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Enny kept picking at a little flap of rubber that had fallen outside the seam of her metallic arm. She poked at it with her opposite hand, trying to reorient it along the ulna-shaped portion of her exoskeleton. The rubber bunched and cracked, too expanded at this point to fit back into the crevasse. She used two fingers to try and smooth it out, or maybe to twist it. Maybe it had already been twisted, she thought to herself, which would explain the bunching. Twisting it in the opposite direction might resolve the issue. No such luck, she quickly discovered, as one bunch relented, another formed an inch further along.

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She debated tearing the rubber flap from her arm completely. She was sure it had some actual purpose other than just being aesthetically pleasing, as most of her body was function-over-form... the rubber might've been a seal, designed to protect her inner arm from sand and other particulates that could cause wear and electrical hang-ups if they were allowed to congregate inside her... or maybe it was an electrical conductor. Prosthetic bodies were easily susceptible to power surges or static. Enny had recently (within the past week or so) watched some poor sap catch fire after having an internal electrical adapter ruptured from only a non-lethal grazing of one of her rifle shots. The wiring inside the cyborg's chest had been hastily strewn together by a cheaply-bought mechanic, something clipped to the copper wiring of a conflicting voltage standard, creating an effect like trying to plug a fridge into a two-pronged wall socket adapter... With such haphazard construction, the possibility of their body boiling itself from the inside out was inevitable. You have to be careful about those sorts of things.

Prosthetic bodies, especially the cheaply-built ones among scavengers and gangs would have been considered walking fire hazards by pre-war standards, though cyborgs themselves were light years ahead of any other technology of that era. Once they were a miracle of human ingenuity, now... like cockroaches in their tenacity, she felt.

The target wandered into view of her scope, and the distraction of Enevelen's arm quickly took a backseat to the task at hand. The figure poked its head out from the entrance to a large, sandstone cavern, one Enevelen had been carefully observing for more than eight hours now in total silence. Her rarely-blinking electronic eye peered through the cross-hairs of her rifle, staring down the figure's nostrils. She cherished this gun like no other, mostly because of its efficiency and tactical versatility... but it was also her child. It had been soldered together from the weapons of past bountyheads and built to her exact specifications, a device curated from hilt to barrel to be her personalized dream rifle... While it had its limits, and required reassembly often, she could never part with it. It was part of her.

Weapons were close friends to a bounty hunter. A gun or a knife, for example, was often their only true ally during a job. Many, like Enny, spent every waking moment practicing with their weapons, cleaning their weapons, repairing their weapons, contemplating the purpose of their weapons... They paid a hunter's bills, and were their only consistent companions on every job. It was hard not to obsess over them.

Enny had slept with her rifle clutched tightly through many cold nights, her arms wrapped around its body and the barrel tip pointed down between her thighs. She had noticed how surprisingly easy, and enjoyable it had been to personify inanimate objects whilst feeling so isolated in this desert. Her rifle was her best friend, more than anyone else. No one she knew had been as reliable or as useful in recent memory. People always failed her, but her gun had yet to do so.

She talked to her gun a lot, but she didn't consider this strange. Her brain was partially artificial, and thus she knew she was less susceptible to stress-related madness. If she was really losing it, she'd know. She remembered a movie from the twenty-first century about an unaugmented human being stranded on an island with a beach ball. She remembered the ball having a red face, which was strange to her. There had been toys made of it. She had never seen this movie, but thought of it regularly. A raw survival adventure set in a desolate area, with few resources to keep them from being swallowed alive by the unbridled wrath of nature in its most brutal and unrelenting form... Finally, she thought, someone gets it.

Action/adventure-type conflicts and broader themes of both physical and emotional isolation were trendy in entertainment of the era. They were exciting to her as well, with all their twists and turns... and though they were "relatable" to her in their plots, she did not live the way those characters would. Her jobs were always slow, methodical, and meticulously planned weeks in advance... and that was preferable to her. She hated surprises, and she would always try to avoid them whenever possible. Movies were an exciting fantasy, but she knew she'd hate living in one.

It had occurred to Enny that maybe the stained red face on the ball had been a hand print of the human's blood. Could it be possible that they had used a human's real blood? She didn't know, though she suspected that would have made her squeamish in her earliest years, long before her military service. Cyborgs like her, she acknowledged, had become familiar to the sight and smell of spilled blood, even if it was an imitation of the real thing. A minority of cyborgs did have actual naturally generated blood, with mock-organic replications of human organs, but most had a blood-oil like mixture of a blackish hue that smelled like mechanical lubricant. Those with the income to afford replications were usually the type running illegal materials between settlements, or otherwise getting regularly mugged at gunpoint and bleeding out all over the dirt because of their presumed wealth. She had found from personal observation that any excessive display of natural, pink flesh tends to send a bold message to other cyborgs, saying.. "I'm loaded! It's all yours! Beat me like a piñata and see it all spill out!"

