Emergency Conscription
The Native Species of EFD rely on three primary conditions to detect, track, and identify their enemies—the players.
The first, naturally, is hearing. Every sound echoing through the map carries its own alert level, and some Native Species hear far better—or far worse—than others.
The second is smell. Per EFD's lore, every Native Species and every player possesses a unique scent spore. Linger in one place and those spores grow thick and cling for a long time; keep moving and they stay faint and fade fast. Native Species with a developed sense of smell, upon detecting those spores above a certain concentration, know that a player is here—or that a player was here.
And last, as everyone would expect, is vision. But that vision does not operate on some simple mechanism of player spotted, therefore alert, track, and attack.
Even humans, depending on their eyesight and cognitive ability, cannot always tell whether a figure standing far away is another person, a ghost, or a monster wearing human skin. The Native Species of EFD are no different. They too possess a mechanism of image identification, a stepwise process that first determines whether something is the same Native Species as themselves, a different Native Species, or—if neither—a human. They do not auto-recognize a player the instant they see one, not in any programmatic sense. They identify humans the way real people do: through multiple stages of discrimination.
Just like right now.
"Gigik?"
I pressed myself against the wall inside a Slaughter Robot shell and held my breath. The small-animal-like thing loitering in front of me was the most basic form a Machine Spirit took when it prioritized predation and nothing else—a slimy, gelatinous, slime-like core wrapped in whatever mechanical scraps it had scraped together for the barest minimum of protection. Think of it as the Machine Spirit's lightweight loadout.
These things packed the wide corridor almost solid. There had to be hundreds of them. Their purpose was painfully simple. Once the Slaughter Robot Machine Spirits—the ones assigned to combat—had butchered their prey to a fine pulp, these things would swarm in, devour the remains at speed, split, and then roll out together in search of the next meal. Eat, split, move. That was the entire job description. And that was exactly why they were the most dangerous things in a Wave.
Individually their combat power is garbage, but get a few dozen together and they can grind one or two humans into paste without breaking a sweat.
The little mechanical parts they wore on the outside were not decoration. Imagine those tiny gears, screws, and saw blades spinning like mad the moment they hit a human. Skin tears like wet paper. Then they shove their mouths in and feast on the meat and blood underneath.
I called them Space Piranhas. Hell, at least real piranhas cannot leave the water. These things could survive being dumped into actual outer space, which made them that much worse.
Don't move until they pass.
I sent a silent warning to the party members trembling around me and kept a close watch on the swarm. You might think that if they were too stupid to find us hiding right under their noses, we could have just run or hidden earlier. But a Wave does not work that way.
What we had smashed were the Slaughter Robots—the Wave's combat specialists. The ones assigned to spotting and predation were still very much intact. If we had just roughed up the Slaughter Robots and then run or hidden, we would not have lasted long before they surrounded us all over again.
And we'd have been human nutrient paste before we could do a damn thing about it.
A Wave is not some neighborhood mutt's name. If it were that easy to cheese, why would I have ever called EFD a game infamous for its difficulty and for how hard it goes out of its way to screw you? It was fun, it was balanced, and the game ops were flawless—that is why I clung to it for ten years. If even one of those three had been lacking, I would have dropped it clean after a year or three, same as anyone.
EFD is that kind of game. The Dark Zone is that kind of place. A Wave is that kind of system. I knew that from experience and knowledge, so this was the only way I could respond. Spinal reflex, basically.
A scrambling clatter of bodies filled the corridor. Having failed to find any image that matched a human, the piranha swarm tumbled and crawled like insects, pouring away toward the far end of the hall. When I spotted the spotting Machine Spirits among them—camcorder and CCTV forms with glowing red optical sensors—my chest clenched for a second. Fortunately they had no interest in the wrecked Slaughter Robots, and they vanished just as fast.
I had been quietly worried they might seep back into our gear, or into the broken Slaughter Robots. Luckily, the ones specialized in spotting and predation had no interest in changing jobs. Click, and you are a spotter. Then the combat-role Slaughter Robots slice the humans into nice, bite-sized star shapes all on their own. Then the predation Machine Spirits rush in, chew-rip-taste-enjoy, and even get to split. Why would you switch to a harder job when you can enjoy consequence-free pleasure and side-effect-free dopamine?
Still, it was a phenomenon I had never seen in the game, which left me a little puzzled.
Don't tell me Native Species have the same grasshopper instinct as humans—wanting to ride their allies' coattails. Is this another tenth-anniversary patch thing?
Every time I ran into one of these changes—subtle, never quite ignorable, the kind that made you nod without thinking—it felt so new, so fresh. This damn game had a talent for making my heart race, whether I was enjoying it from the other side of a monitor or facing it as actual reality.
"Pwah!"
"Is it over?"
"Goddamn it! What the hell were those things?"
"..."
A few minutes after the piranha swarm had gone, they began, one by one, to shed the Slaughter Robot shells and drink in their freedom. Being actual convicts, they seemed to find freedom even sweeter than most people would.
