I got tasked with hunting for a specific bandit.
Unfortunately his location was unknown, so i started to ask around , one guy told me he thought he saw him move through Dead City and another one think he was in the Red Forest and i should ask someone there.
Travelled out of Rostok, went through an uneventfull Army Warehouse and reached the Dead City (as it's early game there's not much npc spawned yet so no problem to travel in most places for now).
In Dead City in the pda channel i caught a battle between a Bandit and Mercenary group near the school, hoping my target would be there i sneaked from behind and noticed the battle had already ended when i arrived, only a bandit was left standing and was looking around.
The guy didn't even saw me coming as i filled him with my handgun bullets. But none was my bounty hunt target.
There was some good enough loot to equip me with better weapon (though most were in damaged state) and more ammo.
I sneaked around Dead City and spotted no other bandit, and tried to avoid going too close to the Mercenary base. I went to Limansk from there.
Moved through a fight between Loners and Mercenaries that left none standing, but got me some nice loot, a not that badly damaged FN2000 that i could repair a bit thanks to a recently looted gun repair kit and even more ammo, great.
Coming from Limansk and moving to Red Forest, i got then into a battle at the small metal bridge in which a Monolith lonely guy was fighting against several Mercernary troopers.
My very recently looted FN2000 proved unvaluable at that point as i took down the survivors of that battle without dying despite my starting armor ( i was playing a Duty guy and it was very early game ) being paper thin.
Of course the medic kits and bandages i looted on my way since Rostok helped a lot
and the hard cover from that truck in the tunnel leading to Red Forest was a good spot to avoid all the shots that were coming my way.
Anyways, crossing the metal bridge i entered the forest itself and heard sounds hinting of a firefight nearby, from the pda channels apparently there were Ecologist involved, they were neutral to my faction (unlike the Monolith and Mercenary ones that were hostile) so i decided to run in the general direction of the battle to help.
On my way i was cautious as there were several anomalies floating around in unfamiliar location (as they were of the random type, that change position after each emission in the zone) .
I heard some mutant dogs barking, very bad news as there's a lot of vegetations and trees there making spotting those mutants very hard , so i started to backpedal with my FN2000 ready to shoot anything that would move.
It didn't took much time when i saw a big pack of angry mutant dogs rushing at me.
I opened fire and killed 2 of them (they were more resilient than i thought) but there were more coming, i had too small armor and the bushes weren't making their position clear, so i just turned back and decided to sprint (fortunately i was keeping my inventory light so i was confident i would have enough stamina to reach an opening or a rock formation i could climb).
... Oh, what's that sound, my view is turning red, there's something in the air, i'm attracted to it .. jump .. sprint ... can't escape ..
*boom* , my character exploded in a gory rain of red.
Yeah, i sprinted right into a random anomaly.