Explosion Is an Art
Explosion is an art.
Anyone who says a thing like that is rarely right in the head, but I couldn't pretend I didn't understand what would drive a person to spit out a line like that. Lucy and I had just pulled off a proper movie-worthy escape with our backs to an explosion that could have passed for art — no CGI, no stunt doubles, no clever camera work. Just raw physicals.
"They say the threshold for pleasure isn't as high as you'd think, but the threshold for pain just keeps climbing with no ceiling in sight. Nngh!"
I slapped the dust off myself and shoved my aching body upright. Everything around us was a milky soup of grit. Judging by the stone chips and shards of glass catching at my boots, the blast had been a lot more spectacular than either of us had bargained for.
I kicked aside the rubble twitching beside me and hauled Lucy up out of the dust-swamp she'd been buried in. She came up as easily as a limp fish, then stared at me in a daze.
"Did we not just nearly die...?"
"You're imagining things."
Nearly die? What kind of nonsense was that. In my dictionary, people were allowed to die. Backpacks were not.
I pounded the dust off her back, partly to knock her wandering mind back into place. Whether the Walkers chasing us had all been swallowed by the blast, or whether the Giant Protospecies simply couldn't find us anymore and had stopped issuing orders, I couldn't feel a hint of anything still on our trail.
"Check yourself for injuries and grab your gear. We need to move, now."
"Using the Boost Syringe earlier was a stroke of genius. If we'd been even a little slower getting up — if we'd taken even a second longer to come to — we would have left our bones here."
"That was all part of the calculation."
It was not. I still hadn't fully closed the gap between the game and reality, or the sense of wrongness sitting in the middle of that gap. But if I admitted that out loud, there was a non-zero chance the backpack would mutiny, so I kept my mouth shut like a responsible team leader. In the Dark Zone, silence is a virtue.
"The Walkers look like they were all swept away in that last explosion, and the Giant Protospecies probably took damage chasing us along the outer wall — or lost us entirely and gave up."
"That'd be it. Aggro's the kind of thing that comes off the moment you slap something stronger over it."
Light bleeding and severe bleeding on different parts of the body at the same time is fine, systemically speaking. Light bleeding and severe bleeding on the same part of the body at the same time is a system conflict waiting to happen. By the same logic, the Giant Protospecies that had been plastered to the outer wall and chasing us was very likely caught in the blast that erupted from inside — or the shock of it made the thing lose the trail and wander off somewhere else. Either way, the aggro itself was well and truly cleared.
"Feels like we sacrificed a lot just to shake one stack of aggro, but think of it as stepping in shit. We're still in one piece, aren't we?"
"That's true, but in other themed Dark Zones, even if you pulled aggro you'd turn it around and use it, or dump it on other inmates while you ran. This time it felt like we pushed ourselves just to clear it as fast as possible."
"In a Survival Theme, not clearing aggro as fast as you can is basically suicide."
"...If our leader is calling it suicide, it must be extremely dangerous."
"Survival Theme is built so the slow ones and the ones who can't read a room eat the whole bill. Remember when we first dropped into this Dark Zone and had to find the parachute packs on the plane? The ones with the fastest instincts get to lock down the fixed spawn points. Everyone else has to play chicken and throw hands with the rest of the inmates, then comb the plane like they're picking lice just to get out alive."
That was just how a Survival-themed Dark Zone worked. In EFD it ran on a four-person team format, so you never really felt the competition. Now that it had become reality, the more inmates they threw in, the more equally doomed everyone became. Sit still and the odds of getting shafted climbed exponentially. Fail to outcompete the other inmates and the odds of dying climbed right along with them. Add farming and quests on top of that and getting out with a proper haul was a goddamn nightmare.
"More than any of that, though, we were thrashing around so we wouldn't trip the gimmick trigger."
"There's a gimmick on plain aggro?"
Lucy asked it with a look of genuine surprise, and all I could offer her was a bitter smile. The deeper you dug into EFD, the more often that exact expression popped out of people. I'd worn it myself more than a few times.
"It's not a complicated gimmick. It's actually painfully simple. If you don't clear the aggro within a set window, it inflates."
"Inflates, as in..."
"Every five minutes, the total headcount of protospecies locked onto that aggro doubles."
"..."
"And if you only clear the aggro without killing them and just leave them there, the gimmick carries over. The next inmate who pulls those same protospecies inherits it as-is."
Say we held aggro for four minutes and fifty-nine seconds, then peeled it with one second to spare. The next poor bastard who tagged those things would eat the full doubled spawn in a single second.
"That's what they call an unblockable, isn't it? Don't even touch it if you aren't sure you can kill it..."
"Exactly. That's why I went overboard and wiped them all. Leaving loose ends is worse. Cleaning the slate here was the safer play."
Was that actually how it worked? Shockingly, yes. Which was why the first thing a fixed four-man elite party did when they dropped into a Survival-themed Dark Zone was shut down every possible aggro source. Veterans and first-timers ran the same route. This time we'd just been unlucky enough to get caught in a forced-aggro event off an environmental gimmick — the siren.
"You could look at this Dark Zone and think all you have to do is run, hide, farm a little, and extract. Inmates who've bounced in and out of a few Dark Zones would think that. It's the natural assumption. A Survival Theme is just designed to kill those people first."
Walk into a mandatory Dark Zone run with that casual attitude and you'd get the rug yanked out from under you. So if you even suspected you'd been dropped into a Survival Theme, you kept your head on a swivel. And you played as selfishly as you could. The same as long as it isn't me mindset as those legendary variety-show hosts on a camping lottery challenge.
"Anyway, we beat the forced aggro, so we won the first round of hot potato. Which means this is the window where we hit the real farming grounds and actually make a profit, right?"
