- OOC:
Crest
(6.2) Sharpshooter
First Level 2 - 6 Weeks & 20 posts
Post 1: Unpin a squad
The thrum of the music would have shaken an unaccustomed soul to pieces. Yet, this was not the case with the lone Lance Corporal sitting in the passenger compartment of the dropship, waiting to hit dirt. Crest lightly pounded out the beat out with his foot, calming his usual jittery nerves. Even though the blast of music resounded within the grass-stained scout armor, with Blackjack’s motto emblazoned in red on the pauldron, a dead silence ruled the dropship.
The Lance Corporal’s eyes fixated on the small blue holoprojector on the floor, currently off. Then with a sigh and with the music still pounding, he carefully examined the TI-47 Deathwind sniper rifle in his hand. His training, first in infiltration, then in marksmanship, and followed by this had taught him to keep his equipment in perfect condition. This time was no exception. Careful not to disturb the delicate scope, he carefully jerked the stock of rifle off. He then separated the firing assembly, the crucial part of any rifle. He examined the firing pin, making sure that there was no rust or residue and that it was of the correct size. Satisfied, he placed it back into its spot and proceeded to examine the chamber, checking for rust or residue of its last firing. Finding none, he set the firing assembly aside and peered into the barrel, checking for irregularities in the smooth, whirlpool shape of the grooves. Finally content with the state of the rifle, he quickly reassembled it and re-fixated his eyes on the small holoprojector, waiting for the briefing to begin.
The music pounded for four minutes, before the holoprojector started warming up. Crest shut the music off with a flick of his eye.
A Lieutenant, with an immaculate, creased uniform, appeared. Crest snapped to his feet and brought his hand up to an unfamiliar salute. His mouth twisted into a grimace behind the visor as he imagined his sloppiness. The last time he had pulled off the perfect, formal salute was...he could not remember when. He had done it when he had first met Gates when he was still a fresh recruit out of the academy, but he had to have done it after that. Nevertheless, his memory betrayed him.
Glaring in disgust of the horrible salute, the Lieutenant began the briefing.
“Lance Corporal Crest, you have excelled at the sharpshooter class with only one other that is on par with you, Corporal Kendel. However, I do not want to see your rivalry today. For your final exercise, I want you to show me and my fellow trainers how well you can utilize your new skills to unpin a squad instead trying to out-do a fellow trainee.”
The Lieutenant’s voice could have frozen lava, as he showed his disgust of bitter rivalry.
“You have the callsign ‘Sharp’. A full squad of troopers, Shock, is currently pinned in a valley with heavy weaponry and a barrage of droids. You’ll be deployed on a ridge along side them. Unpin the squad and cover them to the green smoke. The current time record is ten minutes, twenty-seven seconds by Corporal Ke- Good luck,” the Lieutenant abruptly ended, realizing his mistake in revealing the record and inflaming the rivalry. The holoprojector shut off.
Dammit, Kendel, you will not beat me. I will be better than you. I have not pushed myself to the edge of my ability for these last few weeks just to have you beat me. You will fall.Crest stood up and quickly stretched the tightness from his body.
“Ten seconds out,” came over the intercom.
Crest grabbed his life, also known as the rifle, and prepared to disembark.
“Three...two...one...GO!”
The door slammed open and Crest jumped out of the LAAT/i. Kneeling, he brought his rifle up and quickly scanned the ridge, checking for any...surprises the trainers might have placed to catch an unsuspecting sharpshooter. His suspicions calmed, Crest flicked his comm to Shock’s frequency.
“Shock Lead, this is Sharp, at your service. Heard you guys could use a hand.”
“Bloody good to hear you; we’re barely holding our own. You need to bear west quarter mile and break us out of this area.”
“Copy, I’ll be there soon.”
Crest rose to his feet, slung his rifle onto his back, and drew his Q2s5 blaster pistol. Even though it could not compare to the range of the rifle, he would need speed if he wanted to grind Kendel into the dust. In that matter, failure was not an option. Crest began a sprint across the ridge, throwing caution to the wind, almost literally. He was also very lucky, as he reached the edge of the ridge.
He threw two quick glances, looking for a good position to fire from.
