Demon Hunter: Overview

One of the heaviest Wyrok rifles in the GDS arsenal, capable of killing a 25 ^th Ascension wraith from over a hundred kilometers away. Considered a WMD in the wrong hands, a Demon Hunter is only ever authorized for usage against threats capable of destroying Glacier.

I figure what’s a good way to close off the rifles section is with one of the most biggest guns we got in this here PMC. _{The word you’re looking for is “largest”, are you deliberately fighting the autocorrect system? – Hansuke}
The Demon Hunter is, without a doubt, the most powerful semi-plasmatic rifle we’ve got.

After the Wyroks were created, and their arsenal was being fleshed out, I asked Arkva what their “break glass” weapons were gonna be. Those are what I’d categorize as stuff you don’t use in everyday operations, but to handle “oh shit” type situations. He said there were gonna be a few, not counting their WMDs (we’ll talk about that later), and one of them was the Demon Hunter.
He showed me the first plans for it, and I saw it had a caliber of 500mm.
I said why not 800mm?
He thought about it, remembered it wasn’t his money, and wrote “800mm” on the document.

I think the weaponry researchers are on the verge of breaking my knees anytime they start up a new project, just so my retardation is confined to a medical sector. _{And yet, you’d still find a way. – Iza}

I asked Desmond about it months later and he said that after the R&D was finished, the unit cost of a Demon Hunter came out to the equivalent of an entire Kakos Kahris tank squadron with ammo, crew salaries, and three years’ worth of maintenance work. Due to that we only have six Demon Hunter rifles in total and they’re directly assigned to individual Wyrok marksmen.
Of course this meant I immediately called Arkva and demanded to see one, but he was absolutely shitwrecked at the time so I had to go shove his head into a bucket of ice water until he was coherent enough to lead the way. What greeted me in the Frostfall’s Wyrok hangar was a whole lotta Wyroks, and not a single Demon Hunter in sight.

That’s because Akrva then had to spend like twenty minutes unlocking the storage case for it, authorizing the weapon to engage warmup procedures, and then had to take another few minutes getting his Wyrok online, out of the storage bay, and then over to where he could pick it up. I’m not saying I feel bad about yanking him out of that bar for all that, but my timing certainly could have been better. Gotta say, it was worth the hassle I put him through.

Once the Demon Hunter was free of its case, I felt my ears pop and my gums started to bleed a bit from the sheer presencethis thing gave off. It had the usual wood and metal construction of our firearms, but I could tell this thing was packedinside with tech, coolant loops, Gray Conduits, gas system relays, and enough sophistication to be on par with Glacier’s bridge. I was told it even comes with built in Chaff reservoirs, allowing the Wyrok and the gun’s Gray Conduits to make use of Chaff manipulation in any scenario. When I checked the tech docs on it, I saw “Page 1 of 2393” and decided I’ve only got so many minutes left to be alive.

And because of the lack of real estate within the weapon, it’s a single shot, bolt action rifle. Shoot it, pull the bolt back, load in the new PSS round, push the bolt forward to load the round into the charged shell, lock the bolt into place, repeat. How the hell those pilots do it with Wyrok hands sounds like a gawddamn headache to figure out.
The PSS round contains an 800mm armor piercing tungsten bullet, which from my understanding is designed to penetrate armor and then flare outwards like a hollow point. Except with enough force to set off a seismic tremor or some shit.

You wanna know what’s expensive? The amount of research and time it took to make a charged shell where instead of a PTT or PSS round being loaded into it from the front, the charged shell splits apart and then encloses the round once the bolt pushes it into position. I asked, and Akrva said the lead time on Fabrication making a new one was like a month minimum with the cost being the same as an entire Brass Cardinal. So if we damaged the gun, or the charged shell got messed up by us fucking around with it, we’d probably find ourselves chained to a rock and left to the elements out past Frostfall’s perimeter.

I said let’s go shoot it.
Akrva asked what the fuck we were gonna shoot with an 800mm rifle in the goddamn polar north.
I said something over at the firing range for Glacier’s weaponry.
Akrva asked who was gonna pay for the cost of replacing an 800mm PSS round.
Arkva ruined my damn day.

