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Improbable Aiming Skills in anime and manga.


  • Almost everyone in City Hunter and Angel Heart is a crack shot:
    • Ryo Saeba is quite the crack shot. The first shot he ever fired? Right in the ear of a fighting boxer with a .500 Nitro Express elephant gun. He makes many other difficult shots with his Colt Python .357 Magnum during the series, but the best evidence of his skill came when he used a sniper rifle to shoot a rifle's barrel, a belt, a tie and the buttons of a shirt from about a kilometer away (the guy with the rifle and clothing shots could only whimper those shots should have been impossible. Being capable of shooting a person from a km away himself, he knew what he was talking about).
    • The most egregious example is Umibozu, who retain his aiming skill even after he got blinded. Really. Even Ryo's ability to shoot a rifle's barrel, a belt and the buttons of a shirt from one kilometer away pales compared to that...
    • Inverted and invoked with Kaori, who can't shoot straight. Turns out Ryo had surreptitiously modified her gun to make sure she never kills anyone - but in a case of Gone Horribly Right, Kaori ended up becoming adept at ricochet shots.
      • In one story arc, a one-shot character was taught to use a gun by Kaori and succeeded in hitting the bullseye multiple times in spite of using Kaori's gun. Note that this was a feat even Ryo couldn't accomplish.
    • Justified for Keibu Fumakuchi, a Dirty Cop capable of shooting a woman-sized target at about 1 km: he's an Olympic shooting champion, meaning he has both the skills and the training to do just that (it's a difficult shot for him, but he can pull it), to the point he's considered the best sniper in the world.
    • In the same arc, Ryo proved himself superior to Fumakuchi by shooting the barrel of his rifle at the same distance. Fumakuchi told himself that nobody could pull that shot and it had been a fluke, only for Ryo to do it again, following with Fumakuchi's belt and the buttons of his shirt, and concluding with calling the Olympic Games a contest between amateur (and they are, in fact) and bragging being the best professional sniper in the world, superior to any Olympic champion.
  • Several characters in Appleseed have these skills, thanks to various cybernetic enhancements and genetic tweaks, but even unmodified Deunan is a crack shot. In one memorable moment from the manga, their only hope of saving the city is to prevent a computer jack from plugging into a specific port, closing a connection. The problem is, the port is thirty meters away, at the end of a supercooled vent that nobody can enter, and they can't simply destroy the port. The solution? Take out half the gunpowder from a hollow-point bullet, put a single apple seed inside the tip, and fire it such that the seed blocks the port. It's not an impossible shot, but it's still incredibly difficult, with only one chance, and the fate of the city is riding on it. Naturally, Deunan makes the shot.
  • In Aria the Scarlet Ammo, Reki, whose signature quote is "I am a single bullet. It has no heart. Therefore, it does not think. It just flies straight towards its target", shoots the unilluminated clamp holding a bomb to the shadowed underside of a speeding bus off... from a distance of at least 200 meters... from inside a pace-matching helicopter (think of the downdraft on the bullet), through the siderails of the bridge that are flashing past several times a second... thus forcing the bomb to not only detach from the bus but bounce off the bridge to detonate harmlessly in the water. She is said to be able to shoot anything within a 2km radius without missing.
  • In Banana Fish, protagonist Ash Lynx is, among all his other talents, a gifted marksman. Early on he's shown firing a snub-nosed revolver at two of his misbehaving henchmen, from about twenty feet away, and just barely missing (deliberately) with each shot. The later character Blanca is Ash's mentor in gunplay and is a similarly gifted shot, preferring a sniper rifle over a smaller caliber.
  • Berserk: The archer Apostle Irvine, whose demonic powers include supernatural accuracy, is able to shoot five or ten arrows from his bow with each loose and have every single one hit an opponent's head simultaneously, all from a position about a kilometer away. Most enemies are decapitated by the force of his arrows, but on one occasion he shoots both of a guy's eyeballs out the side of his head with one arrow, and shoots out another guys eardrums!
