Having located my target, I chose not to open fire on the ruthless bastard immediately and instead continued scanning the surroundings below and gathering intel. My eyes kept trailing back and forth over the area and the scattered inhabitants, and once I believed I had seen all there was to see, I began considering my options and how I wanted to go about my opening attack.
Hmm, I was planning on just raining hell on the encampment with rockets on my way over here but there are a number of prisoners spread out across this bandit base… I don't really want to start killing off innocent people if I can help it, especially those so down on their luck that they've been nabbed by Bone Head and his gang, so I'm gonna have to come up with an alternative plan here.
Unwilling to just start launching rocket barrages and carpet bombing the place to oblivion, I started brainstorming and attempting to come up with another viable solution to the threats in front.
I would ask Claptrap, buuut, he's Claptrap, so that's out of the picture.
Although I was sure the little robot would've been pumped to help and give whatever ideas hit little CPU brain came up with, I wasn't dumb enough to actually ask him, so I kept thinking on my own and soon enough came up with a plan that would work… Though it wasn't without its risks.
Sigh, with explosives out of the mix I really can't come up with anything else other than utilizing this elevated position to take out the major threats with my initial ambush and turning this into a drawn out gunfight… Yeah, if I want to try to rescue those prisoners alive that's pretty much my only real option.
A dozen more seconds passed as I racked my brain, but nothing came to me other than the idea of starting things off with a few well-placed longbow grenades and drawing all the attention to myself and Claptrap and killing these bandits the good old fashion way.
Haa, I guess we'll be going guns blazing this fight… It's a good thing I'm pretty durable now but if shit really hits the fan I'll fall back on my explosive weaponry fully because even though I want to do the right thing I'm not going to sacrifice myself for a bunch of strangers I have no connection to nor any feelings for.
Left with no viable alternative but to become the target for all the bandits' aggro, I grabbed my companion's attention and began telling him how we were going to take on this band of savages. "Listen up, Claptrap, because I'm only going to say this once."
"Aye aye, boss man." The small, amusing little machine replied with a mock salute.
Happy to see he was serious, I began laying out the plan. "We're going to take them on from up here, and we'll prioritize taking out the bruisers, raiders, and the badass bandits before we move onto mopping up the lower rung of their group."
"What about the boss?"
"Dont worry about him. I'll take care of him."
I covered a few miscellaneous topics, such as don't kill the prisoner and what we were gonna do if we needed to abandon our position, and a few other scenarios and topics, and once that was all handled, Claptrap piped up. "Alright, when do we start, comrade?"
"Now! Take your position over there and get set up, so we can begin." I told the amusing robot whilst jabbing my finger at the spot just beside me.
As soon as Claptrap took up position right next to me and trained his relatively high end sniper rifle's scope reticle on the head of a badass bruiser, I got my Eridian sniper ready and placed my heavy machine gun within arms reach and gathered four longbow grenades two of which were armed and ready within my palms.
"As soon as these guys go boom, let em have it."
"You don't have to tell me twice." The small robot returned in a vicious tone that was starkly different from the voice his original counterpart typically spoke in.
Hmm, he's sounding more and more like that interplanetary ninja assassin claptrap by the minute, I wonder if that is a good or bad thing… Welp it's not a major concern for the moment so I'll keep an eye on the little bugger's changes and see if he requires an attitude "adjustment".
Not all that worried with the changes my robot companion appeared to be undergoing, I directed my focus to four different gatherings of bandits, specifically those that seemed to wield more combat power and, most importantly, weren't near the prisoners I wished to extract preferably alive. The second I picked out my targets, I took two of the grenades, lined them up with their targets, and activated them, and in the blink of an eye they disappeared from my grasp.
I understood how this particular grenade type worked from my years of playing Borderlands, so I didn't pay their disappearance any mind and followed up those couple grenades with the other two I prepared. When those explosive munitions teleported away to their destinations, I immediately shouldered my Lightning Sniper Rifle, and right as I aligned the alien scope atop my even more alien-looking weapon with Bone Head's temple, the first of the grenades went off.
Let's get this slaughterfest underway.
With the explosive cue going off and blowing up the first two bandit groups, Claptrap and I fired simultaneously, and each nailed our respective bandits. And all whilst this was taking place, the second round of grenades went off and killed most of their targets and sent a handful of lucky bandits flying with depleted shields.
One wasn't enough, huh? Here have another.
Claptrap's badass bruiser didn't go down with the first hit either so we both quickly performed a double tap with his second shot bringing down the brute's shield and blasting a hole straight through his cranium whilst Bone Head's shield shrugged off yet another bolt of lightning from my organic looking sniper rifle.
I was intending to send yet another bolt of volatile electrical energy the bandit boss's way, but a stream of fully automatic fire pelted my own shield courtesy of Bone Head himself.
I better put him down before the rest of the camp throws all their weight at us.
Confident my hefty shielding could handle the streams of SMG rounds, I ignored the bullets impacting my defenses and clattering listlessly upon the center platform in favor of firing my third bolt of lightning. The instant I made that third and final trigger pull, a bolt of whitish blue lightning arced from my Eridian weapon to Bone Head, and as soon as it arrived it finally brought down his durable shielding.
I would've fired again, but the bolt of volatile energy had enough juice in it to load his head with electricity and disintegrate most of the skin and flesh encasing his head down to the neck. When all was said and done he was left standing with a bloody exposed skull and few vertebrae, and that didn't last long either because his standing corpse soon lost all strength and tipped over and collapsed onto the dusty dry earth that covered a sizable portion of Pandora.