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“Alright, listen up, maggots and wanna-be’s. You wanna know why the hell you can hit a small target out there? It’s ’cause your inept bodies can’t hold the damn rifle straight and level for even a second. So...what do you do? Never mind, you guys couldn’t add one plus one, and here I am thinking you can figure this out. You put the damn rifle on a stand. That’s why you carry those annoying bi-pods. See? Everything has a purpose UNLIKE what you all think. Oh, oh, sorry, you guys don’t have brains, so how in the world could you think?”
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Crest grimaced, remembering expert, if slightly rude, Sergeant Major. Shaking his head, he snapped out of the reverie. This was a time to act, unless he wanted to lose to Kendel. He walked to the edge and manually located Shock. Seeing them a bit south of his position, Crest laid down and set up the powerful rifle.
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“Alright, listen up, you half-maggots and half-wanna-be’s. These rifles can shoot a gnat off a person a mile away. YOU, however, cannot. Why? Because you have no idea how to shoot the damn thing properly. This ain’t your E-11 where you can point and squeeze the trigger and expect the target to drop. You’ve got to do it properly, otherwise one shot will land on your target’s unlucky buddy and the next will end up in the nearest star. That makes no one happy and you dead, eventually.”
The slovenly Sergeant Major looked over the recruits, his contempt showing as he looked over a prim and proper, white-shelled Corporal Kendel. His contempt eased slightly as he looked over the only SCOPE trooper in the group. Crest’s armor carried grass stains, and had the Blackjack motto painted in red on his right pauldron, a thing that was sure to garner the Lieutenant’s disapproval, if he ever saw it.
“There are two ways to fire this thing properly. The first is the sniper’s way. The sniper’s way is always from the prone position, and is unmatched in accuracy and range. After lining your shot up, you are going to exhale and you will not inhale until after your shot. This stills most of your body movements. Naturally, with next to zero body movement, your shot is going to nearly exactly where you’re pointing. So, why the hell don’t we use this technique every time? Because it’s too damned slow. That’s when we use the marksman style. In this, you’re not going to hold your breath. You’re going to line up your shot and shoot the damn thing. You can fire from any position, although a crouch is preferred. But this style cuts down accuracy and range by quite a bit. Now that I’ve told you the two extremes, I’m going to tell you one other little secret. You can blend both of them. You can lay down, but need speed? Then shoot marksman style from the prone position. Can’t lay down, but need an accurate, ranged shot? Go to a crouch and exhale before you shoot.”
The Sergeant Major paused as he looked over the potential sharpshooters once, making sure the information was being digested. He was almost disappointed when he saw that everybody had understood it. He had almost hoped to give our punishments one more time.
“Alright, now you try it.”
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Crest slowly examined took in the situation in the valley below. First, Shock was pinned down by an E-Web on Crest’s side of the valley. Next, training droids had burrowed into trenches and were putting out a large volume of fire.
The E-Web would come first. Crest lined up his scope on the droid operating the E-Web. As he exhaled, his scope came to a dead stop on the training droid.
The shot rang out across the valley. The training droids and Shock were, well, shocked.
Crest opened up his comms, “Shock Lead, E-Web is neutralized. Proceed to assault the droids north of you. Ignore the ones to your south; we need to break through to the extraction point.”
“Copy that! Good to have you here.”
As Shock composed itself, Crest shifted his view to the northern trench. The crowded trench was just teeming with targets in close proximity.
Favoring speed over dead-on accuracy since his shots were sure to hit something, Crest aimed at a cluster of droids and let the rifle sing its deadly song. Prosthetic limbs, torsos, and heads were torn apart and sent flying as Crest emptied the clip.
“Sharp, can you hold the southern droids off us so we can attack the trenches?”
“Copy, Shock Lead. On it.”
Crest swapped clips and shifted the rifle over. He lined up the scope on one very unlucky spotter droid. He exhaled. He squeezed the trigger. The round slammed into droid, splintering it.
Calculating each possibility, he swung the rifle across the trench. Finding no prominent droid part, Crest chose the most prominent blaster and lined up the rifle. He exhaled once more. He squeezed the trigger. The shot slammed into the ground above the blaster. Crest stared in anger at the missed shot. With anger clouding his normally sure judgment, he emptied the clip around the blaster. It had no effect and the blaster continued its deadly pour of blaster fire.
He slowly took his hand off the trigger and waited five seconds, allowing the rage to drain out of him.
He pulled himself back into position and swapped clips.
