The Hermat jungle was the hell on earth for the weak humanity. The once open plains that were used for farming by countless villages have now become a sprawling forest filled with horrors unimaginable for normal humans.
This was the place where even the Citadel stopped having thoughts of after a certain incident in the past that caused the end of the village of Alwaris.
Tarkov was unsure what made the monsters in Citadel so scared and why this thing never came to save his village.
but what he was sure of, was the location of a facility that once hid under these plains that were occupied by the forest.
Wearing his old exo-armor outfitted with noise suppressors and stealth augments, Tarkov stepped into the forest.
His jeep was not far, just a few kilometers away from the forest in case he may need the support for the drones. But as he also understood that the distance may cause some interference in the signal, Tarkov also carried small-signal amplifiers on his back to extend the range of his control over the drones.
He placed a signal amplifier for every 500 meters he covered in the forest.
"I can feel eyes on me." Tarkov was not as hidden as he thought himself to be, though only on the outskirts of the jungle, he was already spotted by a small pack of muse-cats. A beast capable of hunting even fiend-level mutants if their swarm got big enough.
But on the periphery of the forest, the swarm was not as big. And due to the low energy activity from Tarkov that was the result of his stealth augments, the little critters treated Tarkov as small prey.
And in their gluttony, they attacked him. Only about 23 of them, all of which became victims of a silent magnetic blade that flew in the air along with Tarkov's control, cutting them before they even had the chance to scream.
"This is just the start," Tarkov said to himself as he caught the flying magnetic blade and slid it back on his back, and activated his heating system that burned off any blood on the blade.
He was already 6 kilometers inside the forest, he had fought some beast, hidden away from some who posed a threat, and soon reached the area that was filled with tall trees and giant vines. Whose mixture was already causing certain paranoia to Tarkov, as the deeper he went, the more things he noticed moving in the corner of his vision, and the world around him also started to blur?
"Poisoned?" This was his first assumption but soon he gave up because the air he breathed was already filtered by his exosuit.
Then he came to a second conclusion.
"A psychic beast?" This was the most dangerous mutant beast an externalist can fight in the wild the majority of the time. The externalist was weak in mental defense until they reached the level of Wilkis and completely transformed their brain into supercomputer making them immune to mental attacks, the externalist on Tarkov's level was still weak.
'This… I need to run.' Was the only thought on Tarkov's mind. He knew that getting eyed by a beast of this caliber was not good and his years of training in the military have instilled self-preservation habit into his body.
Not to forget, the mutant's beast's ability to rally other beasts in the area will only make his situation worse if he waits here.
"Drones up." Tarkov needed to hurry. He can't back down and waste time, Yoshikov will leave for Citadel and he won't ever get the chance to learn the names of others who were killing his clan that day. The only thing left in his mind was guerilla warfare.
His command, boosted by signal amplifiers, reached the jeep in a second and awakened the drones within it.
One by one, these drones of different shapes and sizes fell out of the jeep and took different forms. And following that, the twenty aerial drones picked up the drones in the shapes of wolf and the cheetah flew into the air at the fastest speed possible, not caring for the noise they were causing.
"Thirty kilometers away from the destination." A voice sounded in Tarkov's ear. He had set his lower torso Exo into autopilot and was running through the forest toward the direction Girisia described on its own.
Tarkov can't trust his senses for directions, so he focused on something more important, killing the mutant beast that was running towards him.
"Where are you?" He questioned, his mind was calm to the extreme even with his senses affected due to the mental control of the beast.
His magnetic blades with minds of their own were cleaving through the mutant beast that tried to stop him. The shotgun augments on his hand automatically shot at anything moving which was picked by his sensors.
– "Drones will reach the user in 10 seconds"
A melodic voice came into Tarkov's mind, he knew that time was not on his side and soon he may be overwhelmed if he didn't find the position of the psychic beast. So his only chance to get out of the encirclement was to sacrifice his drones.
– "25kilometer away from the destination."
– "Drones have arrived."
The first disappointing notification was followed by a good one, from the sky, multiple drones with animal shapes started to drop down around Tarkov's running figure.
Each of them was either armed with blades or bullets and there was no need to give order to these metallic beasts.
It was a classic battle of meat versus metal, a beast with soul vs a metallic puppet with programming, and both of them controlled by a higher being.
"Not on the north point, neither on the west side." Even if his biological senses were played with, Tarkov was still able to see the whole battle situation with the sensors on his exo-armor, for his body and the suit were the same.
And from these sensors, he was trying to pick up the patterns or lack thereof. The psychic beast needs to be close if it intends to affect the senses of its victims so there was a high chance the beast was moving as fast as him to not break its mind attack on Tarkov.
"Nothing found underground." After this, Tarkov was able to pinpoint the potential location of the beast or where it hid.
"It's up… in the trees…" There was no need to question why his flying drones never picked up the beast. He aimed all the weapons on his back and commanded his drones to follow the same idea.
"Fire" An artillery of fire and blades wreaked havoc in the forest, the trees fell one by one, the beast hostile or not dying in droves and there was not even a little bit regret in Tarkov's face.
This forest may have housed his village once but it also abandoned his people in the time of its need.
He didn't owe the forest anything anymore and the carnage was only the result of the hostility the forest showed him.
"Disperse." He ordered the drones after feeling the cloud over his senses disappear.
He didn't know whether the psychic mutant was dead or not, for now, all he cared about was to leave the destruction before something bigger was attracted to this place.
– "20 kilometers away from the target destination."
"It's still too far, I don't have much of a choice." He was forced to do something he hated the most.
Tarkov knew he had been marked by the jungle and something soon would come to hunt him down.
So he left his armor, leaving it on autopilot to run in the opposite direction.
He threw his magnetic blade to the drone floating above his head, using it to transfer his blades to his jeep.
As for his clothes, he threw them on the burning remains of what used to be a fifty-meter tree.
At this moment, nothing was on Tarkov's body and hence was defenseless.
But not for long.
Activating his ancestral blood, some special changes took place inside Tarkov's body. Two fleshy feelers grew out of his head and his legs stretched to the likes of a dog while with crackling sounds, his vertebrate expanded and hunched to the front.
The mutation was not absent in his hands, they too elongated till they reached Tarkov's knees.
Nothing was left of the handsome captain called Tarkov anymore. Only a common beast of the jungle existed anymore.
So not wanting to waste any time, Tarkov with his newfound muscle strength jumped from the ground and exited the destroyed area, then latching onto the closest tall tree he could find. Tarkov slowly climbed it and started to jump from tree to tree like a monkey.
Though he stumbled and lost his grip and even fell at times. But he seemed to be getting adapted to these movements. He had only seen his elders do it as a kid and now he was doing the same and enjoying it.
'I should have tried this earlier.'
Unbeknownst to happily swinging Tarkov. Two moth-like figures were eyeing him from afar. One was smaller and a bit injured, the other bigger with nothing but pity in its eyes and not toward its child but the other "child" swinging in the trees.