Sniper

[reliarobot]

Firmly in the realm of silly and probably bad ideas: tower defenseploitation

You live in the sniper tower. You've never been outside of it. You know that you're in one of a row of identical towers, facing the direction of the Enemy. Through your scope, when the Enemy stops and you can look anywhere but Their heads, you can see other towers.

Machine guns. Mortars. Flamethrowers. Strange, esoteric towers which create some unknowable energy field over the others. All of them have small teams of people who work together, load the guns, take aim, calculate areas of effect. Not you. You, and those like you, are alone.

Occasionally a resupply truck comes around, with bullets, food, and water. All you need. It's not like you can do anything but this.

You keep your scope trained on the driver, every time. Watching their face. Tracing the line of their jaw down to their vulnerable neck from hundreds of meters away.

You haven't fired. You don't know what would happen if you did. You don't know if you could, if your fingers would follow your command, if the strike pin would swing, if the gunpowder would refuse to light and report you for treason.

The Enemy is back. They aren't people. They don't act like them, don't move like them. They float, gracefully, inches off the ground. You get lost in Their eyes as you load the next round and, inexorably, remove the light from Them.

Load, aim, shoot. Load, aim, shoot. Your orders are the same: shoot whatever Enemy is closest to the base. Occasionally, you get slightly different ones: shoot the flying Enemy, etherially gliding through the skies, heedless of the road. Shoot the healthiest, large and lumbering with noble fur.

Those ones you love, and hate. It takes several seconds of shooting from you and all your sisters to bring Them down. The noble fur stained with blood, the sharp tusks stilled as the rest of the Enemy push inexorably past.

How you long to see Them in motion. How you long to see Their tusks crush the doors of your base like tissue paper. You wonder what They would do with you, afterwards. Would They sully their ivory tusks with your blood? Could you be so divinely blessed?

Your bullet sinks into Their hide, and They groan and fall. New orders: resume firing at the closest target to base.

You load the next shot.

Until that day.

You take aim.

This is your purpose.

You shoot.

Comments

[ckiewithdreams]

Hot. (: