This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/duddlered on 2026-04-18 16:19:36+00:00.
Had to stub chapters 1-31 because of Amazon, but my first Volume has finally released for kindle and Audible!
If you want to hear some premium voice acting, listen to the first volume, which you can find in the comments below!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/duddlered
Discord: https://discord.gg/qDnQfg4EX3
*******
For a group of men who had just volunteered to stay behind and fight a monster in a dark tunnel, their preparation seemed to be going about as smoothly as a fistfight in a phone booth.
"For the love of… Can you gimme your goddamn grenades already!?" Reyes hissed, his hand out, fingers snapping impatiently as he crouched next to Newman's position at the corner of the intersection.
Newman recoiled like someone had just asked for his firstborn. "Hold on—hold on, hold on, let me just—" He started patting down his own kit, which was the universal sign of a man who had lost track of his own equipment somewhere between the sixth and seventh near-death experience that evening. His hands moved from pouch to pouch, producing items that had absolutely nothing to do with what was being asked for.
"Newman,” Reyes growled in impatience. “Grenades. Now."
"I'm looking! Just—give me a second! Can you wait?! I—" Newman pulled something from a pouch, squinted at it through his NODs, and immediately shoved it into his cargo pocket with the urgency of a man hiding contraband. "That's not—that's mine."
Reyes caught it. A few metallic objects that looked somewhat like gold bullion, but with unfamiliar markings and letters. "What was that?"
"Nothing," Newman responded immediately, shoving it deep back into his pocket.
A few moments of silence stretched as Reyes glared at him menacingly. "... Newman."
"It's nothing I ain’t gonna share, sarge…" Newman said again, looking away like a kind caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Reyes didn't ask again. Instead, he simply reached over and started going through Newman's kit himself, his hands moving with the efficiency of a TSA agent who'd been personally wronged. Newman squirmed and protested, slapping at Reyes's hands like an irritated cat, but the Sergeant responded with a quick, calming slap to the back of the head. Two fragmentation grenades were quickly grabbed from Newman's carrier, followed by a few extra rounds of 40mm that he was holding for Finch, and—
"Hey! Wait—my cookie, man!" Newman lunged for Reyes's hand, but the Sergeant had already pulled free a crumpled ziplock bag containing what appeared to be the flattened remains of a chocolate chip cookie from his MRE. "You fucking asshole! I was gonna eat that!"
"Shut the fuck up." Reyes shoved the cookie back into Newman's chest without looking and continued sorting through the haul. “You’ll get a new one.”
“That was my coffee blended cookie...” A genuine moan of disappointment left Newman’s mouth. “Man...”
Reyes smacked the back of Newman's head again and glared at his private. "Well, if you had just handed everything over like I first asked, I wouldn't need to fucking frisk you," Reyes shot back, lining up the grenades on the floor next to the AT4.
"Well, I don't know what I even got anymore, man," Newman muttered, scooping whatever he could salvage of the cookie, coffee, and creamer mix back into the bag like it was something precious. "I've been running for my life for the last hour. Half my shit's probably scattered across three different tunnels."
Rolling his eyes, Reyes stood up and started rifling his own pockets, taking inventory of what he had himself."You've got your rifle, two mags, and apparently sludge. That's more than enough."
"Three mags." The private corrects, shifting in place as his sergeant shot him another more withering glare through his night vision goggles.
"Oh, excuse me. Three mags and a fucked up cookie. We're practically a full platoon." Reyes replied while still frisking his chaotic subordinate.
While the two of them continued their domestic dispute, Finch was dealing with his own problem.
He'd been pacing back and forth across the width of the intersection for the last minute and a half, M320 in hand, trying to figure out where the hell to set up. The intersection offered three positions to choose from, one of which was Newman's corner on the right side. When Finch looked to the left corner opposite him and then to the middle of the corridor, he saw a direct line of sight but no cover at all.
