Slowly, after hours and looking at the Bounty Hunter tablet, I knew that I only had a couple more hours before nightfall. The group of bounties ahead was going to be difficult, and there was more than I wished. I started to make little trip holes in the bushes around where I was firing in case I needed to retreat.
Which was highly probable.
Digging a little ditch just in the underbrush of a plant, I found the roots made my life a pain in the ass. Breasts also did not help when you had to crawl around properly. For once in my life I understood that none of my submissives ever understood what proper crawling was.
Proper crawling was dragging your body across the ground using your arms, legs, and feet to propel yourself forward.
Dragging your face in the dirt to keep your head down was a damn part of it too.
Now, though, I had a few unseen traps and some markers I set for myself to know where to run. I decided that when I got back to the ship, SILENCERS WERE NEEDED! I needed to find a way to shoot quietly, and I doubted in a future universe, there was not a way to quiet gunshots. These were all things that a seasoned professional gamer like me should have thought of.
There was a problem with my thinking, and I found my mind was getting much more engaged as I planned this out. Before, I always had a set number of things I could use in the game. There were options and things I could and could not use because of balance issues, even as the game developers struggled to balance things. This world forgone that and allowed me so many options I didn't even think about the options and what I could do with that freedom.
I needed to think about things, and I hadn't done that before, which was weird. So many times in Call of Duty Virtual Reality, I thought about these things and wished for more freedom in movement. They continued to balance things, making some things more broken than others. Now, as I dug a hole to give myself cover, I wasn't even sure I would work in the underbrush to camouflage myself and ensure the enemy could not see me. I realized how much this Tutorial was supposed to make you think.
You had to be in a six-month contract and in your own universe where you could die. The main universe did not have permanent death, but the Tutorial did. That made no sense to me until now.
This was Gabin Corporation getting you used to the mindset that you needed in the main world. Otherwise, it would be a slaughter fest with you running out and dying and thinking the game sucks. It was like a Newbie running out into the line of fire, thinking he could take a couple of shots. They had no idea of the thoughts that those season players had. You were dying because the enemy was prepared and waiting for you, like in a real damn war, while you were running around proving Darwin's theory of evolution.
This game's freedom completely would revolutionize PvP and PvE in the main universe once people started to understand this. I needed to start looking into the mid-nineteen hundreds and early two thousand war tactics. IEDs, mines, booby traps, these things were the function that I was looking into. The Vietnam War, the Afghan war, the Ukraine war, World War I, and two would have a lot of information for me to digest. Sure, they might not be the best in a science fiction world with magic. But it would still give me a baseplate for things I could do and protect myself.
For now, I made my little dug out and crawled back and to the side to start digging a new trap. I placed a little sharpened stick at the bottom and moved along and put more in. I marked them a little so I wouldn't run into them and continue to do that for a bit as the sun started to dip on this planet.
Finally, I crawled back into my dugout, brought my sniper forward, and looked through the scope to gain more information. Again, I wished for a thermal scope as I looked down the sights and watched that woman from earlier talk to a brown man. The man looked annoyed at her, and it seemed they were cooking. Then I had a thought, and I decided that a distraction would be good.
Then I thought about it more as I watched a third blue man come out and look at the previous blue woman with a lecherous smile through the scope. I didn't have the time and the things at this moment to set up the trap I was thinking of. In fact, I ensured to bring explosives on this trip, and they are in my pack. If I were to bring myself into the midst of their camp, then I would use them. For now, I watched as a fourth dog man walked out of a tent and sniffed the air, and he smiled. He looked at the food and seemed to say something.
The brown man smiled, and I settled in to watch the bounties move and interact with each other and kept count as they ate. Something told me this wasn't the moment to attack, though, and I watched in silence as they interacted more and finished cooking. My stomach felt a little hollow after all the crawling and digging. I moved slowly, pulled some jerky out to feed my character, and watched.
