Time to Make a Play
Analysis and research usually lead to excellent results. There's a reason people grind their brains working out strategies and drafting plans. The minimum effort required to win — the reason I scrape and claw to take games — is the same.
But the true heart of a fight on the battlefield isn't the chess match of staff officers rolling pencils at a desk. It's the soldiers who stake their lives. The outcome of a game, too, had to be decided by the crack of a trigger.
I knew that. Strategic planning mattered a great deal in a real fight. A commander's post wasn't there just so someone could take the blame. You needed someone to marshal the troops and write the operation. Without that, you were nothing but a ragtag mob.
But this wasn't a war. You could call it a miniature of one, maybe, but in the end these were people I would never see again. This wasn't the time to command and maneuver allies. It was time to pull the trigger — not to sit here agonizing over the enemy's routes and strategies.
Call it my stubborn ego if you want. I wouldn't bend on this.
Not much time remained until the match ended. Sweeping the surroundings through the sniper scope, I found myself drifting into old memories — from long ago, when I had just set foot in mercenary life. The days I lived walking the line between life and death.
That's right. Back when I had a man's physique and could shout, without shame, that I was a man.
...I wasn't a man anymore.
At a slight distance, an enemy was on the move. Not toward the front where my teammates were, but looping wide around the flank — a rat sneaking in to hit us from behind, no question. Leave him and our people would get blindsided and wiped. That much was obvious. And once the enemies up front finished off our team, what would they do next? Come for the sniper who'd been sitting in the rear, needling them the whole time.
The weapon in my hands was a sniper rifle. Let them close the distance and death would be hard to dodge. Given the state of the match, the moment our teammates got wiped, flipping the game would be all but impossible. To win, I had to kill the rat.
I lined the sniper scope on him, settled the muzzle, and evened my breathing.
It was the City Combat Map, packed with buildings. And the target was moving only through the gaps between them, trying not to get spotted. My perch wasn't that high, so hitting a rat that kept vanishing between structures was never going to be easy. The one mercy: he still didn't know he'd been seen.
No real strafing — just running in a straight line. In this situation, putting a round through the back of his head was the smart call. For me, it just made him an easier target.
The rat between the buildings was moving fast. A sprint perk, maybe. Or perhaps he was carrying a short SMG. I tracked him with the muzzle. I didn't shoot early. When you hunt, you stay patient. The perfect moment when the prey lets its guard down. Sinking your teeth into the nape at a timing they cannot possibly dodge — that was the foundation of the hunt.
The rat vanished behind a building. Taller structures packed the way ahead. Miss him here and I might as well give up the shot. I snapped the muzzle to the far side, where he'd come out.
The building was longer than I'd thought. If he didn't stop — if he just ran straight through...
I counted quietly in my head. I couldn't think only about his running speed. Bullet travel time, distance, all the variables that came with them. And if the rat did something unexpected, every calculation I was making would be worthless. Even so, I trusted my gut. Maybe I was betting on instinct honed over years as a mercenary.
"Three... four..."
I murmured the numbers, thinking. The rat running behind the wall projected itself in my mind, and in a flash the instinct I'd trained for so long answered.
Now.
BANG!
A short, violent gunshot. At the same instant, the round flew toward an empty alley.
All kinds of mockery scrolled through the chat. It had been a stretch of a shot, no question. Not a simple snipe — there was distance involved. The target hadn't been standing still, and there were plenty of obstacles like buildings in the way. Putting a round through a tiny gap between structures on an enemy moving alley to alley... that was a difficulty that might as well have been another way of saying give up.
The reason I took it anyway? You could call it arrogance. It was also trust in senses I'd honed over a long, long time.
And trust always pays you back.
A clean kill log popped up. The timing must have been exact. The round punched through the enemy's head the instant he came out of the building. I lowered the sniper rifle I'd kept aimed in case I missed. That, at least, bought me a moment to breathe.
Chat started flying. Mixed in were plenty of lines tearing into my teammates. A team game isn't a solo game. Even if you've got someone good, if five people are taking dumps, you can't mop fast enough.
In the time it took me to get one kill, two allies went down. One of theirs for two of ours. A creative economy if I'd ever seen one.
The ally who'd just died had finally snapped. The chat that followed had everything from asking after my parents to swear words I'd never heard in my life.
It wasn't that I didn't understand. There were two snipers on the team, myself included. One of them had such pathetic skill he could be called a shit-pooper. All he did was plant himself in one spot and pull wide aggro from the enemy. Of course that wasn't going to look good from a teammate's point of view.
That's how perception works. Not everyone with tattoos is a bad person, but you still tend to steer clear when you see one. From my teammates' angle, all they could see was the sniper taking a dump, so they lumped me in as a shit-pooper too. And help is the kind of thing you don't notice while you're receiving it. Plenty of times you only realize how much it mattered once it's suddenly gone.
Rush. Better to just rush. A new kind of fight always threw a dramatic spice into living — even more so with this many people watching. Sitting on a sniper rifle the whole time had gotten stale, if I was being honest. The fights that broke out were all running in almost the same pattern. It was time for a new stimulus.
Even if I kept playing it out like this, the only road waiting at the end was defeat. A sniper's position wasn't suited to mopping up the shit five people were dumping.
That didn't mean I planned to throw the sniper rifle away. As I'd said in the stream title, I intended to challenge all the way to Diamond with nothing but a sniper rifle. Call it a pointless stubborn streak if you want. I was doing it simply because I wanted to. There was no special reason beyond that. In a way it might have been for fun. Or a kind of proof, aimed at the idiots who said my aim was trash.
Whatever it was, I had no intention of folding on a resolution I'd already made.
Of course, I also had no intention of sitting on my hands and letting the game slip away. The pile my teammates had left was generous enough, and watching them fight over whose dump it was had been quite the spectacle. What did it matter who'd done it? The shit was already on the floor. What I had to do now wasn't find the culprit — it was figure out how to clean it up.
If things kept on like this, defeat was all but certain. In that case, I at least wanted to try a new challenge — like adding a fresh spice to the bland life of a sniper.
I grabbed the sniper rifle and started running toward the front. Whatever came of it, I had to make a play.