Improbable Aiming Skills in fanfiction.
Crossover
- Child of the Storm:
- Clint is widely acknowledged as being the best shot in the Nine Realms, matched only by Prince Faradei of Alfheim, the real life Legolas. To take one example, while showboating he casually fires a shot that bounces off three pillars and snatches Volstagg's sandwich out of his hands before embedding in the wall. And then it exploded. Taking the sandwich with it. A Justified Trope due to the fact that Clint is Minerva McGonagall's illegitimate grandson by Bucky Barnes and his magical talent manifested in slightly enhanced reflexes and eyesight, much like Ultimate Hawkeye, but with a few extras.
- The Winter Solder. If he shoots at you, you're probably dead.
- Fate Revelation Online (Fate/stay night and Sword Art Online):
- To help teach Argo how to use her telekinesis, she and Shirou play darts. As Shirou is getting bullseyes, Kirito starts talking to him. Shirou turns to listen to him, as is only polite... and continues getting bullseyes without looking."Hm." Shirou pursed his lips, before he also guessed. "Was it an NPC that sells really delicious food?" Since it was his turn, he absently gestured, launching his own dart. It would have been rude to look away, so he kept his attention on Kirito. He could see the target with his mind anyway, so he didn't need his eyes.
Kirito started at him, glancing over his shoulder in a double-take, before sighing in even deeper depression. "No, that's... no."
Argo raised an eyebrow, glancing from the target back to Shirou with an incredulous look. There was no need to check; Shirou had known it was a hit the instant the pick had fired. - Later, Kirito mentions that when it was time for Shirou to practice his own telekinesis, he started doing this with swords.It had been one thing to watch him play darts with Argo using TK, but seeing him shoot swords just as easily gave him pause.
- To help teach Argo how to use her telekinesis, she and Shirou play darts. As Shirou is getting bullseyes, Kirito starts talking to him. Shirou turns to listen to him, as is only polite... and continues getting bullseyes without looking.
- Haloid (Halo & Metroid): The Spartan soldier in that video is simply put, an insane marksman with just about ANYTHING. Ricochets from sniper fire hitting moving targets and ricocheting off of OTHER moving targets, insane levels of accuracy with rapid-fire weapons at a full run, THREE TON VEHICLES, SHOTGUN FU. Seriously. It's like watching every action movie hero's specialty with a weapon crammed into a can of complete fuckwin.
- The Hell-er-Nator II: Ghosting the Machine
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Terminator): First Sargent Benjy explains that she's so good with her wrist rocket by practicing with it daily for almost four years. She practices hitting moving targets by shooting dragonflies, wasps, and hornets out of the air. - Glintlock in Manehattan's Lone Guardian possesses these when it comes to crossbows. He is skilled enough with one to shoot down a fly at the weapon's maximum range while taking the wind and the fly's erratic movements into account.
- Mass Foundations (Fallout & Mass Effect): Downplayed in Redemption in the Stars. In the first chapter, Ethan Sunderland, the Courier has only a decent chance of hitting the flamethrower gas tank at medium range with the VATS targeting system.
- My Huntsman Academia (My Hero Academia & RWBY): Panchito "Pistoles" Rojo manages to aim at Izuku from underneath the docks just from the glow One For All: Full Cowl gave off, cutting a hole in concrete with his revolvers to make Izuku fall through. The kicker is that he did this while the docks were full of containers packed with volatile Dust, doing so without hitting any of them or anything else in the chaotic firefight above.
- In The Night Unfurls, all the hunters that use firearms (Kyril, Hugh, and Soren) have yet to miss a single shot, though many of their targets are at close range that facilitates their Sword and Gun combat style. Special mention goes to Hugh, who manages to shoot someone in the throat from a mile away.
- Scoob and Shag: Yosemite Sam's Ballyhoo, "Infrared", allows him to shoot with precision down to the millimeters. He uses this both in combat and to torture prisoners by intentionally missing them by hairs, but it's powerless against Popeye's ability to go into Bullet Time and just dodge around the bullets.
- Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami: Dark buys a sniper rifle with which to assassinate Near, and aims at him from the top of the "Eyfal Tower". The implication is that he could have killed Near with a single bullet and didn't need to buy a box... if Near hadn't used a Nerf gun to shoot out Dark's bullets and scope. Later, in what might be due to a typographical error, Dark manages to kill 1000000 (one million) Stormtroopers with 100000 (one hundred thousand) bullets, which requires killing on average, ten people with a single bullet, and only misses once.
- Fate/Black Dawn: Shirou scoffs at the archery portion of the tournament, and gets a bullseye from a hundred and twenty yards away. Everyone else was having trouble with thirty yards. He privately notes that he could have done it from farther, but a hundred and twenty was the edge of the field. Morgan quickly realizes that he could have hit a moving target at that range with no more trouble.
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Both Mothra and Monster X display this with their Projectile Webbing and Destroyed Thunder respectively; hitting their targets or targets' body parts on-the-mark from a proportionately significant distance away.
- Jun-A266 in Halo: A Fistful of Arrows gets some pretty good shots, like sniping an abductor holding a hostage from a helicopter. But he's also shown struggling to snipe a Hunter, and one improbable shot turns out to have been a Gone Horribly Right for him.