A second figure appeared, several meters from the mouth of the cave, having appeared from nowhere. This cyborg was a long-haired, skinny thing with sunburnt rags, stained brown with wet sand. They rushed over to the cave, kicking up an obvious cloud of dirt and sand as it stumbled its way across the clearing. She watched as the second figure quickly collapsed into the arms of the first in loud, sobbing hysterics. It collected the second in muted surprise, cradling its head into the folds of a soft burlap poncho.

Enny stared at the two, eyeing them down through the unrelenting gaze of her glowing, omnipresent digital cross-hairs, watching as the target glanced around anxiously. It appeared to be scouring the landscape for any threatening signs of life outside the isolated cave, any crouching assassins that may have seen the second figure's very noticeable arrival. Enevelen was concealed from their view, positioned several miles away behind the brush of a distant sand dune.

The brush's thin bushes concealed her lanky figure, and a carefully under-polished and non-reflective chassis of her body kept the hot sun from reflecting a bright glare. Her upper body was wrapped in a dirty grey-tan scarf that knotted around her shoulders and head, hanging down like a parka across her back. This outfit was common among those who had lived among the dunes, the idea being that this rotten garment would keep the wind from kicking up sand into the innards of her artificial body, or taking on too much heat from the unrelenting sun above. Her dark, reflective visor was the only feature of hers that sat prominently and unopposed in the open sun, its tinted glass allowing her a uniquely effective tactical capacity to ignore both the blazing glare of the sun and the rampaging sand that would otherwise harass her breathing and sight.

Enny, having been without a real nose for over a century, found herself briefly distracted from her work by an involuntary mental effort to recall the scent of blood. She was sure it had had a smell, and she knew she had to have smelled it at least once in her lifetime, considering the amount of death she had encountered in her long, long, life. She would have had been in a variety of situations wherein the smell of blood would have been prominent, and totally unavoidable to her.

She could easily recall the smell of a decaying body, and even that of a live one, both freshly showered and not. The taste of blood was like salt, she remembered, which her mock silicon tongue was still programmed to detect... but she wasn't sure of the smell. As much as she wracked her brain, the information was just not there.

It was strange, Enny thought to herself, how little things like that get lost along the way. The smell of blood was by no means an essential memory, and she acknowledged that the absence of a sense of smell did not really effect a cyborg's life very much. She was by no means dependent on nutrition from organically grown/cooked food as prominently as before her prosthetics... but still, her inability to grasp the scent from memory with any sure certainty gave her a slow, but resounding sickness. The cruel dysphoria from the realization put an unwelcome tightness in her stomach... followed soon by the inevitable cavalcade of sizzling bile crawling up, into her throat.

She always hated this, and tried her best to ignore the sensation. It was unfortunately difficult to do so, as the unwanted liquid had begun to burn the inside of her mouth.

The target and its companion traded tense, forced smiles, clutching each other's open palms. The more feminine one, dirty and torn, spoke excitedly, though Enny could not make out the conversation from this distance. She had realized that the most likely reason that she had not detected this person approaching earlier is that the feminine cyborg had buried itself several meters below ground. IT may have been in this state for a week or longer, totally inert and absolutely silent, in only a way that a cyborg could. Enevelen surmised that this feat had been pursued without any communication or prior approval from the target, and likely with the intention of avoiding detection from hired assassins, spies, or whomever. Enny had, however, now seen the cyborg, so the plan had failed spectacularly. With that clumsy display while running over to the target, kicking up an entire cloud of sand along the way, its approach had been as subtle as firing off a flare.

Enevelen noted the time as she began a recording within her HUD, to be stored for optional distribution to her commissioner and other interested parties. Included in the recording was video and audio feed, synced playback of mental processes (filtered without her wandering thoughts, of course, for posterity) as well as internal statistics like body temperature, heart rate, hydraulic pressure.... all things the client and other future clients may find engaging, to hopefully tip a sale in favor of her focus and efficiency. Her own records would benefit from this recording as well, being able to study her own internal behaviors for personal improvement... it would be a valuable collection of data.

The battery was warm, its charge emanating a faint green glow from the rims of the rifle's outer chamber. An innocuous, foggy steam crawled out from the upper vents, near the top of the barrel. A soft hum rumbled from the base of the device, one that was a familiar and comforting sound to Enny, but also one that would sometimes cause her heart to race in excitement. Loading a fresh battery, one for which this model of rifle regularly cost as much as small mammalian early century pet for a pack of two, was a process comparable to that of this rifle's vintage bolt-action, combustion-focused predecessors.

Pulling back the pin, a used battery sprung from the green-lit socket on the side of the rifle, followed by a trail of steam and a muted 'thump' as it collided with the cushion of sand. A new one, retrieved from a pack of two (wasting more than two whole pulse rifle batteries on one bounty head was a sure sign that you should pack up your equipment and immediately look for a different line of work while your head was still attached to your body) was then slipped into the vacant chamber. The positive and negative blunt-action charge coils connected with either side of the fresh battery, and a satisfying 'cha-chick!' followed from re-inserting the chamber into the body of the gun. The weapon's electronics would then whrr to life yet again, and the shot would be ready to fire.

