Invisible Air Sniper

A flame of ten metres stretched out from Mega's incineration cannon stopping short outside a house.

Mega turned off the flames after a few seconds when he realised that the target was gone.

Mega turned around and caught a black spike that was heading towards his back and crushed it in his hands.

He looked up into the night sky to find the source but couldn't find Hikaru.

Another bone spike appeared from the sky and raced down at him at high speeds. Mega snapped his head to the right and the spike penetrated the concrete on the ground. Cracks webbed out from the hole.

He switched to thermal vision.

Thermal vision works by detecting infrared light emitted by animals and objects. Anything that has a temperature emits infrared light as radiant energy of heat.

Since background heat is less intense, they will be displayed as dark blue while relatively warmer things like Hikaru Suteki would appear as red and yellow.

Through his thermal vision, he saw yellow and orange painted over the houses, trees, concrete and various other objects. Above the horizon was a dark blue sky.

He didn't see anything.

A black bone spike hit his chest and bounced off. It made a hole through his white T-shirt revealing a black metallic chest. There wasn't a scratch or a dent.

Since Hikaru didn't seem to release any heat on thermal imaging, Mega switched to night vision.

Night vision uses an image enhancer that collects tiny amounts of light and generates a brighter image.

Photons (light particles) are converted to electrons, amplified with high voltages which then passes through a screen containing phosphors. The phosphors are excited by the electrons and emit green light.

Through his eyes, he sees green on the ground level. Some houses had their lights off, presumably, they were trying to hide in their houses. Other houses were bright white and green through the windows.

Above the horizon, the green begins to fade into darker colours until black.

Finally, the image is further enhanced by his bionic eyes allowing him to see the white clouds that otherwise would be black in the background.

Again, Mega couldn't see anything. Yet another black spike shot towards him. He casually brushed the spike away with his hand and examined closely at the area where the black spear came from.

As the white clouds moved, he saw some stars disappear for a second before reappearing as if a dark wave passed them.

'Is he trying to avoid being seen by moving away from the clouds?'

Mega blasted into the sky.

***

Hikaru flew up into the sky with his black wings and immediately turned his skin as black as he could by producing and condensing the pigment melanin into his cells. Then he absorbed his clothes (which were made of mimicry cells) and produced a black suit.

He kept flying to make as much distance as possible. Fire is a very dangerous thing for anything organic.

He was resistant to bullets because his body was now made of ultra-hard bone and metal alloy and dense muscles.

Earlier when he was shot in the head, the bullet didn't go through the skull and only made a small dent.

He then bent the dent back and reformed the hole.

However, fire affects a huge area and burns each of the cells and the cells underneath it, killing them quicker than he could regenerate.

After a graze from the blaze earlier, just the heatwave melted a layer of his skin off instantly and then it evaporated into nothing. His flames were probably much hotter than regular flamethrowers.

He produced a couple of bone javelins coated with melanin and threw it at Mega. It was easily blocked and evaded.

Hikaru figured that the cyborg probably has thermal imaging and so covered himself in melanin-coated metal.

He instantly weighed more and his wings were less effective because of the smooth metal surface instead of elastic skin. Since the metal wings aren't collapsible, there was an increase in negative lift during the upstroke.

Due to the increase in the fluctuating range of the periodic lift curve, which increased the offset consumption of the lift, the wings consumed more energy.

However, Hikaru has tonnes of biofuel to convert into chemical energy. He compensated for the weight force by increasing his flapping frequency by ten-fold.

Any conductive metal reflects infrared light. The thick layer prevents infrared light from escaping his body for a little while until it begins to warm up. While it reflects background thermal radiation from the surroundings, it blends into the night sky.

There is too little infrared gradient between him and the sky for Mega's thermal vision to differentiate and the black pigment helps by absorbing a bit of the infrared light.

With this method, Hikaru was like an invisible air sniper. It was one of the many methods he could have used to kill Botan.

Seeing that Mega didn't react while looking upwards, he threw another spear.

It bounced off his chest. He could tell it hardly did anything to him but was too far to see the extent of the damage. A cyborg's lack of reaction was advantageous for hiding one's weaknesses. Even if the spear was effective, he could just bluff it with that poker face of his.

Since Mega probably has thermal vision, it was likely he would also have night vision. Hikaru was a few hundred metres in the air out of the effective range of night vision scopes.

The only way he would be seen is through the combination of the use of certain star gazing pieces of equipment that would give night scopes long-range capabilities or his black body be exposed against the white clouds.

Hikaru used his third eye on the back of his head to avoid the clouds as they slowly rolled by. There was nothing he could do about the stars.

However, his real purpose was to draw out Mega's long-range weapons and their capabilities.

Presumably, Mega was using night vision as he still stood there watching the sky. Hikaru threw another spear.

After a while, flames erupted and Mega flew into the sky at rapid speeds.

At first, Mega was heading in a general direction but after getting closer he started heading straight for Hikaru.