You're walking in the woods. There's no one around, and your palmhusk is almost dead. Out of the corner of your eye you spot him: Ol' One-Eye.
He's following you, about 30 trees back. That's where the references end, though. You can hear the faint rustle of treeneedles every now and then. A soft crunch of snow and a hushed, burbling breath from above, as quiet as a breeze. You're out hunting Beefgrub so you and Zebede can have some meat for the next few days while delivery drones refuse to visit due to the intense snow, but now? Now you're feeling like the one being hunted. You don't think it sees you exactly, yet - but it knows you're in its woods.
You've only seen Blizzard Terrors looming in the distance before. They tend to shy away from the openness of your ranch's fields unless they're desperate to steal one of your herd; but you've heard tale they like to linger in the trees, where their tall, pale, scarified limbs can blend in at a glance with the birch trees that litter the local woodland.
The last few messages you've managed to tap out on your waning palmhusk - its battery is never great, but especially not in the cold - have largely been questions about the beast that seems to be stalking you, and it doesn't seem like a great time. An angry, obsessive beast with one eye, one hand, a smattering of scars from multiple people in your friend group and hell-bent on injuring the Local Bee. Your last outgoing message is one of cocky self-assurance that you'll be the one to fell the fiend, but your pusher feels chill as the high blizzard snowdrifts all around you.The varmint-rifle you brought in your hands is certainly not enough for a threat this big, you'll have to dip into your Strife Specibus for something a little bigger... but for now, you do still have dinner to catch.
The beefgrub nest isn't too much further from where you stopped to text the groupchat. A dark spot in the forest where the snow falls thin enough that ground-cover pokes through, letting the little meaty critters snuffle around for morsels. You line up your shot, squeeze the trigger, and an echoing crack cascades between the trees as your prey squeals its last. You wince, wishing you could afford a silencer for your weapon, but the noise is made. All you can do now is hurry in through the snow to captchalogue the grub the size of a small pig and hope to gog you can get away again before the thing that's stalking you-
A low, gurgling growl sounds out, coupled with the sharp splintering creaks of breaking wood as the Terror lurches forward towards the sound to investigate. You mutter an oath muffled by your parka and snatch up your prey into a captcha-card, then bound away into the snow to try and hide. Tall, gangly, trolloid limbs lurch through the darkness towards the smell of fresh blood, the sound of Trollian artifice. You pin yourself behind a tree, pulling out your strongest revolver and clutching it to your chest while you tremble and hope it can't track you with one eye.It leans down, snuffles around. Footsteps thump and crunch through the snow, and for a moment you think it's turning to leave.
Then the tree behind you wrenches down and out of the way and there it looms, Ol' One-Eye in all its macabre glory, bellowing right in your face. A face like a lightmare from sleeping outside sopor, scarred by bullet-wounds with an empty pit where an eye should be. A torso bearing half a greatsword just jutting kind of impudently out of it and pockmarked with an upsetting number of bullet scars. One hand seems messily cleaved from its body, still fresh enough that you can see its dark blood glistening, half-healed. You're stunned enough that you're barely moving to aim your gun before you get knocked flying several yards from a swift punt to the torso. Oof, there goes your breath.
You stagger back to your feet, spitting a bit of bronze into the snow, and check your gun. Single-action, six shots, standard ammo. You've got a few reloads if needed for this gun, including one full load of incendiary ammo - but those are expensive at a few caegars apiece, so you don't keep them chambered by default. One-Eye is busy still snarling fearsomely at you, and you just take the time to yell back just as loud as you can, cock the hammer back, and fire off a shot that grazes the beast's cheek. Its hiss is so shrill it's like a kettle boiling over, and you can't help but wince. It's not much of a wound, but you know what they say - if it bleeds, we can kill it.You crack a grim smile at your foe and pull the hammer back again, lining up your next shot.
You expected it to counter-attack. That's how strife tends to go, a series of abjuring and aggrieving and autoparrying so on. You didn't expect it to ARBORIFY and throw the tree at you, though. The log bounces sidelong through the snow at you, covered in sharp bare branches and weighing several hundred - if not a few thousand - pounds. If that thing hits you at that speed, you're a bronze smear. So as it bounds near, you take a deep breath and launch yourself forward in the finest Youth Roll you've ever attempted. A hazy red you attribute to adrenaline fills your vision as you try to bound over the tree, and for a moment you feel the bare branches scratching along your parka for a lot longer than expected; in this haze, it feels more like bony fingers slowly carressing you than the high-speed slice of sharp twigs that should be wrecking your jacket. But as soon as the odd floaty gentleness of your dodge-roll occurs to you, the moment passes and you tumble into the snow, perfectly unscathed. The tree tumbles on past and takes out a dormant sapling a few dozen yards away, falling still and silent thereafter.