  • Black Butler: Mey-Rin, one of Ciel's servants, appears to be extremely clumsy and easily flustered during her daily duties. But when danger calls, she takes off her glasses and demonstrates the reason why she was hired; her extreme farsightedness makes her a master sniper. She handles all manner of guns with no problem, and can dual-wield sniper rifles like pistols without skipping a beat. She's even said that she prefers to snipe without using a scope.
  • Black Cat: Train pulls many stunts similar to Vash, including shooting down both barrels of a Dual Wielding opponent and shooting other people's bullets out of the air (after a few seconds talking about how their shots would be ineffective anyway). Maybe most improbable is when he shoots a can off a stump, then shoots it five more times while in the air, aiming at the same spot where he shot it the first time. He only hits three, gets annoyed, and is later spotted next to a pile of similar cans having wasted a lot of bullets. One can only assume he got it right at some point. He complains that he's "losing his touch" and that he needs to practice, something he apparently hadn't done in a while.
  • Revy from Black Lagoon not only hits practically every time, but it seems like every mook she shoots dies instantly or is at least incapacitated. The secret is she shoots both her guns at once at the same target (usually) putting down a withering barrage of fire and hitting said target multiple times. Even when executing a badly wounded mook she pumps five bullets into him - which says something about Revy I guess.
  • In Blade of the Immortal, Habaki has a pistol-wielding marksman who manages to save Habaki's daughter/subordinate from death by arrows, by shooting all 10-20 of them out of the air. Made even more improbable, by the fact that they were flintlock pistols.
  • Bleach: The entire Quincy clan are this trope, most notably Ryuuken. He restores his son Uryuu's drained powers by shooting an arrow through a chakra point 19mm to the right of the sino-atrial node of the boy's heart without damaging the tissue around it. Uryuu wasn't standing still for this, either, he was trying to dodge. Although a gifted surgeon familiar with the human body, Ryuuken needed Nerves of Steel to perform un-anaesthetised heart surgery on his dodging offspring with a giant flaming energy arrow.
  • Canaan: In the first episode, Canaan takes out several enemies at long-range with a pistol.
  • Case Closed:
    • Vermouth, despite being injured, manages to shoot out the gas tank of a car with a small handgun while driving another car and looking in her rear-view mirror. As Akai remarks, she's very good. (Akai himself is no slouch, either, able to Scope Snipe Gin from several buildings away, but he was only able to pull that off by setting a trap.)
    • One of the movies involves a sniper making plenty of fairly improbable shots, but the most egregious one is when the sniper shoots somebody on a very far away moving train while the laser aim is pointed on him, which would only be possible if the bullet moved at the same speed as the laser, as in the speed of light.
  • Juzo Naniwa in Combattler V pulls off some truly ridiculous shots. At one point, he throws a pistol into the air, runs out from behind cover and proceeds to not only shoot the trigger of said pistol, causing it to fire at a small mind control device attached to another character's neck without harming them but then shoot the airborne device. Both of these shots are taken while he's still falling from jumping over a shot from the mind controlled character's ray gun.
  • Cowboy Bebop: Spike Spiegel has a remarkable knack for shooting people right between the eyes even in the most frenetic gunfight. It carries over to his Swordfish, too; in "Boogie Woogie Feng Shui", he proves capable of hitting a fist-sized rock with a Wave-Motion Gun in flight.
  • Dakara Miyoko Desu: Miyoko's father-in-law can spit a watermelon seed at a fly.
  • Death Note: In the last episode, when Light quickly tries to write down Near's name on a hidden piece of Death Note, Matsuda reacts in a split second and shoots the pen out of Light's hand. He pulls it off even better in the movie version: he shoots Light's watch off his wrist. The movie foreshadows his skill somewhat by offhandedly mentioning that he's a sharpshooter.
  • Mikan from The Demon Girl Next Door can hit a target the size of an A4 paper from a kilometer away, though she does so by magical assistance.
  • In Digimon Tamers, Henry combines this with his usual posing. One card, three targets, and the card game wasn't even his forte in the first place.
