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Leon is so hot.
His skin is sweltering, bug bites ravaging up his exposed back as he stumbles through the thick jungle. He lost his shirt to the mud, having slipped down a moist slope a few miles back. His guns were caked in it, the dirt clogging up the mechanisms and effectively making them useless.
If the canopy above him was even somewhat open, he would have rubbed the wet dirt up his arms to protect his skin from the sun, but the tropical forest is nothing but dense. He's been stumbling around for hours, his breath just as hot as the air around him.
One might think the thick foliage above him would do something to cool him, do something about the heat, but it's like one giant oven out here. The air is wet, so wet that Leon's hair is damp and plastered to his forehead.
It's like this place is slowly boiling him alive.
He shakes his head, mumbling, "Focus."
It is hard to do just that, his vision starting to blur at the edges. The vines climbing up the trees seem to move in his peripheral vision. He can't make out if the twisting green things are snakes or just foliage, so he pushes on, trying to avoid what he can as he slashes through a giant fern. His muscles are burning, his throat impossibly dry. He hasn't seen a water source - at least nothing safe. He was trained for this, trained to survive in such extremes, but this place has been slowly sapping all of his energy from the moment he set foot into the thick undergrowth. He has yet to reach his destination, his sense of direction skewed from the overwhelming heat pressing down on his shoulders.
His boots squelch into a puddle of mud, the wet earth hard to trudge through. It suctions him down as he takes a step forward, not really seeing much of anything but green, before something catches on the tip of his boot.
He twists as he falls, his body slipping into the giant leaves of a banana tree before tumbling hard against a hidden boulder, the air in his lungs forced out of him as the ground dips. His vision flips as his body rolls against another rock, another stick, another tiny fern in the ground, until he slaps against the wet ground, hard.
He's flat on his stomach, his palms splayed out in the dirt as he coughs out a wheeze, trying to suck in a breath as he looks up.
Hot breath is blown into his face through a giant puff, a giant wart hog staring Leon down. The tusks on this thing are massive, its eyes beady and black.
"Ohhhkay," Leon breathes out, slowly shifting his palm across the dirt for his survival knife. It had slipped from his hand during the fall, landing just to the side of him. "You're a big guy," Leon comments as the animal in front of him kicks at the dirt, another angry huff sounding from its nostrils.
Leon's lips twitch into a grimace of a smile, his breath ragged as his heart slaps against his chest. If he gets mauled to death by a jungle pig, he will never live it down. He'd be dead, of course, but even as ash, he'd cringe at his embarrassing cause of death.
He takes a measured breath through his nose, looking at the warthog one more time before whipping his arm out to grab at his knife. The pig squeals, the sudden movement startling it enough that the quick pause gives Leon time to roll over. He picks up the knife between his fingers as he rolls to the side, landing on his knees with his arms up in a defensive position just in time for the warthog to launch itself at Leon.
It really was a big thing, for a jungle pig, but it's easy to kill as Leon swipes his knife into its neck. Its squeals die in its throat, it falling with a thud to the dirt. Leon sighs, retrieving his knife by the grip of it as he apologizes quietly, "Sorry buddy. Looks like you're dinner."