Ten minutes of watching turned into a half hour, then into a full hour, then another full hour as they cooked and talked. All of this was without anyone keeping watch, and it felt like they were unplanned for an ambush in the middle of criminal territory. That didn't seem right, and my gut told me there was a sniper or two out there keeping watch over the camp.
I watched people come to the edge of the clearing to do their business and walk back into the camp. I watched and watched as the night started to fall, and their fire was the only light. I saw them start to drink, and then I saw someone new.
So far, I have only seen nine people, but now I have seen a new person—a mousy-looking man with large mouse ears. The crew on the ground seemed happy to see him and thanked him as the Dog man slapped his back and smiled; the Mouse guy started to hand him a light-looking sniper rifle, and the Dog man walked away from the camp, heading towards the cliffs, and I grinned. I watched as he headed to the cliff face, and I barely saw the cave he entered through, and I finally had a grasp of the situation.
There were ten men and women in the encampment. A sniper that rotated every twelve hours to look out for them. I wasn't sure what they were here for, but all of them had at least small arms on them at all times. They didn't look vigilant, but that was because the sniper was watching over them and was meant to be spotting them. The mouse guy was now defenseless while the dog man was on the lookout.
I was curious to know if they had a thermal or something on that scope or why they trusted the dog man for the overwatch at night. But they all started to settle in for the night, and I started looking for a way to ambush that dog man without being spotted. The Forest ended a bit of distance from the cliff face, but there was a bit of underbrush to crawl through. I could spend half the night moving into position or find one of the cliff face holes the man would be overwatching from without light.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
I already made my decision and started to move back. I wanted to move silently and wished for a silencer for my handgun now more than ever. Hopefully, I could find something on my way, but I was not holding my breath. I crawled back, scaping my breasts as I went, wishing I had a chest of steel at this point, but I wasn't about to complain about it. I loved my proportional breasts and wasn't about to get rid of them because of a little inconvenience.
Intrusive thoughts plagued my mind, but I grabbed my backpack and started to move. It was time to devise a plan, and I started to grab my knife, a couple of grenades, and wire. It wasn't going to be much, but it was going to be my last round of protection from the bounties I needed to take. I had to do this all in advance and hoped for the surprise and things to kill more of them. Hopefully, they would run, and I could take over this area and set it up for my bounty hunting. I wasn't about to hold my breath, though.
Hope for the best plan for the worst!
I grabbed some things from my backpack and put the backpack on my back. I started to move to the furthest edge of the forest, slowly making sure I couldn't be seen at the edge of the forest and stayed low. It took time, and I almost tripped on many things as I moved in the darkness. I wished for dark vision, thermal vision, or any sort of night vision, but my wishes were fruitless thinking.
Taking the long way around, slowly the darkness settled in, and I was feeling tired, or my character was. I wanted to take a nap, but I knew that would be a terrible idea. Instead, I took out some water and drank a little while taking a break near where I would have to start my crawl. I took out some jerky in my dirty hands and consumed a nice portion before getting up and making my way to the edge of the forest by the cliffs. Then, I marked and concealed my backpack.
I then started a long crawl. I moved with my head down, unsure of the surroundings, as I dragged my face through the dirt. I moved, barely able to see the plants as they came up, and I tried to avoid moving the bigger bushes. Slowly, Ever so slowly, I moved, and the night wore on. I hated this dragging movement and dragged myself for over two hours.
If this was something I would regularly have to do, I would have a hard time playing this game professionally. Still, I would do it; I wanted to do it and needed to do it. My thoughts were running wild, and I thought about my encounter in real life as I took that woman hard. That was an amazing feeling for me, fulfilling some of my darkest desires. It was amazing, and I knew that she was enjoying every moment with enthusiastic glee even as I did horrible things to her.
I stopped as I realized my mind was wandering so hard that I started to feel moist below, but worse, I was already at the edge of the underbrush. Now was the riskiest moment, and I lifted my head slowly and felt almost stupid for it. I noticed that there was someone awake, and I heard some strangled cries and moaning from the camp.
