TransWorld: The stronger, the weaker (600 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.93 on 18 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by <interloper> (View user info) at 2007-09-06 23:14:48 EDT
"The stronger we are, the weaker we become."
Like most enigmas, she had many names. The Spanish Wolf, the Pit Viper, the Night Viper. Her real name though was Gabriella Víbora, and to the surprise of most who found out, she was fully human.
Prior to the war I was sent down to the Southern Continent to find her and learn from her, to learn what made Troglo shocktroopers and the Felis clans fear her, to learn why her name made the wolf-packs shiver and her presence made the snake men hide. I was sent to learn how a single pureblood human commander and a small contingent of soldiers could make war on well funded, well equipped mercenary armies of genetically enhanced killing machines... and win.
I remember the first time I saw her: a small, lean woman in her early thirties, smooth mocha skin and silky black hair rolled up under a camouflaged hat. Her eyes were grim, but not cold. She cradled a weathered sniper rifle in her arms as she looked me over, biting her lower lip thoughtfully. After a moment she turned to her man and nodded, and he withdrew the knife from my throat.
"Si, ven, come with me."
* * *
Part I: The Mind at War
"They has been following us for two weeks," she whispered, passing me the weapon. Pressing the rifle's comb against my jaw, still warm from her breath, I peered through the optics at an encampment on the mountainside across the valley. As I counted the number of troglodyte soldiers she whispered an order to her lieutenant, who vanished back into the dry mid-summer underbrush. "The gorilla troopers son demasiado lento, move too slow," she explained to me. "They are not made for these kinds of war. We must move more slowly."
"I don't understand," I whispered as we crawled backwards over the ridge. "Why not evade and flank them?"
"No," she replied, waving her hand dismissively. "Forty soldier with full armors and heavy weapon. I lose too many men. We mataremos todos, kill all of them, and lose no men. You will see."
"How?" I asked as we quietly rose to our feet.
She held out her hands for the rifle. "Forty gorilla soldier, heavy armor, heavy weapon, many weeks of rations. Cuatro small vehicle for carry supplies. Two mechanic. No pájaro... no bird scout. Muy fácil."
And she was right. We lead them deeper into the mountains and up to the high grassy plateaus, and there she struck. From a mountainside two of her marksmen shot out the four utility crawlers. Then, while the two mechanics struggled to repair them, she lit the grass fields on fire. Naturally, the troopers escaped, but hundreds of pounds of c-rations and ammunition burned up with the crawlers.
"We move faster now," she grinned as she watched the flames finish their work on the crawlers through the rifle scope. "They have choice now, follow us... or wait for supply."
"Prepara los soldados," she ordered her lieutenant before turning back to me. "The silverback, he is angry. He has been struck, he cannot find his enemy to strike back. He does not feel fear, he does not feel pain... this makes him weak. He will make the only choice his psicología will allow. He follows, a su muerte."
Sure enough, they followed. An old military proverb says that an army travels on its stomach, and the troglodytes have big stomachs. Gabriella... the Pit Viper's soldiers were sixty-strong, mostly human or close-human hybrids. Though not nearly as strong or as fast as the troglos, they were battle hardened vets with the cleverness that comes from serving under a commander like her. When the time came to turn back and ambush the troglos, the battle was a short-lived bloodbath. Weak with hunger and short on ammunition from several days of otherwise harmless harassment from our skirmishers, they fought bravely but fruitlessly. As she had foreseen, we lost not a single soldier.
"When tu enemigo fights you," she grunted as we cut the heads from the bodies, "he must fight you in his mind before in the flesh. We make them fear what they must fight."
We left the bodies there, headless and mutilated.
* * *
Part II: Slight of Hand
By early fall it was apparent that things would get worse before they got better. More platoons of troglos had been deployed, and they were better equipped and had detachments of avian scouts. Furthermore, intel over the wire suggested that the Felis clans had been offered lucrative bounties to assassinate the Pit Viper.
"It is ...unlikely... los gatos will start war with us again." Gabriella shook her head. "Especialmente with the gorilla soldados in the mountains. Pero si... but if they did, we could easily..." She bit her lower lip thoughtfully.
