The Siberian Wilderness

[Rennia Trayvold]

The man panicked at the onslaught generated by the two supernatural beings. He stopped trying to fire and concentrated on just running as Richard's rounds exploded all about him. He got peppered with Rock and tree pieces as he narrowly managed to avoid the rounds with speeds that suggested that he too was probably not human either. He didn't look different like either the daemon or the reaper, but he was definitely far too adept to be some simple lucky fool.

Rennia was done waiting. He could not be allowed to get the drop on them yet again. If he had, they would be goners for sure. As soon as she felt it was safe she took off, letting her left arm off the rifle and using its sling and her right arm to steady it as she sprinted through the trees and danced as far away from the mines as she could. given they'd cooked the snow around them, that was fairly easy to do now. Even if they were disarmed, she wasn't going to risk it.

She got closer and closer and closer to the man. If she couldn't aim her rifle at him steadily with the ache in her left arm, she would simply deal with him another way. Unfortunately for him, she could close the gap faster than he could extend it, and she came closer and closer to him as the moments past. Then he made the mistake of turning around. His plan was to fire his rifle, but it didn't work out that way. The daemoness was on him in a second and then it was over. The man stood in front of her with an expression of shock and horror. She stepped back and then lifted her boot up to press against his abdomen and pushed him back with it. Light danced off a metallic object that appeared to have a large portion of red on it. Any fool with two braincells would have identified it as a short (relatively speaking) sword that the daemoness had produced from somewhere.

Before her lied the corpse of the man she had been chasing and one look upon it brought a laugh from her. Luck had truly been on her side, for underneath his coat... just barely visible, the man had strapped himself with explosives. It looked as if he had planned to take her with him, if she ever caught up with him. Seems that it didn't quite work out the way he intended it to.

[Richard G. Hale]

'Whoever planted these mines here was a jackass.' thought Richard as he very slowly worked on removing the various mines from their places. It would have been easy enough to do on any other occasion, but the guy had planted them in JUST a way that made it very difficult to remove one without the possibility of another going off. The Bouncing Betty mines he was familiar with, they were a force to be reckoned with back in his childhood. This of course, also made it easy for him to deal with them.

A needle, knife, and a steady hand was all that was really necessary to capture a Betty. All of which he very luckily had. The first step was to locate the mine, which was fairly easy given the large spots his steam had made in the snowy permafrost. The next step was to find the spot the arming pin usually was planted, and replace it with a needle. That would prevent the mine from going off while someone was working on it. Afterwards, Richard just needed to remove the three detonators, all of which could be removed by loosening the bolts on the top of the can.

Then there were the Claymores... And the rest of the mines, really. The Skeletal hermit didn't know much about any of the rest of the more modern mines, they were after his time. Still, he disarmed the ones he could by cutting any strings he found. He very carefully kept a few of the "Bouncing" mines he came across in his bag, once they were safely disarmed of course. The rest he left as it was, perhaps placing a stick upright in the ground to mark the spot. Following this pattern, he very slowly made his way through the forest in the general direction that his current traveling companion and assailant had run.