The target was about to get into the glass elevator when he took something out of his pocket. He put it to hir ear and started to talk to it, so I guessed it was some form of comunications device. I haven't been on this world long enough to know what it was called. He seemed distressed suddeny. Guess he was recieving some bad news. He turned towards the window and it seemed he tried to find something behind the reflection in the darkness, before he turned so fast it almost seemed panicked.
"Neptune, come in."
"What is it?"
"Something's up."
I started to nervously slither my tail over the ground behind me.
"What's happening? Talk to me."
"The target picked up some communications device and suddenly it seemed panicked, like something was hunting it."
"Something it knew?"
"Dunno, but it looked outwards momentarily."
Proce may be questioned due to her lack of inhibitions, but she's smart enough to know what I was getting at. Part of the reason as to why I chose to tell her of this mission and part of the reason why I let her come along is because of her instantanious insight. If a target knows it's hunted it'll probably choose less risky possibilities, and if it knows who it is the moment of surprise is likely lost.
"Should we abort?"
It was Proce who suggested it. I considered this. If the target knew of our presence it meant that the group had managed to track us down, but for it to find us this fast was very unlikely. On the other hand it was possible that the watchers of Earth had found us, but had that happened they still wouldn't know who our target was.
My train of thought was aborted as the target put down the comm and headed for the elevator. It still seemed nervous, but not even the dumbest vi would walk into the mouth of a pilré.
"Negative, we're still on. Prepare to move."
The elevator doors slid shut and time seemed to stop. I've heard that unlike me some mercenaries turns calm when they're about to perform a hit. Before the target was even near the kill zone I was always tighter than the Viala-Kildon intraplan. The elevator was dragging itself across the fifth floor now. It's not the best of qualities for a shooter to feeze up from stress when the time to shoot approaches, but for me it's more than just freezing up. It was finally passing the third floor. I'm scared every time I'm going to pull the trigger, my heart racing at the speed of light, but it's a good thing. I can, for lack of a better word, control it. It was about to cross the second floor. I react within the microsecond, right when it's time to pull the trigger, able to pick off a flea at a hundred yards. The problem with sniping isn't the range of the scope but how fast you react when the bead cross over the target, how well you can percieve your surroundings, how well you can mentally map the trajectory, speed, offset of target and projectile, not to mention potential blockages such as armor, or ricochets.
First floor. I put my finger on the trigger, pulling it back, readying to shoot.
...OOM!
The blast could hardly be called a explosion, more like a sudden bass boom, like all other sound was silenced and we heard it through water. I looked up and in the sky what looked like a small star had appeared, slowly sinking towards the earth, bathing everything in a cold white light. The second later buzzing and interferences rang in my head, and I crawled up, hugging my tail in the sudden shock and pain. Trying to ignore it I turned back to the scope, and was just in time to see the top of the elevator dissappear into the ground.
The interferences continued, but I could hear Proce speaking, trying to speak. Trying to percieve something else I put my tail back on the ground, and if possible my heart grew colder than it already was. The ground was vibrating. Humming like a beehive, erasing all possibilites of hearing anything. The light seemed to disturb the light spectrum aswell, for I looked at my arm and I was glowing like a neon sign while all other light seemed dimmed.
Now I was really scared. 'How were we found?!' I momentarily screamed in my head when I heard something, not through our link or the vibrations in the ground, but my 'real' hearing. I heard pounces, screeches, and metal hitting pavement in the alley. I was already raising my right leg to pounce into the air, to Proce, when I managed to filter something out from the patternless buzzing and wheezing of the mencom.
"...it's a trap!"
It may seem narrow minded and...stupid in retrospect, but I really hadn't thought about that until now. It actually made me pause mid-stride. How had they found us? How had they known? How did they find out so early?! We'd been fucking set up! It was actually a stroke of luck that I didn't manage to go further than moving my leg, for right behind me I heard a footstep. A single, heavy footstep, with the dulled vibrations of Earth armor boots, and I froze.
