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The bullet’s crack, the splitting of air, the thunk of the thing burrowing into flesh, sinew, and bone. All play out in your head, having heard them a thousand, thousand times before. Out in the world however, there is nothing. The tremor of your Sharps as the bullet leaves is the only indication you have that anything has come at all of depressing the trigger. That, and the blooming wound that spiders out from the meat of the creature’s back.
It rises, its shoulders slump and roll with heavy, labored breaths, but it rises. It turns to face you as you slowly reach into your coat pocket and remove a cluster of four cartridges, laced in between your fingers. One is entrenched in its seat at the breech. The creature shrouds itself in an aura of menace, of virile hatred only available to those on the brink of death. It breathes faster…faster. You cock your rifle’s hammer. The thing raises its head back, screeches soundless to the sky, and stampedes forward.
You fire without raising the rifle to your shoulder, the shot lodging in the right foreleg. Your fingers twirl in continuous motion, your hands almost frozen, stinging with the vibration of load after load, shot after shot. The thing dragging its lame back leg slows it, and all four of the large .52 calibers find victims all across the creature’s body. Its beak is bloody and chipped, its knee is popped off at an angle, its ocular orbit is shattered with fragments peppered in its eye, its ribs are convexed from a vicious shot to its center mass.
All inflicted without a whisper. Its storm slows, the wounds taking their toll, but does not abate. The rhythms of its coming pound from the earth up into your feet, you can feel them, and you first feel their vanishing before seeing the creature raise them up and smash them down in a hush. You see a route open and dash through, as you saw Talons-on-the-Tree do, close and inside its reach.
The hammers impact just behind you, almost toppling you. You bring your Sharps up almost point blank to the hole in its chest, and pull the trigger, observing the signs of the shot to make sure it went off. The smoke flies, the creature sways, and you feel a gust as it repositions. It does whatever it can to be away from you, and you do whatever you can to stay in its blind spot.