After that I didn’t get a chance to see a Demon Hunter again until the next expedition, and even that was like two or three years into it.
We found ourselves getting stalked by what Estra and Nax called a “Night Scion”, and from what we could tell it was fully capable of crumpling Glacier like a tin can if we let it catch us off guard. Damn thing was being a creep, hiding behind stars in the sky and in the outline of the moons at night, probably waiting for the right opportunity to jump us. I said I’d go out and deal with it cause to me that just sounds like it’d be a good time, but Arkva said it’d be an ideal opportunity to give their Demon Hunters a whirl. Couldn’t argue there, so he grabbed his Mist Stalkers and off they went into wilderness. Or whatever the fuck counted as wilderness on that planet, place was full of plants that thrived in magma, and that doesn’t sit right with my walnut sized brain.
If that Night Scion was going to creep on us, the Mist Stalkers were gonna give it the exact same treatment.

About four days later I’m up on top of the bridge observation deck, just keeping an eye out, when I see the Mist Stalkers running like absolute hell towards us while Arkva is yelling over comms for Glacier to hold fire. Took ‘em a few seconds to reach us from the horizon, then all of them took a running leap up onto the forward deck.
Whole goddamn fortress went into red alert within moments, cause suddenly that Night Scion was charging right towards our faces.

Arkva and his two marksmen then turned around, ran towards the tip of Glacier’s forward deck and brought their Demon Hunters to bear. When I saw their muscles tense up and their Nerve Harnesses engage, I immediately did the same right before they pulled the triggers and that’s the only reason I’m not rocking cyberware in my eyes and ears.
I’m not good with writing or words or whatever, so the best way I can describe what happened is that those guns broke the goddamn sky.

I saw a blinding flash of this dark red colored light (and saw dark spots in my vision for days afterwards), heard a sound like my head was thrown into a tree stump mulcher while a hydrogen bomb went off, and a shockwave that would have thrown me clear of Glacier if I hadn’t grabbed onto something. At the time I didn’t know what the hell that gun did to the plasmatic matter before firing it, but that shit looked corrupted and made my teeth feel like they were peeling apart the second it left the barrel. Whatever ash from the planet that was on the hull of Glacier got blasted off by the shockwave, these uh… fire trees or whatever on the surrounding mountains… all those got flattened, the dampening systems in Glacier’s forward legs redlined for a split second, and apparently even the bridge’s window (that multiple meter thick armored glass shit) flexed from the blast.
Then I got to watch what happens when three 800mm PSS tungsten rounds hit something organic while traveling at 6000 kilometers per second.

I want you to imagine taking a herd of cows that have been dead for two days, lighting them on fire, putting that onto a rocket sled, and then launching all of that straight into a wall.
That Night Scion, that thing that was as large as Glacier, exploded into the dark red fireball of gore, bones, ethereal blood stuff, and all kinds of other unidentifiable shit with one of the loudest, thunderous explosions I’ve ever heard. The hits were so violent that it caused a second shockwave that knocked me on my ass, punched holes in the planet’s atmosphere, made Glacier have to brace itself, killed every native creature in a 4km radius, and straight up set off a tectonic shift beneath the planet’s surface. I walked away from that entire situation with a concussion, a bloody nose, and one hell of a bruise on my back BECAUSE I WASN’T EXPECTING THOSE FUCKS TO RUN UP AND DO THAT.

Soon as I could, I tracked down Akrva and was gonna throw him through a wall if he didn’t give me a good reason as to why he had his squadron run back to Glacier before shooting. His reason was “Ground out there was too soft, needed a more stable surface to shoot from”.
I saw mountains and rock shelves out there, I think he wanted Glacier’s guns behind his squadron in case they missed.

All that said, you’ll understand why we have to limit our usage of Demon Hunters to only the most critical or highly planned out of situations. What happens if we shoot those things with legionnaires on the ground? What if the force of the gun firing knocks aircraft out of the air? What if they miss and the round shoots off into the Celestial Throne to hit something or someone else?
Even I got busted up when I wasn’t expecting them to be fired, and I was a long way from the forward deck at the time.
You don’t exactly go tossing nukes around like they’re flashbang grenades, and you don’t yank a Demon Hunter off the rack for some casual target practice. Those kinds of weapons are only used in coordinated and planned out operations, and usually require signatures to take the blame for the ammo costs that are gonna cross Iza’s desk.

Though when we do break them out, I’m always there to watch it go down. There was one time the Mist Stalkers broke out all six Demon Hunters and took on an entire choir of 25 ^th Ascension wraiths. When it was over, they’d spent every single round of Demon Hunter ammo we had aboard.
I don’t think the Godraught ever forgave us for what happened to that world, but y’know, tough shit.

-FrW Nahli Lok-Riveria