He was well inside the fifty-meter threshold.
At this range, with Ballistic Proficiency locked at LV2, Roger's hit rate was as close to absolute as physics and a human hand allowed. The .30-06 Springfield round left the Garand's muzzle at 865 meters per second, it crossed fifty meters before most men had finished their trigger pull. There was no such thing as a grazing wound at this range. The round either missed completely, or it ended the conversation permanently.
Roger did not miss.
Bang.
The lead operative dropped. Roger adjusted right. Bang. The second. Left again. Bang. Third.
Three shots, three results, less than two seconds. He moved his sights and found empty space where the threat had been.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Active threats neutralised - Ally protected.
Scenario Completion Data: +5
He registered the notification the way he'd register a car indicator clicking, present, relevant, filed. The data was accumulating. The System was doing its quiet accounting in the background. Roger was focused on the arithmetic that actually mattered right now: how many rounds in the current clip, how many clips in his pockets, how many threats still moving in the smoke ahead.
He was pulling ahead on the first two numbers and behind on the third.
He moved.
The ridge was a shifting labyrinth. The Imperial Guard's tunnel network ran beneath the entire plateau like a root system, and the exits were everywhere, cracks in rock, false floors in craters, trapdoors under rubble so that clearing a sector never meant the sector stayed cleared. You pushed fifty meters forward and the ground behind you might exhale three operatives who hadn't been there when you walked over it.
Roger was mapping it as he moved, building a mental picture of angles and sightlines and the spaces where the smoke was thinnest.
He almost walked into the flamethrower operator.
The man materialized out of the haze like an industrial nightmare - M2 tanks on his back, pilot light flickering at the nozzle of his weapon, the heavy suit making him look like something from a different kind of war entirely. He gave Roger a look of mild surprise and then refocused past him.
"You're a bit late," Roger said, gesturing at the sector behind him. "Already cleared this stretch."
The operator's expression shifted into something appreciative. "No worries, friend. This ridge has more holes than a colander. I'll find somebody to argue with." He hefted the nozzle and headed for a bunker complex to the east, his tank unit's pilot light leaving a tiny trail of heat shimmer behind him.
Roger watched him go for exactly one second, I know what that thing does to people, he thought, and then deliberately did not finish the thought and turned back to the task at hand.
He found Smitty-Rick by sound before he found him by sight.
The BAR had a particular rhythm to it, heavier and more deliberate than a standard rifle, a mechanical stutter that Roger's ears had already learned to locate and track through the ambient noise of the ridge. He followed it through a ruined stretch of trench line and emerged to find Smitty in fine form: methodically working through a concealed trench with the BAR's bipod extended for stability, the heavy barrel dropping Imperial Guard operatives as they tried to scramble out the far end.
Two down. Smitty reached for a grenade with his free hand.
And completely failed to notice the spider hole opening silently in the ground six feet behind his left shoulder.
The operative came out of it fast and low, the way all the best ones did, not standing up to full height, just unfolding from the earth like something that belonged there. Fixed bayonet. Angled approach, exploiting Smitty's blind spot. Two more steps and the angle would be impossible to miss.
Roger put a round in him from thirty meters.
Bang.
The operative went down. Smitty, mid-motion with the grenade, didn't register the shot behind him until he glanced back and found a body cooling at a range that made the implications obvious. He stared at it for a beat.
"Thanks, Roger."
"Don't mention it." Roger was already reloading, crouching behind a section of collapsed wall. "And pull back from the point a bit. You're pushing too far forward."
"I've got the BAR."
"The BAR doesn't fire sideways. You get surrounded out here, even you have to pick a direction." Roger snapped the fresh clip home. "There are more of them than there are of you, Rick. Act accordingly."
Smitty flexed a mud-caked forearm with the energy of a man who had not fully internalized what Roger had just said. "Let 'em come. I've got enough rounds for introductions and a meaningful conversation."
Roger looked at him for a moment. "You're going to be a problem all day, aren't you."
"Probably," Smitty agreed cheerfully, and went back to his work.
