It Opens Its Eyes
The sooner you got used to the Darkzone's darkness, the better.
Countless threats crouched in that dark, secrets that set a challenge-seeker's pulse racing, and the colossal rewards you only earned the right to claim after you'd clawed through every hardship and ordeal—all of it was concentrated in the Darkzone's darkness.
A newbie first picking up EFD, if they followed the orthodox route, started by learning how to find their way in the dark. Once they'd gotten reasonably skilled, they learned how to find enemies in the dark. And once they'd gone fully fossilized, they learned how to pluck exactly the rewards they wanted from the dark, one after another.
And in the end, you start looking for 'content' in the dark.
I swept my surroundings by the fluorescent glow of a Glow Stick—already the fifth one I'd snapped—and drifted for a moment into a haze of old memories. Play a god-tier game for a full ten years and even fossils like me end up licking crumbs off the floor. Digging into EFD's lore had been a pretty substantial crumb.
The EFD developers weren't exactly generous about doling out plot hooks, but they weren't amateurs tossing them around carelessly either.
Even this contaminating fog that showed up now and then in certain Darkzones—the cause of that was crystal clear.
Every so often I shone the Glow Stick down at the fog on the floor, reading the air currents. There was no longer any denying that the contaminating fog was leaking from inside the facility, and it had been left sitting long enough that I suspected it had seized the entire map.
A lot of prisoners have been in and out of this sector by now. The fact that the contaminating fog is still pouring out means nobody ever reached the heart of this facility.
Or maybe they had reached it, and for some reason just left it alone. Honestly, either way didn't matter. If the "lore" I'd so deliciously licked clean from EFD was right, I already had a pretty good idea what was pumping this contaminating fog out.
And I still needed to recover the high-value asset Crazy Clock had flagged. While I was at it, I figured I'd clean this Darkzone out.
Sssssssssss.
This time I reached a bulkhead that had started to close from the top down, then snagged on something and stopped about ten percent open. A massive volume of fog was blasting out through that gap with tremendous force. I tried operating the bulkhead's touch panel through Crazy Clock, but the panel only flashed red.
"Yeah, I figured as much."
But so much fog was leaking through that I couldn't see exactly what was jammed in the gap. I had no choice but to shove a Glow Stick in and sweep the ground with my hand, and that was when my fingertips hit something hard and uneven.
…Metal? Ore? No—this is closer to bone.
If it were metal, the fog's moisture would have rusted it long ago, and I'd have felt that distinctive gritty corrosion. And for debris from a collapsed wall, the surroundings were far too intact. More than anything, whatever my fingers had found was remarkably smooth, with a number of malformed curves.
Some incident had probably gone down, the researchers here had triggered the emergency lockdown protocol, and they'd been a hair too late—something inside had lunged out and gotten caught between the bulkhead. What came after that was the painfully obvious creature-horror script. Native Species would have come pouring through the gap, and the contaminating fog would have swallowed the facility and the entire map.
"A revolution that succeeded thanks to one guy's sacrifice, huh."
I gave up on extracting the revolutionary martyr's remains from the bulkhead and rolled my body through the fog into the interior. My specialized gas mask started beeping a warning, so I immediately swapped the filter for a fresh one, for good measure.
Oxygen filter consumption in this sector exceeds that of other sectors by 100% or more.
The internal ventilation system must be activated immediately.
"I know."
The oxygen filter I'd just replaced was wearing down faster than I'd expected. I needed to get Crazy Clock connected to the facility management system, and fast—but the fog that had been accumulating for ages made it feel like I was swimming through mud. I couldn't see a thing. I couldn't hear a thing. My body had gone heavy as waterlogged cotton, and even taking a single step was agony.
Central nervous system abnormality detected.
Immune system overactivation.
The contamination was so extreme that even a high-performance specialized gas mask couldn't block it all. I flicked the endlessly chattering watch with my fingers until it shut up, then snapped three Glow Sticks in a row and tossed them one each toward nine o'clock—left—twelve o'clock—ahead—and three o'clock—right.
When your sense of balance and direction weren't intact, you were better off trusting one solid piece of information and just moving stubbornly.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Goddamn oxygen filter. I'd just replaced it. I pulled a new one from my pack and swapped it immediately, and the rate at which contaminants were seeping into my body seemed to slow, if only slightly. I didn't waste that window—I jammed an emergency injector into my thigh.
Using a precious emergency treatment kit that was as good as a lifeline here hurt like hell, but this was the kind of thing that turned to shit if you hoarded it.
