As night fell once again, the serpentine Ranger/ Rogue hybrid awoke from a very light sleep. As per usual, she was only ever truly able to sleep in a state where she was just on the border of consciousness and unconsciousness, though despite that she still got the benefits of deep sleep even though she could be roused from her slumber by a certain series of different events when necessary.

With it being near pitch black out, with the little light coming from the moon, stars, and numerous fires in and around the Grekel encampment, she had an easy time retracing her steps in total silence and secrecy, reaching the place she had previously identified as the most ideal infiltration point with minimal effort. The fruits of being part snake were shown clearly, as she had the sight of a mere human and also the sight of a snake, seeing in both the normal spectrum visible to humans and also that of the thermal spectrum.

The fires did mess with that a bit, but not nearly as much as for a creature such as, say, a Predator (yes, I know what their true name is, but I would prefer not to have an army of lawyers attack me), but it was a bother nonetheless. Plus, she had her sense of smell to count on, too, though with the horrid stench wafting from every corner of the settlement, she really wished that she was smell-blind now.

She did not scale the wall to enter the camp. Instead, she slithered through a gap in the wall where a bunch of logs in the poorly maintained and built palisade were either bent or askew.

Of course, before going through completely, the did peek her head partially through to scope out the situation on the other side. Finding no foes to fight or alert, she commenced with her infiltration.

Her goal was not to kill or steal or burn or in any way, shape, or form destroy or end the life of anyone or anything here. Rather, her goal, as given to her by the Great Mother Herself, was to scout and, only if she deemed it absolutely needed, cause some trouble.

She had the words drilled into her that she was not to be captured or killed, and if scouting was not possible or if her cover was blown she was to get the fuck out of dodge as soon as possible and make a break for home with all due haste. She was not here to cause harm or damage, but instead merely to observe and try and see if there was any threat from the neighbors.

She had, in the brief time she had been here, already confirmed that the nearby Grekels were a threat and that they intended to do harm to the fledgling Lyrhean nation, so that goal was already fulfilled, though only partly. It would be completed to its fullest once she got back home and relayed the information, though she felt she could stay a while longer and gain more valuable intel if she took a little more of a risk here and there.

She did not need to use her own weight to check and see if the shanties were able or unable to sustain her mass. This was not an A*sassin’s C*eed game where she could climb on top of rickety structures and expect them to hold her weight no matter what she did. This was real life, and those crap buildings would fall apart with an overly stiff breeze, meaning she could give one a swift kick and it would break apart like a house of cards.

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And so, with rooftop parkour out of the question, she had to make do with some good old-fashioned M*tal Ge*r S*lid style sneaking. Given her body had the features and benefits of both warm-blooded and clod-blooded creatures while only suffering from a small number of drawbacks from each, along with her innate biological sneaking ability and contortionist levels of flexibility, she figured she would have a very easy time getting in and scouting the place out without being spotted.

…

She cursed under her breath as she dragged the dead body of a Grekel child over to a crate filled with straw and hay and stuffed the corpse inside while making sure it would not be easily seen anytime soon. Her infiltration had been going swimmingly until some dumb shit of a Grekel child spotted her and very nearly set off an alarm.

He felt two ways about this. On the one hand, she had just killed a child. An innocent child, more than likely. On the other hand, she had confirmed that this camp was making ready for an all-out attack on her people and that all children here were born by interspecies forced impregnation, i.e., r*pe.

Sure, the kid didn’t choose to be brought into existence that way, but he was still both a child and also a creature that more than likely had nothing but antipathy towards anything other than its own kind if the dialogue she overheard from other Grekel kids was anything to go by. The kid was born by sin and, if the others’ views were also his own, then he was irredeemably malicious towards non-Grekels anyway.

Or maybe she was just trying to rationalize her murder?

Either way, she could no longer keep up her scouting mission, not only because she had been forced to take a life that would almost certainly be noticed but also because she needed to alert the rest of her people of what was coming. Oh, and the sun was about to begin to peek over the horizon, too, so she needed to avoid being caught out in that as well.

With the body hidden and the coming fight on the horizon, she found herself stopping mid-sneak as a thought crossed her mind. If there was an attack on its way regardless of any potential attempt of her stealthily exfiltrating the area, then what was the point of being quiet?

Hell, what was the point of not causing a decent amount of damage on the way out, too? She could easily scale or simply leap over the walls, and she had confirmed that the average Grekel elite (if they could be called that) was only about 1.2 times ‘better’ than the average human, stats-wise, so she could easily mow through dozens of Grekel before needed to bail.

A wicked smile crossed her lips as she grabbed a torch from a shanty's outside wall and ripped it clean off, causing said structure to crumble apart. She yeeted the torch over towards a large amount of flammable material and once it caught fire and the alarm was sounded she rushed towards the wall that was closest in direction to her homeland.

She smirked as she sliced a Grekel nearly in half with a single swing of one of her daggers before sliding and spinning while drawing her bow and letting loose three arrows in short succession. She sighed as she danced through the rapidly growing conflagration.

If only someone would play some music from the W*rriors game series...