He found Hollywood shortly afterward.
The man was at the bottom of a shell crater, a deep one, good walls, reasonable protection and from a purely structural standpoint Roger couldn't fault the choice. The problem was the expression on his face, which was the expression of a man who had decided the crater was his home now and intended to see out the rest of the conflict from it.
Hollywood was, physically, the most impressive-looking soldier Roger had met on this ridge. Broad shoulders, strong jaw, the natural posture of someone who'd been put together correctly. He was also, at this particular moment, clutching his rifle with both hands and staring at the crater's rim as though the smoke beyond it were personally hostile to him in a way that was both unique and specifically targeted.
Roger stopped at the edge.
"Hollywood."
The man's eyes snapped up.
"That crater," Roger said, keeping his voice level and not unkind, "is not a position. It's a hole. You stay in it, you are a fixed target for the first grenade someone lobs in your direction, and there will be grenades, because there are always grenades. Get up and move forward, or stay there and wait for one. Those are your actual options."
Hollywood opened his mouth.
Roger had already moved on.
He leveled the Garand and fired a measured string into the smoke ahead - bang-bang-bang-bang - not targeting anything specific, just maintaining pressure, keeping Imperial Guard heads below the trench line while the squad consolidated. The M1's tempo was a tactical asset in itself. The operatives on the other side were working bolt-actions, which meant every time they fired, they had to cycle, eject, chamber, re-acquire. Roger had already sent his next round before they'd finished the cycle on their first.
An operative appeared at the lip of a spider hole ahead, pulling the pin on a grenade with the practiced speed of someone who'd done it many times. He had his arm back, weight committed to the throw.
Roger's front sight settled on his centre mass.
Bang.
The operative dropped. The grenade went with him, back into the hole.
BOOM.
The ground shuddered. Dirt cascaded over Roger's boots. He registered, neutrally, that the man in the hole had been trying to kill him and the eight men behind him, and had instead solved his own problem in the least useful way. He felt nothing particularly profound about this and was mildly grateful not to be spending energy on it.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Active threat neutralised - Explosive hazard redirected.
Scenario Completion Data: +5
Behind him, the sound of boots scrambling on loose dirt. Hollywood was out of the crater. His rifle was still pointed at the sky rather than the enemy, which was less than ideal, but he was vertical and moving, which was significantly better than horizontal and stationary.
Progress is progress, Roger decided, and moved on.
The trench they reached ten minutes later wasn't much - shallow, poorly braced, constructed in a hurry by someone who'd had other things on their mind, but it was lower than the surrounding terrain and it had walls, which put it leagues ahead of open ground. Roger slid in at a controlled angle, checked both directions, and found it clear.
His lungs were burning. The air up here was punishment - cordite, burning material, the particular chemical smell of recent explosions that coated the back of your throat and stayed there. He took two breaths and got his heart rate back under control.
A heavy thud announced Smitty's arrival on his right. The BAR swung immediately to the trench's forward-facing lip, bipod down, ready. Then quieter movement on Smitty's other side - Doss, appearing from the smoke with the unhurried precision of someone who moved through chaos on a different principle than everyone around him. His medic's bag was open and his hands were moving before he'd fully settled. Blood on his arms, mud on everything else. None of it his.
Roger gave him a look. Doss met it with one that said: I know. I'm fine. Are you?
Roger turned back to the smoke ahead.
From somewhere out in the grey - distant enough to be a question, close enough to be a demand, a voice:
"Medic... please... help--"
Roger had already identified the target before he consciously registered the sound. A Federation soldier, prone, forty meters into open ground, bullets raising fountains of dirt in a patient, systematic ring around him. The Imperial Guard snipers weren't in a hurry. They were waiting, and the wounded man was the bait.
Roger pulled back below the trench lip.
"They're running a decoy," he said flatly. "That man's alive, but the moment anyone goes for him, they have their targets."
"He's still alive," Doss said.
"I know."
"He needs-"
"I know that too."