They eased closer, almost creeping towards me. I went over the way the roof looked in my mind. Behind me was a door to a stairwell and a air duct, about five feet between one another, and I was somewhere in the middle. The constant thumping, buzzing, wheezing and screeching in my head made it hard to concentrate, but by the sound of it they were about ten, possibly nine feet away and making their way closer to me. I guessed that the human wasn't very used to seeing a humanoid parody of a lizard, and so it wanted to be close enough for a certain kill.
It was a guess, but I had very little else to go on, so I slowly slid my right hand forward, against what looked like a secondary pistolgrip, carved into the weapon. Through the vibrations the humans footsteps sounded about seven or eight feet away now. I had gone tense, and time seemed to slow again as my hand moved over the carving in the weapon. Now it was six feet away. My index finger dipped into the trigger guard and my thumb slid over a flat area near the back of the barrel assembly and the gun lay in my hand. Five feet away.
Time seemed to stand still as I twisted my arm backwards, towards the human. The rain reflected the glow in my skin and made it look like a minor universe, with me as the central star. My gaze met with the humans and I saw the shock in his eyes. He looked like a shadow thanks to the light from that strange interference device. He had risen his weapon but had no time to fire. I twisted and turned the weapon and fired. The homopolar coils transfered a two point eight megajoule current to the sixteen millimeter self combusting 'Firefly' round and accelerated it to three thousand two hundred and ten miles an hour, exiting in a concentrated plasma burst and leaving a brightly lit orange stroke of light in the sky and a smouldering tunnel through the soldiers skull.
The soldier fell down on the roof. Without thinking I reached out my tongue and tasted the air. It was instinct more than anything - I was completely capable of sensing smell with the two nostils in my face. The scent of scorched flesh mixed with the residual charge of the atmosphere in a nauseating aroma of sulfur. I loathed the smell as much as killing. Not wanting to linger I took a sprint over the body and dissappeared into the cleft seperating the buildings.
I spread my legs till my feet connected with the wall to slow my decent and my claws screeched from the friction. About twelve feet above the ground I let go of the walls and landed with a thud that seemed to shake the trash cans. Normally I would have hoped to get away with stealth, but something had happened to Proce. I couldn't hear her fighting anymore.
I sprang like a arrow from a strung bow, moving through the alley in a speed that seemed nothing short of ridiculous in this confined space. Mere feet away from the juction I put my feet on the right wall, pressed away from it, put my other foot on the upcoming wall, turning my body left in the junction as I did so, and landed again on the ground. I lost hardly any speed, but I heard and felt my tail swish into the wall hard enough to make small splinters fall off. I cursed and raised my speed even more.
The light from the 'star' shaded everything except me, and the deadened omnisonus made the happening nothing short of frightening. All I heard of my own footfalls was a muffled echo, and trash cans, walls, and reflections melded together in a black mass of obscurity. I was hardly able to see the alley to my right until it was too late. I twisted into the alley, using the left wall as a step in the same manner as before and I saw them.
They must've been wearing something that made them reflect light even less than the rest of the world, because shades was the only thing I could describe them as. They were nothing but sillhouettes against the darker alley, as if they were cut out from reality and I was looking down the void of Chaos itself, like ungods radiating with darkness, casting a shadow on darkness itself, and like a green sun in a universe of darkness, Proce lying unconscious beneath them..
Without thinking I threw myself towards them, a fit of rage incompareable to anything other than reptilian. I was going to kill them, tear them up, reach into their gut and strangle them with their intestines before they could even get into shock. I was. Then something hit me in the back. Involuntarily my entire body tightened up in pain, my muscles wrenching in every direction and I couldn't hold back a roar of fury and suffering. Unable to control my muscles I fell head first over myself in an angle that seemed like it was going to break my neck and landed on my side, not far from the dark figures in front of me, spasming like a fish on land.
