Trolling Without Consequences
EFD was a PvE co-op escape game at its core. That did not mean there was no way to kill another player.
They had packed so much hyperrealism into the thing that the methods for murdering your own teammates—trolling, in other words—were practically overflowing. I had personally run through just about every one the game would let me try.
Of course, trolling on the live servers never earned you anything except a torrent of "compliments" from your teammates and a public inquiry into whether your parents were still breathing, so people generally kept themselves in check. That much was true.
But for me, right now, the game was reality.
Carve up a few annoying bastards and bury them in the Darkzone, and not a single consequence would come back my way. No report for intentional trolling. No getting stuffed and mounted on the community boards. No one sliding into my whispers or screaming slurs about my mother over voice chat.
And the haul on the other side of that equation was huge.
First came my own safety. Then there were all the delicious items those vicious bastards currently threatening me were carrying. I did not have a single reason to spare them—and I had more than enough reasons why they had to die.
"Hey! I know you're hiding in there! Get the hell out! Come out and I'll let you walk—long as we take the items you farmed!"
I had already settled on drowning the lot of them when some idiot posted at the entrance bellowed that out of nowhere. He seemed to think he was doing me a favor, offering to spare my life if I surrendered. The only fool who would believe a lie like that was the fool who had just told it.
The man who had noticed I was already inside did not care for the idiot's bluster either. He let out a long sigh and sent two of them in ahead.
"You and I hold the entrance. You two search the inside together."
"The interior's this huge and you want us sticking together? That's going to take forever. And the fumes coming up from the lower floors are starting to get thicker."
"And if you split up and get picked off one by one? Our strength drops, theirs goes up, and the whole thing turns into a death spiral—you get that? Don't worry about the clock. We're not the ones in a hurry. The one hiding in there is."
He wasn't wrong. There was only one entrance, and if they planted themselves across it like that, I had no way out. This was a restricted zone—no windows leading outside, no ventilation shafts big enough for a human body to squeeze through.
"Whoever got here first already stripped the place of anything worth taking. If he was gutsy enough to hit a spot that had a Growler in it, he's got that much instinct and that much skill. Am I right?!"
He asked it loud enough that it was clearly meant for me, and I almost shouted That's right! without thinking. I had been turning this over since my first day in prison: maybe I ought to slap a strip of tape over this mouth of mine, the one I could barely keep under control.
I gave them nothing. Eventually they started the search as planned. The leader and the idiot held the entrance while the other two came in as a pair, weapons leveled, sweeping from the outer rooms inward.
One of them is carrying a short spear just over a meter long. The other has a heavy hammer.
A short spear and a heavy hammer were both melee weapons with their own trade-offs. Compared to a machete or a utility knife, both of them had overwhelmingly longer reach, and both hit hard enough to matter. Those were the upsides they shared.
The downsides they shared were just as obvious. Both of them were garbage in a true close-quarters brawl. Both of them were a nightmare to swing indoors. And…
Depending on the wielder's actual skill with the weapon, their efficiency swung from devastating to worthless.
Clang!
I snatched up the sturdiest-looking piece of metal research equipment lying around and hurled it as hard as I could. It caught the hammer-wielder dead on the goggles of his gas mask.
Those goggles were coated with a display layer for projecting holographics, which meant their durability was nothing to write home about. Even being generous, you were looking at tempered glass. The impact would have left a faint crack across the lens, and it would have chewed up that sensitive coating along with it.
"Ghk! What the hell?! My vision just went weird!"
"Get a grip, you moron! The goggles on a specialized gas mask have a self-repair function, so if you just wait a—holy shit!"
The hammer-wielder could not ride out the panic and confusion of a wrecked field of view. Even with his partner standing right beside him, he started swinging that hammer in wild, mindless arcs. The spearman had to scramble away from him, and I did not waste the opening.
"First time in the Darkzone?"
"You son of a bitch!"
"Everyone's like that at first."
A newbie who tried to kill a primordial, got slathered in the thing's blood or bile instead, and then completely lost his head because he couldn't see—that kind of newbie was almost cute. I had been there once myself. And watching one of them go down in a pathetic heap without landing a single clean hit produced a strange little thrill. Exactly like right now.
Shunk!
"Gah—?!"
I had to give him credit: even with his stance blown apart, he still managed to stab with the short spear. I slipped the thrust, light as anything, and drove my blade into the side of his neck. The edge punched through at the exact point where the carotid ran.
He seemed to understand, in that instant, that the steel buried in his throat had just severed the most important line in his body. Behind the gas-mask goggles, his pupils shook as they found mine. Blood came up with every ragged breath, and in seconds it had flooded the inside of the lenses.
"Grhk—grrrhk…!"
The strength went out of him all at once. He drowned slowly after that, trapped inside his own blood.
"Fuck! Fuck! I'm not letting this go!"
The other idiot had been swinging his hammer like a man possessed, and he had finally beaten the fear down far enough to function. His goggles seemed to have cleared. The moment he spotted me he sucked in a harsh breath and clamped both hands around the hammer again.
Spirit was a good sign. It meant he was healthy. But what good was a healthy body? In the Darkzone, you needed a healthy mind if you wanted to walk out alive.
