Sacred Grid Efficiency
EFD was a cooperative game at its core. Reality, I now understood, was a very different animal. So it wasn't strange in the slightest when problems that had never existed in the game suddenly shoved their heads into the picture here — abandoning a teammate you'd been working with only moments ago, for instance, or casually hunting other prisoners to line your own pockets.
I've been playing EFD for ten years, sure. That doesn't mean I slacked off on living in the real world.
You pick things up whether you want to or not. After school, after the military, after landing a job at some no-name company and rubbing shoulders with every type of human being under the sun, there are facts you learn even if you'd rather not. Which meant I could read, to a degree, the scraps of emotion people leaked without meaning to — the thoughts flickering behind their eyes. I wasn't some renowned psychologist, and I hadn't mastered mind-reading. I just had a sharp eye for people.
Those two from a minute ago? Yeah. They were the backstabbing type.
Three people escaping from a prisoner team that was supposed to move in groups of four? That much I could understand. Two-man teams, three-man teams — even solos like me weren't unheard of. But one of them had a blade smeared with fresh blood you never saw on Native Species. They'd made the small, scrawny prisoner push the cargo tray by himself. And they'd been ready to ditch their teammate at the first sign of trouble. Put it all together, and the odds of those two turning traitor at the critical moment looked pretty damn high.
So I steered them toward the elevator as naturally as I could, and the instant their true colors showed, I locked them in and used them as bait.
Leaving that mountain of loot behind in the elevator with them had hurt like hell, but I'd still managed to walk out with one person's worth of items. And that "item," astonishingly enough, was trotting along behind me of its own accord.
"Hey... do you know this facility pretty well?"
"What makes you say that?"
"Well... you're moving without any hesitation. Like you know exactly where you're going."
"Moving is a lot more useful than standing still. That's all there is to it."
I answered with deliberate indifference and flicked a sidelong glance at my prisoner companion. Even being generous, he was maybe five-foot-three, and his build wasn't something you could call decent even if you were lying. He wasn't wearing any special gear like I was, and there was no sign of illegal implants anywhere on his body. On the surface, he was completely ordinary. No — a little below average, even.
The special goggles behind his gas mask hid his face, and his voice buzzed and warped through the filter, so I couldn't confirm what he looked like. But I figured his face probably matched the meek attitude — soft, unthreatening. What I really wanted to know was why those two hadn't used this guy as bait first.
Meek personality that never talks back, nothing special about the physique... they were probably planning to squeeze every last drop out of him and toss him at the end.
Even if they'd all escaped together, those two would've snatched his share of the loot and stuffed their own pockets. You didn't need a crystal ball for that one. So this prisoner buddy of mine had nothing to worry about. That backpack he was carrying? I was going to swallow it whole myself. A cheap commission in exchange for saving his life. That was a profitable deal no matter how you sliced it, and I was sure he'd see it that way too.
But it's still not enough.
Thanks to offering those two greedy pigs up to the wolf pack, I had some breathing room again. One backpack was stuffed to capacity with a full person's worth of loot, but the other still had empty space. Anyone who'd cash out here and now could go join the Super Coward Club, as far as I was concerned.
That version of me from day one in the Darkzone — the guy who'd been shaking in his boots because he only had one life coin? That guy was already dead. And he was staying dead until I packed every last empty slot in these backpacks and walked out of here.
I grabbed the shoulder of the prisoner who'd been quietly trailing behind me and spun him around.
"Wh-what? Why all of a sudden!?"
"Hold still. I just want to check your back."
That overstuffed, ballooned-out backpack had been bugging me for a while now. Sure enough, the moment I opened it, all I saw was worthless white-tier junk — and stuff that didn't even qualify as white-tier. A backpack stuffed to bursting with garbage. It was such a horrifying, disgusting, soul-crushing sight that goosebumps crawled over my entire body.
"D-did I do something wrong? I just put in everything I saw. The leader told me to do it that way..."
"This isn't farming. This is being an unlucky janitor."
If a professional scrap dealer had seen this, he would've caved this guy's skull in with a bundle of newspapers worth pennies a pound.
"Never fill my backpack with this kind of trash again. It makes me want to pay your parents a visit."
"This is my backpack, though...?"
