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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Knowing the left side was where the concentrated gun shots was located, Caleb immediately threw his entire body weight to the right. With the explosive, terrifying speed of an apex predator, he launched himself off the velvet bench and jumped violently out of the carriage as to the right, diving straight through the shattered right side window frame before the shooters could adjust their aim.
He hit the muddy cobblestones, rolling with flawless, kinetic momentum to bleed off the impact, his expensive charcoal grey suit instantly ruined by the grime of the docks. He sprang up to a crouch, his eyes rapidly scanning his immediate environment for a defensible position.
Gunshots were continuously being shot toward the ruined carriage, the heavy thwack of lead chewing through the wood and metal echoing loudly in the narrow street.
Caleb scrambled forward, throwing himself heavily behind a thick, solid steel lamp post that stood on the corner of the intersection. It wasn't perfect cover, but the heavy iron base provided enough ballistic protection to keep him from getting cut in half by the crossfire.
Breathing steadily, his heart rate barely elevating despite the chaotic ambush, Caleb at this time reached beneath his tailored jacket.
His hands moved with blinding, practiced speed, and he simultaneously took out both of his customized, gold inlaid M1911 pistols from his leather shoulder holster. The heavy, oiled steel of his own revolutionary creations felt cold and incredibly reassuring in his grip.
He pressed his back against the cold steel of the lamp post and carefully looked out from his cover.
Through the thick, settling gun smoke and the lingering fog of the docks, he analyzed the tactical situation with a max level combat intellect. There were several people who were actively shooting at him. He counted six distinct muzzle flashes coming from elevated positions.
Two were crouched behind a stack of heavy wooden barrels fifty yards down the street, three were advancing slowly from an adjacent alleyway using repeater rifles, and one sniper was positioned on the rusted iron fire escape of a nearby warehouse.
They were not wearing uniforms. They were dressed in the rugged, mismatched coats and flat caps of professional mercenaries. Hired guns.
Caleb gritted his teeth, a dark, utterly terrifying rage beginning to boil in his chest. They had ruined his peaceful afternoon, they had killed his driver, and they had dared to attack the Don of Saint Denis in broad daylight.
He wanted to know exactly who they were. He wanted to know which suicidal, moronic rival faction or bitter tycoon had signed their own death warrant by orchestrating this hit. But Caleb also knew the absolute reality of a gunfight. You cannot negotiate while bullets are flying.
Taking care of the trash first was the only priority. He would slaughter the bulk of the assault team, but he made a cold, calculated decision right then and there: he would leave exactly one of them alive to interrogate, to brutally extract the name of the man who sent them to kill him.
Caleb thumbed the heavy steel safeties off on both of his M1911s. Click. Click.
He didn't wait to be flanked. He didn't cower behind the pole. Caleb immediately stepped out of his cover.
As his tailored leather shoes hit the open cobblestones, his max level Handgun skill instantly activated, seamlessly taking over his nervous system. The world seemed to violently slow down around him.
The chaotic noise of the docks faded into a hyper focused tunnel vision. In that singular fraction of a second, the wealthy, charismatic businessman completely vanished, and he turned into the absolute, feared gunslinger he was known as in the deepest, darkest nightmares of the American underworld.
The shootout began in earnest, but it was not a battle. It was a mathematically perfect execution.
The sniper on the fire escape raised his rifle, trying to acquire a target on the man who had just stepped out into the open. He never even got his finger near the trigger.
Caleb raised his right M1911 and fired without aiming down the sights, relying entirely on absolute, supernatural muscle memory.
BANG! BANG!
The semi automatic handgun roared, the slide cycling faster than the human eye could track. A double tap of heavy .45 ACP slugs flew across the street and struck the sniper square in the chest. The kinetic force of the massive bullets physically lifted the man off his feet, throwing him violently over the iron railing of the fire escape to plummet three stories down to the pavement below.
The three hired guns advancing from the alleyway shouted in alarm, realizing their target was not cowering in fear. They raised their repeater rifles and opened fire, wildly spraying lead down the street.
