No, It's Wabbit Season...

I moved in near silence from tree to tree, careful not betray my position by stepping on any stray sticks or other forest debris. The whispering wind covered what little sound I did make. It was moments like this that I was glad that breathing was purely optional for me. My body didn’t need oxygen or any other gas contained in the atmosphere to keep functioning, but I did need air to make my vocal chords work, so I kept a moderate supply of air in my lungs in case I needed to shout something out to surprise my foe.

The sound of a twig snapping to my left and rear stopped me short. I froze in place, focusing my attention on my hearing, trying to sort out the various normal sounds of the woods at night from that which didn’t belong. Unable to locate the culprit with my hearing, I shifted my vision in the Shadowland—one skill that I had retained, thankfully.

Scanning the woods around, the only forms I could make out were those of the normal critters of the night that often go unseen, if not unheard, by normal folks.

I unfocused my eyes and scanned the area all around very slowly. There, just beyond the large leaning pine tree to my far left was the blurry outline surrounding what can only be described as a void. Once I located the outline, I narrowed my focus to discern who or what the form was.

It was laying low, perhaps even stretched out on the ground, which is one reason that it had been so difficult to see on my first couple attempts to locate the form. Unsure as to whether the creature saw me, I swung around to face it full on and dropped into a cautionary crouch. It was maybe fifty feet away, but there were several trees scattered between us, some large, some small, but none preventing a direct line of sight between us.

The form shifted slightly, its movement accompanied by a soft, metallic click.

Sensing that the form did see me, I decided it was time to shift tactics, none too soon, either.

I leaped forward and upward into the air from my crouching position higher and farther than any Olympic-caliber athlete could hope to match and grabbed for a thick branch of the solid oak tree about a third of the way between us just as the first burst of projectiles sliced through the air where I had just been standing.

The bullets had a weird, glowing tracer effect in my current mode of vision that reminded me of my military days and learning how to shoot at night using tracer rounds with my M-16. Before the glow from the first burst had faded though, I was using the momentum of my leap to swing around in a slightly different direction to land no more than fifteen feet from the prone figure as it let loose another barrage at the branch I had been hanging from.

I landed in a crashing roll that made enough sound to wake the dead, but I added to it with a wild war hoop that I hoped would freeze or shock my nearly invisible foe as I leaped for the now visible rifle that it was trying to bring to bear on me.

Let me digress a little bit here on a subject about which I happen to know way too fucking much about:

Getting shot sucks.

Getting shot in the chest by a hi-powered rifle at really close range that you are leaping towards out of desperation only adds to the level of suckitude.

Getting shot in the chest by a hi-powered rifle at really close range that you are leaping towards out of desperation because you know that the bullets have been magickally enhanced to take down banes and other supernatural badasses (which you happen to consider yourself to be one of) raises the suckitude to almost mythic proportions.

The impact of the bullet threw me backwards into trunk of a smaller oak tree that shuddered under the impact of my rather significant bulk and the remaining momentum of the bullet slamming into my chest. I felt my head crack into the tree and then the scraping of the bark against my scalp as I slid down to my ass. The impact had knocked all of the remaining air from my lungs and had put a serious dent in the silver-coated chest plate that I had been wearing for just such an occasion.

It took a moment for me to get through the pain enough to draw in a breath to complain with.

“Fuck me, but that hurts! I don’t know why I ever agreed to this shit.”

The figure got up giggling. “Why, Daddy, you do it because you love me…and because you are our only renewable resource as a bad guy.”

I shock my head and felt around the chest plate for the impact point of the bullet. I found three serious dents all closely clustered around where my heart was—each one easily a half inch to an inch deep. “Yeah, but I thought you were going lower the power on those bullets of yours. If you missed the plate, I might not be so renewable anymore. There are limits even to my healing abilities.”

She giggled even louder through her helmet. “Don’t worry, Dad. Herne has said that I am the best natural shooter he has ever trained. He said I could probably have made the Olympic team if I wanted to.”

I shifted my vision back to normal mode in time to see a heavily camouflaged Jasmine rise from her prone firing position, her rifle in her left hand and her new helmet in the other. “So how does that new helmet work?”

She strode over to stand over me, tucking the helmet under her left armpit before reaching down to help me stand with her now free right hand. “Oh, it is so cool! I was able to see in the Shadowland just like you’ve talked about, I could see you sneaking through the woods a hundred yards away. I can’t wait to tell everyone how easy it is to use as well. Alora really outdid herself this time.”

Every bone in my body ached as I stood up and tried to ‘walk it off’ as every childhood sports coach I ever played under had told me to for every type of injury I had sustained in those games.

“And, for your information, Father, those bullets were only slightly charged. If they had been at full strength, I would have had to clean you off of that tree rather than help you up with a hand. We need to be able to take down a Doppelganger or a Bane with these things, and that’s not easy to do.”

I nodded as we began the long walk back down to the compound. “I’m sure Herne will be more than happy with your full strength batch, Jazz. Just do me a favor and make sure that you don’t grab any of those bullets for any of these practice sessions, OK?”

She wrapped her right arm around my waist and gave me a good, hard, and ever so painful squeeze. “Don’t worry, Daddy. I won’t let anything happen to you that you can’t handle.” I heard her sniffle just a little bit. “I miss Kenny so much!”

“So do I, Jazz, so do I.”