One of my favorite things about DAYZ is the great stories it creates. I've been on for about 3 weeks now and have a few really good ones of my own, but this is the first one I have shared on the forum. I want to start by saying that this is not an impressive kill, or an epic one in any way. I just got very lucky on a bandit who wasn't paying enough attention. I am also not implying that I did the "right" or "wrong" thing by killing the bandit. Only sharing the story the way it happened and the emotional effects I experienced from it.. That being said, here it goes: I have been working with my friend who started playing about the same time as me. We have recently been trying to find a suitable vehicle to repair and use to establish a more permanent foothold on the map. After working some industrial locations looking for parts and such, we had both lost a lot of blood and were looking for some animals to kill for steak. We had lost our previous vehicle due to a server glitch of some kind (not sure what happened) and with it our supply of blood bags we had looted. We were on our way to the NW airfield to hit the barracks on the southwest corner, and amazingly didnt see a single animal along the way. When we arrived at the airfield we had no steaks, and my blood was about 5500, his was about 3000. We decided to go inside anyways and loot the barracks for ammo. I have an M4A1 CCO SD that i found in a tent in the woods a while back, and he is carrying an AKM. In general we keep rifles in our packs and use hatchets for zombies, because the STANAG SD ammo is so rare that i never have more than 2 mags and I try to save them for emergencies, and his AKM attracts zombies for miles. We dont have too many player encounters because we stick to low population servers so we weren't expecting one on this airfield raid, so our hatchets are out and it is decided that I will lead the way because i have more blood and his is so low that he can barely see. Hatchets in hand, we find a hole in the fence and enter... Into the pine trees on the soutwest corner of the airfield we go. crouch walking our way to the barracks. I keep him informed of zombies in the distance and cut wide around the ones who are nearby. He follows directly behind me, maybe 2 meters off my back. after making it through the pines we arrive on the back side of one small building in a clump of three that look out onto the pavement. I slowly step up between the first two buildings and pause for a second to scope out the area ahead. The third building is on my right, 15 meters ahead and I can see the corner of it on the right of my screen. after maybe 3-5 seconds standing there, a bandit steps out from my right to the corner of that building, and starts scoping out the same area ahead that I am. For a second I froze. I thought i was imagining the whole thing. Hallucinating from lack of blood. Anything other than ACTUALLY standing 15 meters from a bandit who had no clue I am there. Time freezes in the airfield and nothing exists in the whole world (as far as i knew at the moment) but me and him. My friend and I do not KOS. We play on low pop servers, try to detect Player presences early, and avoid contact. When we do contact players we generally get down, take cover, or retreat and wait for them to move on if we see them first. A couple times we were spotted first, fired on, and we returned fire enough to disinterest our attackers so everyone could mutually retreat, bandage, and lick their wounds. Until now I have never killed a player, neither has my friend (except first time we played and he accidentally hit me with an axe and I died). We have both, however, been killed several times by KOS players. I had a bandit come into a house I was looting with an AK, see that i was unarmed, fresh off beach, say he wasnt gonne kill me, and then shoot me in the back when i turned to leave. I have had bandits sneak up 2 meters behind me and order me to not move, then shoot me in head with a sniper rifle when i started to turn around. And I have had players shoot at me after helping kill aggro zombies that were chasing them, which is why i don't help them anymore when i see people being chased by zombies. And still, I Have never killed on sight. I always try to evade and avoid. But here I am with 5500 blood, a buddy who is down to 3000 blood, standing in the airfield with a bandit in front of me. Any second he was surely gonna turn and see us, and shoot us both. We had no chance in a firefight because we were so low on blood and both had hatchets in hand, not guns. We had already lost our vehicle with our supplies in it and only had what we were carrying, so death meant starting from scratch. All these thoughts raced through my mind in an instant, and right at the same time my buddy yelled "HOLY SHIT THERES A GUY RIGHT THERE!!!!" I took off in a dead sprint straight at him, hatchet in hand. He never even turned around. I closed the 15 meters between us immediately and swung the axe, and swung it again, and again ... he went to the ground .... another swing, another, another, and another. I wasnt thinking about anything but how dead i wanted him. I didnt want him unconcious, bleeding, or dying. I wanted him DEAD. So I just kept swinging long after he was on the ground. Probly twenty hatchet swings in all. When i stopped and turned back my buddy was just standing there, staring at me, silent. then suddenly "OH MY GOD THAT WAS A BANDIT!! I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST KILLED HIM WITH A HATCHET!! DOES HE HAVE ANYTHING GOOD!?". My heart still pounding, hands still shaking, I checked his gear. I couldnt believe it, this guy had 6 Stanag SD mags in his inventory. And another 8 in his bag. A frag grenade. 3 morphine injectors. 2 Silenced rifles. Antibiotics. All the time I have spent looking for these Stanag SD mags. And this guy is loaded down with them. Its a gold mine. "He must be duping" i cant help but think ... maybe thats not true but I cant imagine how else he would have this much. I took all the Stanag SD mags and that pretty much filled my inventory. "Dude take anything you can carry from him, and then hide the body. He may have friends nearby. I'll keep watch just be quick" I tell my freind. After he loots the body we roll over to the barracks as fast as we can and then run like hell outta there. When we left the airfield there was a cow AND a goat in the field to the west, we killed and gutted both while I kept looking over my shoulder, still expecting the bandit's buddies to be coming after me. We took our steaks and RAN to the woods where we cooked them up and got our blood back to a reasonable level. As we ate steak I was still all jacked up from the excitement of the kill and couldnt help but relive it in my mind. In retrospect, do I regret killing him? No. Would I kill another? Depends. Like I said, our general response to player sightings is evade and avoid. We have never engaged anyone who didn't engage us first until this. I didn't see any other options at the time. If he had turned around we were both dead. I have no doubt of that. We had no chance in a firefight with the guy. I felt like I had to do it. The nice gear and loot was a bonus. But whether I did the right thing or not doesn't matter, and I will never know. What matters is that we lived to continue our journey. Isn't that the whole point?
