When the Fog Lifts

In the Dark Zone, darkness is bad. Fog is good.

Wouldn't both be bad? They wreck your visibility the same way, and either one leaves you wide open when something jumps you out of nowhere.

Not quite.

In EFD, darkness—one of the Dark Zone's signature environmental gimmicks—is classified as human-hostile. Thick fog, by contrast, is classified as human-friendly.

The darkness laid over an entire map is simply a near-total absence of light. Visibility collapses, and human beings have no choice but to move by artificial illumination. To keep from being spotted by Native Species, veteran players lean hard on Glow Sticks—but a Glow Stick is a one-use consumable, and you can only carry so many. You spend them the way a miser spends coins.

Just flipping on a flashlight or lighting a torch, though, is a different kind of stupid. That is getting down on your knees and begging something to come eat you.

Fog, though. Fog is good. It blinds Native Species and humans in equal measure.

Even detection-type Native Species that can see straight through darkness, even hunter-types that home in on human body heat—none of them can see through fog. And that makes sense. Thick fog is not smoke. It is a natural screen of water droplets, dense enough and large enough to serve as genuine cover. Artificial light and heat cannot punch through it properly. In the end, thick fog is a human-friendly environmental gimmick: the one condition that actually lets you use Glow Sticks the way they were meant to be used.

Which is why I led Lucy along a "safe" route with a softly fluorescing Glow Stick in my hand, her small frame glued to my back.

A Pathfinder's job is to pioneer a route that is safe, fast, and efficient, then walk everyone else down it. Among the prisoners who work the Dark Zone, it is the role that demands the highest skill—and because of that, it is the role that can demand the biggest cut.

At the moment, though, Pathfinders are not exactly a celebrated class.

Everyone's too busy being drunk on fighting.

A single competent Pathfinder should make a party's exploration vastly more efficient. The prisoners now have a different appetite. They would rather muscle other parties off the good farming spots, or slug it out head-on with whatever Native Species come boiling in. From where they sit, the logic goes something like: Pathfinder? Isn't that just a leech who points at a map and rides the bus?

You can see it in how the current clans and fixed parties are aggressively recruiting combat-focused prisoners and almost no one else.

"Hold."

I raised a fist. Lucy stopped on a dime and sharpened her guard. I pulled out another Glow Stick, woke a fresh glow, and flung the one I had been carrying out into the dark ahead.

Tuk. Tuk.

The light stick bounced a few times across the asphalt and rolled, its faint scattered light reaching through the fog. What it revealed was a long cylindrical object. Given where we were standing, it should have been a traffic light, a utility pole, or a street tree—if you thought about it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the ordinary way.

"Throwing dagger."

"Here you are."

I took the blade Lucy passed over her shoulder, lined up the target properly this time, and put everything I had into the throw.

Thwack! Crash!

The instant the dagger punched into the cylinder, another cylindrical shape erupted beside it and slammed into the ground with all its weight. As if to crush every half-assed guess about traffic lights and utility poles and street trees, two legs casually announced themselves and started moving across the pavement.

It looked like a heron standing motionless on one leg in a shallow river, ready to spear and snatch the moment prey showed itself. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠A thin sheen of cold sweat broke across my skin.

Native Species were no different from us in this fog. Without hearing or touch, they could not find prey either. So this one had learned to work human psychology—camouflage itself as ordinary scenery, then take you in a single burst.

A specimen that figured out this is the most efficient way to hunt in a modern city.

The thing confirmed that the insolent prey that had touched its leg was not underfoot, then lumbered off with a disappointed thud-thud, leaving its disappointment behind. I could not say exactly what it was, but the circumstances pointed to a subspecies of Lightman. A real Lightman would have dragged a lighthouse-sized light source over our heads as it moved.

The moment we were sure it was gone, we searched the ground it had been using as a blind. If a Native Species had been lying in wait, there was a high chance something there was drawing human footsteps.

As expected, there was an electronics store.

We eased the fire shutter up and slipped inside, then started farming like Remy raiding a kitchen after dark. The place had already been picked over a few times, but most of the looters seemed to have gone for the expensive, bulky prizes—televisions, computer towers. A fair number of the smaller components were still sitting there, waiting.

"The real cost-effective electronic parts you can pull out of the Dark Zone are circuit boards and storage devices. If you can grab a graphics card, grab it."

"Compared to what people are using on the outside, those are basically antiques. I'm afraid I don't quite understand how they could be cost-effective."

"Stuff farmed from the Dark Zone has high research value, high experimental value—and a lot of it performs way better than you'd think."

Take the android parts I had turned into improvised weapons and bombs in that space-themed Dark Zone a while back. By the standards of 2040s Korean society they were nothing special. Actually use them, though, and the performance and efficiency were shockingly good. That is why governments and corporations alike will happily buy up whatever junk prisoners scrape together—the way a Hunter Association in a hunter web novel will still pay decent money for an ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠F-rank magic stone.

Even after I explained it, Lucy still wore that faintly puzzled look. She filled the backpack anyway. It helped that whenever she slacked on packing, I would grab that little head of hers with both hands and bark, You are wasting money right now! You might as well be throwing it on the floor!

