The following story is rated T for Teen due to violence and adult situations.

The Cowboys haven't been seen in for a long time. They rode at the beginning of the Golden Age. For generations after the Cowboy's victory at Arena, the Civilized Lands flourished. Food grew more abundantly and life became easier. Pecos Bill was buried in a tomb called Alamo.

Gates were a big part of what made the Golden Age so golden. A Cowboy could step into one gate and step out from another anywhere in the world. Fleets of airplanes and cargo ships rusted away because no one had use for them anymore. Giant gates the size of barns moved trade goods around the world. Microscopic gates carried electrical signals faster than the speed of light.

With all those gates, no one rode horses anymore. Few hunted or fished for their dinner. The Cowboys grew soft with ease and stopped hunting wild allosaurs.

Then came the Fall. When the gates stopped working, they didn't just shut down. The gates fell inward, becoming holes in space, breaches. Things from other worlds began creeping through those holes and into the Civilized Lands. Fires and toxic fumes and diseases from other world came through the breaches. Then monsters crept through, like trapcats and the plasma worm. The people didn't have a way to shut the breaches, but what's worse, they no longer had the grit of Cowboys to persevere.

Remember the second rule of the Code of the West.

Thou shall do what has to be done.

Choas erupted on the farm like a geyser of adrenaline. The exploding bean kettle inside the farm house severely injured the Reptilian Raiders there. The other raiders focused all of their attention on the explosion and failed to see the scarecrow moving. The trapcats leaped away from the small structure and hissed at it.

The scarecrow took aim at two different targets at once. With its right hand, it aimed a pistol at the Raiders coming out of the broken wagon. With its left hand, it leveled the rifle towards the scout who was just outside of the house. With calculated precision, a first shot from the handgun pierced the heart of the nearest Raider exiting the wagon. A second shot hit his companion in the side of his head.

Meanwhile, the scout noticed movement out of the corner of her eye. She dove for cover behind the corner of the house. The scarecrow's rifle followed her movements.

Inside the house, the Raiders were faring no better. One raider was unconscious with a head wound and bleeding out on the floor from a deep gash to its gut. A second Raider had a leg nearly taken off, but he was able to pull himself by his arms. He pulled himself onto a small bed close to a window. When he threw an arm over the window sill, a wire trap dropped from the window frame, slicing his scale-covered flesh to the bone and pinning him in place. The trapped Raider screamed in pain, but unconsciousness from blood loss soon took him.

The Raider's leader rolled onto his stomach and looked around groggily. Deafened by the explosion, he couldn't hear the screams nor the gunshots, and he couldn't see much better. Beans dripped into his eyes. He pulled out his revolver from a holster on his hip. He crawled to the open door. As soon as he looked outside, a bullet hit the Raider through the side of his head.

The scout swatted silently and counted gunshots. As the shooter killed Raiders and then trapcats with eerie efficiency, she heard ten blasts. She knew that the shooter couldn't be using a six-shooter like her leader carried. Many other firearms carried only ten bullets, but she held her breath listening for the sound of metal scraping against metal as a clip was changed. She heard that sound followed by the soft noise of an ammo magazine hitting the dirt ground. Seizing her chance, she ran towards the treeline, keeping the farmhouse between her and the shooter.

The shooter took careful aim. It spotted the fleeing form. With a squeeze of its left hand's trigger finger, it fired a single bullet from the sniper rifle. The bullet passed through the farmhouse window, pierced lingering smoke, through a second window, and struck its moving target. The scout stumbled to the ground in tremendous pain. Her spine had been severed, stealing control over her legs.

The shooter stood over her, so close that it cast a noon shadow over her. She looked up at a face which was featureless save for a single large camera-eye. In her own language, she said, “You're not so big. You're smaller than me. I had expected the feared metal assassin 402 to be as large as a Tusker.”