The Dark Zone Has No Answers
The eyes and ears watching this side have multiplied lately.
I was lacing up my combat boots, scanning the surroundings by sense alone. Back when I'd played EFD, Sixth Sense Enhancement had merely boosted the luck stat related to farming. In reality, it did exactly what it said on the tin.
Thanks to that, a casual glance or a slight tilt of the ear was enough to pick up nearly everything generated around me. Of course, I wasn't some psychic who could know every last thing within an N-meter radius. It was closer to grasping only the information I was 'paying attention to,' or the 'irritating information' my sixth sense automatically delivered.
In other words, even with an enhanced sixth sense, I had no way of knowing a cockroach was crawling under my feet — but I could easily notice some bastard drawing a knife behind my back.
A blade hissed toward the nape of my neck. Matching the attacker's slash, I spun my body sideways and snatched his wrist. If I'd grabbed him from the front, I could have converted the force straight into a stab — but since I'd dodged to the side and caught him, any attack with the knife was completely shut down.
The idiot, realizing this, immediately dropped the blade and tried to snatch it with his other hand.
"Your reflexes and improvisation aren't bad, but you're way too careless. If you were going to pull that, you should've brought two blades from the start."
I kicked the knife he'd dropped aside with my knee, then drove a fist into his unguarded gut. The blow landed with a dull, meaty thud.
I was already geared up for Dark Zone insertion, which meant I had modular exosuit units on both hands. Well, I wasn't planning to just murder him outright, so I held back a bit. I didn't even switch the exosuit's power on. But even a professional fighter wouldn't stay standing after taking an iron fist to an unguarded abdomen.
"Huuuurgh!"
"Whoa, you packed in a hearty breakfast for today's big job, huh?"
I sidestepped so the thick pancake batter pouring from his mouth wouldn't touch me, then grabbed his limp head and hauled it up.
"Coming after the back of my head first thing in the morning — the bounty must've been pretty fat this time, huh? You know the Gwangsu Family got fucked doing this exact same shit, right?"
"G-ghrrk…!"
"If you had the guts to ice someone, why not at least grab a cheap homemade gun instead of a blade? Or is that too much for a bottom-feeder like you?"
Prisoners possessing personal firearms or combat implants inside the prison was no longer 'illegal.' You needed at least a weapon to protect yourself if you were going into a Dark Zone, and the prison acknowledged that much. But using personal firearms or combat implants out in the open in this strictly managed facility was a different story entirely.
On a small scale, it was a challenge to the authority of the state. On a large scale, it constituted a terrorist act that could lead to a prison break or a riot. That was why even the big shots among the inmates generally didn't try to use firearms inside. Combat implants could have their evidence destroyed or denied if you put your mind to it, but firearms always left definitive proof no matter what you did.
So even in the 2040s, when everyone used cutting-edge weapons and implants, if you wanted to ice someone in prison you still had to use a blade, a club, or your own body. This guy couldn't even manage that — and got wrecked by me instead.
"I won't bother with the usual lines like 'who's behind you' or 'how many more of your buddies are there.' That'd cut my appearance fee, you know?"
"Kh, khuh! Puhuhuhu! Putting on… airs, are we!"
"If that's how it looked, good. Image-making is one of my specialties."
He still didn't seem to have learned his lesson, so I drove another fist in until his guts mashed. What was dripping from his mouth now wasn't vomit but dark red blood — but for a guy carving away at his own lifespan, it was an entirely appropriate treatment.
"Cough! Cough! I-I'm just… an experimental punching bag."
"What?"
"To intuitively see… how fast you react. And how… incredible you are. An experimental… punching bag."
Only then could I understand what he was rambling about. Previously, the Gwangsu Family had pointed out that I was isolated and said they'd keep sending assassins to harass me, whether in prison or the Dark Zone. But looking at the ones who'd been quietly watching me lately, or the idiots who occasionally picked fights, something was definitely different. They kept probing — investigating from where I started paying attention, how fast I reacted, and finally how far I could respond.
They were testing my physical limits.
I'd thought things had gotten quieter than before and let my guard down a little. I never expected them to come at it like this. To avoid a warning from the prison AI watching through the CCTV, I tossed him aside at an appropriate moment. Even if I left him like that, he wouldn't be coming back unless he found a skilled doctor. That guy, true to his role as a punching bag, was destined to be used once and discarded.
But I wasn't.
I still can't afford to get on the prison's bad side, can't get swept up in a mass prisoner uprising, and can't openly slaughter people in an open space.
In short, if I was going to fight in a public place, I had to either stay strictly within the bounds of self-defense the prison recognized, or finish things somewhere the prison's eyes and ears didn't exist. Just like I'd iced the Gwangsu Family that kept bothering me — in Vladimir Borshch's independent territory.
I don't know who, but they used their head.
No. In this case I should say 'I don't know what bastards.' This definitely wasn't a job of a scale one person would pull off alone.
I went back to checking my gear under the gazes of countless prisoners, quietly waiting for the elevator to arrive. Meanwhile I started culling the list of people who might hold a grudge against me, one by one.