Options, options, options…
Finch stopped at the right corner and looked down the corridor. Newman was already there with the AT4 propped against the wall next to him. Posting up next to the PFC would give Finch overlapping fields of fire, and if things went sideways, they could bound back together. But the anti-tank weapon was there. If Finch was right next to whoever decided to let that thing loose, the backblast alone would rearrange his organs. The AT4-CS was a confined-space variant, sure, but 'confined space' and 'standing directly next to the guy firing it' were two very different things.
After a moment of careful thought, Finch moved to the left corner and took a knee, sighting down the corridor from the opposite angle. This offered good cover and a good angle. He could drop 40mm rounds down the hallway without worrying about backblast. However, if the lizard managed to not die after eating an AT4 and charged their position, Finch would be on the opposite side of the intersection from the other two. If everyone bolted in different directions, he'd be cut off. Alone. In the dark. With a wounded, furious monster between him and the only people who gave a shit whether he lived or died.
Being cut off was less than ideal.
Finch stood up and walked back to the center. Stood there. Looked left. Looked right. Looked down the corridor where the scraping was echoing from.
The middle was the worst of both worlds. Sure, it gave Finch a clear line of sight, and he didn’t really need to worry about taking cover or fussing over having a clear shot, but this position didn’t sit well with him. If he was standing in the center of the intersection when a multi-ton lizard came barreling around that corner, he would be the first thing it saw, and it would most likely be the last thing he saw if they failed to kill it. No cover, no concealment—just Finch, a grenade launcher, and whatever higher power was supposedly looking out for Lance Corporals who make questionable life choices.
He walked back to the right side. Stopped. Thought about it and then walked back to the left.
"Finch," Reyes said flatly, not looking up from where he was staging grenades. "Pick a spot."
Finch couldn’t help but grumble as her rubbed his chin, trying to decide. "I'm working on it."
Reyes paused and looked at the Lance Corporal with an incredulous and furious expression. "How ‘bout you stop working on it and just pick a fuckin’ spot?” the Sergeant said with an inflection that implied he was getting sick of what essentially amounted to herding cats. “Just plant your ass on the other side and stop pacing around like a dumbass. Tu puta madre…
Finch opened his mouth, closed it, then finally sank into a crouch at the left corner. It wasn't perfect, but perfection had left the building somewhere around the time a dragon had chased them through a medieval basement. The left corner gave him a clear shot, solid cover, and if he needed to move, the long corridor behind him offered an escape route that didn't require crossing in behind Newman's AT4 if he decided to fire it.
He’ll just have to figure out whether the monster was going to die or not after being hit.
"This is fine," Finch called out quietly.
Newman finally began to settle into his corner at the intersection, with his rifle resting across his leg and the AT4 propped against the wall within arm's reach. A bit of life was finally starting to creep back into his features as he shifted his plate carrier to sit more comfortably against him and adjusted his NODs one more time.
"I’m good to go," Newman spoke up while pressing the housing of the night vision goggles tighter against his brow as if that extra millimeter of contact would somehow squeeze more performance out of the optics.
Reyes positioned himself just behind and offset from Newman—close enough to feed him grenades or take over the launcher if something went wrong, but far enough to avoid having his lungs turned inside out by the backblast if the AT4 went off. The Sergeant fussed around and lined up the fragmentation grenades on the floor in a neat row out of nervousness, forcing the pins in the same direction. There was no reason for him to do so, but Reyes did it anyway because even in a medieval tunnel about to host a fight with a mythological creature, he still found time to be particular about his explosives.
Then the three of them settled in and waited.
It wasn’t long before the intersection fell silent, or as silent as it could get when everyone in the rowdy Fireteam was scooted around like they were about to shit themselves. Their rifles were up, their positions were set, and all three pairs of NODs were pointed down the same corridor, staring into the whitish-black void where the scraping was steadily, unmistakably growing louder with each passing second.
It was a strange kind of waiting. Not the anxious, stomach-churning type that indicated they were walking consciously into an ambush. This was the patient, resigned waiting of men who had accepted their situat...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1sp1zw0/grimoires_gunsmoke_operation_basilisk_ch_161/