Something in me rebels at the thought of using Bullet's weapons, however irrational that feeling may be. It's like not wanting to spend dirty money. Bullet's guns are filthy things, coated in the blood of people innocent and not. I'd rather put trust in the power I've grown to hate over the years than mix our grime. I have enough blood on my hands without scraping any more under my fingernails.
Getting the drop on the men in RA's camp will be more of a challenge than picking off the patrol team was, but not by much. They have no one watching the entrance road into their camp, and I doubt they have an exit plan if things go sideways, other than to shoot their way out of it.
There are a surprisingly limited number of situations you can legit shoot your way out of. I should know; my brother tried to utilise that method a hundred times in a hundred different scenarios. I've gotten shot more times than I care to remember thanks to his fight-or-flight switch getting jammed on fight, regardless of the odds or potential consequences.
Positioning myself as close to the camp's inner perimeter as I can without being spotted, I wait for the most opportune moment to unleash my attack.
My time comes sooner than I expected, when a man who appears to be one of RA’s leaders stalks out of their one tent and starts shouting in Croatian for his men to gather around the tables covered in maps.
I hold fire until every single one of the remaining extremists has congregated around the tables, therefore putting themselves within my direct sightline. None of them are wearing body armour or even thick jackets to shield them from potential assault, likely due to the country's extreme heat. Their necks and faces are all well exposed.
Rolling my shoulders back and readying my stance on the thick tree branch I've decided to use as my perch, I gather my floating shards of glass and give them a forceful shove with my mind.
A swarm of glowing glass weapons fly through the air and hit their targets within seconds.
Chaos erupts in the camp, men screaming in pain and shock as glass cuts into them, drawing blood and ripping apart unprotected flesh.
Of the ten men in the camp, only seven go down in the initial blast. Most of them take glass to the throat and crumble to the jungle floor in varying states of death or dying.
There was no chance I could kill them all at the same time. Too much margin for error: the distance and wind resistance, as little of it as there is in this humidity, making it near impossible to land successfully lethal hits across the board.
Panic sets in for the RA members who are still alive and capable of movement. One is well enough to get up and run for the vehicles in an attempt to escape. The other two have their guns out and pointed up at the trees, eyes desperately searching for a tangible threat to shoot at.
If they were a little more experienced and a lot less terrified, they might catch sight of me within the greenery of the jungle trees. But their fear-fuelled shock, as well as their general incompetence, makes them sloppy and slow.
I climb down from the tree, depending both on my training and the myriad of ongoing jungle noises to camouflage the sound of my descent to the ground. As soon as my boots hit dirt, I quickly dart away through the trees. Once I'm at a safe distance, I pick up a large rock and throw it at the branches I was hiding in, causing them to rustle ostentatiously. The men fire their guns off in that direction like they're trying to set a world record for the number of bullets wasted in the span of five seconds.
Taking out my Sig and pushing away the sound of Leo's voice calling my gun "Siggy" like the loon he is, I shift between the trees, moving around the camp to attack the men from behind.
Once in position, I fire off two quick headshots, blowing out the skulls of the panicked men who were still shooting at the empty trees.
Turning away from the dead extremists, I set off to intercept the man who’s trying to flee in one of the jeeps. He's already behind the wheel and driving away down the only exit road, forcing me to chase after him at a sprint.
Liquid Onyx survivors are fast, faster than any ordinary human could be, and my years spent with OI testing my endurance by getting me to run until I dropped from exhaustion, I'm probably faster than most.
Since the runaway jeep is open topped, it's easy enough for me to grab hold of the folded back roof and vault myself onto the vehicle, bracing my knees so I don't lose my balance and go flying off it. The driver turns his head at the sound of me thumping down behind him. His eyes widen in fear, and he shouts something at me. I know enough Croatian to understand the word "please" although the expression on his face would have given it away regardless.
One of the things I hate about in-person assassinations, when I’m not able to do the job from afar as a sniper or with poison, is the pleading and negotiation bullshit from my target. When a person begs for their life, it usually happens in stages. They cycle through confusion, fear, panic, anger, and fake acceptance like waves hitting a rock during a storm, one after the other. Useless. Fucking pointless. Because I'm the rock, and I ain't moving for them.
I fire off a shot to the driver's head, blood, bone, and brain matter exploding like a bomb blowing up the side of a building.
When the jeep lurches to the side, I'm almost sent sprawling onto the dirt road. At the last moment, I'm able to regain purchase by throwing my weight forward and crashing into the passenger seat. I grab hold of the limp corpse slumped beside me and heave it out of the jeep like an apple core, shifting into his vacated seat and thrusting my foot down to jam on the brakes.
I take a moment to breathe as clouds of dust, thick with dirt, puff up around me like infected mist. One of my hands clenches and unclenches on the steering wheel, my other still partially gripping the Sig as I force myself to work through the adrenaline and take back control of my mind and body. Breathing in deeply, a gust of humid air fills my lungs, making me feel like I'm inhaling steam, the back of my throat simmering with it like meat on a grill.
If I were normal, I'd be sweating profusely in this heat, but I'm not, so my body remains mostly dry. My Liquid Onyx blood protects me from the debilitating effects of extreme temperature changes, but that doesn't mean I'm unaware of them. If anything, the experiments OI did on my genetically modified body made me hyper-aware of those shifts. It's like when someone can feel the cold in a previously damaged limb. Or maybe it's more like trauma echoes. My body remembers the pain of being encased in a freezing or boiling metal coffin and lets me know, tremors of memory roving through me like a warning.
Looking over my shoulder, I see the broken, dead man grotesquely heaped on the road behind me like a forgotten piece of rubbish. Earlier, I didn't allow myself to catalogue any differences between the men, finding it easier to morph them together as "targets" rather than to view them as separate people with names and thoughts of their own. But now the immediate danger has passed, I'm struck by how young the man in the road looks compared to the others. The rest were in their thirties or forties, whereas this one looks barely twenty-five. He might even be younger than me, for fuck’s sake. What the hell was he doing out here?
I've always hated it when groups like RA recruit kids. It seems like such a waste to twist a young person's mind and turn them into cannon fodder, forcing things like me to snatch away the lives they barely got to experience.
This dead kid could have grown up to be anyone or anything. Now he's nothing and no one, lying still and useless in the road.
I hope whatever cause RA was fighting for is worth it, worth all this mess and death at my hands.
Shaking my head to dismiss the unhelpful sentimentality my mind has just conjured up towards the man I killed, I look away from him and focus on the path ahead for a while. What's done is done. This is almost over. That's what I should be focusing on. All I need to do is finish the job, and then I’ll never have to think about it again.
I give myself one more deliberate inhale and exhale before getting out of the jeep and making my way over to the dead man to pick him up. A plan still formulating in my mind, I dump him in the passenger seat beside me and drive back to camp.
