Chương 147: Chapter 146 – Bessie

Quiet as he could, Cole pulled up his rifle and willed it into the DMR configuration. Not wanting to take the chance of alerting Bessie by pulling his Snakebite rifle out of its straps, he had to think about how to do this. Shooting Bessie first might kill her, or those scales might be thick enough to shrug off even the squid gun's heaviest shots. The juvenile hounds in her posse gave him another option, though.

He could use those like he'd use the swarming arrowheads to start stacking up his bonuses and let the ricochets hit Bessie from oblique angles. Increased damage and recoil on kill, arcing electricity on hit, and increased acuity on elemental damage. The March gun he'd left Oak Ridge with was now, as Jefferson would have called it, a build-defining weapon. Unlike a mage who relied on ethereal energy charges, Cole and other kinetic energy manipulation classes would only ever be as good as their weapons.

It was a damn good thing his secondary class let him fine tune those weapons to ridiculous degrees. First things first, in order for his ricochets to function, he had to mark targets. That was still the fulcrum in his kinetic redirection path. All his charges were back up, so he at least had some leeway to work with. He tapped one of the stars burning at the back of his mind and activated Meteoric Leap to mark Bessie and her hounds.

As soon as a red glow surrounded Bessie, her head snapped in his direction and she opened her mouth. If his speed wasn't nearly as high as his acuity, he might not have been able to dodge the stream of searing napalm that blasted his way. But he kicked off the tree and tore upwards through the canopy as wood and fungus beneath him burst into flames. Cole gritted his teeth. Wind whipped around him as he flew through the air.

Underneath the foliage, the red glare of the marked targets chased after him, along with another bellowing roar from the oversized hound. She had immediately keyed in on him as soon as he'd marked her. He should have seen it coming, seeing as Bessie seemed to have her own prey-tracking ability. She wasn't even the first enemy he'd come across. Both Beast Cult mages seemed to have tracking spells as well.

The connection in the Lewis Field was a two-way street, and naturally, there would be things that exploited that. No point crying about it on the wing. Cole fed his momentum into his rifle and fired down at the silhouettes, shots streaking away like cannon rounds. Two high-pitched yelps echoed out of the forest, along with the flash of electric blue light on the underside of the foliage. But another tight jet of fire arced out of the forest, straight at his trajectory.

He burned another half charge and kicked to the side, stomach lurching as his body shunted off at an angle. The flaming beam cut straight through the air where he'd been. The fire crackled, like fireworks with loose gunpowder. Some of the sparks splashed onto the back of his cloak. Luckily the garment was resistant to heat and the clinging flame only smoldered a bit. He dropped back down through the canopy and charged his rifle again just before he landed.

As soon as his feet touched the ground, he felt the trembling in the earth through his boots. Bessie charged straight at him, churning up the forest floor and tearing out undergrowth. Morganstern had been right. Bessie moved fast. Faster than something that bulky had any right to move. He only had a few seconds to fire his rifle, sending the enhanced shots straight into Bessie's skull, where they slammed home like sledgehammers, stunting her charge and turning her about, but not penetrating or killing her.

Her head whipped to the side, and her shoulder caught the edge of a tree and reduced half the trunk to kindling. But the big reptilian dog stumbled from the impact, tumbling and scrabbling to get her feet back under her. That had been just the opportunity the rest of her pack needed to make up the difference. The smaller hounds flowed around her, growling and snapping. Cole burned another charge and kicked backwards at a low angle, staying ahead of them as his shallow arc carried him between the trunks.

He fired as he flew, course correction from his target marking making up for his lack of solid ground. Rounds from his rifle whipped up by his accretion wraps smashed into the pack of hounds, creating a small lightning storm within their ranks as the bullets bounced and triggered their elemental effects. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. His Acuity shot through the roof, and the increase in sensations nearly overwhelmed Cole.

His vision hyper-focused on details as though he looked through a 20x scope, seeing imperfections in individual scales on the hounds and chipped teeth in their mouths. Their noise became a screeching, incomprehensible orchestra in his ears that drowned out everything and the smell of blood and ozone flooded his nose and threatened to make his eyes water. He landed on his back, sliding and rolling.

Even his clothing felt extraordinarily rough against his skin and he could feel water flowing beneath the substrate under his cloak. The individual footfalls of the remaining hounds punched his overwhelmed senses. But the fact he could hear them coming meant he wasn't out of the woods, yet. He rolled, trying to will his eyes back to normal. Just how high had his Acuity been boosted? Particles of dirt, dust, and fungus filled the air from where his shockwave had kicked up a ring of debris around him.

Catching movement as he swept his eyes around, his perspective shifted outward and he locked eyes with the remaining hounds. He didn't have time to scramble to his feet, instead angling his gun from where he lay prone and firing between his own knees. The shot kicked like a truck, improperly planted as he was. But the front half of the hound exploded in a blast of electricity that arced to the nearby hounds an instant before two of them also went down to the ricochets.

There were only a handful left, and some of the survivors had begun to think better about continuing the chase, opting to break from the pack and flee for their lives. A heavier, stomping rhythm beat through the ground beneath Cole. Bessie was back on her feet and headed his way. Cole rolled over, forcing himself up despite his overwhelmed senses disorienting him. He would need time and practice to get used to this. But it meant his weapon was now the strongest it had ever been.

He reached down and yanked a new magazine from his pouch and fed it to his gun, willing it to shift again while he held the image of a deer-slug in his mind. Big bore, big bore, biggest you can give me! Thought Cole as the gun hissed and steamed in his hands. The barrel shortened, widening, and then stretched into side-by-side barrels. Extra tentacles wrapped his shoulders and stiffened for support. Rolling thunder swept through the valley as Bessie's stomps felt like steel shoes tap-dancing on his skull.

But he spotted the dusty red of her scales and the red glow. His Acuity was still going mental, catching on small, irrelevant details of the woods and the debris in the air. He concentrated, forcing his eyes to focus on the enormous, charging hound. He drew a bead on her snarling muzzle and squeezed the trigger. The impact of the recoil in his shoulder sent a shock of pain through his body that whited out his vision for an instant. His rifle thundered, so loud it was painful even through his ear protection.

Across the track of forest, Bessie jerked as the pair of amped up, high-caliber rounds struck her in the chest and foreleg. They didn't ricochet this time. One round nearly took her front leg off, splintering bone and shredding muscle. The other punched through the scales of her chest and bowed out her ribcage from the internal pressure, forcing a jet of blood put through not only the entry wound, but her mouth and nose as well.

The gigantic hound kept running for a few paces on sheer muscle memory until it collapsed, digging a furrow in the soft turf. Bessie slid to rest amid a cloud of dirt and spores. She pawed at the air for a few more seconds, then went still. Her scales began to turn black and flake off into the air and a wash of ice swept through Cole's body. Cole settled back onto his ass, breath heaving. It took a few minutes for his Acuity to return to its baseline enhancement level.

It took longer for his collarbone to stop throbbing. The enhanced perception had also boosted his pain sense.

"Fucking hell," he gasped. He unclipped his helmet and ran a hand through his hair, wincing as he moved his shoulder. With his left hand, he peeled back the edge of his shirt collar, looking at the yellow and green bruise that had already started spreading under his clothes. He wouldn't be doing an elephant gun shot like that again any time soon. He was lucky he hadn't broken his own collarbone.

His gun simply sent him a pang of self-satisfaction as it shifted back to its carbine configuration and moved a questing tendril toward the next magazine in his pouch.