Sniper Priests
The Unseen Priests of the Long Rifle or, as they are more commonly known, Sniper Priests, are a breed apart from typical servants of the Church. The supreme exemplars of their deadly craft, they slay their foes from afar with unerringly accurate bullets from their precision-crafted rifles. What makes these warriors of God unique from other sharpshooters in the war against Hell is that each has ritually blinded themselves as part of their devotions in preparation for taking up the Black Scapular of the Passion.
Sniper Orders
Just in the Levant alone, there are several Sniper Orders, the most notable of which are those of Saint Sebastian, Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, and Saint Ludmila of Bohemia. Each Order has its own unique traits and specialisations in weapons, tactics, and holy ammunition, based on the doctrines and miracles of their founder. Each aspirant who hopes to have a prophetic grace bestowed upon them, does so with a heart that recognises such gifts are not intended to edify and exhort the individual, but the Faithful as a whole. A priest gifted with such a prophetic grace can see fractionally into the future and is thus aware of precisely where their target will be, allowing them to shoot with pinpoint accuracy. Of course there is many a slip twixt cup and lip, and the vagaries of war mean that even the greatest sniper is not infallible. The most renowned sharpshooters in the war are those of paramount faith, men and women who know that every time they squeeze the trigger, they lessen the presence of evil in the world.
Relic Rifles
In addition to the many standard weapons available to them, each Sniper Priest bears a long rifle that is as much a holy relic as it is a weapon, a divinely-inspired instrument of death crafted by the most sought-after gunsmiths in the world. Many such weapons are said to have been blessed by saintly figures of history and have been in the possession of their order for many decades. Entire armies have fought to bloody ruin to recover such weapons upon the death of a Sniper Priest, and the now lost Order of Saint Mercurius – the Father of Two Swords – detonated its catacomb magazines to destroy its monastery-foundry rather than allow its armoury to fall into heretic hands when the walls of Eskentos fell.
Conventional sniper rifles often incorporate magnifying range-finders, but the weapons of the Sniper Priests are frequently crafted with relics of the Order’s patron saint, such as those crafted by the Foundries of Saint Sebastian, which mount scopes without lenses, but which contain bone-shards of their patron saint. The relics of Saint Sebastian are said to make their bullets even deadlier against the plague-carriers of the Black Grail, while the veiled snipers of Saint Ludmila of Bohemia can witness their targets through walls of solid stone and are even said to be able to shoot around corners. The rifles of Saint Gabriel are potent against the bestial servants of Hell, able to punch through the the thickest of hides and armoured bone.
The Black Scapular
In the field, a Sniper Priest is often swathed in the Black Scapular of the Passion, a blessed cloak that serves to obscure their presence on the battlefield and which can sustain them for inordinately long periods without food or water. A heretic could pass within inches of a concealed Sniper Priest and never know they were there. One story in particular tells of a mysterious Sniper Priest known as Shepherd Sugitani, one of the resurrected order of Negoro-shū and his famed Kunitomo rifle, who slew the Choral Triumvirate with a single bullet at a range of three miles during the Siege of Saint Lux.
When a Sniper Priest takes to the field of battle, the first warning heretic forces have of their presence is when their diabolical leaders start dying with sanctified bullets punching through their skulls. Many a warband of New Antioch pinned down No Man’s Land has been saved by the deadly accuracy of the hitherto unseen presence of a Sniper Priest throwing the servants of Hell into disarray before the resurgent soldiers of the Faithful.