Caleb didn't flinch. He easily retaliated, his movements fluid and mesmerizingly lethal. He walked forward at a steady, measured pace, completely ignoring the bullets that cracked through the air inches from his face. He raised both pistols, his arms extended, forming a flawless triangle of lethal geometry.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The deafening, rapid fire staccato of the dual M1911s completely drowned out the slower, clunky operation of the attackers' lever action repeaters. Caleb fired left, then right, transitioning between targets with absolute, robotic efficiency.
The first mercenary in the alley took a heavy slug to the throat, dropping his rifle and collapsing instantly. The second tried to turn and run, realizing they had ambushed a demon, but Caleb put a .45 caliber round directly through the center of his spine, dropping him face first into the muddy puddles of the street.
The third man managed to fire one wild shot before Caleb's left hand gun barked twice, tearing through the man's chest and sending him crashing into a pile of wooden crates.
Empty brass casings sprayed brilliantly into the foggy air from Caleb's weapons, raining down onto the cobblestones like deadly, glittering hail.
The two remaining shooters behind the wooden barrels down the street were completely paralyzed by sheer, unadulterated terror. They had expected the Don would be very skilful since they were told of his past by the client, but not this much. They were facing an unstoppable, relentless force of nature that was cutting their team to pieces in less than ten seconds.
One of them panicked. He broke from cover, screaming in fear, and tried to sprint across the open street toward the safety of the docks.
Caleb's eyes locked onto him. BANG. A single shot rang out, and the running man's knee completely shattered, sending him screaming and tumbling violently across the harsh cobblestones, entirely neutralized but alive.
That was the one he would interrogate.
The final hired gun, realizing he was the last man standing, frantically tried to rack the lever of his repeater from behind the heavy wooden barrels.
Caleb didn't even slow his pace. He walked directly toward the barrels, his blue eyes cold and utterly merciless. He emptied the remaining rounds in his right hand magazine directly into the thick wood of the barrels.
The high velocity .45 slugs easily punched through the oak and the cheap iron bands, tearing through the cover as if it were paper. The man behind the barrels let out a wet, choked gasp, slumping heavily against the wood, dead before he hit the ground.
The heavy slides of both M1911s locked back with a metallic clack, signaling they were completely empty.
The deafening roar of the gunfight ceased, replaced by the eerie, ringing silence of the docks and the pathetic, agonizing screams of the mercenary writhing on the ground with a shattered knee.
The hired guns that had gone out to kill him had fallen down one by one, completely and utterly decimated by a man operating on a level of violence they could not even begin to comprehend.
Caleb stood in the middle of the street, the smoke pouring from the open chambers of his customized pistols. He casually hit the thumb releases, letting the empty magazines drop to the bloody cobblestones, and smoothly slapped two fresh, fully loaded magazines into the grips. He racked the slides, chambering fresh rounds.
He holstered his left pistol, keeping the right one drawn. He slowly walked over to the screaming, bleeding mercenary on the ground, his polished leather shoes crunching over the broken glass and empty brass. It was time to find out exactly who was foolish enough to declare war on the Thorne Empire.
He moved with the terrifying, unhurried grace of a reaper whose gruesome work was almost finished. The heavy, metallic clack of his leather shoes echoed off the damp brick walls of the surrounding warehouses, serving as a grim countdown for the last man left alive in the slaughterhouse.
Caleb stood over the bleeding mercenary. The hired gun was writhing in the mud, clutching his completely shattered knee, his face pale and contorted in absolute agony. He was panting heavily, his eyes wide with a primal, suffocating terror as he looked up at the towering figure of the Don standing above him.
The mercenary had expected a soft, wealthy businessman. Instead, he was staring into the cold, dead, and utterly merciless blue eyes of the most lethal gunslinger to ever step foot in the American South.
Caleb didn't say a single word at first. He simply looked down at the pathetic, groveling killer who had just murdered his carriage driver.
Then, with a deliberate, calculated cruelty designed to break whatever fragile sliver of resolve the man had left, Caleb raised his polished leather shoe. He brought his boot down heavily, directly stepping on the open, shattered wound of the mercenary's knee, pressing his body weight into the pulverized bone and torn flesh.
