone better than you became a "talent freak."
Flip reality over and you'd find far more people who'd barely clawed their way to what they wanted through blood and sweat than people born gifted. To them, being labeled a talent freak would have been a dishonorable title. But people who didn't know others' efforts only looked at the results. They believed that person hadn't worked for it — that they'd reached that place because they had talent. An ugly, crude way of thinking. In a way, it was a blatant kind of mental victory — the sort available to anyone who'd fallen behind.
Anyway, the reason I was thinking about all this now... was because I'd realized that one of those vanishingly rare, almost mythical talent freaks had been closer than I thought.
The distance from the firing line to the target was about twenty-five meters. Not that far. My old self could have hit it without any trouble. But the target as seen through Lee Harin's eyes, versus my own, was clearly different.
No matter how carefully you aimed, shooting always tended to rely on feel. From Lee Harin's perspective, though, the target created the illusion that it was right in front of my face. As if instinct itself were whispering, Shoot like this.
The slight sense of dissonance I'd felt when firing the rifle became certain once I shot the pistol. A sensation I could never have felt as my old self.
That's right. Lee Harin — no. To be precise, Lee Harin's body was a talent freak in the truest sense of the word. Which made me want to find out how far I could go in this body.
There was just one fact I'd overlooked: that the next pistol was a Desert Eagle, infamous for its recoil. And that Lee Harin's body was frail, having never exercised at all.