The other tents seemed to be unmoving, and I decided it was now or never to get to that cave entrance. I slowly got up, and I took my assault rifle off my back. I started to walk and move forward to the entrance of the cave that was a hundred meters away. It was not a short or long distance, but it felt like a huge distance as I noticed a person at the campfire now watching as people played with each other in one of the tents.
Realizing I was holding my breath, I took a steady, silent breath as I moved forward slowly.
Fifty meters!
Forty meters!
Thirty Meters!
Ten Meters!
I made it to the entrance, slowly moving in, and looked around, seeing nothing of note. I was about to take a step forward when I noticed something a bit of a distance in, making me look down. There were cans on a string dangling, and I looked down. Slowly, I moved forward till I found the string and stepped over it carefully. I looked and realized there was another, which I slowly stepped over.
I could barely see, and I inched forward into the darkness and saw a light deeper in the cave. I moved slowly forward and stepped over one last string before the light. I slowly looked into the light and noticed that there was just a lighted path headed at an elevation, and I slowly and silently as possible walked up the path. It was lighted now, and I couldn't see any more traps as I moved.
Every portion of this cave was bathed in light at this point by latrines, and I heard someone yawning up ahead. “Ah, Talia must be getting revenge for the other night right now,” I heard a man chuckling now, “Lucky bastard. Must think she is going to kill him. How hard she is riding him. Amazing pussy she has.”
The man seemed to be talking to himself while he bathed himself in the darkness. The lights ended at the top of the elevation, and I realized what they were for and nodded to myself. The Dog man was lying down on the ground watching the forest line. He watched, and I saw him moving his scope slowly.
Slowly, Ever so slowly, I moved forward and pulled out my knife. I could not make a single noise. I couldn't allow him to shoot his gun or make a noise. Not a single sound.
No Noise.
No Noise.
NO NOISE!
This mantra continued in my head as I moved forward as slowly as possible till I was right behind him. My feet were right beside him, and I brought my knee toward his back as I brought the knife toward the center of the back of his neck.
It was sudden, and the Dog Man jerked as I severed what in a human would be his spine with my knife and exhaled, killing the man under me without him shooting a single shot. His body only jerked once, and I slowly reached down and removed his finger from the sniper rifle, and I disarmed him, taking up the lighter-than-I-thought sniper rifle.
My breathing was a little heavier than I thought, and I flipped the man over. I realized that the man looked shocked in death with wide-open eyes. I closed them and took out the tablet I forgot to put away. I snapped a picture for the bounty office and instantly came back with a reply.
—
Bounty: Orion Longtooth
Race: Dognic
Crimes: Assault, Assault with a deadly weapon, Murder
Federation Bounty: 5500 Federation Credits
Wanted Dead or Alive
Note: Known to be with a pack of men and women attacking and murdering Bounty Hunters. Proceed with Caution
—
A low bounty compared to the woman, but it never says how many counts of a crime they were charged with. I sighed, pulled the body back into the light, and started to loot it. I pulled out a small handgun and two magazines for the sniper rifle he was using. Looking around for a couple of moments there were also some rations, and I nodded to myself.
Now was not the time to start a battle or to eat. Now was the time to prepare, and I walked back into the light, taking some wire, and got to work refurbishing the traps. It was going to be a long night for the bounties. They just did not know it yet.
I smiled as I got to work, thinking of a backup plan in case they got up here. One thing I knew was that I wished for more guns to make it appear as if there were more shooters. What could I do in situations like that?
My mind was hard at work as I played with a Trap, setting it up to make a more explosive noise just in case they got to the cave. Then I had an extra grenade, and I had a smile on my face as I thought of what to do.
Damn, after all the sneaking and stealth shit. I had a fun plan for those bounties down below. I sadistically grinned as I got moving to implement it.