3. Lyudmila Pavlichenko
The unfortunate implications of this entry aren't lost on me, as sniping is a position where it is mandatory that the shooter be neither seen nor heard. Still, badass deeds come in many forms; in this case, in the guise of the quiet, unassuming history nerd called Lyudmila Pavlichenko. In the summer of 1941, the 24-year-old was busy studying at university in Kiev to pursue a career in academia, wholly ignorant of the era-defining events about to unfold. When the Wehrmacht rapidly crossed the border on 22 June, Lyudmila fondly closed her books and marched straight down to the recruitment office. She was a career-minded woman, and the fascists would pay dearly for their presumptions that her sole purpose was to breed slaves or die like an arbitrarily-defined 'subhuman'. Unfortunately, the Revolution, for all its idealist promises about a new age of liberty and egalitarianism, hadn't quite gotten round to the 'gender equality' thing, and the casually sexist douchebag behind the desk initially tried to have her transferred to nursing despite her explicitly saying she wanted to join the infantry to
inflict wounds. He finally relented after she all but waved her credentials as a sharpshooter in his face. And with that, Lyudmila picked up her trusty old Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle and began a long and illustrious career perforating German skulls for fun and profit. In late summer and autumn of that year, she found herself in the besieged port city of Odessa, where she became a murderous ghost, recording some 187 kills over a two-month period, and frightening the hell out of her German and Romanian oppressors, who probably slowly began to go insane in the belief that the officially atheist state employed supernatural agents. When Odessa was finally overrun, Lyudmila jumped on the nearest evacuation ship across the Black Sea to Crimea, where she chillaxed at Sevastopol until a horde of Germans kindly provided more target practice when they came to seize the vital port city the next summer. In the blistering steppe heat, she successfully saved another 122 jackbooted goons from the perils of warfare in the most expedient way possible, including 36 who picked up their own sniper rifles and shouted over lazy taunts about kitchens and sandwiches. Alas, she had a run-in with some mortar fire which, because of her unwavering devotion to the Motherland, merely briefly hospitalised her. After that, her Soviet superiors realised that she had essentially become too good of a propaganda tool to die, and she was forbidden from returning to the front. She was instead sent to be an instructor at a professional sniping school, where she trained other eager young men and women in the fine art of blowing heads off. When she wasn't teaching, she was sent out on publicity tours to the other Allied nations to regale them with tales of her exploits. For her single-handed long-distance evisceration of some 309 confirmed enemy troops, she ended the war as a Hero of the Soviet Union. The moment she was able to, she went straight back to university to finish the degree that the Germans had so rudely interrupted, and spent the remainder of her life as a military historian in the service of the state. The lesson here: do not enrage nerds. They can easily wipe out the equivalent of a small battalion.