Is it training? Augmentation? Genetic engineering/manipulation? Any or all of the above?
Me, I think it's hard to believe the literally superhuman (see the notes about No Regret's timeline in the No Regret board) Silencers owe their success to any one method of enhancement; it's more likely that it's a combination of factors, from optimized biology to anabolic steroids to, hell, nanotechnological augmentation, if we wanna get sci-fi-y. But, if anything, what is most responsible for their deadliness?
I was contemplating this one day at work when I was supposed to be doing something productive, and it came to me. Above the physical conditioning and the equipment, what makes a Silencer is mindset. They see the truth of things--not philosophically speaking, but in the real world. That man is pointing a gun at them. An alarm has gone off and WEC SOP dictates a response from security in thirty seconds. There is no way out save through the enemy and they will not accept a surrender. And so forth.
There are no rose-colored glasses for a Silencer. Always seeing what is, they can immediately take steps to deal with it, not having to work around wishful thinking. It's like being knurd*.
Trained as they are, their solutions are usually quite direct (often destroying a given obstacle), but they can be more subtle (such as digging around a likely nearby desk for a few seconds for a keycard buried under a stack of papers).
But that wasn't quite enough. Then I remembered one of the ideas about the brilliant show Firefly that intrigued me: that both a protagonist and an antagonist on the show were so incredibly intuitive they could appear as if they were psychic. (The protagonist, in fact, was, but in previous episodes she was just alluded to as having a mind that worked differently--able to pull off a complicated folk dance perfectly the first time after viewing it once, shoot three people with her eyes closed using math, correcting her older and quite intelligent brother's spelling when she was 3 years old, and so on.) The antagonist in particular could, at a glance, tell that a man had quite a different past than what he claimed, that a young woman to be susceptible to threats of sexual violence, and that he had to use logic and debate to keep a young doctor from attacking him.
That ability also applied to other interesting characters from other media, but was never better espoused than by Jason Bourne, in the Bourne Identiy movie.
"I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars in the parking lot. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself in a fight. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray pickup truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking."
That, then, was it. A Silencer has this intuitive grasp of the truth of a matter, whether implanted through gene therapy, born witih it (naturally or through genetic engineering), or trained to that way of thinking. That mindset is then focused on the arts of war--martial arts, weapon use, environmental factors, tactical considerations, and so forth--but he still possesses it in all things, if he tries. (I have this image of a Silencer incognito at a dance club appearing to get into the music but he's really just calculated a sequence of steps that will carry him through the crowd with the minimum resistance, based on the flow of bodies and the rhythm of the music.)
The perfect soldier is never out of his element, and the Silencer's mind, more than anything else, ensures that he isn't ever.
*I will not spoil the joke, but I encourage you to read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. In particular, Sourcery, which explains precisely what being knurd is. In footnote form, not unlike this. But funnier.
Me, I think it's hard to believe the literally superhuman (see the notes about No Regret's timeline in the No Regret board) Silencers owe their success to any one method of enhancement; it's more likely that it's a combination of factors, from optimized biology to anabolic steroids to, hell, nanotechnological augmentation, if we wanna get sci-fi-y. But, if anything, what is most responsible for their deadliness?
I was contemplating this one day at work when I was supposed to be doing something productive, and it came to me. Above the physical conditioning and the equipment, what makes a Silencer is mindset. They see the truth of things--not philosophically speaking, but in the real world. That man is pointing a gun at them. An alarm has gone off and WEC SOP dictates a response from security in thirty seconds. There is no way out save through the enemy and they will not accept a surrender. And so forth.
There are no rose-colored glasses for a Silencer. Always seeing what is, they can immediately take steps to deal with it, not having to work around wishful thinking. It's like being knurd*.
Trained as they are, their solutions are usually quite direct (often destroying a given obstacle), but they can be more subtle (such as digging around a likely nearby desk for a few seconds for a keycard buried under a stack of papers).
But that wasn't quite enough. Then I remembered one of the ideas about the brilliant show Firefly that intrigued me: that both a protagonist and an antagonist on the show were so incredibly intuitive they could appear as if they were psychic. (The protagonist, in fact, was, but in previous episodes she was just alluded to as having a mind that worked differently--able to pull off a complicated folk dance perfectly the first time after viewing it once, shoot three people with her eyes closed using math, correcting her older and quite intelligent brother's spelling when she was 3 years old, and so on.) The antagonist in particular could, at a glance, tell that a man had quite a different past than what he claimed, that a young woman to be susceptible to threats of sexual violence, and that he had to use logic and debate to keep a young doctor from attacking him.
That ability also applied to other interesting characters from other media, but was never better espoused than by Jason Bourne, in the Bourne Identiy movie.
"I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars in the parking lot. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself in a fight. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray pickup truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking."
That, then, was it. A Silencer has this intuitive grasp of the truth of a matter, whether implanted through gene therapy, born witih it (naturally or through genetic engineering), or trained to that way of thinking. That mindset is then focused on the arts of war--martial arts, weapon use, environmental factors, tactical considerations, and so forth--but he still possesses it in all things, if he tries. (I have this image of a Silencer incognito at a dance club appearing to get into the music but he's really just calculated a sequence of steps that will carry him through the crowd with the minimum resistance, based on the flow of bodies and the rhythm of the music.)
The perfect soldier is never out of his element, and the Silencer's mind, more than anything else, ensures that he isn't ever.
*I will not spoil the joke, but I encourage you to read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. In particular, Sourcery, which explains precisely what being knurd is. In footnote form, not unlike this. But funnier.