"Hoo. This wasn't the kind of trick I was supposed to burn in a place like this. Can't be helped."
I tossed aside the now-useless Slaughter Robot shell and wiped the cold sweat from the back of my neck. The temperature was dropping by the minute. You could not let sweat sit, not even for a second. Wipe it off as fast as possible and cut the heat loss however you could.
"Hey, so what the hell were those things just now? You looked like you knew."
"If you call the ones we just turned into scrap 'soldier ants,' then the swarm that just rolled through were the 'worker ants.'"
"Those are ants? They got ants like that in space?"
"Jesus Christ, just listen, you meathead."
I handed Lee Duho his hammer back, snatched my shotgun out of his hands, and kept going.
"The ones that've aggroed onto us are a kind of colonial Native Species. They get assigned unique roles depending on the machine they infest. Parasitize a Slaughter Robot like this and you become a soldier, the one that hunts humans down. The ones that slipped into the 'lenses' we smashed on the way here—CCTVs, camcorders, iris scanners—those take the watcher role. Spotting."
"Then the ones that just swarmed past?"
"Those are closer to grunt labor plus producers. When a Wave kicks off, they roll out with the rest, surround the humans, and devour them in one go. Then they use that energy to split. Which means even more machines get infested."
The three blockhead brothers nodded like they had finally gotten it. I would have bet my wrist they had not understood half of that. Did not matter. Ahn Moon-ho, their actual brain, would have understood just fine. If it came to it, he would parrot the explanation back to them in my place.
"Wait, then can't we just keep wearing these shells? Those things didn't recognize us just now."
"They didn't recognize us because it was the first time they'd seen it. Run into the same situation again and we're guaranteed to get made. They can communicate among themselves."
The first time, we in our Slaughter Robot shells had probably registered as unfortunate comrades who had failed to stop the humans and gotten smashed. Next time, it would resolve to what the hell are these bastards? Same reason that in the last fight, the ones getting their clocks cleaned by Lee Duho's hammer had suddenly started rushing in threes and fours to block it. They are not as smart as humans, but they have a degree of learning ability and discrimination. And since they operate as a colony rather than as individuals, the efficiency goes without saying.
"So what do we do next? No matter how hard we bust our asses, I don't think we can smash all of them. And we don't have the kind of firepower that could just wipe this whole sector."
"The Wave is still running. Until our aggro drops, they'll keep roaming the Dark Zone on high alert. We'll have to respond accordingly."
"For example?"
"Assassinate the ones in charge of spotting, wipe our aggro for good, and turn that predation-only swarm into a bunch of idiot scrap heaps. Or... like you said, bring overwhelming firepower and wipe them all in one go."
Either way, the risk was huge. The spotters were easy to pick out—distinctive red optical glow, unmistakable forms—but they were surrounded by the piranha swarm, which made assassinating them a nightmare. On the flip side, wiping them with overwhelming firepower meant first acquiring that firepower, and the means to do so in this Dark Zone were extremely limited.
In a place like this, finding something that can explode isn't hard. Whether you can actually set it off is a different question. And if you really do set it off, it could lead to a much bigger problem.
Do not forget. This was a space station whose power supply had been cut, the temperature plunging in real time. Blow a wall and we would all get ejected into space like an Among Us vent. And even if we got lucky and the walls held, wreck the power source and we would freeze stiff as dried pollack. Bet my life and my pride on this extreme either-or? That is the kind of idea only actual lunatics would entertain.
So I'll do it right now.
Ahn Moon-ho must have read the glint in my eyes through the gas-mask goggles, because he asked, carefully:
"So we're blowing them all up after all?"
"No?"
"Pardon? Then we assassinate them and drop the aggro...?"
"No. We do both."
"..."
Ahn Moon-ho wore a poleaxed expression, but he did not bother arguing. Whether he had remembered precaution number three, or simply figured that arguing would not change my mind either way, I could not say. From my perspective, I was just glad he was a quick study.
"We do need to drop the aggro, yeah. But we also need the explosion. Those things aren't the only ones we have to deal with."
"Can we even manage that with just the five of us?"
"If five isn't enough, we just gather more."
"Pardon?"
"Effective immediately, we are conducting an emergency conscription of Ass-ei, so we can put a proper end to this heart-pounding Dark Zone grand adventure."
Places where prisoners would hide from Machine Spirits in a space-station theme? Obvious. So obvious it made me yawn.
To escape a space station with the power cut, you have to come in from the outer spawn—the safe zone—into the deep danger zones one way or another. But there's no way unprepared prisoners can handle Machine Spirit pursuit, murderous cold, and a dark, complicated indoor layout.
If you asked me to name places where Ass-ei would be holed up—just to take cover for a bit, and maybe thaw out while they were at it—I could give you ten off the top of my head. And of course, comb through all those candidates and we would have no trouble conscripting some nice, fresh Ass-ei.
All right. New policy locked in.
Today's concept: Pacifist Han Seungho.
Instead of killing every prisoner I met and farming them, I would, in my boundless generosity, reform them (physically) and have them volunteer to join this glorious adventure.