Farattuur’s Misfortune
Farattuur looked about, suddenly nervous from the slightest crackling sound of foliage, the crunch, crunch, crunch of crushed leaves in the autumn forest. Something was tailing him, and it wasn’t friendly. He pulled out his officer’s laser, and scanned the area about him with smart-contacts that gave him a live feed of augmented reality data via drone telemetry.
He decided to switch to infrared, and suddenly caught sight of his pursuer. A big one, standing fully four meters tall, and carrying a heavy rifle that would look like a cannon to a smaller human. Damn. Mokthraga. They’d hired Mokthraga mercenaries. Farattuur remembered his last encounter with the species, a race of hominoid giants from a world rich in heavy metals. That did not go well for his team, sent to extract a fellow soldier from a combat zone after a botched mission.
“Bradak’Tul!” He shouted into the forest. “Show yourself! Meghuruut! Enemy!” The rippling effect of a cloaking device suddenly flared with a pulse of ultraviolet and cerulean blue light as the giant, or rather giantess, revealed herself, a woman of more than twice the height of an ordinary human, and built to support every centimeter of it, carrying a rifle that would make a Tyrannosaurus rex nervous about commencing hostilities.
It was a bit late to react for Farattuur, though, as the giantess had already drawn a bead on him, the telltale dots of a laser-scope already marking him between the eyes.
Odd. The weapon looked built from borrowed Broogh technology. It was an insight that did little good as he felt the nearly infrasonic “poom!” from a concentrated gravitic pulse, just before his skull opened like a raw egg and his body, now minus its cranium, toppled to the forest floor.The woman looked in his direction, examined her handiwork before packing up her weapon, whistling a happy tune, and went back to meet her combat mates.
Copyright © Troy David Loy, 2018
poor fellow! fantastic story Troy!
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