Casual Heroing

No matter what positions you are in, you have to stay as comfortable as possible. The rifle can bounce from different angles off the ground when you have to fire repeatedly. Side alignment and side picture adjusted… and you should be able to rest and relax while properly looking through the scope. Scope shadow, you need to move off center, and see dark scopes, you can use them to look straight through the scope. There’s not that big of a difference between lying down with a rifle and writing notes in your secret diary while glittering the edge of the pages, prone on your bed.

All the technicalities will never be as important as having the right feeling when the finger presses the trigger. A lot of experience goes into it. I have talked with people on forums who shoot gun every single day, either because they are geek enthusiasts or in the military. The most important thing, and most agree, is how much time you spent with a gun between your hands. The longer you had it, the better will be the feeling when you shoot. Anything else doesn’t really matter. Even with the best calculations, with the best preparations, your bullets might swerve because of a sudden breeze. In that moment, you have to adjust in a split-second before your target shoots you off.

They will never make a film about me sniping anyone from a couple of kilometers, but I’ve trained so many days and spent tens of thousands in bullets to be able to hit a target reliably at 100m mark. Anything inside such a range is relatively easy. Even a moving target. I can shoot 200-300m without feeling out of my comfort zone as well. Further than that, it becomes a hit or miss.

The leaves around me rustle a little while I slightly shift my position. I’m covered in vegetation and even the McMillan TAC-50 that I’m personally handling is.

Initially, I had thought that crafting handguns and making a couple of rifles would not be that different. I was terribly wrong. I have plants all over France making the components for Berettas, but there’s no way they could replicate the rifle I bought from some of my contacts. And it costed me.

But in a fantasy world where apparently most shields suffer from small projectiles like arrows…

I see my first targets approach a rocky part of the terrain where I carefully dug deeper the holes that were already there. I might be a touch too paranoid, but if there was any [Merchant] or [Bodyguard] worth their salt, they would notice the usual condition of the road. Sadly for them, no one can feel me from such a distance. I’m around 70m from the small wagon and I see two men on the front. No one following behind.

They don’t even look around. Not that they would see the camo that Sortina had made especially for me.

Did you know that improper breathing, especially with a long-range rifle, can throw your aim off wildly? Meters, even. Not centimeters. Even squeezing the trigger too rapidly, or jerkily. It has to be a smooth and uniform movement to ensure that the rifle will move as little as possible.

I breathe in lightly and I see the horse eyeing the road and slowing down a tad. The driver barely notices, trusting the horse to do the right thing for himself.

As I hold half a breath in, I stop breathing.

The finger slides gently on the trigger and a second after, a .50 bullet tears through the side of the man who was wearing armor, probably messing his insides pretty badly. The horse suddenly raises his head at the noise, but doesn’t run off. The other guy, the [Merchant] looks bewildered. Sadly for him, I’ve already pulled back the bolt handle and then back in with a new bullet.

Again, after half a breath, I shoot at the [Merchant], who has barely reacted.

The [Merchant] falls off the carriage and the horse, this time, freezes. It starts looking around, neighing. It has no idea what’s going on.

I wait to see if there’s a third hidden person inside their wagon, but nothing comes out after several minutes. I know that some [Rogue] could have stealthed his way out of it.

I wish I had some artifacts.

The objects that adventurers or the military of this world use to fight. Something to reveal the position of enemies would be incredibly good. Something like thermal or night vision.

Ten minutes go by and the horse has defecated in the meanwhile, still waiting for new orders. It can probably smell the blood, but nothing is coming out. We are still pretty far from the actual village, and that’s why I’m taking my sweet time. I have a time-table of when the [Merchants] should go where. It’s something that sweet Licinium has given me right before I headed out for this mission.

The fact that the old man has such information makes me uneasy.

I get up and draw my handgun, moving from tree to tree, closing in on the wagon, keeping an eye out for any movement. [Stealth] can disguise your presence, but not the traces of it. That’s why I’ve decided to fight somewhere with a lot of bushes around. There’s no way you could move around without giving yourself away.