By mid fall we confirmed the rumors. To identify Felis assassins, every few days Gabriella would perform a checking manouver. We'd cross difficult or exposed terrain very quickly, planting scouts at high vantage points roughly a day ahead of time. They would then remain behind to see if we were being followed. The Felis, who typically worked in teams of three or four when hunting combat units, were presented with a difficult choice: cross the terrain and risk being exposed, or find another route and risk losing the trail. For the elite Felis, who pride themselves on their speed, stealth, and effectiveness, the choice was an obvious one. As the Pit Viper knew, they would react in the only way they were capable of.
The scouts never saw the Felis. What they did see were the birds fleeing as something unseen moved swiftly through the valley below. Had the Felis been slower, less direct, or less stealthy, they might have mistaken it for a wild animal. But it was not, and we knew then that they were coming.
The Pit Viper's face was blank when we told her, save the corner of her lip tucked gently between her teeth.
"Julio," she said to her lieutenant after a few minutes. "Debemos darles provisiones de nuevo." Then, turning to me, she explained. "We must see if there are more. Los gatos... the clans have no love for the gorillas."
The scouts were resupplied, given an extra radio, and left behind. The rest of us headed deeper into the mountains, our eyes scouring the sky for the avian scouts. Less than a day later the call came back from the scouts: at least two more Felis had crossed the valley. The Pit Viper was pleased at the news.
"To avoid being found," Gabriella explained, grinning, "los gatos travel in separate before attack. They all follow one leader, no radio, no comunicación. El líder, the leader, will leave hidden trail for others to follow. This is their strength... this is their weakness."
To keep the Felis uncomfortable, the Pit Viper moved her men as quickly as the situation would allow. On the third day we caught sight of a bird scout in the distance, and doubled our pace. It took two more days, two more nerve-wracking days as we moved, hid, moved, hid, and moved under the eyes of the avian scouts. Then, on the third day, the Pit Viper sent off a handful of men with loaded with extra weapons and special instructions.
As they stalked off into the trees she looked at me with a toothy smile. "Our timing, it is very important. We have been following los gorilas."
Two platoons of them, to be specific. Sixty gorilla shocktroopers, fully armored, heavily armed, two bird-men scouts, and twenty odd support infantry... in the mountains, hunting the Pit Viper. And we got closer still, knowing that as we watched them, a Felis assassin was in turn watching our moves, trying to understand our purpose.
Gabriella woke her soldiers early that morning and we approached the troglo encampment. With a wide grin she issued an order over the radio, and within twenty minutes a battery of gunfire echoed over the mountains and through the morning chill. Predictably, the troglos broke camp quickly and took off in pursuit.
"They fired at the bird-scout," she explained as the last of the two platoons disappeared from view. "Twenty guns. Ven, come, we must work."
With that we rushed through the empty camp in pursuit of the gorillas. But as we entered the remains of the camp, the Pit Viper stopped, in plain view, and peeled off her camouflage jacket, throwing it to the ground. Then, with her rifle slung across her back, she began to scale a large tree. When she was about twenty feet up she stopped, looked out across the sky for a minute, and dropped back to the ground.
"Ven!" she shouted, and we sprinted down the mountain.
Twenty minutes later, with all but a handful of the Pit Viper's men continuing down the mountain, we lay silently on the side of the mountain, having turned back to flank the remains of the camp. Peering through her rifle's scope, Gabriella smiled.
"Look." She handed me the rifle. "Decepcion... deception upon deception. What did she see? Was it really what she saw? Did I watch the sky? Or did I lay the trap?"
And there, in the rifle's optics, I watched as a camouflaged female Felis snuck stealthily into the remains of the camp. She approached the jacket discarded so carelessly by the Pit Viper, and picked it up with a clawed hand.
"Mira! A chance to catch the scent of her careless prey! Such an opportunity afortunado... how lucky she is." I saw the Pit Viper's toothy smile from the corner of my eye.
The Felis lifted the jacket to her nose and inhaled deeply... and spasmed. She stood up quickly, fell down, and began to convulse. I turned to look at the grinning Pit Viper.
