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When you see your first Deathclaw up close, your life doesn't flash before your eyes. It doesn't have time. It doesn't have room. There's just this hwoorf noise and this dead-meat stench and this world-devouring blur of pink and tan and motion and claws and-
BANG.
-and red. So much red. All over the place, you, the ground, everything, and you're panting so hard and staring at the thing that it's not until Initiate Dimple comes running up all frantic that you realize the red didn't come out of you. It's the lizard's. All of it.
Dimple's apologizing like her life depended on it and you're not sure why. Didn't she just- wait. No. No she didn't. That wasn't her weapon. She's got an AER9, all the Initiates do. They don't make that noise, they fire coherent light, there's nothing in a laser rifle that can do that. Plasma rifles can't do that. Even a Gatling can't make that sound and it's not like the Initiates have access to Gatlings anyway. So it wasn't Dimple who did this, or Reuben or the other guy. The Deathclaw got past all three of them.
But it's dead now.
Most of the monster lizard thing's head is missing. Something slammed into it like the fist of an angry Frankenstein. One hell of a something; what's left of the skull is thick. It's hard to tell but it looks like whatever it was hit the creature below the horns, near the eye, right as it was leaping.
One shot. One shot took that beast down. From- okay, if it got shot square in the side of the head the projectile (it had to have been a projectile, that's not the kind of wound plasma leaves) had to have come from that direction and there's nobody in that direction. There's just the factory.
... the factory.
Paladin 101's on the roof of the factory, isn't she.
And she's got that.... weird scoped rifle that you've never really had the chance to ask her about before.
You have got to see that woman's gun. And soon. Holy cow that was a glorious shot she made.
BANG.
-and red. So much red. All over the place, you, the ground, everything, and you're panting so hard and staring at the thing that it's not until Initiate Dimple comes running up all frantic that you realize the red didn't come out of you. It's the lizard's. All of it.
Dimple's apologizing like her life depended on it and you're not sure why. Didn't she just- wait. No. No she didn't. That wasn't her weapon. She's got an AER9, all the Initiates do. They don't make that noise, they fire coherent light, there's nothing in a laser rifle that can do that. Plasma rifles can't do that. Even a Gatling can't make that sound and it's not like the Initiates have access to Gatlings anyway. So it wasn't Dimple who did this, or Reuben or the other guy. The Deathclaw got past all three of them.
But it's dead now.
Most of the monster lizard thing's head is missing. Something slammed into it like the fist of an angry Frankenstein. One hell of a something; what's left of the skull is thick. It's hard to tell but it looks like whatever it was hit the creature below the horns, near the eye, right as it was leaping.
One shot. One shot took that beast down. From- okay, if it got shot square in the side of the head the projectile (it had to have been a projectile, that's not the kind of wound plasma leaves) had to have come from that direction and there's nobody in that direction. There's just the factory.
... the factory.
Paladin 101's on the roof of the factory, isn't she.
And she's got that.... weird scoped rifle that you've never really had the chance to ask her about before.
You have got to see that woman's gun. And soon. Holy cow that was a glorious shot she made.