The cold path forward was lined with scattered bullets, leading back to the half-buried rifle.
The snowstorm tested his resolve, shattering his goggles with a large piece of hail.
Winds whipped his face with a thousand pale pellets. A symphony of snow exploded like cannonballs in his ears.
Time began to blur —
He couldn't tell how long it had been since the icy assault began. But he knew that it had to be somewhere between thirty seconds and a thousand years. He didn't know whether the heiress was even still alive. But if she was, the window of opportunity was shrinking.
It chipped away at his senses, sight, sound, touch, and balance.
But Two-Zero-One continued, the rifle was his North Star.
He pushed past the million miniature miseries and made it back to his previous position.
The young assassin lifted his firearm and wiped the frosted scope with his thumb.
Frustrated, he threw his shattered goggles to the side. His right eye was dark copper, with a small black mole just beneath it. His left was an azure blue, glowing faintly in the monotonous darkness.
"Room… where is…" He rasped, searching for the warm glow in the distance.
In spite of the blizzard, the villa remained standing, barely inconvenienced. Inside, the situation escalated. The CEO bled on the floor, while the butler still had the heiress hostage, feral, shouting, swinging his gun.
The young assassin pulled the trigger, but there was only a hollow click.
"Huh?"
Empty.
He turned around, and all the bullets buried.
But a fleeting shaft of sunlight pierced through the dark gray, shining on a single bullet above the snow.
Invisible needles stabbed his cheeks, refusing to be ignored. But he inched towards the bullet with his elbows. But as soon as his stiff fingers grabbed it, the snow shifted, causing the firearm to slip.
"No!" His heart pounded against his throat as he barely hung on.
A drop of blood slid across his face, down his chin, and falling into the darkness.
Two-Zero-One instinctively pulled himself back up, the last bullet squeezed tightly between his fingers as he hurriedly placed his hand on solid ground.
The snow slid under him, while his rifle threatened to drag him to the depths.
Nature forced him to make a decision: Drop the gun, or fall with it.
Rather than continue down the abyss, he sunk his feet into the deeper into the snow, slowing his descent.
Barely clinging on, a snarl formed on his face as he thought about her expression.
But the blizzard wasn't something he could kill.
It was just something in the way.
Two-Zero-One mustered all the strength and willpower he had left to pull up the weapon.
Thin frost forming around him melted into steam as his flesh lit red. Blue light ran through his veins, boiling his blood, barely lifting it to eye-level.
Though the storm insisted on blocking his view, the flickering sunlight granted him a few seconds of clarity to find the yellow dot.
As soon as it cleared and focused, he saw his target headed towards the door with the heiress. She reached out for her father, who was still bleeding on the ground.
His heartbeat rang.
From outside the window bars, the heiress' outstretched arms forced him to remember something he desperately tried to forget.
In that moment, he caught a glimpse of someone else — a girl with golden hair and golden eyes, desperately reaching for him from beyond the iron bars.
In front of him was another crying child, another outstretched hand out of reach.
"Not again."
Hanging halfway between the light and the abyss, he loaded his last bullet.
Both of his eyes radiated with an unnatural azure, and a blue burst slammed him back to solid ground.
Snow, wind resistance, trajectory — all of those lost meaning the moment the bullet left the muzzle. It weaved through the falling snow and hail, leaving behind a trail of blue sparks as it crashed through the window, before taking a sharp, upwards turn straight towards the butler's head.
In less than a second, the scent of gunpowder was blown away by the blizzard's last breath.
The sun had set.
With a deep groan, the young assassin returned his gaze towards the villa.
Gazing through the scope, he saw the silenced faces of those staring at the stained wall. After a second's notice, their mouths widened.
Without sound, Two-Zero-One could only imagine the screams and panic. The exception was the old man, who reached for his daughter, and the young heiress, who remained stunned on the floor, holding the butler's hand.
Even as her father embraced her, she slowly turned her gaze towards the shattered window, her blank gaze almost making eye contact with the young sniper.
But as Two-Zero-One noticed, one more hailstone shot down from the sky and shattered his scope, as if to tell him that his job was done.
He picked up the rifle and all the scattered things that he could find along his shattered goggles, stuffing them all into the bag. As he slung it over his shoulder, the weight nearly toppled him over.
"All I had to do was pull the trigger…" There was a raspiness to his voice, "So why…?"
It was a simple, yet incomplete question. One without an answer, or perhaps the answer was lost in the snowstorm.
Bile crept up from his throat. He swallowed, grimacing from the sour taste.
With the adrenaline gone, his knees began to burn as he began his descent.
His body was stiff and tenderized, and his shirt was torn apart. Yet in the darkness, he looked up, and the wintry black trees were still standing. Above those, an aurora danced in the sky.
He didn't realize that the storm had already passed.
Feedback hissed in his ear and the voice followed, asking frantically, "— Agent Two— One, do you— ? I repeat, do you copy, Two-Zero-One? Are you alive?"
"I'm… alive." With a cracked voice, he answered.
"Status?"
"I've successfully…" He took a sharp inhale, reiterating, "I've successfully completed mission. I'll be returni—"
Crack.
The sky's last bullet. One final shard of hail.
A sucker punch from the tail-end of the blizzard.
Two-Zero-One collapsed to the ground and slid towards the forest, leaving a trail through towards his body, which as he crashed against one of the trees.
Frost seeped into his veins, sapping at his strength, "Not here…not yet… I still have to…"
Pain throbbed through his body as if his blood vessels were about to burst. While the bitterness of bile filled his taste buds. The only other thing that his senses registered were the beating footsteps as he was buried by snow.