Gotta admit, the tech here is good.
Temporarily, at least. The emergency nanobots injected through the syringe started rapidly repairing damaged cells in my body, and my mind and senses recovered to some degree.
"Which way's the high-value asset?"
I knew it'd be here. A researcher who'd been working on something in this place wouldn't have made it out in time. They'd have gotten caught in the incident, which meant the high-value asset would have been left lying around here too. I hurried toward three o'clock before the drugs wore off.
This had been one of the more important private labs—the scale was considerable. I had to cover another twenty or thirty meters by feel before I found the high-value asset Crazy Clock was talking about.
"This it?"
What I'd picked up was a USB-type storage device kept in the inner pocket of a researcher's white coat. This time, though, I couldn't laser-read the storage device until I cleared the fog first, so I groped thoroughly over the researcher's desk—not even bones left of them.
Crazy Clock read off the labels linked to the four buttons on the small control panel.
"This guy hit the emergency isolation button the second he felt things going sideways."
"But the bulkhead didn't finish closing, so it was never fully isolated—which means the contamination purge button wouldn't have worked."
"And since it was never isolated in the first place, the isolation release button wouldn't have had any reason to work either."
What must it have felt like, pressing those three buttons one after another and watching none of them execute properly? You couldn't script a more vicious screw-job.
I pressed the button the researcher had never even gotten to try, and offered a prayer for his soul.
Every ventilation port in the ceiling, walls, and floor—all of them sealed shut by the emergency isolation protocol—opened completely and began circulating and purifying the air.
SHWAAAAAAAAAA!
A powerful wind roared in with a sudden, tremendous suction, stripping away the contaminating fog and pumping in fresh air. In less than thirty seconds the contaminating fog had vanished clean, and the ugly truth it had been hiding for so long stood revealed.
What occupied the center of the vast laboratory was a massive cylindrical glass tank, its middle completely shattered by some impact. It was exactly the kind of glass tank that mad researchers in sci-fi dramas and movies always seemed to keep one or two of.
This one's not getting the blind treatment.
Maybe because it was closer to a phenomenon—or an entity—than to information. I thought it would've been nicer if the goggles on my specialized gas mask had just censored the whole thing cleanly, and I rolled my shoulders loose.
"You connected to the system yet?"
Twitch.
"......"
Thirty seconds was too late.
"If you have to, just figure out where the farmable items are and disconnect. That's enough."
My work here was done anyway. I'd completed the primary objective Crazy Clock had issued, and I'd stopped any further generation of the contaminating fog that had seized the entire map. All that was left was happy farming and getting out.
Twitch.
Twitch.
It'd be a lie to say no. But I didn't bother answering. If I did, I might not be able to take a single step.
Twitch.
I'd barely counted to twenty in my head before I forcibly severed Crazy Clock's system connection and bolted straight for the exit.
Sure enough.
CRASH!
"Fuuuuuuck!"
Why had the researcher running the experiments here hit the emergency isolation button the instant he sensed something was off? Normally, human survival instinct would have you get yourself out safely first, then hit emergency isolation.
That researcher had felt it in his bones too.
You couldn't let that thing out.
And right now, I was thinking the exact same thing.
An indescribable, horrific roar slammed into my back and my eardrums at the same time. Instead of going to the trouble of turning my head to check behind me, I rolled my body through the bulkhead gap—the one with a massive being's bone fragment jammed firmly in it, just as I'd expected.
Grrrrrrrr… BOOM!
It opened its eyes.
It was coming out.
It was coming after me!
Shit, shit! I thought it was already dead because it wasn't reacting!
I'd figured it was like the bastard that died stuck in the bulkhead—already long dead, just a leftover husk pumping out toxins!
Who the hell knew it was hibernating!
If reality had a Super Bowl for crowning the luckiest person alive, it wouldn't have been an exaggeration to say I'd just won the Super Bowl for crowning the unluckiest.
KRAAAAAANG!
The thing that smashed through the bulkhead that had imprisoned it for so long had every right to do so.
"This is reality, you crazy bastard!!"
I gritted my teeth and ran, shuddering at the howls echoing behind me. Buying the Modular Exo-Suit from Lee Sena had been a genuine stroke of genius.
"This is some actual luck-screwed-game bullshit… oh, that's a tasty one."
Of course, even while sprinting full-tilt toward the exit, I didn't forget to stuff the expensive items down my pants along the way. A modern man's dopamine-addicted, fragile psyche was often something even I couldn't do a thing about.