Before leaving, Sayan buys 30 slugs for the TOZ 66 for 948 RU, bringing him down to 3075. Gotta spend money to make money, right? He departed at 12:35, heading towards the basin of a hill where four fleshes frolicked. FFF. Upon noticing him, they feigned a series of charges, but did not commit to the engage. Three ran away, leaving one cornered by Sayan. He made quick work of the animal with his knife. He plucked out its eye for a keepsake, then attempted to track the other fleshes. He chased the one he found back around the basin, like a running back with the skills of a spastic Siamese twin with elephantitus. He eventually resorted to pounding it in the ass with a pellet slug, weakening it enough for him to deliver the killing blow with his knife. He chopped off another hunk of flesh and set off across the marsh.
Across the marsh, near the remains of another rusted boat was a flesh cavorting in the mud. Sayan crouched silently as the flesh was torn apart by gunfire. He located the gunmen – two stalkers who were then moving further away from him. From their Columbine-style trenchcoats, they must be bandits. Sayan decided to follow them, after slicing off some hide and two hunks of meat from the mutated pig.
Creeping through the reeds, Sayan narrowly spotted three stalkers moving towards him thirty meters ahead and to the right. He sat back in place, unsure of their allegiance. Stalking the stalkers parallel to their path, Sayan came across the dead remains of a few fleshes, boars, and even two Bloodsuckers. They were too badly decayed to have anything valuable, so Sayan kept shadowing the unkown stalkers.
The stalkers took out their guns and fired short, controlled bursts into a boar and a few dogs chasing each other around the hamlet. Sayan waited for them to begin moving on, then snuck behind them to salvage the carcasses. That's when he found it.
A large mass of flesh that must have weighed at least 500 pounds. The torso had what seemed to be a stretched and distorted face that may, perhaps, have been human at some point. A large set of arms seemed to be its form of locomotion, with a smaller almost vestigial set above it. The gangly lower part of its torso had a large right foot, and instead of a left one, a sticky tentacle. Sayan hacked off the pseudogiant's hand, already making up the story of his slaying of the beast.
The stalkers were taking up position in the hamlet, so Sayan moved on. He crossed down into the dried remains of a channel, under a cracked bridge, and came up to a road with a metal railing. From the bushes he heard a bark, as a blind dog came snarling after him. He let off two panicked shots, only hitting one, and hopped over the railing to avoid the dog's charge. This continued for a few repetitions until Sayan let off two more shots, the last hitting and killing the dog, but not before the dog bit him hard in the thigh. He cursed the thing as he ripped off a hunk of dog meat. The Koreans would pay well for it.
Wincing through the pain in his leg, Sayan continued onwards, fuelled by his thirst for adventure. He walked the undergrowth between a gas station on the left and a ditch on the right filled with a building-size mass of twisted roots. On the other side of the anomaly was a campfire with a human skeleton, complete with PDA and a cracked EO-20 PBF gas mask. He celebrated with a quick jerk into the ditch, then continued south. What he saw as he rose over a ridge sent a sliver of poop down his leg.
A hunched over figure on all fours stared at him quite plainly with four eyes split between its two heads. The Chimera leapt, and Sayan dove to the side with a girlish scream. He sprinted away further to the south, relying on adrenalin and sheer terror to guide him. He ran until his sides split with cramps, and only then did he look behind him to find he was safe, for the moment. As he rested against a tree, he found a multifuel stove, complete with three liters of kerosene. With that, he could live off the land. He was one step closer to self-sufficiency. After a brief rest, he moved east, trying to find another way back that would avoid the dangerous predator. He moved behind some kind of walled depot, finding a plastic jar and some busted ammo.
Despite his close run in with death, Sayan couldn't feel happier as he skipped along, shotgun in hand, dreaming of all the Martha Stewart-style home cooked meals he would prepare. The mountain lion almost took him by surprise. He barely had time to scramble up a rock and let out a desperate blast that grazed the beast. It retreated into the brush, but the noise of the shot attracted another predator. . .
On all fours bounded closer what seemed to be a disheveled man with a broken gas mask. He jumped frighteningly far towards Sayan, clawing him across the side. Sayan fell to the rock, bewildered, firing haphazardly into the dirt below him. He was unable to stop the snork's final lunge that disemboweled him and gave him an up close lesson on how snorks eat through their gas mask.
The zone has claimed another one.
