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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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The sixty men of the Thorne syndicate moved out of the ridge camp like a silent, heavily armed shadow. There was no shouting, no bugles, and no warning. They split into their designated squads perfectly. Vincenzo and Silvio took their twenty capos and peeled off toward the sleepy town of Rhodes, disappearing into the fog. Arthur and Sadie, leading their flanking squad, slipped quietly into the dry creek bed, moving like ghosts through the thick brush toward the Caliga Hall curing barns.
And Caleb, leading the main frontal assault personally, of course, marched directly down the center of the main road.
He was flanked by John, Bill, Lenny, Sean, and twenty of the most ruthless Italian capos.
Caleb walked at the head of the formation. He had left his horse behind, this was a breach that required boots on the ground. He had dressed for combat. The heavy leather duster swept around his ankles. He had his new, perfectly balanced gold inlaid M-1911 pistol strapped to his right thigh in a quick draw holster. His pristine Vanguard bolt action rifle was slung across his back.
But currently resting in his hands, gripped tightly by his leather gloves, was the terrifying, blued steel Sweeper submachine gun. The heavy fifty round drum magazine was locked into place, the bolt pulled back and ready to unleash hell.
As Caleb and his squad approached the front gates of Caliga Hall, the thick morning fog began to thin just enough to reveal the massive, hastily constructed wooden barricades the Grays had erected overnight.
Dozens of ex Confederate mercenaries were huddled behind the thick wooden crates and overturned wagons, their breath misting in the cold air, gripping their lever action repeaters, nervously staring into the mist.
They had been warned. Leigh had returned from town yesterday screaming about the impending attack. But the attack, even though already warned, still was a big, crazy, entirely incomprehensible thing to these men. They expected a traditional shootout. They expected men riding on horseback, exchanging potshots from behind trees.
They did not expect a synchronized blitzkrieg attack.
Caleb stopped fifty yards from the barricades. He raised his left hand, closing it into a tight fist. His entire squad halted instantly, raising their weapons into the fog.
The silence stretched for three agonizing seconds. And then, from the far eastern side of the plantation, the deafening, ripping roar of automatic gunfire suddenly shattered the morning.
BRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
Arthur and Sadie had breached the curing barns. The terrifying sound of the Sweeper submachine guns echoing from the flank sent the Grays' frontline defenders into absolute, immediate panic. The mercenaries whipped their heads toward the barns, screaming in confusion as their rear guard was suddenly decimated by an unbelievable volume of fire.
"Now," Caleb whispered.
He raised the Sweeper submachine gun to his shoulder, aimed directly at the center of the wooden barricades, and held the trigger down.
The coordinated attack screen erupted with apocalyptic violence.
Caleb's Sweeper roared to life, spitting a continuous, blinding stream of muzzle flash into the fog. The heavy .45 caliber hollow points tore through the morning air at seven hundred rounds per minute. The wooden crates the mercenaries were hiding behind didn't just splinter, they absolutely disintegrated under the sheer, concentrated kinetic force.
"Push!" Caleb roared over the deafening mechanical thunder of his weapon, walking slowly and deliberately forward as he fired.
The twenty capos and the gang members beside him opened fire simultaneously. The Vanguard rifles cracked like thunder, the polygonal rifling sending the spitzer bullets punching cleanly through the overturned wagons and the men hiding behind them. Bill pumped his Auto 5 shotgun as fast as he could pull the trigger, sending massive walls of 12 gauge buckshot tearing through the mist.
The Grays immediately went completely nuts.
The frontline defenders screamed in sheer, unadulterated terror as the air around them was instantly filled with a wall of lead. They tried to fire back, desperately working the levers of their outdated rifles, but they were completely suppressed. Before a mercenary could even level his weapon, he was cut down by a sweeping arc of fully automatic fire from Caleb's submachine gun.
Click.
Caleb's fifty round drum ran dry. He didn't stop moving. With a fluid, practiced motion, he dropped the empty Sweeper so it hung from its leather tactical sling across his chest. His right hand blurred downward, his high attributes in agility and strength cause his combat speed become the fastest.