“Shock Lead, this is Sharp. I’ve got no shot on the southern trenches. Take the northern trenches and escape.”
“Kinda hard to do if with blaster fire just waiting to take of our heads!”
“Well, I can’t do anything. I can help you on the northern trenches, but not southern.”
“Fine. We’ll take it. Try and soften them up for us.”
“Will do.”
Crest returned his attention back to the northern trench and slowly loaded the next round into the chamber. A brief glance back at Shock showed the squad preparing to make a mad dash to the northern trench.
Yet, Crest still needed to soften up the northern trenches up, and he prepared himself to fire. He slowly and carefully picked off the droids on the edges, knowing that with Shock’s attack up the middle, those droids would be destroyed. In addition to that, Shock could and would be decimated if they took heavy fire from both sides at once.
Shock suddenly splintered apart from their fortified outpost and made individual runs toward the northern trenches. Crest shifted his fire and was able to pick off the majority of the droids that had been able to compensate and had started firing on Shock.
“Shock Lead, head toward my side of the northern trench; I’ll take care of the far side.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to take the far side instead of you?”
“No. I’d have to point near vertically down to be able to get off a shot, and it gets kinda difficult then.”
“Fine, we’ll take your side.”
As Shock secured its position, Crest let the rifle’s deadly effect slowly shift up the trench carefully exterminating the pestilent droids. Shock concentrated their fire and presented a wall of blaster fire against the other droids. Within a minute, the northern trench was cleared.
Crest casually let his hand fall back to get a new clip to replace his empty clip. He pulled it up, only to find it marked with two red stripes, his custom mark for the last clip he had.
How in the world...I didn’t burn through that many clips that quickly, did I?Crest looked around, only to find about five empty clips lying amid a pile of brass canisters.
Five clips... ten rounds per clip... fifty rounds used... Did I shoot that many?... I did waste that one clip... I guess so... remind me to carry more clips on squad missions and definitely many more on Wildcard missions.“Shock Lead? Sharp here.”
“Yes?”
“You need to escape, before I run out of ammo.”
“A sharpshooter running out of ammo? That’s a new one.”
“Yes, well, it’s the case. I’ve got ten rounds, which I’ll use to hold off any pursuers from the southern trenches. From over here, it looks like a short thirty-meter sprint to the green smoke.”
“Alright, give me a sec to inform my squad and we’ll be a-going.”
Crest waited as ‘Shock Lead’ gave the briefing to his troopers.
“Sharp, we’ll escape on the count of three.”
“Copy that, Shock Lead.”
“Three... two... one... GO!”
With that, Shock exploded out of their hiding spot and made a mad dash for the green smoke. Crest shifted his rifle over to the southern trench and scanned the length of the trench, looking for a pursuing droid. Two seconds passed before he located the first of the pursuers.
Resisting the urge to snap off a quick shot, Crest exhaled and slowly squeezed the trigger. The round slammed into the droid, ¬¬¬¬tearing its torso and right arm¬ away.
Nine. Five droids exited the safety of the trench and proceeded, in a clump, in an attempt to pursue Shock. Grimacing, Crest carefully examined for the possibility of killing two droids with one shot or the ability to delay them. Seeing one, he carefully estimated the amount of leading the first droid would require. Crest exhaled and fired one round. The droid abruptly had its head taken from it. The body tumbled to the ground.
Eight.The nearest droid was sent head-first over the body, as it was not able to adjust quickly enough. One other droid followed suit before the rest adjusted their course. Crest lined up his scope on the legs of the two droids, as the round would easily push through both pairs of the spindly legs. Exhaling as was the ritual, Crest fired one round. His shot landed a bit lower on the legs then where he would like it, but it still effectively disabled the droids.
Seven.Crest quickly shot down the last two droids.
Five.Crest swung the scope over trench, daring a droid to show its mechanical head for a free head massage, courtesy of the Blackjack Assistant Squad Leader.
“Sharp, we’ve reached here. Signaling our handlers.”
“Rog’, Shock Lead.”
Crest relaxed... only to have a new connection establish on his comms.
“Lance Corporal Crest.”
The Lieutenant’s voice jolted Crest’s lethargy.
“Sir!”
“Good job on unpinning Shock. Nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Report back to base for a debriefing.”
The comm shut off. The Lance Corporal shrugged and trudged his way to the shuttle.
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- WC: 2,563
