I Took a Day Off. The Battlefield Took It Personally.

I decided to have a day off, like a proper one.

No website. No T-shirts. No fixing things. No staring at lifestyle images wondering why yesterday they looked incredible and today everybody appears to have been photographed during a power cut.

Just me, a shooting game, and a few peaceful hours popping lead into imaginary people.
Lovely.

I loaded in.

And, for reasons I still can't explain, almost immediately became Foghorn Leghorn.

“I say, I say, boy. Go get the twelve, boy. We're going hunting.”

Apparently this was now how military operations were going to be conducted.

The plan was simple.

Stay low. Stay calm. Be sneaky.

“I say, boy, the secret to hunting them sneaky humans is you have to be sneaky yourself. Stay low, stay calm and atta—”

DEAD.

Excellent.
Apparently the enemy had attended a different tactical briefing.

Then somebody appeared with what felt like an entire feck-tard battle super warship with all the trimmings, and approximately thirty-two cannons.

We got our asses blown to bits !!!

Never mind. New life.

I parachuted heroically into battle, touched the ground, and almost immediately got introduced face-first to an armoured vehicle.

Forty millimetres of disagreement arrived shortly afterwards. KA Booom! 

Dead again.

Two lives gone within roughly ten seconds of my feet touching the ground.
This was going well. Exceedingly well. 

By about life four or five I had established that none of this was actually my fault.

Obviously. Der. ! 

The problem was that I was busy giving tactical instructions in my Foghorn Leghorn voice.
Had I not been doing that, I would clearly have been sitting comfortably on around 400 kills and zero deaths.

“I say, boy, you're cramping my style. I'd be four hundred and nil by now if—”

BANG.

Shot in the arse.
A-g-a-i-n. !!! - ! -!!!

At one point I took what appeared to be another cannon round directly to the rectum.

Life Six

Life six briefly looked promising. I was saved, for one beautiful moment, hope returned.
Maybe this was it.
Maybe life six was the chosen one.
Maybe the great comeback had begun.

No.

Life six was extinguished almost immediately afterwards.
By this point I'd stopped playing a military game and started participating in some sort of rapid reincarnation simulator.

Forget Mickey 17.

This was Lee 6, Lee 7, Lee 8...

Spawn.

Run.

Get shot in the arse.

Repeat.

The Sneaky Russian Incident

Then came my tactical masterstroke. I decided to become a sneaky Russian.
Sneaky sneaky. p.s no hate for the Russians I lovvvves every body !

I abandoned everybody else and crept off alone towards Area G.
Everything went quiet.
All quiet on the southern front.

I found a rock.
Perfect.
Cover.
Concealment.
Safety.

I ran towards it like the highly trained tactical genius I clearly am. Yesss. Yes I am. 

Unfortunately...
an enemy soldier had already chosen the exact same fucking rock.
So there I am thinking I've discovered my secret hiding place, while this bloke is already sitting behind it.

I arrive.
He presumably looks at me thinking, What the fuck is this idiot doing?
Then he calmly puts his gun around the side of my head.

Pop. Pop.

Dead.
You genuinely couldn't script it better.
I'd successfully used stealth to sneak directly up to the barrel of a gun. 

Life Eight: The Redemption Arc

Then came life eight.
Life eight was different.
Life eight had promise.
Initially the scoreboard suggested otherwise.
Eight deaths.
Two assists.
Zero kills.

I thought I'd already killed two people, but apparently some other motherfuckers had nicked them at the last second. Typical.

I'm risking my imaginary life out here while Dave from Newcastle puts one bullet into somebody's ankle and gets the bloody kill.

But then something happened.

Kill one.

There we go. show me the money... Your bad guy has arrived... !

The machinery was warming up. Clearly those first eight deaths weren't incompetence.
They were calibration. Then:

Kill two.

I say, boy!

The reflexes were returning.
The operating system of excellence had finally finished booting.~
Then:

Kill three.

Now we're talking.
Life eight was where it was at. I'd gone from human target practice to an actual functioning combatant. I even started taking over a compound on my own.

Heroic.

Tactical.

Fearless.

Possibly even competent.

And then... ... ... ... ... ...

I got shot in the rectum.

Of course I did. Life eight ended as so many great military careers have ended: three kills, renewed confidence, and a bullet up the arse.

A Successful Day Off

So that was my relaxing afternoon. I sat down because I was tired and needed to stop working.

Within minutes I'd developed a Foghorn Leghorn military persona, been destroyed by armoured vehicles, assaulted by artillery, accidentally shared a hiding place with the enemy, died approximately eight times and sustained injuries to my imaginary rectum that would concern even the most experienced battlefield surgeon.

But I did eventually get three kills. And that's what matters. Sometimes you've got to warm up. Sometimes you've got to find your rhythm.

And sometimes you've just got to accept that the bloke behind the rock was there first.

I say, boy... we'll get 'em next time. Get my sneaaaky sneaker trainers !