He drew the gold inlaid M-1911 pistol from his thigh holster in a fraction of a second.
A brave, incredibly foolish Gray guard vaulted over the shattered remains of the barricade, charging Caleb with a raised machete through the smoke.
Caleb didn't even break his stride. He leveled the M-1911 and pulled the trigger three times in a heartbeat.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The smooth, flawless recoil system of the handgun kept the barrel perfectly flat. The three heavy .45 slugs hit the charging guard dead in the center of his chest, stopping his momentum instantly and throwing him backward into the mud like a broken ragdoll.
"Left flank, clear them out!" John yelled, working the bolt of his Vanguard rifle with blinding speed, dropping two mercenaries trying to flank them from the oak trees.
"Keep moving! Don't let them breathe!" Sean screamed, laughing like a maniac as he dumped the magazine of his own M-1911 pistol into a group of retreating farmhands.
The first line of defense was utterly shattered in less than sixty seconds. Caleb stepped over the bleeding, groaning bodies of the ex Confederates, his boots crushing the shattered wood of their barricade.
But as the fog completely cleared, revealing the sprawling, massive expanse of the Caliga Hall tobacco fields leading up to the main house, the sheer scale of the battle became apparent.
Dozens more guards were pouring out of the worker cabins, setting up heavy firing lines along the wooden fences. From the windows of the sprawling white plantation house, snipers were knocking out the glass, resting long barreled rifles on the sills, desperately trying to draw a bead on the advancing mobsters.
The Grays were broken, but they were cornered, fighting with the desperate frenzy of trapped rats.
Caleb holstered his smoking pistol. He reached over his shoulder and unslung the Vanguard rifle. He chambered a round, looking up at the second story windows of the plantation house. The war was far from over. The true slaughter was only just beginning, and the beautiful, pristine grounds of Caliga Hall were about to be completely painted in blood.
While Caleb was methodically dismantling the front lines of the Caliga Hall plantation with mechanical, terrifying precision, the rest of Scarlett Meadows was rapidly descending into an absolute, inescapable nightmare.
The coordinated assault was not limited to the sprawling tobacco fields. Miles away, simultaneously erupting across the sleepy, dust choked town of Rhodes and several highly secretive locations scattered throughout the surrounding county, the true scale of the syndicate's wrath was being unleashed.
These were the crucial operational arteries that belonged to the Gray family, hidden warehouses, illicit moonshine distilleries tucked into the dense bayous, guarded supply depots, and fortified checkpoints.
Every single one of these locations was currently under a massive, synchronized attack from the splinter groups of elite Italian capos.
These highly disciplined death squads, led by the ruthless veterans Caleb had meticulously assigned to the task, moved with the synchronized lethality of a modern military strike force. The sheer volume of the assault was something the southern state of Lemoyne had never witnessed in its entire history.
For the people of Rhodes and the innocent civilians living in the farms and homesteads around the county, the morning had transformed into a waking, paralyzing terror. They were, of course, living in absolute, suffocating fear.
Entire families huddled together on the dusty floorboards of their homes, crawling under heavy oak beds or locking themselves inside pitch black root cellars, praying to whatever God would listen that the violence would pass them by.
The gunshots did not stop from the moment the sun broke through the morning fog. It wasn't the sporadic, rhythmic popping of a standard frontier shootout. It was a relentless, overlapping, deafening roar.
It sounded as though the gunshots were actually rain that poured down continuously, a metallic, apocalyptic thunderstorm not stopping whatsoever, and it was echoing from everywhere.
The terrifying crack of the high velocity Vanguard rifles and the deep, concussive boom of the Auto 5 shotguns reverberated off the wooden storefronts of Rhodes, rattling the glass in the windows and sending horses panicking in their stables.
But the sound that truly shattered the courage of anyone listening was the continuous, ripping BRRRRRRRRRRRRT of the Sweeper submachine guns. It sounded like the sky itself was tearing apart.
On the southern edge of town, a hidden Gray family warehouse disguised as a dilapidated railway freight depot was currently being systematically violently purged. This warehouse was the central nervous system for the Grays' illegal smuggling operations and the armory for their newly hired ex Confederate muscle.