Shlick!
I ripped the blade free of the spearman's neck as he collapsed into my arms. Every inch of that motion had been calculated. Right before the hammer-wielder charged me, I tore the knife out hard enough to send a fountain of blood straight at him.
"Aaaagh! I can't see a damn thing again!"
Anything that stuck to the surface of a gas mask had to be wiped off by hand or washed clean with a specialized solution. An industrial hammer was heavy enough that even a big man had to swing it with both hands—and now, with me standing right in his face, his vision had gone to hell a second time.
He had just walked into a lethal two-choice problem. Scrub his teammate's blood off the goggles with one desperate hand…
Or die nicely on mine.
I did not rush him. I tossed the spearman's corpse at the man instead, in the brief window where he hesitated. If he had even a scrap of a brain, there was a chance he would time a counter for the exact moment I came in.
"I fucking knew it, you bastard!"
Wham!
Sure enough. He did not wipe the blood. The second he felt something coming at him, instinct took over and the hammer came around. He smashed his poor teammate's body into a beautiful out-of-the-park home run, the kind of contact you could feel in your teeth, and then he cackled, savoring the win. Far too early.
"In the Darkzone, you use your ears more than your eyes, friend."
That was exactly why people who leaned on their eyes alone never quite shed that newbie stink. In EFD, you had not even taken your first real step until you learned to play by sound.
Shhk!
"Gaaaaaah!"
He had put everything he had into that swing, which meant he could not recover in time. I carved a deep line through the back of his knee. Blood burst out of him and his whole frame folded in an instant.
Ordinarily I would start at the wrists, so they could not even hold a weapon—but that was a wasted cut if you could not take both hands at once. Especially with a heavy bastard like this. You break the legs first. That's textbook.
Once the stance goes, fast reactions become almost impossible. Once the whole body's balance goes, you cannot respond at all. That was the sad truth of every bipedal animal on the planet.
The moment his ruined leg failed under his own weight and he crashed down, I kicked him hard in the nape of the neck. One solid hit and he made a dying little urk as that massive frame went down completely. The shock through the neck seemed to cut the power to every muscle he had; the hammer slipped out of his hands and hit the floor.
I did not finish him. I left him just enough of a chance that fast first aid might, somehow, keep him breathing.
"Aaagh—hhhk, nngh…!"
A wounded man who had taken a critical hit but had not blacked out would pour that unbearable pain out as moaning, a kind of background track he could not shut off. In a laboratory drowning in silence, the big guy's wet, clinging groans rolled through the air. That would lodge in the ear better than a one-on-one special lecture from Daechi-dong's star instructor.
Which was a roundabout way of saying that the two still blocking the entrance could not play by sound anymore. Not with that hulk groaning like that.
And the first-strike advantage always belongs to the ambusher who stays hidden.
I knew they were holding the doorway. They still had no idea where I was or how I was coming. That was the enormous gap that opened up over a single scrap of information—whether you had it or you didn't. I loved this kind of play for exactly that reason. AI or human, I could toy with them one side at a time.
Whoosh!
I stepped out of the dark without warning and threw the short spear. It flew dead at the laboratory entrance. The two men blocking the door and I registered each other at almost the same instant—and by then the spear had already left my hand and was cutting the air.
One of them was going to die. Guaranteed.
"Wai—aaagh?!"
Shunk!
I had put everything I had into that throw, hoping to kill the leader standing in the doorway. He must have half-expected to be the target, because he yanked the idiot beside him over and used him as a meat shield. The poor fool never even got to swing a weapon. The short spear punched through his chest; he gagged once or twice and was gone in a matter of seconds. It had gone straight through the heart.
"…You're a lot better than I expected."
"If I had that big guy's raw strength, I could've turned both of you into kebabs. That's the one part I regret."
A one-shot, two-kill was every man's romantic fantasy. Unfortunately, it looked like I was not going to be the bird that got to drink from that particular cup.
I checked whether the last man standing would pull the short spear out of the idiot's chest. If he had so much as looked like he was going to yank it free and throw it back, I would have melted into the dark again. He just dumped the corpse to one side, so I walked out into the open like I owned the place.
For someone who had so meticulously planned a two-man search-and-hold, he was not quite as fastidious as I had expected.
He stared at me as I came out of the shadows, then put real force into the hand wrapped around his machete.
"Wait. I remember you. You're that cocky newbie from the cargo elevator."
"Want an autograph? There's paper and pens all over the place."
"You've killed people before, haven't you? Figures, for a death-row inmate. God damn it. This is why I never wanted to get mixed up with you death-row bastards."
"You might feel differently if you woke up one morning and found out you'd been turned into one."
"Bullshit. That's three teammates you just dropped with your own hands! You filthy murdering piece of shit!"
"Teammates? Looked more like convenient meat shields to me. Anyone could see you'd been running that team for your own comfort."
And let's get the facts straight: they were the ones who had come to put me in the ground. I did not feel any particular need to correct the record point by point, though, so I just brought the utility knife up into a ready grip.
"So shut the hell up and get in stance, you son of a bitch."
When this was over, one of us was going to keep his mouth shut for good.