After a failure-riddled start, my attempt to turn S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s mutants into beasts of war is finally bearing fruit. I’ve engineered a Bloodsucker attack that wiped out the worst of villains – someone who was mean to me – and I’ve progressed far enough to really open up the map, and with it, access to more of the Zone’s fiercest fleshwarps.
Also, rats. Buoyed by the successful Bloodsucker siccing, I’m back on the trail of some mysterious anomaly scanners, and word is I might find a lead inside a local maze of wrecked cars. It’s heavily guarded by some gangster types, but for once, I won’t have to dash off in search of some far-off muties and coax them back here using my neck as bait. Mercifully, a gaggle of overgrown rodents are already hopping around right outside the labyrinth’s entrance. I beckon them in like a bouncer on his last day, then sprint past the stunned gunmen, who can barely shoulder their rifles before being set upon by a pack of giant carnivorous hamsters.
It’s chaos. The rodents, bouncing all the while, spread to out to gnash at whichever random piece of flesh their radiation-addled instincts decree, while the gangsters immediately abandon what little combat discipline they started with to rake full-auto fire around each other’s feet. And, at me. For all our numbers advantage, I can’t entirely shake the aggro heat, forcing me to duck and dip between hollowed-out bus carcasses as both aimed and stray bullets ping into the sides.
Out in the open, the situation is deteriorating. My fuzzy minions are chomping bravely, but they lack the reach, speed, and leathery skin-armour of a Flesh or Snork, and against the ceaseless rattle of six different AKs, their numbers are rapidly thinning. Bravely, I retreat, shuffling through a waist-high gap in the maze wall just as I hear the final nasally death cry of my rat army. Never has so much been owed, with so little achieved, to so few. Worse, I can’t just skip past these blokes like I’ve done with previous human foes; the objective is, specifically, to make them dead.
Clearly, I’d need to replenish my mutants. I decide, again, to trot back to the cement factory region where I’d picked up that Bloodsucker. As I dash away, an unfamiliar bang rings out behind me, and a worryingly hefty-sounding shot slams into the dirt near my boots. I spin around and spy a lone figure, far off but clearly fancying his luck, tracing my steps away from the maze entrance. Sorry, matey boy, I’ve got appointments with far more violent freaks than you. I run into a nearby thicket, breaking his line of sight, and lose him in the trees.
Soon, I begin wondering if the mutants are trying the same with me. I spend a weirdly peaceful few minutes investigating old ruins and forest clearings, hoping for something with fangs to pop out, yet they never do. The closest I come is catching the sounds of a trapped Bloodsucker inside an underground garage, but after examining the entrances and exits, I conclude I can’t escape while also taking him with me, and thus have no choice but to let him starve to death.
As I leave the garage, wondering if I should have dropped in a sausage or something, a flashing white semicircle – I should really see my ophthalmologist about that – alerts me to an approaching do-badder of the more sapient kind. Then a shot lands square in my chest, to the tune of what is now a much more familiar bang. It’s that guy again!
You.
Somehow, he’s tracked me across a good kilometre of ground, and must have practiced his sharpshooting along the way because good Christ he is killing me. I book it across open ground, copping two more hits, and start chain-popping medkits as soon I reach the cover of a small forest. I still don’t have the means to fight back against my pursuer – I’m without mutants, and swore never to shoot a gun or insert a knife in anger – so have little choice but to run fast and hard back towards the maze, where I can decide my next move.
Yet within seconds, that white curve is back, and so is the shooter, who refuses to fall outside of blasting range no matter how fast I sprint. I scale hills and weave through trees trying to shake him off, bandaging an increasing variety of bullet wounds as I go, but nothing works. Every time I seem to get clear, he’s there, hoofing it with the grim determination of a man who has nothing left in this world but the will to take my life. I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. But he knows I must die.
From dusk to darkness, he chases, and the lack of light is only making it harder to find some kind of self-defence monstrosity to direct at him. I’m getting exasperated and making rookie stalker mistakes, charging into anomalies that shred my skin with a thousand pieces of floating, broken glass, or gravitational pulses that spit me out with painfully crunched bones. None of this helps my dwindling medkit and bandage supplies, which are in danger of running out completely if I can’t shake this inhumanly fit bastard.
Then, from the gloom emerges another pile of abandoned cars, and in the centre: a lone Snork, feasting on a corpse and emitting an unusual electronic beep. Friend, I have never been so happy to see your emaciated, gas-masked face. I’m wary of using a single mutant to fight off what looks like a fully armoured soldier, given how badly that mass rodent rush went, but at this point I’ll take whatever ghoul I can get.
No more running. I turn around and, with the Snork on my tail, charge back towards the pursuer, meeting him in the trees. It’s a long, costly, extremely difficult-to-screenshot fight, as the Snork repeatedly abandons the target to try beating on me instead. But, as I sink my ninth syringe of painkillers, the mutant’s most powerful leap attack connects, flattening my tormentor and sending his limp corpse sliding pathetically through the mud.
I reward the Snork for his service by baiting him into another gravity anomaly, allowing me to inspect my would-be assassin in peace. His name is Taras Verglas – doesn’t ring a bell – and his arm patch suggests he’s part of a neutral mercenary faction, further clouding why he chose to attack me. Looks like that secret died with him, though the rare .303 ammo he was carrying will be far more valuable being sold to a trader then dumped into my organs.
That just leaves one other mystery: why was the Snork beeping? Returning to the body, I find it strapped with a electronic collar, while on the dead stalker he was snacking on, a PDA reveals that somewhere out there is a scientist paying big money for them. Looks like I’m not the only one in the Zone looking to tame its beasts.