Silvio, the towering, mountain like mafia enforcer, kicked the heavy wooden side doors of the depot completely off their iron hinges with a single, brutal strike of his boot.
"Clear the floor! Leave no one holding a gun!" Silvio roared in his booming, heavily accented voice, stepping through the splintered doorway.
Inside, nearly two dozen Gray guards and mercenaries scrambled for cover behind massive wooden crates of stolen Kentucky bourbon and stacks of imported steel intended for the Grays' ambitious, doomed city building project. They leveled their old repeating rifles and fired blindly toward the doorway.
The bullets chewed into the wooden doorframe, but Silvio didn't flinch. He raised his silver inlaid Auto 5 shotgun to his shoulder. He didn't bother pumping, he simply held his ground and pulled the trigger in rapid succession.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The long-recoil system absorbed the massive kick, allowing the giant enforcer to unleash a localized hurricane of 12 gauge buckshot. The wooden crates the mercenaries were using for cover simply exploded into clouds of lethal splinters and shattered glass. Whiskey poured out onto the floorboards like a river, mixing instantly with the blood of the men caught in the blast radius.
"Flank them! Use the rifles!" shouted one of the Italian capos, a scar faced veteran named Lorenzo.
Four capos fanned out to the left and right, moving with fluid, practiced combat geometry. They raised their Vanguard bolt action rifles to their shoulders. Through their pristine optical scopes, they acquired their targets with surgical precision. The polygonal rifling of the barrels sent the heavy, pointed .30 caliber spitzer bullets tearing across the length of the warehouse.
The bullets didn't just hit the mercenaries, they punched clean through the wooden support pillars, piercing the iron siding of the indoor freight cars, and struck the men hiding behind them with devastating, armor penetrating kinetic energy.
The Gray guards screamed in sheer, unadulterated panic. They were trapped in a meat grinder. A mercenary near the back windows tried to make a break for it, vaulting over a stack of grain sacks to reach the back alley.
Lorenzo didn't even aim down his sights. He simply drew his gold inlaid M-1911 pistol from his shoulder holster and fired twice. The heavy .45 slugs hit the fleeing man in the spine, dropping him instantly into the dust.
In less than three minutes, the sprawling warehouse was completely silent, save for the dripping of shattered whiskey barrels and the groans of the dying. The capos reloaded their weapons with cold, mechanical efficiency, stepping over the corpses to secure the building. The first operational artery of the Gray family had been severed.
Simultaneously, a mile outside of town on the main dirt road leading toward the swamps, another brutal confrontation was taking place. The Grays had established a heavy, fortified roadblock here to monitor incoming traffic and protect their eastern backers.
Ten ex Confederate mercenaries were stationed behind a wall of overturned wagons and sandbags, nervously gripping their rifles as the sound of distant automatic gunfire drifted through the trees.
They never even saw the attack coming.
From the dense, foggy tree line bordering the road, a squad of Thorne syndicate capos emerged like phantoms. They didn't shout a warning. They simply raised their weapons.
Two capos carrying the terrifying Sweeper submachine guns stepped up to the edge of the brush. They locked their heavy fifty round drum magazines into place, pulled the charging handles back, and leveled the blued steel barrels at the barricade.
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
A blinding, continuous stream of muzzle flash illuminated the morning mist. The sheer volume of fire was incomprehensible to the men behind the sandbags.
Thousands of grains of hot lead poured into the roadblock at seven hundred rounds per minute. The overturned wagons were chewed to pieces, the wood splintering and disintegrating under the concentrated kinetic force. The sandbags ruptured, spilling dirt into the air in a massive, blinding cloud.
The mercenaries screamed, dropping their weapons and covering their heads, but there was nowhere to hide. The heavy hollow point bullets tore through the barricade as if it were made of paper. Men were cut down where they stood, thrown backward into the red dirt by the sheer impact of the rounds.
When the fifty round drums finally clicked empty, the capos dropped the submachine guns to let them hang on their slings, seamlessly drawing their M-1911 pistols to advance and finish the job. The checkpoint was completely, utterly annihilated. The road to Rhodes was wide open.