The mercenary's spine arched violently off the muddy street. He let out a piercing, blood curdling scream that echoed loudly over the rushing waters of the Lannahechee River, a sound so raw and agonizing that it sent a shiver down the spines of the hidden dockworkers cowering in the nearby alleyways.
"Oh God! Oh God, please! Stop! Please!" the mercenary begged, sobbing hysterically as tears of pure, blinding pain streamed down his soot stained face. He frantically clawed at Caleb's ankle, his bloody fingers slipping uselessly against the expensive fabric of Caleb's ruined charcoal suit trousers. "Mercy! I'm begging you, have mercy!"
Caleb didn't flinch. He didn't ease the pressure of his boot by a single millimeter. He just stared down at the man, his expression a mask of cold, unfeeling stone.
"I want a name," Caleb said, his voice dropping into a low, vibrating hum that cut cleanly through the man's frantic screaming. "I want to know exactly who sent you to do this. Who hired you to ambush my carriage?"
The mercenary gasped, choking on his own spit, his eyes darting frantically. He was terrified of the men who had paid him, bound by the fragile, honorless code of the criminal underground. He opened his mouth to lie, to stall, to beg for a doctor.
But Caleb was out of patience.
"Tell me," Caleb ordered, slightly grinding the heel of his boot into the shattered joint. "Because if you tell me exactly who paid for this hit... maybe I will let you live."
At that exact moment, the profound, supernatural effect of Caleb's max level Persuasion Skill immediately kicked in.
It wasn't just a threat, it was a psychological sledgehammer. The invisible, overwhelming weight of Caleb's sheer, dominant willpower bypassed the mercenary's conscious defenses and struck directly at his absolute core. The words didn't just offer a choice, they presented an undeniable, absolute truth.
The mercenary's brain instantly recognized that resisting the man standing above him was as futile as trying to hold back the ocean with his bare hands. The terrified killer believed with every fiber of his being that absolute, total honesty was his one and only path to salvation.
The mercenary's resistance shattered completely. He nodded his head frantically, his jaw trembling so hard his teeth clicked together.
"Okay! Okay, I'll tell you! Just take your foot off, please, I'll tell you everything!" the man wailed, coughing up a small splatter of blood. He sucked in a ragged breath and practically screamed the answer into the foggy air. "The ones who hired us... it was two people! To the west! One was named Tavish Gray! And the other one was Leigh Gray! They paid us in gold! They told us you'd be an easy mark!"
Hearing those specific, highly recognizable names, Caleb's eyes narrowed, and he was, of course, profoundly surprised.
He slowly lifted his boot off the man's ruined knee, allowing the mercenary to collapse backward into the mud with a shuddering, pathetic sob of relief.
Caleb took a step back, the gears of his intelligent, max level Business and Tactical mind instantly spinning at a blinding speed to process this massive, unexpected variable. He genuinely didn't expect that the Grays would be the ones making the move against him.
The Gray family. One of the two ancient, fiercely proud, and profoundly ignorant plantation families that ruled the dusty, blood stained town of Rhodes.
Caleb knew the political landscape of Lemoyne better than anyone. He knew that the Grays had indeed become significantly more powerful over the last several months, especially after their eternal, bitter rivals, the Braithwaites, had been completely taken out and burned to the ground by him and the Van der Linde gang in the past.
With the Braithwaites erased from the map, the Grays had successfully monopolized the local tobacco trade, seized total control of the Rhodes sheriff's department, and crowned themselves the undisputed kings of the local county.
But Caleb also knew that being the king of a dusty agricultural town was absolutely nothing compared to being the Don of Saint Denis.
The Grays were arrogant, yes. They were greedy, definitely. But Caleb knew they wouldn't dare to do something this overtly suicidal. They shouldn't be so profoundly stupid as making a direct, violent move against him. He was the Don.