  • Nobita from Doraemon, who's otherwise a Loser Protagonist, is actually quite a marksman when it comes to using BB guns firing rubber bullets.
    • A manga episode have Nobita travelling to the Wild West, and realizing he's in the middle of a town infested with bandits. He somehow managed to out-gun two adult bandits, despite being a 12-year-old, albeit freaking out after witnessing blood firsthand. Dorami managed to come to his rescue in the midst of a heated shootout, give Nobita a gun that shoots "Sleep-pellets" (thereby turning the gunfight into Bloodless Carnage) and Nobita easily wipes out a town filled with bandits in a lengthy shootout by making all of them fall asleep.
    • The manga of Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops have Nobita and Doraemon trying to rescue Riruru from the steel troops, when Riruru is handcuffed to a robot guard. Nobita somehow managed to shoot the cuff's chain from a distance away without hitting either Riruru or her guard.
    • Doraemon: Nobita and the Galaxy Super-express have Nobita and Doraemon - and Nobita's new rival, Ashton - partaking in a shooting contest. Ashton fires six shots at six targets, hitting five, while Nobita only managed to hit one... before it's revealed the tin Nobita shot at contains six holes and six spent bullet casings.
  • Eyeshield 21:
    • Although his excess of guns is usually just for intimidation (and laughs), Hiruma has insanely good aim when it counts with his guns or a football. The Kid, too, although he's descended from Olympic champion marksmen.
    • Pretty much all the quarterbacks, as expected of them, have great aiming skills, with the biggest exception being (probably) Homer from the NASA Aliens/Shuttles, who has a super long, super huge pass, but has little control on where it lands and so he relies heavily on his receiver, Watt.
  • In Fairy Tail, Gray manages to shoot Racer with an arrow from a mile away.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, Riza Hawkeye's idea of disciplining a puppy is to empty a pistol's magazine around it, without even grazing the puppy.
  • Full Metal Panic!:
    • Kurz Weber is apparently one of the most naturally talented marksmen in the world, and generally handles sniping duties for his unit. This includes, at one point, making a shot from the back of a moving truck that goes straight into a Humongous Mecha's machinegun, disabling the weapon — using an ordinary sniper rifle. His personal best? A 1,620 yard kill-shot at heart, at night, during a storm, while dying of massive physical trauma including a broken back. At the time the novel in which this happened was written, the world record was 2,500 yards, with a considerably more powerful rifle, in considerably more ideal conditions (good lighting, no crosswind...).
    • Compared to Kurz, Sousuke's marksmanship is merely normal, but he still nails a watermelon from something like fifty paces, blindfolded, during a game of crack-the-watermelon in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. With a shotgun.
    • And then there was Shinji, he hit several turrets while running so he could be able to look at the girls bathing. He lands on Sousuke's crotch.
  • Future Diary:
    • Yuno is scarily good with a handgun as well as any bladed Psycho Weapons she gets her hands on. Best exemplified when she took down a police SWAT team by shooting them all in the neck, thereby avoiding their bulletproof vests and helmets.
    • There's also Yukiteru and his darts, which he uses as weapons against other diary owners.
  • The Major from Ghost in the Shell once shot a fleeing perp in the ankle, as he was landing from a jump, at what could have been no less than a hundred meters. Justified somewhat with the Major being a full cyborg capable of acting with literally mechanical precision and has targeting software capable of calculating all aspects of the shot.
    • In the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG episode "Poker Face", the Major and Saito face off. It becomes a game of I Know You Know I Know when Saito is viewing the skills of The Major and realizes she does not have the software for midrange sniping skills. He attempts to shoot her before she can download the software. The Major had been fooling Saito into thinking that she couldn't shoot down his bullets midflight the whole time and shoots him in the eye. Maybe.
  • Golgo 13: To say it simply, Duke Togo is the greatest sniper in the world.