While the outer perimeter of the Gray family's territory was being systematically violently dismantled, a very different kind of panic was unfolding right in the heart of Rhodes.
Meanwhile, inside the upscale, velvet draped parlor saloon that the Grays owned and operated, a building they had completely closed off to the public to serve as a luxurious, secure headquarters for their corporate financiers, the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense.
The representatives of the eastern backers, the wealthy, smooth talking suits who had promised Tavish and Leigh Gray the world, were currently scrambling like terrified rats on a sinking ship.
These were men who dealt in ledgers, stocks, and hostile corporate takeovers. They were used to destroying lives from the safety of a boardroom in New York or Chicago.
They were absolutely not used to the deafening, earth shaking roar of a mechanized war taking place just outside their frosted glass windows.
Mr. Sterling, a tall, sharply dressed executive with slicked back gray hair and a bespoke three piece suit, was frantically shoving stacks of bearer bonds, coded telegraph transcripts, and legal deeds into a heavy leather briefcase on the mahogany bar. His hands were shaking so violently he kept dropping the papers.
Surrounding the executives were their personal security details. These weren't local farmhands, these were hardened, highly paid bodyguards, former agents, ex military sharpshooters, and ruthless corporate enforcers.
They were currently checking their heavy revolvers and pumping their repeating rifles, their faces grim and sweating as the continuous, rhythmic crack of Vanguard rifles echoed down the main street outside.
"Pack the damn ledgers, Sterling! Leave the clothes!" shouted Mr. Vance, the lead bodyguard. He was a massive, scarred man wearing a reinforced leather vest, currently shoving shells into a double barreled shotgun. "The situation out there is completely compromised! We have to leave right now, or we are going to be slaughtered in this room!"
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Name: Caleb Thorne
Age: 23
Body Attributes:
- Strength: 8/10
- Agility: 8/10
- Perception: 9/10
- Stamina: 8/10
- Charm: 8/10
- Luck: 9/10
Skills:
- Handgun (Lvl MAX)
- Rifle (Lvl MAX)
- Firearms Knowledge (Lvl MAX)
- Past Life Memory (Lvl MAX)
- Knife (Lvl MAX)
- Blunt Weapon (Lvl MAX)
- Sneaking (Lvl MAX)
- Horse Mastery (Lvl MAX)
- Poker (Lvl MAX)
- Hand to Hand Combat (Lvl MAX)
- Eagle Eye (Lvl MAX)
- Dead Eye (Lvl MAX)
- Bow (Lvl MAX)
- Pain Nullifier (Lvl MAX)
- Physical Regeneration (Lvl MAX)
- Crafting (Lvl MAX)
- Persuasion (Lvl MAX)
- Mental Fortitude (Lvl MAX)
- Cooking (Lvl MAX)
- Teaching (Lvl MAX)
- Trilingual Language Proficiency - G, I, & C (Lvl MAX)
- Inventory System (Permanent - 100x100x100)
- Acting (Lvl MAX)
- Alcohol Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Treasure Hunter (Lvl MAX)
- Drugs Resistance (Lvl MAX)
- Business (Lvl MAX)
- Leadership (Lvl MAX)
Money: 2,772 dollars and 60 cents
Inventory: 283,392 dollars and 61 cents, 11 gold nuggets, 74 gold bars, 1 Double Action, 1 Schofield, 2 Colm's Schofields, 1 land deed (Parcel), 1 Mauser, 1 Semi Auto Pistol, 1 Lancaster Repeater, 1 Old Wood Jewelry Box, 1 F.F Mausoleum small brass key, 1 Ruby, 1 Braithwaites Land Deed, 1 Broken Pirate Sword, 1 Milton's Safety Deposit Key, Proof Of Marlin-Thorne Firearms Co., 10 Dynamites, 1 LeMat, 1 M1899, 1 Carcano, 1 Ownership deed of Doyle's Tavern, 3 Diamonds, & Important Documents & Deeds Of Cornwall
Bank: -