We had filled about a third of the pack, and I was thinking we could move on, when Lucy suddenly picked a camcorder up off the store floor and brought it over.

"Leader, please take a look at this."

"It's just an ordinary camcorder."

"No. There are signs it's been used."

At that, I turned the thing over in my hands. She was right. It was not a new model off the display rack. It was a beat-up used unit, worn smooth by someone's hands over a long time.

"The battery… it takes regular cells."

I rummaged the nearby shelves, found a few batteries, and swapped them in. The camcorder woke with a faint click, and a low-quality recording started crawling across the tiny screen. "Video" was generous. The picture was nothing but crawling static. The only thing actually coming through was the audio.

Every prisoner wore a special gas mask whose goggles had the Blind Feature baked in, so text was a black wall. Listening, though, was no problem at all.

The last line cut off, and the recording died. I jabbed the play button again and again, hoping something else had been saved after it. Whether the camcorder was too badly damaged or its owner had never managed a clean recording, every clip that came next was nothing but noise. Now and then a scream leaked through, or a grotesque sobbing, or the sound of something being smashed to pieces—but they were all fragments, too brief to pull any real information from.

And when the final recording started, we shut the camcorder off as fast as our hands would move. The last sound that crawled out of it was loud enough, and wrong enough, that it could have put even the two of us in danger. Anyone who had lived in a modern city would have felt their hair stand on end the instant they heard it. A creeping, full-body dread, the kind that writes itself into your skin.

Yes. Just like that siren.

"Goddamn Survival Theme."

This was not the siren that triggered an escape gimmick. I could tell the difference without breaking a sweat. This was the Dark Zone's signal flare—the one that announced a full-scale human hunt was about to begin.

Thinking about it, it had been way too quiet.

A Survival Theme Dark Zone spends the entire run with its hands around the prisoners' throats, asking the same question over and over: You just want to leave? Or do you want to die? Almost no one gets to answer, I'll farm, I'll clear the quests, and I'll walk out in one piece, thanks. A Survival Theme does not leave cocky skulls like that intact.

In other words, it had been suspiciously calm, and the prisoners who had decided this place was a playground were about to meet the collection agency. The loan coming due was their lives, and the collectors had finally decided to use force.

Lucy and I slammed the electronics store's fire shutter down without waiting to see who moved first, then dragged over the heaviest tables and chairs we could find and jammed them against the entrance. It was a slapdash barricade—the kind I had seen somewhere before. Which was another way of saying that even a slapdash barricade will hold, if the luck holds with it.

"…Leader."

"What?!"

"The fog… it's lifting."

I stopped hauling furniture and looked outside. She was right. The fog was thinning, sliding away toward another sector as if it were alive. I keep ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hoping grim predictions like this one will miss for once, but I was starting to suspect this body of mine had dumped more stat points into occult than science. How else did every bad feeling land with that ghostly, click-into-place accuracy?

"Prep for combat."

At that short, hard order, Lucy stowed her club and wrapped a hand around an SMG in each fist. A pair of submachine guns loaded with forty rounds of 9mm each would, for a short burst, put out more firepower than a machine gun.

We put as much distance as we could from the entrance and secured an escape route leading deeper into the darkened store.

…Thud. Thud. Thud.

Vibration and noise rolled in from not far off. The Giant Protospecies that had vanished a little while ago seemed to be coming back this way. Other sounds mixed in with it, plenty of them—a grotesque sobbing braided through the siren like wind, and screams that sounded as if they were being torn. They put a cold finger on the base of the spine.

If those were not human voices, the sobbing and the screaming were almost certainly coming from hunter-type Native Species.

What hunter-types show up most in a modern-city Dark Zone?

I raked through my memory, and the shortlist surfaced at once. The closest match was the Night Walker. They came out mainly after dark and ambushed by tracking body heat and noise—an upper-tier specimen of the ordinary Walker line that spawned in modern-city settings.

Rarer, but still on the board, was the Wraith, a Native Species locked into a female form. Instead of closing in and using raw force the way Walker-types did, a Wraith kept up a tearing shriek or a grating sob and chewed a person's sanity down to the bone. Once the target's mind hit empty and panic locked them in place, it drifted in without a sound and finished the hunt at its leisure.

I tossed a syringe to Lucy, whose face had started to go the wrong color. She did not even check what it was. The instant she saw me drive one into my own forearm, she did the same.

"Boost Syringe. The main effect is a physical boost, but it also dumps adrenaline through your system, which hardens your mind as a side benefit. That should let you ride out the noise for a while."

"…That's a relief. To be honest, I thought Baba Yaga had come crawling out."

"The witch from the Russian stories, right? Yeah. Not that far off."

The difference between a legend and a Native Species is that a Native Species, at least, has a strategy.

WEEEEEEEEEEEN… then silence.

The city's brief stay of execution—its warning—ran out. The first Survival Wave came crashing in.

Of course, my answer to that ruthless binary—escape, or die?—had already been decided.

Click.