Raymond Arbuncle Denton, RAD to his friends, had been a Green Beret for over a decade. He had specialized with the long gun, and had been forced into the test pool for the AI assisted scope program. He had worked through the bugs in the system with the code-heads and finally gotten back to being one of the best long range asset elimination specialists.
Decorated so much that he felt more like one of the decorations in the room than another person when forced to wear his formal greens, he preferred to focus on his missions when in the field and his family when not. But, he was in the field now, so Ray kept his focus. He and his spotter, a darker fellow who barely needed camo' to keep hidden, had been in position, watching the asset, awaiting orders for a few days now, and now the radio finally came to life.
“Base to RAD-Bang unit, RAD-Bang unit, come in.” The expected, if embarrassing call came through.
“This is RAD-Bang, we read you base. Proceed.” Bang – the code-name his spotter was given – answered.
“When are we finally gonna get a better callsign...” Ray muttered.
“The mission is a go, you are to eliminate the asset when no one can see him, extraction will be sent to the RV once we get sat confirmation.” came the response.
“Understood, see you soon. RAD-Bang out.”
The shot was lined up, distance called, weather factors accounted for, and Ray was deep in focus, waiting for his spotter to let him know the asset was unseen, when the first change happened. “Hey, Bang, shut that light off, its messing up my sightlines.”
“... uh... Ray? That light coming from you. You forget to turn off your flashlight or something?” Bang queried.
“What?” Ray looked around taking his eye off the scope for the first time in a long while to look around. A few minutes of searching, and nothing glowing or emitting light was found, so they reset, and got ready to take the shot. Again, a glow soon began to be seen, and again they checked for any source, finding nothing.
Finally, they gave up on finding the light, and just completed the mission, which took a bit, but they were successful, called it in, moved to another safe scope point, and awaited confirmation. After reaching the RV and being flown out, their mission reports this time included the anomaly, and various things were tested. It wasn't until a few weeks later, while Ray was practicing at a range with a new AI module, that the first clue as to what was going on was discovered.
As he focused again on his target, and got in the focused headspace, and even brighter light than last time began back-lighting his scope. The range had a few cameras, as the last thing that was needed was for a poorly thought through prank to go wrong, so there was a digital record with multiple angles on it available to go over. Another search was done, and the only thing the two incidents had in common was Ray. Bang wasn't there, he had something else to do, and range practice didn't require a spotter.
Ray was taken off the active duty roster until the source of the glow could be identified, and it didn't show up again until he was once again focusing entirely on something. This time, Ray was working on his core strength in the gym, and had just gotten his rhythm, when the glow showed up again, once again centered on him. As soon as he noticed it, it disappeared.
“What the....”
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Stopping what he was doing, and thoroughly thrown off of his stride, Ray looked around, but nobody else was there. He was wearing shorts and a thin white t-shirt, so there was nothing on him that could possibly be glowing. His phone was even a few feet away, so it couldn't be that either. After a while he went back to his work-out, and got back into his stride. Once again, as soon as he got in the zone, the glow came back. Once he noticed it, he focused on it, but didn't break his stride this time.
A strange sensation was tingling on his skin, like a light buzzing was there, and as he focused on it directly, he found he could manipulate it. Noticing this, he stopped everything else and kept his focus on the sensation. Slowly but surely, he gained more and more control over it, until he was able to complete his workout routine without glowing anywhere noticeable.
As soon as he was able to control it more easily, he went to his CO with his discoveries. Soon he found himself at a black-site, and his powers were put through the ringer, his own physical condition barely being paid attention to. Test after test, endless instruments measuring anything the tech-heads could come up with, and more focusing on more things than he had done since his final semester of school when he made the mistake of taking five 6 unit classes in one go later, and he was sent out onto a new range with a new weapon.
The RD34, creatively named such as it was still a prototype and was the 34th version, was a light-based long range ray-gun, and thankfully, this time, it didn't explode when he channeled his new power through it and down the range at his target. No, this time, instead of trying to push a projectile down the barrel and out of the gun, his power itself was the ammo, and when he hit his target, it exploded into flames. Finally a gun capable of harnessing his powers had been built.
Except that using the gun was less effective than just shooting the beam straight out of his finger at a target. And so, more testing, more designs, more trying to focus in new ways, and more nonsense. Soon, he was on the range with another design, and so it continued, until he was able to be deployed again against his next target without lighting himself up like a Christmas tree.
The AI this time had less to worry about in terms of drop due to gravity, and trajectory being changed due to weather effects. No, this time his rifle's AI was focused on the array of mirrors and lenses in the “barrel” and optimizing not just the range and the power of the “projectile”, an amount of light-based energy poured into the rifle's accumulation chamber, but also the wavelength, so that it wouldn't be visible, and thus couldn't be traced back to its source.
And so RAD-Bang was sent out once more, this time on a rather low priority mission, just in case the rife still needed further tweaks to be useful in all scenarios. The target was cleared, the go-ahead acknowledged, the shot lined up. “Try not to be so flashy this time...” Bang muttered, and Ray chuckled a bit as he focused. Soon the round was en route, and hit its target, and as Ray was breathing out in relief, his target exploded.
“Oh, shoot!” Bang gasped, and after they glanced at each other, they took off to scope point B, to check for any further actions needed. Once they got there, and radioed in what happened, they waited. And waited. And kept waiting for a full two days, as control had them sit on the situation until a decision had been reached. Apparently there was a lot of discussion back at HQ, and the muckity mucks were mucking around trying to shift blame until the full coroner's report was obtained, and they switched to trying to regain blame, or rather credit, for the inexplicable sudden self-explosion of a minor leader of a terror group.
Bang and Ray went to the RV, and returned to base, and the rifle was sent back to the eggheads who went over the mission-data from the blackbox. Ray went to the range with his old long gun, and did practice shots to clear his head, some with the gun, and some with his fingers while using the gun's scope. Though he did have a close call as one of his finger shots clipped the shoulder strap and ricocheted off into the wall. This, however, soon started a new round of testing with new weapons, one of which wasn't really a weapon at all, and just a scope platform that he could point down more easily for more accurate pointer-shots.
Really, there's no accounting for style in the military's naming sense for anything. The Secretary of the Navy is SECNAV for goodness' sake, and that's just the first three letters of the relevant parts of his title. Ray was mostly just glad the gun had been called the shot scope and not something worse. Anyways, the next gun they had him use burned a hole through anything it came across until it stopped being supplied with his power, and he was sent to try a bunker-kill mission.
Ray and Bang got into position once again, got the go ahead for the mission, and the shot was initiated. And then a bird fell into two pieces and landed in a shopping center while he was still focused on his target. Ray and Bang both paid it no mind, as birds passing between the target and the shooter was common, and the shot was not interrupted. The target was neutralized, the kill reported, and they arrived at the RV to return to base. Once they got there, though, they found out that ignoring the bird was not quite as wise as they had thought.
There was a video going viral on social media platforms of the two halves of the bird landing in the shopping center. Now, since it had been split into two by a high energy beam of light, the bird was not bleeding, but all the sudden, a bald man who had been minding his own business, had been slapped upside the head by one half of the bird. Which caused him to stop, and look down at where it had landed, which then let the other half land on top of his head, and take on the appearance of a particularly odd toupee.
And thus a storied career of an accomplished sniper changed into the origin story of a super-human with light-based powers. Another entry was added to the database, and a poor folic-ally challenged fellow was made into a meme.