  • Grenadier:
    • Rushuna Tendo, the main character, is also a peace-loving, gun toting blonde in a red jacket. At one point, she stopped a massive barrage of bullets by firing a single bullet, that caused a chain reaction where each bullet deflected the next bullet down the line until the final bullet destroyed the machine gun firing said bullets.
    • In the final battle in the series, in which Rushuna faces off against her Evil Counterpart, 80% of the bullets they fired would hit each other exactly between them. In one case, rapid-fired while jumping away from each other.
    • The improbable aiming with these two starts well before a shot is even fired: to load their guns, they literally thrust their chests in the direction that allows the bullets stored in their cleavage to leap right into the loading chambers.
    • The very first time you see Rushuna use her gun, she picks off a sniper from about a mile away. With a revolver. Firing it across her body at waist height. And she makes sure it's not a lethal shot.
  • In the manga Gun Blaze West, "Target" Kevin is a sharpshooter... with a double-barrelled sawed-off shotgun. Yeah. He's also got a twelve barrelled number for special occasions, but still seems to think of himself as an ace marksman even though it would take more effort not to hit something with that monster.
  • Gundam series:
    • Lockon Stratos from Mobile Suit Gundam 00 is recruited for the PMC Celestial Being because of his ability to, with the aid of his Dynames Gundam, shoot a satellite out of orbit from the ground, not to mention during the siege on the Ptolemaios, the Gundam was not calibrated and he ignored Haro's request to tune the gun and instead programmed it to manually target or else he would have been inactive for a good 10 minutes. That and he also has skill with a real life sniper rifle.
    • A less noticed example would be Lady Une of Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. She managed a headshot with a standard hand gun, while the target was in free-fall and she was in the airplane she had thrown the target out of 8 seconds prior. Wing also has Trowa Barton, pilot of Gundam Heavyarms. In The Movie alone, we see him shooting missiles out of the air and fighting hundreds of opponents without a single fatality. Nothing impressive for your standard Cold Sniper, right? Well, Trowa does all this with Gatlings. On top of that, in one episode we see that Heavyarms' control system doesn't auto-compensate for the added weight of the Gatlings, meaning there's incredible resistance on the control sticksnote ; on the plus side, this also means that the Heavyarms gains a massive boost in speed and maneuverability when the Gatlings run out of ammo and Trowa drops them.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: Kira Yamato once he gets the Freedom Gundam. Granted, he is using a targeting computer for aid, but nonetheless, he frequently fires five beams at once, which disable (not destroy) five different mobile suits per volley. He's even better in Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny, where he's got even more beams and often fires from strange angles (such as being upside down). Not to mention that he repeats those incredibly precise shots very rapidly, sometimes non-lethally disabling everyone else on the battlefield. You could maybe chalk this up to his being a Coordinator... except that no other Coordinator in the series even comes close to that level of marksmanship.
    • This could be due to his being claimed to be the ultimate Coordinator by Rau Le Creuset towards the end of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED.
    • One minor villain in ∀ Gundam is somehow sniped in the head while being flipped upside down.
  • Gunsmith Cats revolves around high-octane gunning and driving around the streets of Chicago — and the main character's trademarked ability to shoot her opponents' trigger finger off at a generous distance. (Hence her nickname, "Thumb-Snap Rally".) Her skills aren't Grenadier level bullshit, but they come close.
  • Hellsing:
    • The vampire leads are extremely good (though not infallible) shots due to a sort of "third eye" superpower they have. Even more impressive is the manga's Rip van Winkle, whose magical rifle fires bullets that change course mid-flight to such a degree that they can hit multiple targets and blow up helicopters. Meanwhile, Seras manages to snipe two dozen missiles fired at Hellsing manor from four kilometers away and does it so fast, they all explode almost simultaneously.
    • The fully human Integra Hellsing (in the first TV series at least) is shown as capable of shooting the exact same spot on a target repeatedly (creating a single hole in it) and rapidly shooting the shape of a cross into the face of a vampire (take into account the gun's recoil and the fact that the vampire would stagger back after each shot).
