SOME CRAZY STUFF WITH LEONARDO DA VINCI (Assassin's Creed Brotherhood)

There is this fun little mission I came across in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood last night. It involves a war machine, a machine gun of sorts, made by Leonardo da Vinci, and mounted on a wagon pulled by two horses.

Now, that thing was never constructed in Leonardo's lifetime; it was too advanced for what the 15th and 16th-century technology could actually produce, but what you see in the game is a fairly accurate portrayal of what Leonardo envisoned in his sketches.
The mission started quite unexpectedly with a whisper. While walking the streets of Rome on a lazy, sunny afternoon, I heard a voice that sounded like is comming from inside my head, at first.
The first litlle sub-mission of the mission, an overture of sorts, was finding out the source of the whispering voice, which was an easy task.

It took me only a minute or two to get to the great Leonardo, who is portrayed as quite a conspirator in this game.
He explained everything about the machines he was coerced into building for very shady purposes, and how I have to destroy them.

The real mission was ready to start. In this screenshot, you can see me standing on the cliff above the buildings in the area called Colli Albani, the place I have to infiltrate.

In this picture, I'm performing the iconic Leap of Faith jump, one of the gameplay mechanics that kinda define the Assassin's Creed series.

I took this screenshot a moment after landing in the hay.

Wathching my avatar perform these extreme stunts always gets me high on adrenaline while simply sitting in my soft, comfortable chair.

The game lets the player approach the mission however he/she prefers, but ...

... but to get the best out of the situation, a discreet, stealthy approach is highly recommended.

In this screenshot, I'm observing the behaviour of the guards in order to find the right moment to pass them by unnoticed.

I just passed another guard when this screenshot was taken.

Here you can see me avoiding the enemies by keeping myself high enough above their heads.

The scaffold on this house was very helpful.

The architecture of that period offers quite a few elements that an experienced assassin can use to traverse the urban area with a fairly good chance of remaining unnoticed.

Before destroying the 33-barreled organ gun prototype, I had to burn the sketches and blueprints that had led to its construction.
Here you can see me watching those papers. A few seconds later, I set them on fire. In the following screenshot ...

... my avatar is carefully approaching the machine gun wagon from the rooftop of the nearby building.

In this screenshot, taken a few seconds before the explosion, you can see me hiding behind the wall far enough from the wagon. According to the plan, I had to destroy the machine gun by igniting one of the nearby barrels containing gunpowder. And so I did. It worked. The thing exploded, and the wagon flew in pieces, but ...

... but that was a false prototype. It looked like the real thing, but it was just a prop put there as a decoy in case of sabotage. My enemies ended up being smarter than I expected. The wagon with the real prototype was hidden in another building, and now it was escaping, so I had to make my horse run really fast if I wanted the job to be done.

They did their best to stop me, but ...

... but I reached the wagon eventually and jumped on it. The soldiers looked quite surprised to see me so up close.

In this screenshot, and in the one that follows, as well ...

... you can see me fighting those soldiers. The fight didn't last long.

Very soon, the wagon with the Renaissance superweapon was under my control.

Just when I thought that I could relax a bit after all this action and excitement ...

... the cavalry reached me, so the fight continued.

Leonardo's weapon worked great, so I never felt outnumbered. I was a one-man army with that machine gun thing.

With no more soldiers behind me, I detached the wagon and ignited the gunpowder barrels.

When this screenshot was taken, the superweapon was in flames - the mission was accomplished.

And that's it ...

... the post ends here - THE END.

This is my entry for the @gamingphoto/gaming-photography-weekly-contest-52987f46834cf by Hive account@gamingphoto