- Invoked in Persephone when Stoick discusses with Gobber the chance of him recreating the device Hiccup used to shoot down Toothless in the first place. As Gobber observes, Hiccup taking down a Night Fury in the dark with an untested weapon was a miracle in itself, and what Stoick is proposing is even more desperate as the Chief wants to repeat that feat without killing Hiccup in the subsequent crash.
- In "Tingle", Kate Bishop has to jump out of a moving Quinjet, with minimal experience using a parachute, and then shoot a gun out of a man's hand so that he loses his leverage (the gun is currently being used to threaten a civilian to keep Spider-Man 'under control' as the criminals auction people off).
- Averted in the Uplifted series. The accuracy of weapons is shown with a surprising degree of realism. Someone's clearly done their research.
- Inverted in Pony POV Series with Shining Armor. His aiming skills are indeed improbable... improbably BAD.
- In No More Heroes 3: Alternate Struggles, Sniping Lee's idea of target practice involves shooting down civilian aircraft from the sky by blasting their engines and pilots, and then headshotting every single passenger in them before the planes hit the ground. Without a scope.
- A Small Crime: Kit can throw a card in the air and then shoot it (with her crossbow) right in the middle before it even hits.
- In Sonic X: Dark Chaos Episode 61, Espio manages to throw an explosive shuriken at a pursuing Jewish cruiser. Not only does he manage to actually hit it in zero-gravity, he gets a direct hit on the ship's ammo magazine and immediately blows it into scrap. Even Espio himself is surprised he made the shot.
- Tsali demonstrates this numerous times with both his Chaos powers and his wrist-mounted weaponry. Justified, since he's a very advanced battle android and has been fighting a war by himself for thirty years.
- In Gambit: Play For Keeps, a fan video involving Gambit and Rogue, Gambit is forced into a high-stakes life-or-death poker game by a gun-dealer he had cheated some time in the past. To force Gambit to play the gun-dealer has Rogue bound to an Electric Torture machine, in an undisclosed location that can only be accessed by Magik, who is serving as his Dragon. At one point, as Magik steps out of one of her portals, Gambit throws two playing cards past her through her portal, lodging them into the computer systems controlling Rogue's shackles, freeing her.
Unsorted/Dormant/Dead
- In Part Two of the notorious fanfic Sailor Moon: American Kitsune, protagonist Davey Crockett manages to shoot and obliterate a throne on the Moon from the Earth with what amounts to an automatic, double-barreled sawed-off shotgun fired at a soda can thrown into the air. As if that weren't enough, the character sitting in said throne is left completely unharmed. The countless questions this raises, such as how Davey can tell where the moon throne is in the first place, are never brought up or answered.
- Tiberium Wars has a deliberate Take That! directed at the official novelization, where a character gets a headshot on a target a hundred meters away with a pistol... except unlike in the official book, the one making this headshot is Colonel Nick "Havoc" Parker.
- Later on, a Nod Commando disarms a thrown grenade by shooting the fuse off it with her laser pistol. Admittedly, she's a cybernetic killing machine that has hyper-advanced technology crammed into her body, but damn.
- Lieutenant Fullerton, a GDI Commando, twists this around. With some careful setup using an air vent, a remote camera, and his helmet computer, he's able to calculate the precise angles to fire through a wall to kill every Nod soldier in the next room with his railgun.
- In the Poké Wars 'verse, Dawn (yes, that Dawn) becomes an amazing sharpshooter after her dampeners are disabled. Her key highlights:
- In The Coalescence she lands "headshots" from a pistol on a swarm of Cloyster. Their "head" (actually the black pearl) is small relative to their body, they are leaping up and their shells are open only for a short time. She doesn't miss a single shot.
- In Dawn of a New Era she kills three Fearow, one after the other, with headshots... from three kilometers away.
- In The Pokémon They Carried, it is implied that all the snipers defending Groudon's Wall can easily make two kilometer shots. Dawn is the best of them all.
- Ferris: The main feature of the alien Infiltrators, which are this fic's Thin Men. And that's before one gets plasma sniper rifles.
- Wings to Fly: Lucrezia Noin gets a few seconds of a glimpse at an enemy mobile suit before it moves into cover behind a row of buildings. She lines up on a matching pair of windows in one of the buildings and times her shot to blow off the enemy MS' lower leg.
- Korsan in The Pirate Pegasus can shoot a bullseye from across a room with a custom-made crossbow twice, with the second bolt actually piercing the first.
- Several characters possess this in Broken Bow, but it's entirely justified, since the ones who do are the Hunters of Artemis, who are blessed with this as a power and have had centuries of experience to boot; Apollo and Artemis, the twin archer gods; and their children. Well, Artemis' child.
- After becoming a vampire in More Than Just a Man, Lelouch manages to shoot out the factosphere of a Knightmare (a roughly fist sized target) from over a hundred meters away with a pistol while on top of a moving train.
- Distortions (Symphogear): Kir Voronin introduction is shooting Genjuro from a building 3 kilometers away with his sightline obscured by a host of trees in a park. The only reason that his next two shots don't end up hitting Hibiki and Miku is because it was intercepted by their bodyguards.
