The Weeding Out
EFD is home to Dark Zones of every theme imaginable, but if I had to single out the most peculiar among them, it would be the Survival Theme.
In a certain sense, this one lives up to the catchphrase Escape From Darkzone better than any other — it demands that every prisoner thrown into it extract as fast as they possibly can.
Just ignore all that and grind through contracts or farm loot like usual, right? Surprisingly, no.
True to that "Survival" label, it comes with far tighter extraction conditions and far more vicious environmental gimmicks than any other Dark Zone. Powering through all of that to farm anyway is something even veteran players struggle with. Hell, even I used to run a dedicated timer program and play the thing down to the minute.
What makes Survival-themed Dark Zones especially brutal, though, is a special gimmick that triggers for every prisoner the instant they drop in.
The Cull.
"Get up! Now!"
I grabbed Lucy by the shoulder — she was sitting there with a look of utter bewilderment — and hauled her out of her seat. She seemed pretty shaken, but she quickly registered that something was seriously wrong and stuck close to my side.
"What on earth is going on?!"
"What's going on? We're trapped on a plane that's crashing in real time, that's what!"
Warning klaxons screamed through the cabin. The whole fuselage rattled and lurched. Emergency oxygen masks dangled over every seat. It looked like a scene ripped straight out of a disaster movie about a plane crash. Or maybe a blockbuster about terrorists hijacking a flight.
Survival-themed Dark Zones are infamous for triggering a gimmick designed to screw you over the second you drop in. If you don't react fast, you die. Period.
Spawn on a plane, and it's going down. Spawn on a ship, and it's sinking. Spawn on a moving train, and it's derailing or colliding.
Players who've run the Survival Theme enough times eventually learn the strats and master the gimmicks, so they don't die for nothing — but unfortunately, the convicts in here aren't players. They're just ordinary people.
"Found them!"
"Found what— ah! Parachutes!"
"Put one on, fast. There'll be as many parachute packs as there are people who dropped in, but aside from a few fixed spawn points, the rest are hidden in completely random locations."
I smashed open the parachute storage compartment that the flight crew would unseal in an emergency and pulled out our packs. There were ten parachute packs in that compartment. The other convicts, catching on a beat too late, came charging at us all at once.
"W-wait! Give us some too!"
"You cheap bastards, trying to save only yourselves?!"
"Selfish sons of bitches!"
I knew they'd turn into a mob in seconds, so I started hurling parachute packs like a madman through the lurching cabin. The packs went tumbling among convicts who could barely keep their balance, and they threw themselves at those packs — their lifelines — instead of at us.
"Hey, you idiots! There are parachute packs hidden in the overhead bins too! Stop fighting each other and go find your own!"
"There's one in the bathroom over here!"
"Give it here!"
"Get the fuck off me!"
There were enough parachutes for every single person, but some of the convicts, lost in panic, couldn't accept that fact lying down. A gunshot cracked through the cabin. A blade punched into flesh. In an instant it was a bloodbath — brother slaughtering brother. And that was despite the fact that, aside from us, they all belonged to the same clans and parties.
Looking at this mess, two or three out of ten are going to be dead before we even start.
A little looking around would turn up a parachute pack, but they were wasting their energy on this garbage. I guess a criminal's nature doesn't change just because they ended up in a cell.
While some of the idiots kept up their irrational, unhinged brawl, the quicker ones hurried to search the area and, like us, started finding parachute packs one by one. Those who'd finished prepping for escape headed for the cargo hold at the rear underside of the aircraft, or piled onto the side cabin doors trying to force them open.
"But Leader — if we took the controls, couldn't we stop the crash and land wherever we wanted?"
Lucy asked that while I was manually cranking the cargo hold open. Honestly, it wasn't like I'd never thought of it. In EFD I'd tried more than once to save a vehicle that was scheduled to crash, sink, or collide and keep it running in one piece.
It had all been a waste of time.
"Everything in a Dark Zone already has a designated 'purpose.' A crashing plane exists to crash. A helicopter that can get you out of the Dark Zone exists to extract. You can try using them for something else if you want — that's your call — but there's no guarantee you'll get the result you're after."
"Is that so?"
"Say I find a perfectly good car. Could I drive that car out of the Dark Zone?"
"Couldn't you?"
"If you drive it to a designated extraction point, sure. But flooring it in a random direction that isn't an exit isn't going to get you out."
In EFD, instead of invisible walls to stop players from leaving the ZONE on a whim, they added vicious gimmicks so you couldn't stay alive for even a second in the space beyond. Sudden toxic contamination. Insanity. Full-body paralysis. Death by assault from some unidentified "something." And so on.
That's why I map Dark Zones obsessively and make damn sure I never cross a ZONE boundary, even by accident. I have no interest in a ridiculous ending like dropping dead from some supernatural force.
"Anyway, we can talk about that later. Let's get out of here first."
"Ah! Right — we're crashing as we speak!"
"You know how to use a parachute, at least? If you don't, say so now!"
"I do! I learned in Russia!"
"Of course you did. Russian-made — quality you can count on."
A country of insane macho men with vodka running through their veins instead of blood. Figures. I'd heard even little kids over there can field-strip an AK in their sleep. It'd be weirder if someone of Lucy's caliber didn't know how to use a parachute.
"Alright — jump! Jump! Jump!"
I barked it like a seasoned jumpmaster, chopping my arm down, and Lucy — who'd been waiting at the front — sprinted out through the open cargo bay first.