It was a strange thing, a device designed for cushioned metal hands to grip and fiddle with as easily as a child's toy, and yet its purpose was to brutally dispose of living beings.

The bile in her chest was beginning to curdle against the synthetic flesh that walled the rear of her mouth. It burned, not unlike an exceptionally hot bowl of soup. She did her best to swallow it back down to the cast-iron boiler that sat in her basement of a stomach, her interior feeling scorched by the sensation. It stung like hell, but it was a familiar pain that had hurt her many times before. Accidental glances on many cold nights, in reflective panes of glass without a proper mental warm-up had made her sick on the previously-stained carpet of her hide-out floor... It was a behavior very typical of her, she had noted begrudgingly. It was an Achilles heel widespread amongst those with heavy augmentations. Military-oriented cybernetics unfortunately make their users seem to her, rather inhuman. Those who suffered from that sort of body dysphoria would often become nauseous, even if they otherwise had no issue with the concept of monstrous augmentations on an ethical level.

In the early days of prosthesis, when augmentation technology was not yet of a decent quality by anyone's standards, the general public had a similar sickness about it. The wealthy upper class frat packs that could afford their ludicrously high cost would have ridiculous things like cameras and solar plating drilled directly into their noggins, which made everyone very nauseous, but these groups of course insisted on pursuing these trends in favor of normalizing adoption of the technology. The military applications that followed were much less nausea-inducing to others, because at least with a hulking two-ton super-soldier, the dark green triangular plating of the shoulders and the unblinking, Terminator-like laser-based sight systems like those developed by political powerhouse The Formation at the earliest crest of their long reign, were of course intended to be disturbing. The service that had birthed Enevelen in her current form, also of The Formation originally, designed their earliest augmented warriors for power, fear, and loyalty above all else. She had personally idolized those first few volunteers, and even remembered telling a friend that she half-jokingly desired to have 'dated' one.

She supposed their infamous dark monoliths would've tasted the sickness too had they seen themselves in their own newly-adhered reflective shells before their consciousnesses had been removed, their cold, dead eyes starring back from a faceless black statue... Luckily, there was not much going on in the mind of an early augmented soldier other than programmed orders, artificially inflamed blood lust, and a strong sense of patriotic duty.

Enny padlocked her vision and the aim of her super-charged pulse rifle between the eyes of her target, staring directly through its skull from a great distance. Its smile had turned sour as it stared past its softly sobbing companion into the distance. Its eyes were dead, its mind fixated on other things. To Enny, its expression seemed to be that of cold awareness, possibly a tired acceptance. Its soul had already left its body, artificial seams along its face sagged like that of a frowning old man. The target glanced towards Enny, miles away, as though starring right through her. The likelihood of it sensing her in any real way without the specific and direct use of advanced satellite-based landscape visualizing software was highly unlikely, and as such, she did not question this behavior, and did not believe that it was truly staring at her, but rather aimlessly into the distance.

Perhaps the target had suspected to some degree that this was an inevitable outcome, and had only just now put the pieces together that as it stood stone-faced, barely dressed past pajamas in the mouth of this random desert cave, tightly clutching its fragile, desperate partner to its chest as it stared off into the endless soft beige dunes of the vast Hourglass Desert, the environment's rounded edges rippling against the expanse of the sea-blue sky... that these would most likely the last few seconds of its life.

The target found its face stiff with disappointment at the thought, and shook its head lightly in disgust at itself for not remaining oblivious to it. He did not know what to do, as he was young, and had never been in such a situation before. The girl in his arms was looking up at his face, searching for an expression, and he made an effort to give her a moment of intimate eye contact. She seemed to receive it, but did not have time to process what the gesture meant.

A bright green needle from Enevelen's rifle pierced through the brush, and across the dunes, sending waves of sand particles spiraling into the air like a corkscrew around the beam. A sound resembling that of a lightning strike pierced the silence of the desert as the beam connected with the target's temple, directly above its right ear. Its head became white-hot, and then exploded in a fleshy mess of wires and melted plastics as the second figure was splattered with its partner's warm synthetic blood-oil. The second figure's face did not have the mechanisms required to emote what it felt at that moment.

Enny mentally confirmed through her scope that the job had been completed, and watched as her visor HUD alerted her of an electronic deposit of credits in her bank account. She sighed in relief and deactivated her rifle with a snap of the hilt, compacting the smoking weapon like a folding bike into her hands. Tapping at her visor, the recording finished and saved itself into her external cloud storage. She rolled over onto her side, stretching her metal spine before collecting her things, a lengthy bag for the rifle and its adjacent sniper mods, and then shuffling quietly off between the dunes.

She stopped briefly as she heard a late-reaction guttural shriek of indescribable pain and sorrow echoing from far away. It continued for several seconds and made the empathetic parts of Enny's brain shudder with difficult feelings of fright and guilt, but she quickly tapped at the rim of her visor with a finger to silence the audio frequency. The soft, empty void of the desert's wind was then all she could hear.