Assassin’s Hammer: Overview

A rifle used by Intelligence Legion operatives on particularly large targets where smaller caliber arms simply won't suffice. By firing a large blade of tungsten sharp enough to smoothly cut bedrock, one that's wreathed in plasmatic matter, the weapon ensures that even one shot is enough to mortally wound even the largest of targets.
_{Again, I don’t believe this is required knowledge for new expedition legionnaires and contains classified information. – Ye-Jun
I heard back, and we’ll remove this and other instances during the next editing pass. – Hansuke}

Right on, so I disagree with marking weapons as classified for anyone that’s already part of GDS, meaning we’re gonna talk about a gun usually reserved for killing some of the gnarliest creatures around. I’ll get bitched at by Ye-Jun, Iza, Hansuke, and others, but I find this shit too cool to keep under wraps for no goddamn good reason.
_{Your sheer blatant disregard for OPSEC is withering to endure. – Ye-Jun}
This weapon isn’t meant to be used for conventional operations; due to the Gray Conduit requirements, among others, it’s almost exclusive to the Celestial Throne (or within the boundaries of Frostfall).

Not long after we started our expeditions, we ran into the issue of lacking a legionnaire fieldable weapon that could put the murder on creatures found in the higher ascension layers. Nerve Harnesses can only get your ass so far before the gains you make from the extra effort aren’t worth the effort you put into making that happen.
_{The phrase you’re looking for is “diminishing returns” you ignorant troglodyte. – Iza}

As much as ya’d like to believe it’d work, you eventually hit a point where Illit cannot make a 7.62 PTT round punch through the armored carapace and abatement field of a 20 ^th Ascension Wraith. Well, you can with enough Hath, Ashath and Entropy thrown into the mix but we’re trying to make that not as critically necessary.
When I talked to the Science Legion weapons lab about this, they brought up their ongoing work with plasmatic blade type weaponry, and I immediately knew I had to see this for myself. They had this prototype that fired tungsten blades that were set vertically, so think of a shape like this |. Once the blades had been sharped with some obscenely precise process that involved microscopes, they were covered in inert plasmatic matter and set into place by people who would really, really regret dropping them. The target it was aimed at was this line of big ass blocks of armored, steel reinforced concrete. I checked the backstop and it looked like some sort of abatement field held up by a few dozen Gray Conduits, which seemed fair given the targets.

Once we were all behind the blast glass, they pulled the trigger and all I heard was an explosion followed by someone shouting “Oh fuck!” repeatedly. The blade had just zipped through all of the targets, leaving molten metal and plasmatic matter in its wake, and then penetrated the abatement field before continuing on through the fucking lab wall.
Thankfully they’d been smart enough to not position the gun range to face in towards the rest of their sector, so that blade shot right out of the lab, through fifteen layers of armor and infrastructure, and into the frozen hellscape of Frostfall’s perimeter, never to be seen again. I was impressed and said I’d be down for backing the project, but they didn’t seem all that happy at the time.

Took another year before I saw the first Assassin’s Hammers show up in Glacier’s armory, and going over the handling forms for them and their ammo felt like research for a damn college degree. They had to be stored under certain conditions, had to undergo routine maintenance every year, the ammo had to be kept in the magazines at all times, Fabrication had to make the ammo and then store it in the magazines immediately, just a whole host of shit that sounded like a total headache. Didn’t even pay them any mind until a long time later, when I had a few spooky boys from the Intelligence Legion drop by the armory to draw a few Assassin’s Hammers for some… thing, they were up to.
I said I’d hand them over, but only if they gave me a video of them being used in action. Their commander agreed, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get a blood slate eight days later with everything I asked for.

How the fuck do I write about this without breaking OPSEC…
_{Words fail me right now. – Ye-Jun}

There was a uh… entity? Yeah, an entity.
From the note that I found on the blood slate the situation was that we’d gotten intel, done some scouting, and found this entity was a huge threat to Glacier if it we didn’t deal with it before our arrival. Our spooky boys from earlier were sent ahead to deal with it, so the video started with them entering its like… it kinda resembled a church or whatever. Lots of dead shit piled up and around the area, and some of the corpses were for species I knew were an absolute hassle to kill. Whatever this thing was, it probably stood on the same level of threat as a Colossus. _{Nahli, new legionnaires have no idea what that term means. – Hansuke}

So the spooky boys snuck in, found it hunched over an altar full of corpses, and took up position. Much to my goddamn annoyance the footage cuts out for a few minutes, but then it shows the entity being held in place by… uh, stuff that spooky boys are capable of doing to restrain… entities like that?
Fuck that’s the best I can do alright? _{Or, alternatively Nahli, you could not write about classified ops in the first place. – Ya-Jun}
Video then showed one of their squadmembers taking aim with an Assassin’s Hammer, firing, and straight up halving the goddamn entity’s head straight down the middle. The cut was so clean and cauterized that the fuckin’ thing probably didn’t realize it was dead for over two seconds. Then the plasmatic matter caused the internals of the head to burst into plasmatic fire, so it was ultra super triple dead at that point, but then I got one hell of a pleasant surprise when it PUT ITS HEAD BACK TOGETHER AND STARTED ATTACKING AGAIN.
WHY WASN’T I INVITED TO HELP KILL THAT THING? WHAT THE FUCK?! THEN YOU CUT THE FOOTAGE AGAIN!
_{Nahli, for the love of God, this is a formal introductory manual and not your diary. Please try to write in the correct tone for once. – Hansuke}

Next time the footage came back showed it being restrained again, except this time it was missing all of its appendages. This time the spooky boy leapt up, stood on the church’s ceiling, and fired the Assassin’s Hammer downward to split the entity in half all the way down its torso. Plasmatic fire started burning the internals, the bones all burst into ash, big ol’ scene of carnage anywhere you looked.
This time it stayed dead, unless you motherfuckers cut that part of the footage too.

What that told me is that the Assassin’s Hammer can definitely kill shit by shredding right through any hide, armor or protection, but I noticed something else in the footage.
The blade it fires is fast, I mean comicallyfast.
When you hit the point of confronting entities like that in the higher layers of the Celestial Throne, something like projectile speed becomes super important. I’ve gone after a few creatures and entities that could dodge or block PTT bullets because to them, that’s moving at a snail’s pace. You can boost the projectile with Illit but then why not start off with the advantage? It makes sense as to why the spooky boys needed those rifles in the first place, since I can bet they knew anything less would be useless against whatever the fuck that thing was.

I got curious and did the math, and sparing you the numbers, a .308 round from a Brain Dagger takes a few seconds of flight to hit a target at 4km. When you have to nail someone in the chest from that distance, those few seconds of flight represent numerous opportunities for your target to shift their position and make your shot miss.
I did the same math for the projectile from an Assassin’s Hammer and found that to hit a target at 4km would take it .00032 seconds.
That isn’t just a rifle, it’s a fucking laser.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria

_{Like all of you, the previous paragraph confused the everloving shit out of me. I checked and can confirm that Nahli asked Glacier to do the math for her. – Dr. Baddarick}