  • In Higurashi: When They Cry Kai, Kasai manages to snipe out all four tires of a van (think of the angles!) in under 7 seconds from a great distance. This apparently requires no resighting, reloading, or any movement on the part of the shooter.
  • Inuyasha:
    • Kikyo performs several impressive feats of marksmanship with her arrows, a skill that isn't passed on to Kagome at first, but by the end of the series Kagome is able to shoot moving targets while keeping herself balanced on Inuyasha's back, hit tiny shards of the sacred jewel hidden within a enemy's body with pin-point accuracy, and eventually shoot a target even if a person or wall is in the way, without the arrow hitting that person or wall.
    • Sango also fits into this category seeing as she's able to hit a mark with her enormous boomerang with incredible accuracy, even when it is on the rebound.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • Hol Horse's Stand basically grants him Improbable Aiming Skills, as he can control where the bullet goes after he's fired it. And yet he never manages to hit anyone (that wasn't retconned back to life) with said homing bullets.
    • Even further along the timeline is Guido Mista, whose Sex Pistols Stand kicks the bullets he fires out of a gun. If he doesn't feed them first they won't work and also will sometimes beat each other up.
    • Johngalli A. manages to be an excellent sniper despite being blind; he gets around his disability by using his Manhattan Transfer Stand to read air currents and redirect his shots.
  • Although the main cast packs two snipers, the most ridiculous case of this in Jormungand is pulled by Child Soldier Jonah, who deflects a rocket launcher shot with a grenade. Repeat, an explosive projectile moving at just under the speed of sound with a grenade!
  • In Jura Tripper, Tiger shoots a saddle latch, causing it to rip and release the saddle. From a flying dinosaur.
  • The main character of Lord Marksman and Vanadis, Tigre, will hit his target no matter what. Even if he's just using a flimsy bow after only practicing with it with two shots, or aiming at someone over 300 meters away, or shooting an arrow that was already fired from 400 meters away on horseback.
  • Lupin III has two such marksmen, Lupin himself and his partner Daisuke Jigen.
    • In Lupin III: Seven Days Rhapsody, they take turns shooting each other's bullets out of midair.
    • In Lupin III: Dead or Alive, Lupin demonstrates this skill during the climax by throwing a knife accurately enough to hit the primer of a bullet, which fired the bullet at General Headhunter's head.
    • As for Jigen, in addition to his incredibly Quick Draw, he has consistently demonstrated accuracy skills that allow him to Shoot the Bullet. He can also hit targets accurately using his revolver while having his back turned to them by using a shaving mirror to aim.
    • In Lupin III: The First, the gang rescues Lupin from Zenigata again. To slow down the police vans, Jigen drives the fiat backwards, unscrews the bolts holding a freeway street sign up by shooting them, while targeting said bolts through via the rear view mirror, causing the sign to crash down just as they race under it.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
    • Vice managed to snipe the head of a Combat Cyborg who was attacking an ally, with said ally being in the way of his line of sight, through a building window, from a moving helicopter that couldn't be seen from said building. And he did this while said cyborg had previously been playing possum, so he only had a split second to react and perform the shot.
    • Subverted in a flashback by the same character. A gunman is holding a little girl hostage. (Even worse? Said little girl is Vice's sister, Laguna.) He takes the shot and hits her in the EYE!!! The guilt from this caused him to quit his job as a sniper and become a helicopter pilot. The girl visits him later in the series while he is hospitalized and she appears to have a glass eye.
    • Near the beginning of A's, Nanoha, while training, uses a guided magical bullet to hit a juice can 100 times in midair, and is slightly disappointed when the can doesn't fall into the trash bin after the final strike.
    • In Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, Teana pops both rear tires of a speeding car in less than a second... with a gun that is decidedly non-magical... while standing on the back of a speeding motorcycle... which is steered by Erio on Super-Speed.
  • Madlax, who can kill anyone not protected by Plot Armor with a single shot regardless or whether or not she's running, jumping, or hanging upside down. Half the time she doesn't even aim. Half the time she doesn't even have her eyes open. And yes, these overlap, resulting in scenes where she literally dances through fully-automatic weapons fire with her eyes closed and picking off her attackers one by one while facing a different direction.