He commanded a heavily armed Italian mafia, an entire fleet of corporate businesses, and he had completely usurped Angelo Bronte, making himself far more powerful than Bronte had ever been. A regional family of tobacco farmers sending six hired guns to assassinate a billionaire mob boss in the middle of his own city? It was absolute madness.
'So, there's something fishy here,' Caleb thought to himself, his sharp blue eyes scanning the fog as if expecting to see the true puppet master hiding in the mist.
It was true that Caleb had recently spread calculated, highly intentional rumors throughout the southern taverns and banking circles that he wanted to acquire the scorched, abandoned Braithwaite land for his own agricultural expansion.
He had done it to test the market and see who would push back. He expected the Grays to be irritated. He expected them to file injunctions with the state courts, or perhaps try to bribe the local land surveyors to block his purchase.
But the Grays shouldn't dare to make a move like this. An assassination attempt in broad daylight? That took a level of brazen, heavily backed confidence that Tavish and Leigh Gray simply did not possess on their own. Someone else was whispering in their ears. Someone else was feeding their arrogance, promising them protection if they took out the Don of Saint Denis.
Whether it was a rogue Pinkerton agent trying to incite a gang war, a rival eastern tycoon trying to destabilize his factory operations, or simply the Grays' own staggering, stupidity, Caleb didn't know yet. But he would find out. And when he did, he would burn Rhodes to the absolute ground.
As he was thinking all of this, rapidly forming the foundation of a brutal military campaign in his mind, Caleb looked back down at the mercenary bleeding out in the mud. The man was staring up at him with wide, desperate, hopeful eyes, waiting for the Don to honor his end of the bargain and let him live.
Caleb stared at him. His expression remained entirely blank, devoid of any mercy or forgiveness. He then nodded his head slowly, raising his right M1911 pistol and pointing the heavy, dark steel barrel directly at the center of the man's chest. "You have done great work," Caleb said to the man, his voice a cold, empty whisper that offered no salvation. "I said maybe."
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Name: Caleb Thorne
Age: 23
Body Attributes:
- Strength: 8/10
- Agility: 8/10
- Perception: 9/10
- Stamina: 8/10
- Charm: 8/10
- Luck: 9/10
Skills:
- Handgun (Lvl MAX)
- Rifle (Lvl MAX)
- Firearms Knowledge (Lvl MAX)
- Past Life Memory (Lvl MAX)
- Knife (Lvl MAX)
- Blunt Weapon (Lvl MAX)
- Sneaking (Lvl MAX)
- Horse Mastery (Lvl MAX)
- Poker (Lvl MAX)
- Hand to Hand Combat (Lvl MAX)
- Eagle Eye (Lvl MAX)
- Dead Eye (Lvl MAX)
- Bow (Lvl MAX)
- Pain Nullifier (Lvl MAX)
- Physical Regeneration (Lvl MAX)
- Crafting (Lvl MAX)
- Persuasion (Lvl MAX)
- Mental Fortitude (Lvl MAX)
- Cooking (Lvl MAX)
- Teaching (Lvl MAX)
- Trilingual Language Proficiency - G, I, & C (Lvl MAX)
- Inventory System (Permanent - 100x100x100)
- Acting (Lvl MAX)
- Alcohol Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Treasure Hunter (Lvl MAX)
- Drugs Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Business (Lvl MAX)
- Leadership (Lvl MAX)
Money: 2,772 dollars and 60 cents
Inventory: 283,392 dollars and 61 cents, 11 gold nuggets, 74 gold bars, 1 Double Action, 1 Schofield, 2 Colm's Schofields, 1 land deed (Parcel), 1 Mauser, 1 Semi Auto Pistol, 1 Lancaster Repeater, 1 Old Wood Jewelry Box, 1 F.F Mausoleum small brass key, 1 Ruby, 1 Braithwaites Land Deed, 1 Broken Pirate Sword, 1 Milton's Safety Deposit Key, Proof Of Marlin-Thorne Firearms Co., 10 Dynamites, 1 LeMat, 1 M1899, 1 Carcano, 1 Ownership deed of Doyle's Tavern, 3 Diamonds, & Important Documents & Deeds Of Cornwall
Bank: -