The Sniper Rifle with PTSD Ah… it will not fade. Branded into my mind for all eternity, the faces of the soldiers I have felled rise from the dark, only to dissolve back into it— one by one. For what purpose was I born? Merely to serve as an instrument of death? I never stood in open combat. I lingered in the shadows of the forest, breath held, my gaze fixed upon a distant heartbeat— a coward’s god of death. When the trigger broke, only the crack of the rifle sang. Their final shouts, their cries— lost in the wind before they could ever reach me. And so, in that moment, there was nothing. No weight. No grief. But now… quietly, yet with the certainty of winter, their faces come for me. And I know— I killed them.