  • Mazinger Z: One of Dr. Hell's Mechanical Beasts (Jenova M9) could shoot down anything as far as one hundred kilometres away. Baron Ashura decided to try out its aim -by shooting down a passenger plane.
  • My Hero Academia:
    • UA teacher Snipe has the Quirk "Homing", which gives him these up to a range of 600 meters. He first demonstrates them by hitting several villains from distances of at least hundreds of meters, with a pistol.
    • Lady Nagant, to the point that Snipe admits she's his Always Someone Better. Her Quirk "Rifle" lets her create a sniper rifle out of her own body and ammunition of her choosing from molding her hair into bullets, but her actual sharpshooting skill is explicitly stated to be all-natural rather than based on her Quirk. In her first scene, she hits Deku's phone not only from far away, but through an oddly-shaped iron sight built into her sniper rifle, bipod and all, manifested from her right arm. Most snipers require a magnified scope and both hands on the gun to stabilize it. Then there's how she's able to aim such that she can curve her shots over a building to accurately hit a target.
  • Natsuki from My-HiME shoots several Flechette Storm magical darts out of the air with dual pistols.
  • Naruto:
    • While training, Itachi leaps into the air and, while upside-down, hits eight targets with his kunai, and strikes two of them in midair in such a way to divert their course to hit two targets behind a rock, while still getting those two to their targets. In an early episode, Zabuza throws some shuriken at Naruto, but Haku, who is standing between the two and off to the side, out of the way of the shuriken's flight path, throws needles at them and knocks them out of the air.
    • Apparently Tenten has this ability, however, this never stops anyone from just blocking or deflecting her ninja tools.
    • Though constantly Overshadowed by Awesome, Ino in her fight against Sakura in the Chunin Exam Prelims snatched a kunai out of the air then threw it back so that it collided perfectly with the tip of another oncoming kunai.
  • Mana Tatsumiya in Negima! Magister Negi Magi could ricochet her bullets and hit her targets with a sniper rifle, even when she couldn't see the target and was firing impact-fused bullets which should have detonated instead of bouncing. Similarly Gandolfini, one of the mage-teachers, was capable of intercepting an incoming bullet and hitting it head-on with one of his own.
  • In Neon Genesis Evangelion, throwing a fifty-meter long spear into low Earth orbit in order to hit an Angel barely a few hundred meters across dead on? It doesn't matter if the thrower was a semi-organic Humongous Mecha with a trio of supercomputers doing ballistic calculations, that sort of thing is a bit much for your average person. Apparently, Rei can do it.
  • Parodied in Ninja Nonsense, where a squad of Ninja pin all of Miyabi's rogue summoning scrolls to the wall with shuriken. Then they all start expressing their surprise, as none of them had ever used a shuriken before.
  • Amazing shooting skills are a key characteristic of the female assassins in the anime Noir. Among other things, one of the characters—on two separate occasions—is capable of shooting the blade off a knife being swung at her partner. She does this with a handgun at up to fifty feet away.
  • Ōkami-san's Ryoshi can shoot marble-sized balls with a slingshot with remarkable accuracy. He shot a moving baseball out of the way, for crying out loud!
  • One Piece:
    • Among the top contenders for main character Usopp's CMOA is when he hits the main antagonist of an arc with a rubber-band slingshot, while standing on the top of a tower several miles away while there is hurricane force wind, with perfect precision. The Marines present note that their guns aren't even capable of shooting that far, let alone successfully aim at that distance. He tops himself in the Dressrosa arc, when he snipes someone in a castle through multiple windows from ONE COUNTRY AWAY. WHILE IT WAS WINDY. And since the target was far beyond the standard range of his slingshot, Usopp had to account for the very non-standard trajectory from two different timed-activation boosters attached to the projectile. Usopp also once shot a ball from his slingshot through a crown on a weathervane chicken that essentially across most of a city. He initially didn't see it because it was so far away.