"Ven, amigo mio, come with me," she said rising to her feet and waving to her men. "La cocaína... cocaine. Their sense of smell, it is too strong. It is their weakness."
I followed Gabriella, the Viper of the Southern Continent, the Spanish Wolf, back into the camp where the female Felis lie convulsing and helpless on the ground. The Pit Viper gave a command to her men, who kicked away the assassin's bladed weapons and began to pull the camouflage fatigues from her body. When she was naked, they bound her faintly struggling hands and feet and strung her up between two trees, limbs stretched tight against the ropes.
Gabriella unbuttoned her camouflage shirt and threw it to the ground, her slender, bare shoulders uncovered by the black tanktop she wore. She reached to her hip and unsheathed a long bladed combat knife.
"If your enemy sees," she said, gently piercing the Felis' bare skin on her back, just below the nape of her neck. Even in her drug induced haze, the assassin shrieked, and I winced at the sound. "If your enemy sees only what you allow him to see... then él piensa... he thinks only what you allow him to think." She grabbed the Felis' hip with one hand as she drew the knife down the length of her spine, splitting the skin. The cat was whimpering, and the soldiers stood back a respectable distance, some averting their eyes. The Pit Viper, her hands bloody and her eyes grim turned to look at me as she made a crosswise cut through the skin.
"Before you can fight tu enemigo in the flesh, you must first fight him in your mind." Her eyes bored into my heart. "Tu mente, amigo mio, is your mind strong enough?"
Placing the handle of the knife between her teeth, she slowly grasped the two corner flaps she had cut into the assassin's skin. Then she lifted one leg, planted her foot in the small of the assassin's back, and pulled as hard as she could.
The Felis screamed. I fell to the ground and vomited.
In twenty minutes she had finished her work. The Felis assassin had died, and we left her strung up between the trees, for all to see. For that was the point. And we followed the Night Viper, the Wolf, the cruel tactical genius Gabriella Víbora out of the camp.
Because what we left behind in a freshly disbanded Troglo camp was a dead Felis assassin, skinned alive, hanging between the trees with her two partners barely eight hours behind her. And when they found her, her body naked, limp, tortured and desecrated, they would assume it had been done by the Troglos, as such were the methods they had used on the Felis before. The Pit Viper had started a war.
"The enemy de mi enemigo," the Pit Viper smiled sadly, "is but another tool for me to use."
To be continued...
User Reviews
Submitted by Alter (user info) at 2007-09-26 22:00:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No, Comment.
Submitted by shadow (user info) at 2007-09-07 15:23:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
not bad.
Submitted by SgtHartman (user info) at 2007-09-07 15:04:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
fucking awesome man
Submitted by beer-turtle (user info) at 2007-09-07 14:19:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
¡Fantastico!
Submitted by zwerg (user info) at 2007-09-07 11:18:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Wow, really good.
Submitted by Darth_Famine (user info) at 2007-09-07 11:00:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
very good
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-09-07 10:56:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2007-09-07 09:45:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fuckin awesome.
Submitted by creep_firebombing (user info) at 2007-09-07 08:40:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Bucket full of fag below.
Submitted by Surgeon (user info) at 2007-09-07 06:42:35 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
tendon..
Submitted by odin (user info) at 2007-09-07 05:30:07 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by hour_man (user info) at 2007-09-07 05:24:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
+2 i'm buying a house today
Submitted by orph (user info) at 2007-09-07 04:50:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Fantastic
Submitted by RabiedRooster (user info) at 2007-09-07 04:36:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was realy freakin' good
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-09-07 03:31:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by haikumikoo (user info) at 2007-09-07 02:38:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
fucking shit.
know = no
This story is just as good as it was 5 seconds ago.
Submitted by haikumikoo (user info) at 2007-09-07 02:38:08 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was really, really good. I think I saw two typos (know I'm not confused by the south american lady's spanglish), but it could be the booze vision.
Too bad there aren't any tits, or people might actually pay attention to it.
Submitted by GodChicken (user info) at 2007-09-06 23:24:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
good shit man.
Did you read my entry?