Doss looked out at the open ground. His expression did something complicated and then arrived somewhere very simple. "If they can't see us through the smoke," he said quietly, "then we can't see them either. Which means the angles aren't as clean as they think."
It was a logical observation and a terrible idea dressed up as one.
"Doss-"
Doss went over the rim.
There was a half-second where Roger and Smitty both looked at the space where Doss had been, and then at each other, and the conversation they had without words was brief and not particularly optimistic.
Roger went over the rim.
Here was his reasoning, such as it was: Doss running into the open was going to draw fire. The operatives who'd been lying in their concealed positions waiting for exactly this moment were going to reveal those positions to take the shot. Which meant that in approximately ten to fifteen seconds, Roger was going to have a very clear picture of where every active shooter on this sector of the plateau was located.
It was, technically, a reconnaissance opportunity.
He was going to keep telling himself that.
"Damn it," Smitty said, from behind him. Then the sound of the BAR's bipod snapping up, because Smitty couldn't use the bipod at a run.
Then boots, following.
"Are they all out of their minds?" Andy "Ghoul" Walker's voice, from the safety of the trench, watching the three of them dissolve into the smoke with the expression of a man reassessing his professional associations.
Doss reached the wounded man and went to his knees without hesitation. His hands went to work, finding the wound's edges, applying pressure, already cataloguing what he was dealing with. His focus was complete. The plateau could have been doing anything around him and he'd have noticed it only in terms of how it affected his patient.
"Frank," he said quietly. "I've got you. Where are you hit?"
He did not notice the three Imperial Guard operatives rising from the dust thirty-five meters ahead. He was not looking at them. They were looking at him, with considerable focus, their rifles angling down to a consistent point between his shoulder blades.
Roger had been timing it.
He'd covered the ground between the trench and Doss at a low sprint, choosing his angle to give himself a line on the most likely direction of threat. When the three shapes rose from the smoke, he was already slowing, planting, bringing the Garand up.
Bang-bang-bang-bang.
Four rounds, three targets. He gave the first one two because the first one was always the most immediate, and because at thirty-five meters the Garand made certainty straightforward.
The three rifles dropped without firing.
Roger settled next to Doss, facing outward, scanning the smoke. His breathing was elevated. His hands were steady. He was doing a rapid mental triage of what he could see and what he couldn't.
"You're clear," he said, not looking at Doss. "Work fast."
"I'm always working fast," Doss replied, mildly.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Ally protected - Ambush neutralised.
Scenario Completion Data: +5
[SKILL PROGRESSION]Ballistic Proficiency: +1
The progress notification registered in the back of his mind. He noted it and kept scanning.
What he didn't register in time was the crevice directly to his left.
The operative came out of it fast and committed, the way the best ones always were, no hesitation, low to the ground, bayonet angled for a thrust that would have been very effective if it had connected. The blade crossed the distance between them and came within four inches of Roger's side before-
Tat-tat-tat.
Three rounds from a BAR, tight and decisive, catching the operative across the chest. He dropped. His forward momentum carried him close enough that his shoulder knocked against Roger's boot.
Roger looked down at the man. Took one breath.
Looked up at Smitty, who had the BAR lowered and was wearing an expression of moderate smugness that he was doing absolutely nothing to conceal.
"Thanks, Rick," Roger said.
"Any time." Smitty checked the BAR's magazine with practiced ease. He glanced at the body, then at Roger, and for a fraction of a second the smugness was replaced by something that was probably relief, though Smitty would have strenuously denied it if asked. "Now we're even."
Roger looked at the operative on the ground. Young. He'd keep noticing that, he suspected. That they were always younger than the uniform suggested. He let the observation sit for exactly the amount of time it needed to, and then he straightened up, checked his remaining ammunition, and scanned the smoke.
There was still an enormous amount of ridge between here and anything resembling safety.
"We should move," he said.
"We should," Smitty agreed, already moving.
Doss finished what he was doing, pressed a field dressing into Frank's hands with a brief set of quiet instructions, looked up at Roger, and nodded once.
The three of them pressed forward into the smoke.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.