    • There are two other characters connected to Usopp, who, at least at the time of their introduction, actually outclassed Usopp in Improbable Aiming Skills. These are Yasopp, Usopp's father, who has claimed to be able to hit an ant between its eyes. The other is Van Auger, Usopp's obvious Evil Counterpart, who has demonstrated lethal accuracy from so far away the main characters can't even see the island he's shooting from. It is unclear whether or not Usopp has surpassed either yet, though it seems almost inevitable that he ultimately will. Van Auger shouldn't be surprising, as his clothes, gun, and aiming ability all seem to be taken directly from Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
    • The Mark Mark fruit allows the user (the fishman pirate Vander Decken IX) to turn whoever he touches into a target so that any item he launches will chase him down forever and hit him unless there is an unavoidable or faster-moving object in the way. This overlaps heavily with Improbable Weapon User, especially since all he has to do to 'launch' an object in a way that triggers his powers is to move it slightly (for example, by shoving something heavy), meaning he can very easily create a case of Everything Trying to Kill You where everything that's trying to kill you is also relentlessly accurate.
    • Kizaru has shown himself to be a pretty accurate marksman too, shooting Luffy's seastone key in half from an incredibly long distance.
    • Eneru is able to use his Rumble Rumble Fruit powers to strike people and objects from miles away using Mantra to sense where they are.
    • Trebol can fling bits of sticky substance, that he secretes, with enough power to punch a hole through a wall. Once he used this trick to shoot a fly, and hit it directly between the eyes.
  • Ranma ½:
    • Though normally she's Overshadowed by Awesome, sometimes to the point of being a Damsel in Distress (though, to be fair, her fiancé Ranma Saotome gets the same treatment too, sometimes actually being a damsel), Akane Tendō nevertheless is repeatedly shown to have amazing skill with thrown or projectile weapons. In one of the earliest stories, she manages to accurately shoot an arrow laden with a bag containing about a kilo of catnip, and repeatedly manages to nail just about anyone she pleases with thrown weapons, no matter what she's actually throwing. One notable example is when Hikaru Gosunkugi tries to ruin Ranma's reputation by dressing up in costume and harassing Fūrinkan Girls, only to pull this on Akane, who promptly attacks him and, when he outruns her, throws an apple at him. It bends around a corner, practically at a 90 degree angle, and hits him hard enough to knock him head over heels.
    • Ranma also exhibits some improbable aiming skills, as he was once able to flick a stub-sized pencil from across the classroom, while jumping, and stick it point-first into the hole of the fifty-yen coin in his teacher's hand. He was also able to jam a polearm weapon perfectly into the key-like slot on a statue, while falling from several hundred feet in the air.
  • In Rebuild World, Alpha's targeting algorithms make it possible for Akira to aim accurately even in the worst of circumstances, like firing a sniper rifle one-handed in near-pitch black darkness or while driving a car or a motorcycle. Her aiming support is what makes it possible for Akira to take down monsters far more easily than he'd normally be able to, with a level of accuracy described by the narrative as "god-like". That said, she's not infallible, and she's also limited by Akira's own body and ability to draw a bead.
  • Rooster Fighter: Keiju catches a flying bug by spitting a pebble at it.
  • In The Rose of Versailles, Oscar is a legend with a sword, so when someone challenges her to a pistol duel, everyone thinks that she's screwed. However, one Retcon later, she's also been practicing with guns her whole life. Who knew?
  • Genjyo Sanzo from Saiyuki for sure. He has not only shot a single playing piece off a floating table when both of them were whirling around in a torrential maelstrom, he once shot a poison seed out of Gojyo's heart with such pinpoint aim that it destroyed the seed without killing Gojyo.
  • In Samurai Deeper Kyo, Basara, who is a member of the Junishinsho, is able to fire countless arrows at incredible speed, and almost never miss, even when he is aiming at such tiny points like eyes or in peoples' mouths. And as if that weren't badass enough, his specialty is firing his arrows in the air so that they will come down around him at the exact moment his enemies close in for the attack. It's implied that Basara is such a strategic genius that he can predict when his enemy will close in, but it seems more like a supernatural ability than anything else.