Well, that was certainly easier than dealing with Sledge-
Before I could complete that thought, a rocket impacted the platform Claptrap, and I were using to take on the bandit camp.
"HAHAHA, NOW I'M GONNA BE THE BOSS!" A big bruiser with a rocket launcher yelled with bloody excitement.
"Fucking bastard." I complained whilst I grabbed my Chopper and leapt from the collapsing, rusted and weathered elevated platform.
"AAAHHH, WHAT ABOUT ME?" Claptrap cried, missing all the gusto he seemed to have gained recently.
"YOU'LL BE FINE, JUST KEEP SHOOTEN!" I yelled back loudly at the same time I was pulling out my Atlas machine gun.
The moment I landed on the ground, I immediately took on fire from nearly every direction as large broken pieces of the blasted platform fell all around me, so I did the only thing I could and raised both my machine guns and let em have it, specifically the retard who destroyed my spot. My initial burst of automatic fire took out over a dozen men, including that dumbass bruiser, but my shield capacity wasn't gonna be enough to sustain all the way throughout this battle if I kept letting these scum chip away at my shield.
Hence, I began retreating to one of the several pieces of solid cover I spotted prior to shit hitting the fan. Thankfully, as I was pulling back, Claptrap got his shit together and started firing without rest so as his sniper rifle rang out time after time and provided covering fire, I pulled back behind a solid broken concrete wall that appeared to have been part of a building a long time ago.
"HAHAHAHA, YOU LIKE THAT, MEATBAGS!" My mechanical teammate screamed from up top manically.
Looks like his nastier version is back in charge again.
I needed a moment for my shields to recharge a bit, so I let Claptrap take some of the heat from me while I hid behind cover and topped up my shields. Once I regenerated several thousand points of shield capacity in a span of seconds and was nearly back to full, I popped back out, triggered | Gunzerking |, and started unloading onto any bandit that entered my field of view. I posed a much, much greater threat compared to Claptrap due to my ability to dual wield at a level that I could accurately fire in two different directions simultaneously, so most of the enemies' fire returned to me as I laid waste to the bandit encampment.
*ARRGH-* A bandit cried painfully as his shielding fell and his midsection was blasted apart and his bloody guts fell out and stained the ground red along with a mixture of other colors.
*AHHH-* Another screamed for a second or two as he burned from my weapon's incendiary effect before immediately being cut off with a round through his head.
The power of my skills and increased stats made me comparable to a T-800 straight out of Terminator, so there was very little the bandits could do but keep pouring bullets in my general direction as I swiftly swapped from one piece of cover to another and more and more of their band fell to my streams of explosive and incendiary bullets. They tried to throw grenades here and there, but they quickly gave that up because I would just dodge, roll, or effortlessly swat them away, which occasionally had the side effect of taking out some of their own guys when I performed the latter.
"DIE, DIE, DIE!" My machine friend yelled madly as he dispatched one meatbag after the next.
...Yeah, I'm definitely going to have to keep an eye on him from now on.
As the bodies piled up and my confidence grew with each fresh corpse added to their mounting losses, I forewent cover for maximum damage output. Eager to bring this battle to a close and move onto my next bounty, I clamped down on both of my weapons' triggers and waved my guns with reckless abandon and upped my kill rate drastically.
"WHAT ARE YOU USELESS FOOLS DOING? KILL HIM!" A commanding voice yelled with anger out of my field of view whilst I was busy filling my enemies with lead and shredding them to bits.
I was practically a butcher at this point seeing the amount of men I had slaughtered and the extreme amount of damage I was doing by the second, so I didn't pay that particular angry voice much mind other than making a mental note of its general direction for later and kept firing round after round at the target rich environment that lay before me. However, I soon discovered that was a mistake because a rocket came flying out of nowhere and impacted my shielding.
*BOOM!*
I didn't understand immediately what had happened, but a second later I regained my wits and found myself soaring through the air.
Holy shit, I'm alive… Thank God I invested so heavily in my shielding.
Although grateful the rocket didn't manage to break my shields, my overconfident ass still got sent careening across the path of destruction I was busy carving through their home base moments prior. This situation would have been a death sentence for most, but thankfully for me, I had enough control over my body to adjust myself midair before I impacted the scarred battlefield.
The instant I came in contact with the ground, I rolled across the lightly colored dirt, jumped back up on my feet, and wisely bolted for cover. And it's a good thing I did because on my way there a second rocket flew from the same direction as that first one and blew up my landing area and kicked up a ton of dust and debry.
"Fuck, that could've been bad... I really need to reel myself in and get it together; otherwise, I'll be visiting the grave way before I'm able to accomplish anything worthwhile." I concluded under my breath as I utilized the convenient obscurest to bail out of the area and change to a quote unquote safer position.
That cloud of dust wasn't going to hang around forever, so I sped away stealthily and wrapped around the camp to take on this new unknown enemy.
"Claptrap, hold your fire and stay in cover for now. I'm busy changing positions." I told my companion over our ECHO communication channel.
"Alrighty, best friend."
The seconds ticked on by as I flitted between the rusted, ramshackle structures, and before long the disturbed dust had finally dissipated and settled, revealing nothing but a crater to the awaiting bandits.
And just about when I had made it three quarters of the way to the opposite side, that same commanding voice rang out. "Huh, where are the body parts… FIND THAT BASTARD NOW!"
"Right away, Rock-O." A few of the bandits answered urgently and with a hint of trembling in their voices.