🐺 ~PROJECT SAC-1~ ⚔️

Chapter 25 - Enemies to Sorta Allies 🤝🏻

(DAY 34 w/ THE BAD BATCH)

🎯 Crosshair 🎯

3️⃣7️⃣8️⃣

🐺 Talla 🐺
3️⃣7️⃣8️⃣

That was the tied score as of this morning between the Sniper and the Agent in the war so fondly known as -

*ahem* correction - HATEFULLY known as:

🤬'Who Can Deliver the Most Scathing Comeback?'🤬

In order to maintain his sanity in the large ship that had grown incredibly small since the Battle for Kamino, Tech had turned Talla and Crosshair's verbal assaults against each other into a sort of game. He kept a scoreboard on his datapad for each opponent and would keep adding tally's when he felt one had been victorious over the other.

Needless to say, there'd been zero progress in Talla and Crosshair's friendship. There was no effort to make progress. There wasn't even a microscopic hint of a friendship to progress on. Crosshair refused to believe Talla was a good person, Talla refused to believe Crosshair was a good person, so the war between the Sniper and Special Agent was even more gruesome than the actual, more important war they fought in.

Unfortunately for Crosshair, he learned the hard way very early on that he had met his match, and that made his already unhealthy levels of spite and hate rise by exponential leaps and bounds. It of course stoking the barely controlled flames of Talla's fury to a full-blown raging forest fire within seconds flat. What Crosshair refused to believe though was that Talla hated all this fighting just as much as he did but felt like she had no other choice.

So, each battle ended with a tie. Every single time. Crosshair would get a leg up, Talla would cut down that leg, and vice versa. They went back and forth, up and down, all day EVERYDAY OVER EVERY LITTLE THING!

Sometimes it didn't even take Crosshair seconds to enrage Talla. He apparently breathed wrong yesterday, she told him to shut up, and another battle ensued.

This was not a very fun game. And it didn't appear to have an end in sight. But it did its job, and non-confrontational Tech did not snap from the insanity all around him, nor did he have to bury the bodies of the two bickering teammates he would inevitably kill if not for his not-so-fun game. It kept him grounded. It was fine. Everything was fine.

But even on the mission they received after Tech recovered, the two enemies didn't bother to set aside their mutual hate and held a petty battle of cruel wits during the battle! Ideally, it would have been great to have two snipers on this retrieval mission, but with them bickering at each other over the comm link, criticizing each other's snipe-shots, droid count or whatever little shred of error they found and had to be vocal about, both trained snipers combined efforts only had the efficiency of one, barely.

The mission was a success, but there were several dangerous instances that were out of their usual level of control, putting ones at unnecessary risk. And no matter how many times Sergeant Hunter ordered them to 'Stow it!' or 'Cut the crap!' or even when Wrecker jumped in and screamed 'SHUT UP!!!' the blissful silence over the comm channel only lasted a total of a record thirteen seconds. Tech wanted to jam their comms, but then the rest of the teams would have been too, so he could not.

Hunter had tried every mediation technique he knew, he tried grounding them, he tried bribing them, he even tried Tech's suggestions on team building exercises he had found on the HoloNet! Nothing worked. Crosshair still thought Talla was out to get them, and Talla had no idea why Crosshair hated her but refused to be a doormat and fought his fire with explosions.