"...Well. Farming does matter more than other people's lives."
"See? Money really is the best."
Lucy was starting to pick up my gold-is-everything philosophy in earnest, which pleased me. People really should run with their own kind.
Telling ourselves there was no way anyone would be stupid enough to poke the bomb we'd already sucked dry and passed along, Lucy and I headed for the absolute heart of the ruined city — the Ground Zero sector. The most expensive items and the safest extraction point existed in the same place, which also meant the most vicious competition. A one-round caged deathmatch was waiting for us.
"Crazy bastards."
Rex clicked his tongue at the pillar of fire punching into the sky with a blinding flash, and at the shockwave and the roar that came with it. The sudden explosion, maybe three hundred meters out, had swallowed roughly half a sizable mixed-use commercial complex and flung a spectacular spray of light across the ruins.
Monty's drone had picked up a mass movement of protospecies the moment the siren started, and they'd been following that trail. Nobody had imagined they would walk into a sight like this.
"Is that him?"
"The rumors say he pulls every kind of stunt in the Dark Zone. Nobody else crazy enough would just blow a building on the spot. The exterior isn't that badly damaged, though, so the fire looks bigger than the blast. They probably cooked off a huge load of flammables."
"Oil drums, gas canisters — a city like this is lousy with them. Wouldn't even be hard. Nudge a gas line in whatever infrastructure is still standing and... well. You know."
Rex nodded along with Monty at the drone controls, but he never took his eyes off the view through the binoculars.
According to the intel, the Super Rookie prized efficiency and would minimize unnecessary fights. Who the hell expected him to come out like that? Was the information wrong?
Even if a massive pack of protospecies had been breathing down his neck, who would have dared predict he'd just demolish a building? Or was that it? Crazy people were unpredictable by nature, and trying to map their range of behavior off scraps of intel was the stupid move?
"Boss. Hostiles."
Rex had been turning the problem over, trying to decide how to track the man, when Malcolm's short-range radio cut in. He snapped his head around. He'd been about to tell them to just deal with whatever protospecies was wandering the street when Malcolm signaled that it wasn't protospecies — it was people.
A cluster of inmates had slipped into view on the roof of the building opposite, lugging bundles of spent parachutes. They flung the chutes like nets at a strangely shaped Giant Protospecies that had just heaved itself out of a gap between buildings.
The thing was already a horror — half-burned from getting caught in that building blast — and Rex's team had been content to wait for it to pass. Then these clueless bastards decided they were going to hunt a Giant Protospecies.
"Those assholes are after bio-samples, looks like."
"Bio-samples? There are actually people who want that shit?"
"Rumor is the corps and the government have been putting in a lot of orders for protospecies tissue lately. These ones probably heard the same story and figured they'd cash in. Well, well."
Monty swung the drone around for a closer look at the circus they were putting on, then snorted. It was so absurd he'd nearly forgotten they were in the middle of an operation.
"Got it! His vision's completely blocked!"
"Throw more chutes! Tangle him in the lines so he trips over his own feet!"
"No other protospecies nearby! We put this one down clean and we don't have to worry about aggro!"
They weren't wrong. Aside from the Giant Protospecies thrashing under a pile of parachutes, nothing else was in sight. Even if there had been, those things would have poured toward the building still burning like a festival, not looped back this way.
"They look sloppy, but their instincts and initiative aren't bad. At this rate they'll put that Giant Protospecies down no problem and walk away with the samples."
Rex didn't jump to agree with Monty's mutter. He tightened his grip on his weapon. If those inmates actually finished the thing, his team might skim a bio-sample off it for free. But since when had the Dark Zone been that generous? The inmates hadn't even started in the same place this time — and then there was the siren, dragging protospecies in by the dozens. This was already nothing like the usual run.
"I've got a bad feeling. We peel off here and keep after the Super Rookie."
"You're fine walking away from a free payday?"
"There's no such thing as free in this world. You've been doing this for years and you're still saying that? Do you seriously not know why we ended up in a prison like this, in a country like this?"
"Heh. Don't hit me with facts like that. That hurts."
"Cut the crap and start mov—"
BOOM.
The sudden noise made Rex's team flinch and look back at the opposite building. And there, astonishingly, was the Giant Protospecies still thrashing under its parachute — and another Giant Protospecies, the same kind of specimen, that had appeared from nowhere and was now pounding the outer wall with its fists.
"What the—"
A protospecies that size had just... shown up? Without a sound? In the second they'd looked away?
"Monty! Malcolm! Were you not watching the perimeter?!"
"N-no, sir! We were watching. It just appeared out of nowhere!"
"And you think that makes sense?!"
"It's the truth, boss. The thing just popped in the blink of an eye. Caught me off guard too."
"This is insane... Dammit, we're leaving. I've got a bad feeling!"
I've got a bad feeling was not just mercenary talk. It was what came out of your mouth on reflex when the feeling was genuinely wrong — when a current ran from the soles of your feet to the top of your skull. Survival instinct, given a voice.
"Move! Do not get mixed up with those people! Watch the protospecies aggro!"
Rex turned his back on the roof across the way, where the inmates were already being butchered without a fight by the Giant Protospecies that had climbed the outer wall.
Yes. That was what the Dark Zone was. A place that shook down the clueless, the weak, and the ones running behind on information for their lives whenever it got bored.
Rex had no intention of ending up like those idiots. He intended to chew them all up in plain sight, crawl from the very bottom back to the summit, and take back the glory he'd lost. And the first stepping stone toward that was the Super Rookie.
Rex's team swung off the city's dangerous outskirts and turned toward its heart. The hunt had only just begun.