Remnants of the Gwangsu Family? No. The ones who survived were a tiny handful who weren't in Cell Block H-088 that day, and most of them were small fry who don't have the capacity to take revenge on me. They might already all be dead. So at the very least, it's not a grudge from before the main story started.
Right after I entered the prison, until the main story kicked off, the only ones who held a direct grudge against me were the Gwangsu Family. If you went down to the individual level there were too many petty ones, so those weren't worth worrying about either.
Wait. Isn't there one more besides the Gwangsu Family?
Checking the shotgun's magazine and spare ammo, I considered a very low possibility. That possibility was the prison's special 'service' the Gwangsu Family had used to try to eliminate me.
The Prison Grievance Office.
It was a Stalker dispatch agency the prison ran with one foot in the door — and the Gwangsu Family had actually hired an Intermediate Stalker to take me out.
Strictly speaking, those guys are prisoners and yet not prisoners, so they're free from Dark Zone restrictions as well. At the same time, they're a Fixer-like outfit that takes enormous contract fees from prisoners to take other prisoners' heads.
I'd given them their first-ever failure. They'd never botched a mission, never even had a Stalker killed by the target — so holding a grudge would be understandable. But outwardly they belonged more to the prison than to the inmates, so they'd draw a hard line between business and personal. Meaning if no contract on me had come in, they wouldn't make the first move no matter how much they hated my guts.
But now more people with a grudge against me had shown up, and a new contract got placed?
Possible enough.
If all the probing so far had been for a thorough investigation of me, that made the Stalker side even more suspicious.
I yanked the glove straps tight, slotted throwing daggers and a holster onto my belt, and double-checked the grenade and flashbang count. Preparations complete, I slung a backpack with the bare minimum of supplies and stood up. At last, the hellbound elevator that would shove us into a far deeper stratum than this lowest floor had arrived.
When I looked around again as I moved, the other prisoners were snickering among themselves as they boarded the elevator, or scattering in all directions, as if nothing had happened. I was starting to get a real sense of what it felt like to be targeted by an unidentified, unspecified number of people.
"Leader. Over here."
Lucy, who'd boarded the elevator first, spotted me and gave a light wave. When I quietly stepped up beside her, she shot me a wordless look, as if to ask what was going on.
"It's nothing. More importantly, how's your condition today?"
"I'm well. I rented a space from the prison separately and tested the new equipment I had fitted last time, several times over, and I got plenty of rest. Right now I feel as though I could do anything."
"That's a relief, then."
I gave a light pat to Lucy's head as she held up her dual SMGs in an akimbo grip, radiating confidence, then went back to waiting for the elevator doors to open. No need to worry about the prisoners clustered in twos and threes chatting around us. Whether they were targeting me or not, they weren't an immediate threat.
What I really needed to watch for was the malice cleverly hidden among this crowd. Malice, depending on time and place, could be something I used — but if I failed to use it properly, it could become a blade of killing intent aimed at my throat. The best response was either to redirect that malice toward someone else, or to thoroughly 'train' them until they were incapable of harboring it at all.
The former is hard because there aren't many people more disliked than me to begin with, and the latter would be even harder since their impression of me is already poor.
So the answer was just to charge in with a kamikaze spirit and burn this one life out? But Lucy beside me was a concern. I was a man who utterly loathed intentional trolling. I couldn't put a teammate in danger just for my own sake.
Thinking in circles here isn't going to produce a clever solution. Let's just go into the Dark Zone first.
Didn't the sages of old say as much? The Dark Zone knows the answer. That's a documented fact — it's even painted on the subakdo murals of Goguryeo.
Then the elevator doors opened, and a wave of muggy heat rolled in. Geothermal heat you got used to encountering the deeper underground you went. Of course, geothermal heat alone couldn't produce this kind of sweltering warmth. Down here there were containment zones and management systems for handling countless Dark Zone insertion points. Think of it as a byproduct of the enormous 'energy' required to maintain them, and it made sense.
The moment some hundred people entered the isolation chamber, the entrance slammed shut with a heavy thud. The guards, as always with not a single change of expression, looked down at us with a bureaucratic attitude and began preparing to open the Dark Zone insertion points.
"Hey, anyone here buy the Dark Zone intel?"
"Couldn't even if I wanted to, not today."
"Why?"
"Of the info brokers who went in at the crack of dawn, not even half have come back."
"…What? Is today some special day? That many info brokers failed to extract?"
"They might not have failed to extract — extraction might just be delayed. Even info brokers can't always get out fast from every Dark Zone."
"Even so, this is definitely different from usual, right?"
One prisoner's question was met with another shaking his head, as if to say how would he know a thing like that. But even the small talk that slightly eased the prisoners' tension before Dark Zone insertion soon died completely as the insertion points opened.
With a signal like a guard's command, nearly every prisoner wordlessly threw themselves into the dark insertion point before their eyes. Inwardly expecting — tensing — over what kind of Dark Zone would greet them this time.
And exactly five seconds later, the hundred-odd prisoners who'd entered through different insertion points all found themselves facing each other in the same place.
Inside a passenger jet that was crashing in real time.
Oh, fuck! It's a Survival Theme!
Let me correct myself.
The Dark Zone doesn't know a damn thing.