Fortunately the aircraft wasn't in a vertical nosedive; it was going down at a relatively shallow angle, so getting out wasn't too much of a problem. Besides, it was going to explode in midair before it ever planted a deep kiss on the ground, so there was no point worrying about the crash itself.
Once I confirmed Lucy had jumped, I didn't bother giving the other convicts any further signal — I threw myself out right after. The convicts I'd temporarily allied with in the Space-themed Dark Zone didn't have any particular designs on me, but I had no doubt that about half the people on this plane did.
"Adios."
I flung myself into the enormous wind pressure and that nauseating weightlessness, waving as I went. The ones who hadn't jumped yet were glaring this way, shouting something I couldn't hear. Most of them probably didn't know the first thing about using a parachute, let alone where to land to stay relatively safe.
Part of me wanted them all to just explode in midair, but that would mean fewer decoys to draw aggro in our place, so this once I decided not to stir the pot.
Lucy… there she is.
I stretched my body as straight as I could and dove toward Lucy, who was already falling below. That cut the air resistance considerably, letting me drop a little faster and more or less in the direction I wanted.
Didn't think the special gas mask would come in handy like this.
Bare-faced, the wind would've been too strong to even keep my eyes open. Thanks to the mask, I could glide in relative comfort. I closed in on Lucy, grabbed her shoulder and arm so we were face to face, and matched her fall speed. Talking out loud while falling wasn't really an option, so we had to use hand signals.
"We've got two options."
"What are they?!"
"Deploy the parachute now and glide as far as we can — or wait as long as possible before deploying and land fast in a relatively nearby area."
Right now we were falling at a gentle speed, bodies spread wide like flying squirrels. The emergency oxygen tanks connected to our special gas masks were steadily burning through their supply, so the altitude had to be pretty high. And looking down, a hazy fog-like something was covering about half of a desolate city that was depressing just to look at.
"A fast drop makes it harder to secure a safe landing, but you can start moving way ahead of everyone else. In Survival Theme, getting the jump on everyone is always a win."
"Setting aside what Survival Theme even is for a moment — what's the advantage of a slow drop, then?"
"You can pick out a confirmed safe zone from the air and drift toward it, which cuts the risk of getting jumped the second you land. It's the safe play."
"If we prioritize drop speed we'd be taking on both injury risk and ambush risk, so let's deploy as soon as we can and prioritize finding a safe zone."
"Figured you'd say that."
I signaled that I'd count to three, then deployed the parachute three seconds later. For a brief moment I felt my body get sucked upward with a whoosh. It wasn't enough force to dislocate a shoulder, but a parachute holding the weight of roughly two adult men in midair — cargo and gear included — was genuinely impressive.
Not that I needed to worry about the lines snapping all of a sudden. The emergency-escape parachute packs we were wearing were fairly large, designed with the assumption that multiple people might hang off one. And the bigger the canopy, the safer it is to fly.
I went first to secure a safe zone, gliding slowly over the city center, which was patchily covered in that hazy fog. Another advantage of a parachute insertion: you can take your time surveying the area and mapping it as you go.
A lot of the sectors are fogged over, but I can roughly sketch the city's scale and layout.
If my guess was right, this Survival-themed Dark Zone we were dropping into was probably taking the form of Ground Zero.
"Ground Zero" means a disaster zone that's been utterly wrecked by a powerful nuclear bomb — or swept by some enormous natural catastrophe, a pandemic, that kind of thing. I didn't see anything resembling a massive blast crater down below, so circumstantially this wasn't a nuclear strike. Which, in another sense, made it a little more serious.
If it's not a nuke, it's got to be either a natural disaster or a plague.
No — let me correct that. There's also the possibility of an invasion by "something." But considering that would balloon the number of possibilities into something way too complicated, I decided to find a safe zone first.
The first safe zone that caught my eye was the rooftop of a large hospital a little ways from downtown — closer to the outskirts than the city center, if I had to put it that way. A big hospital roof doesn't have a lot of structures in the way, and it even had a wide helipad, which made it perfect as a drop zone.
I steered that way, and Lucy behind me adjusted her parachute to follow. Fortunately it was evening, the sun just starting to sink, so visibility wasn't an issue yet. We'd be able to land without much trouble.
The real problem would come the moment we hit the ground.
Tap, tap, tap. As I closed in on the landing zone, I gave a few short kicks to gauge the distance to the rooftop, then used the long, wide hospital roof as a runway and touched down clean. I'd heard even seasoned soldiers find jump training pretty brutal, but with my enhanced strength and the Modular Exo-Suit, it was a piece of cake.
I quickly slashed the parachute lines with my combat knife so a gust wouldn't drag me off, then looked up at Lucy coming in behind me. True to her origins in a nation of macho men, Lucy stuck the landing on pure physical ability and technique, without any of the buffs I was running.
"Whew. We somehow made it down. Honestly, it's been so long I was worried I'd botch it."
"It's been a while?"
"When I crossed over from Vladivostok to Korea, I stowed away on some rich guy's private jet. Before he caught me, I strapped on a parachute pack and hopped out somewhere near Gangwon Province."
…Is she actually insane?
I was starting to realize that Lucy, despite that pretty-boy look of hers, was far more macho — and far more of a lunatic — than she appeared. She was, without a doubt, exactly the kind of walking disaster this prison was made to hold.