As I circle to the back of the wagon, I immediately raise my gun to whatever might be inside—it’s empty. I go around and take off the bag of holdings on the two corpses, careful not to get them too close to each other. Bag of holdings are just a simply trick. Apparently, they come from a rather limited supply and they are rarer than I could have imagined. The fact that the [Hunter] had one was a wonder in itself.

And guess who created them?

Vanedenis.

Oh yeah. They never existed before. They are not a staple of this world. They are one of the many things Vanedenis made out of the blue and that no one was able to reproduce. They are not just spatial magic—it’s something much simpler and, at the same time, complicated. But they sold them in bulk before they got involved in the war with the Ahalis. So, every bag of holding, or Bricolla, how the Vanedenis call them, is actually several centuries old. They are almost indestructible as well.

As I enter the wagon, I find exactly what I was expecting to find. The older brother of the bag of holding—a chest of holding. It’s not bigger than a child’s toybox, probably 40x60 cm and 30cm in height. But it’s still much bigger than any bag of holding gets. And it can contain dozens of time the volume of a normal bag of holding. In fact, if bag of holdings are still pretty common is because this is the higher end product. Carilia is a very rich continent in culture and trade, and it’s not surprising that even a smaller wagon carries one.

I put the gun back in my holster and open up the chest of holding.

A literal cornucopia shown up in front of me. If you have ever seen the Harry Potter movie where they close the guy in a chest, that is what it looks like. I check for the contents and find quite a bit of food, but also many artifacts and, most importantly, ores. I close the chest and go to the front, looking at the two dead targets.

Probably got both to the heart.

I take out the handgun and, with a suppressor on, I shoot them both in the head.

Just to be sure.

I look at the blood dripping on the ground and fetch a blanket from my bag of holding. I have to maneuver them both on top of it to avoid leaving behind traces of this. Then, I pour some of the [Cleansing] potion that Licinium kindly lent me where the blood has fallen on the bare ground. It neatly disappears and I take the horse by the reins, bringing the wagon off track. I chose a place with trees enough far apart that a wagon can go off road.

This wagon is going to be where I’ll be holding most of the stuff I’m going to… steal?

Another world?

Borrow.

No.

Tax.

…

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Many times I wondered what blocked people from becoming rich. Was it that they were born poor? Was there some chemical in their blood, some gene? It’s the same principle by which people don’t stab each other in the neck every day. How is that possible? Even a simple fork in a restaurant could pierce your jugular without a problem. It would pierce the wall of one of the biggest vein in your body with no problem, leaving you to bleed out in a very weird way.

It is about being cold.

If you are cold enough, you can do much more than any other person. If you have a big disregard for the law, you find out that criminals get caught less than you would like to believe. We are mostly bound by the invisible, by the fear, by our habits.

We are bound by our faith in something that isn’t real, like God.

Who might believe that a poorly trafficked road might be taken hostage by a crazy woman with a TAC-50 and stamina potions to avoid falling asleep? And what kind of insane damage could such a person do in three days? If a road is mostly used by [Merchants], since no one really goes toward the half-giant city of Leggiadra, what happens when someone just kills and robs all those [Merchants]?

Unless you have a system to communicate among [Merchants] and send warnings in case something dangerous is on the road… nothing. Nothing happens. People keep dying.

I remove an arrow from my thigh, swearing loudly, and looking down at the [Bodyguard] that I missed. This man had a way of tracking me and managed to actually hit me. I killed his entire caravan, around eight people. The last hit before going back.

The health potion swiftly heals my thigh.

[Gunman – Level 13!]

I spit on the ground, frustrated. I emptied my Beretta in this guy’s chest, killing him as he was approaching me. He probably thought I didn’t have any short-range protection. I dropped the rifle as he was closing in, raising one of my hands and keeping the other on my thigh. When he approached, I swiftly took out my handgun and shot him dead.

Not ideal.

I look at the massacre left on the road and start limping toward the stash of chests of holding I put together under some cut-off branches. Then, I hear a branch break off.