  • In the Science Ninja Team Gatchaman episode "The Bird Missile of Bitterness", Koji is assigned to perform an assassination for Galactor. He's got his rifle pointed at the target, while riding his bike up the stairs of the arena and steering with his feet. Joe shoots out the scope on the rifle. From a considerable distance away.
  • Submarine Super 99: In the very first episode, and despite never having used the rifle before, Susumu manages to hit a torpedo launched at their ship to detonate it before it hits them, at no less than three hundred meters and while it's moving underwater. And in the last episode, he also detonates the stuck torpedoes in Hell Deathbird's ship, critically damaging it.
  • Taken up to major proportions in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which has Yoko in the Final Episode when she snipes the Anti-Spiral's Homeworld. Note that although it seemed like an easy hit, take into account that the fight had the Grand Zamboa and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann moving faster than the speed of light. And Yoko STILL manages to hit her target even through a hail of laser fire while her target was moving at the speed of light.
  • Trigun:
    • The king of Improbable Marksmanship, however, is probably Vash the Stampede. Capable of putting a bullet down the barrel of a sniper's BFG from a kilometer or so away. Earlier in the series, he attends a quick-draw contest, and is able to ensure that every hit is non-lethal by flicking pebbles at the bullets in-flight and altering their course. In the same contest, he tries to get out of the qualifying round by intentionally missing the targets; he fails. Missing, that is.
      Vash: Eh... oops. I hit them all...
    • An even better example from the manga is when he stops the explosion of at least a dozen sticks of dynamite a bad guy threw at once by shooting the wicks off. Before they hit the ground. Please note that he's using a six-shot revolver to do this.
    • Vash has the closest thing to an adequate justification for this kind of ability: He's been practicing, daily, with the same gun, for nigh-on 150 years.
    • Nicholas D. Wolfwood is also quite good, especially for a teenager, but he naturally pales against Vash.
  • Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-'s Kurogane may also fit into this, as he shows himself to be capable of very unlikely feats of precision... exactly once. In Acid Tokyo, he uses a stone to knock a crossbow bolt out of the air and acts like it was nothing out of the ordinary. Comes with being a badass Ninja, apparently.
  • Urusei Yatsura: While an odd example, Ataru Moroboshi usually uses a frying pan to block Jariten's fire breath and to hit him away, usually a few blocks. In one episode, Jariten's mother visits, and he tries to get a carnation for her, only to be delayed by many bizarre circumstances that you get used to when watching this show. In an act that might be considered kindness, Ataru hits Jariten with the frying pan, who goes flying...right into his mother's lap. Please note that Ten's mother was at least a mile away, which makes Ataru more or less as accurate as a sniper...with a frying pan.
  • The snipers in World Trigger can pull all feats that their real life counterpart can do and more. Top snipers can shoot weapons off enemies hands and shoot bullets mid air. With sufficient map information, they can also shoot targets through buildings, line of sight be damned.
    • Justified in-series as trion bullets are not affected by wind, so it's easier for them to pinpoint long distance shots. Also, sniper position has the highest requirement for graduation and as a result, most sniper trainees will never graduate. Snipers that manage to graduate have skill scores well beyond graduates from other positions.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Seto Kaiba on more than one occasion knocks something out of someone's hand with a piece of cardboard.
    • Before him, there was the Agent S5, who used poker cards as projectiles.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX:
    • When Jaden was dueling the Undertaker, a villain with a fake Millenium Puzzle that hypnotizes people, Jaden threw one of his cards at the puzzle and penetrated it from about 15 feet away. Either Jaden has a really good arm or it was made of paper mache.
    • Austin O'Brien takes this further with a Duel Disk that doubles as a gun. He's more than capable of hitting a target several hundred feet away. For whatever reason, the cards tend to explode upon impact.


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