You crack off another shot, and another, and another, and another, and another.. Some of them miss. Some graze it or bury themselves in the bonier, more durable parts of the beast's body with only piercing screams and bellows to signify you damaged it at all. One-Eye looks only slightly worse for wear - stained with its own dark blood and furious beyond all comprehension of rage - and you're out of rounds. You hurriedly clap the cylinder open and shake out the old shells, reaching into your specibus for more when the next hit lands. One-Eye's one good arm backhands you, sending you skidding and flailing some thirty yards backwards on the ice. You only barely manage to pinwheel your arms to regain your footing on a lucky tumble. You watch as it hunkers down on all four - err, threes and prepares to charge.
Reload reload reload c'mon, girl. This thing hits hard enough that one more proper hit on you will probably be the limits of your womangrit, and with Ladyy still safe at home, there ain't no one comin' to save you. Zebede's a mile away and scared shitless. All the other combatants you know live in town, or are ranchers busy with their own herds. You're not sure another living troll is even hearing this fight at all. You skip the standard brass and go for the spicier rounds, thumbing 'em one after another into the cylinder as the monstrosity begins its charge.
This isn't how I wanted this life to go.
The thought echoes through your thinkpan for a moment as you see the blood in its fangs looming closer. It really isn't, on the small and large scale alike. You didn't want to go out gunfighting a cryptid. You didn't want to live on a hellscape where it rains acid and the internet laughs at you for ordering food. You didn't want to let your skills at science and engineering and animal husbandry go to waste on a future of menial drudgery or military gruntwork aboard some dingy starship. You've always felt like you could've been something more. Could be something more, if you just had more time. Just a little more time, to do what needs to be done. Just a little... more...
It takes you a moment to realize that your perception of the world seems to have slowed again. One-Eye should've reached you by now, surely. You spent what felt like minutes wrapped up in that reverie of misery, anticipating the end. But the monster's only halfway here.Maybe this is what it's like just before you die - stuck in a moment to take it all in before oblivion takes you. You glance down at the loaded gun in your hand, the faint glow of fire-rounds just visible on the backs of the bullets in the open cylinder. Expensive. Powerful. A rare and hard to come by commodity for someone of your caste. You look up to the sky. A gap in the snowstorm was just starting when you left the hive, and you can see the darkness of the clear Alternian sky for the first time in weeks. The green moon looms off towards the horizon, round as ever, but the pink one sits directly overhead, full as can be and covering the field in a surreal rosy glow. Maybe that's what's got your pan full of red fog. You take what you think will be your last breath and clap the cylinder shut on your revolver, holding the gun square in front of your chest with one hand, while the other hovers just above its hammer, ready to deliver one final corny line.
You tighten your focus, each coming shot of your final volley calculating in your mind. For a moment, you swear you hear Spaghetti Western music. Just your vivid imagination, probably.
You fan the hammer faster than you've ever fanned it before, each bullet feeling like it's barely left the chamber by the next time the hammer strikes down. You feel like you can see each one making its way towards your target in slow motion until they get about halfway there. Then that red cloud seems to fall away, and all at once your volley collides with Ol' One-Eye in a barrage of tiny orange explosions that blast small but hearty chunks off the monster. A shattered splinter of its already wrecked arm here, what looks to be a good chunk of its upper shoulder-flesh there, a bit of rib or tooth or side or thigh there. The impact of all six bullets somehow striking at once is enough to send it flying onto its back in the snow, its charge interrupted. Those glowing-hot flame bullets sizzle in the bullet-holes, burning away at full intensity for a little longer than you expected.
One-Eye yelps and roars in pain, visibly weakened as it lays there in the snow. You limp forward, all the pain of the battering you just took kind of catching up with you. You feel almost as pathetic as One-Eye looks laying there, wounded in the snow. You're pretty sure if you fire another round, it's gonna knock something loose. Still... You point your gun at the thing's head and hiss through your teeth -
"I dunno if that's gonna be enough to kill a thing like yyou, big fella. I surely hope it is, 'cause I ain't got a lick of strifin' left in me. But if it ain't? Yyou remember the face of the one who done yyou good like this. I see yyou 'round again, I'm takin' the whole head, pardner. Now die, or get goin'."
You butt the monster in the face with your pistol, spit another streak of bronze blood on it, then turn and limp away to leave it to die - you hope - in the snowbank. You're headed home to take a long bath and a longer soak in the sopor. When your palmhusk has perked back up, you'll let the crew know.
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