… is Fair Play [GW2]

“I’ll be at the Grotto in a bit”

 

The captain is doing his job, he’s watching, waiting as he’s done so many times in this dreadful monument to the Dominion’s cruelty, deep in the carcass of the people they’d slaughtered so gleefully. He’d talked to that tengu, he’d seen the carnage himself. He’d watched these charr for two months, watched the United Legion gain and gain and lose and gain and lose and they were no better for it. 

 

The bloodshed continued, whether or not he was watching. The wheel’s cycle continued.

 

He’s following up, tracking and tracing points of contention where the battle had waged, looking for survivors, salvage he can use or give to those who would use it for better things. It’s hunting, but grim. Hunting? No, graverobbing. He’s done his Wolf’s Share of that too in his life, but recovery was seeming less and less like an option for the Star’s Commanding Officer.

He’s scoping the ice pack when the horns sound, scraping, grating. A sound of death. 

Instinctively, he fades into the shadows and as high as he can onto a cliff face if only to save his skin for that brief moment of sight. The fear of being seen, or something like it. He only emerges when he must breathe, like every living being this side of the Mists, the Underworld. Wherever the outliers go when they perish. If he must watch, he watches from this perch while he catches his breath, withdraws the rifle under his pack.

 

He settles into the crevice. 

 

The path to no man’s land opens up. Kessler stares from the back end of his scope, slung low to the ground. Forty, fifty meters away from the top of the bluff, he can just about guess the windfall of the shot, with as often as he’s been getting practice out here, down to the very last foot that bullet would drop. He doesn’t have a second chance, but his train of thought chiefs entirely as the winds do. The temperature drops. The mist congeals. 

 

His eyes go wide as he watches what steps out from the other side of the bridge. His heart drops in his chest. 

 

If you move, you’re just as dead. 

 

“Commander, something’s moving out here”

 

He says it just seconds after he sees it, the subtle shift in the ice. 

 

The stench. 

That feeling. 

It makes eye contact. 

 

Two, three of them in one spot there’s no end to them. The horrible fear that grips his body, a pre-mortem bolt of fear and panic that sends every hair on the back of his neck stand on end —

 

There’s a straggler shot, he feels it bruise deep in his chest when it connects with the breastplate under his borrowed Legion attire. The captain drops under. His radio garbles under the pressure when he flees backwards into the realm of shadows. For the briefest moment, whispers. Figures. A single beam of ethereal, ghoulish green that breaks the surface. 

 

When he rises, it’s to the sound of heavy fire, his world rocked into silence and percussive blasts that thud in his chest to the single, pealed note that stretches out in his ears. The wind pulls at his uniform in raking fingers that pierce like a spirit knife, down to the bone with an otherworldly chill. His chest aches. His hand goes up under the robes and finds no blood, only a single, deep dent in that charr’s handiwork from the back. 

 

Sneaky shot. I’ll kill ‘em. 

 

This is death. It has to be. It comes in frost laden fur and war machines.

 

But the landscape is war-torn, familiar, and the scent of it hasn’t changed and Spirits help him, his head, his eye starts to throb. All things considered, a retreat would be best, but the cold, the chill is deathly similar. He’s felt this before. 

 

When he looks back, one of their numbers follows him with a permafrost stare, a scope raised to meet him. 

 

—

 

The radio crackles on the other end. 

 

“Commander — it’s them, it’s —”

 

Static.

“–st Legion, it’s all ice –”