I ignored whatever he was mumbling and plucked the trash out of the backpack one piece at a time, flinging it away. He was a hamster type, apparently — everything he'd crammed in there was small enough to hold in one hand. Odds and ends, every last bit of it. I threw it out without mercy. Almost everything went, except for the white-tier stuff that actually looked like it had some value, and a handful of high-value items I hadn't even been expecting.
Once the inventory was finally sorted, I grabbed the prisoner — his backpack now dramatically deflated — and decided to give him a firsthand education in what real farming looked like. What a real dopamine hit felt like.
"In the Darkzone, an item's ranking — whether it's worth real money — comes down to one thing: is it useful, or isn't it? Useful to who? To all of us. Take that bundle of wiring and those old batteries over there. In a pinch, we could use them ourselves. But if you wrap them up nice and carry them out, the appraisal officers will buy them at a decent price. Helps them gauge and study the tech level of this place."
"Ooooh..."
"And every now and then you'll find documents or books that the AI built into your special gas-mask goggles automatically blacks out. Grab those when you can. We can't read what's written in them, but the people on the outside would kill for even a speck of that information. And if what's written in there turns out to be more than a speck? The price goes through the roof."
"Ooooh..."
"You don't need to open every cabinet and desk drawer. Most of the time, all you'll get is junk. If you want high-value farming, check under the desks instead of inside the drawers, and hit the shelves instead of the cabinets."
Desk drawers and cabinets were usually full of someone's personal belongings, so unless you were standing in a genuine honey hole, there was no reason to bother. I dragged my endlessly ooooh-ing companion along, demonstrating in person as I delivered a passionate lecture on Farming 101.
"Spare electronic parts you can't identify, versus pill bottles you also can't identify. Which one do you take?"
"Uh... the electronic parts?"
"Wrong. You take both. You just picked one valuable item and threw the other one away like trash! That ignorance of yours is starving my backpack!"
You cruel backpack-abusing monster. If a cop saw this, they could arrest you without a warrant. They wouldn't even bother reading you your rights.
...Aaaaaaah!
"Um, I think those monsters are starting to come after us?"
"I know. But the most important part is still left."
This was something I hadn't had the luxury of checking when I first dropped into the Darkzone. This time I had a little room to breathe, so I was going to look properly.
"In the Darkzone, you can also farm equipment we can use ourselves. Could be a weapon. Could be protective gear. Or, at truly nightmarish odds, an implant or an OOPArt."
OOPArts were specialized tools you could use semi-permanently. The color-coded security keys that worked in facilities like this were a prime example.
And this Crazy Clock on my wrist counts as an OOPArt, if you think about it.
Anyway, farming equipment items you could actually use yourself — weapons, armor, implants, OOPArts — stuff that packed enormous value on top of being practical: that was the hidden joy of EFD. And I knew exactly where those items tended to drop.
In a facility like this, you'd be looking at research labs, armories, cargo warehouses, that kind of thing.
There were even Darkzones that worked the opposite way — low drop rates for trade goods, high drop rates for equipment. As luck would have it, the place we'd ducked into had offices sitting right next to an armory.
We moved to a point Crazy Clock had marked in advance and popped open a bulkhead that should have been impossible to open without a specific security key. Fortunately, my prisoner companion still had no idea what was going on. He didn't even seem to notice that I'd opened the bulkhead at all.
"Someone already cleaned this place out."
I didn't mean other prisoners. Judging by the heavy equipment cases and weapon lockers sitting wide open, the authorized researchers or security staff had looted this place the moment whatever incident hit the facility.
"What's left... a few spare sets of body armor, one pistol, a couple of ammo bundles, and a vibroblade. That's it?"
They'd packed quite thoroughly, I had to give them that. An armory this size should've had at least a few rifles or shotguns, plus several crates packed with ammunition. If you were really lucky, a rare weapon might even drop. That was why high-value farming spots in EFD always sat in the middle of enemy-infested danger zones, or behind some special condition you had to meet just to get close.
For now, I settled for the pistol and the ammo bundles, and pulled a spare vest on over my outer layer. I doubted something this basic would make a meaningful difference in my odds of survival, but in the game it had actually done some work.
Defense scaled with the armor's level, and with the material of the extra plates you slotted inside. That was the system.
Of course, the weight went up with it, which slowed your movement speed and tanked your ergonomics — look-around speed, ADS speed, reload speed, the whole package. Still better than nothing.
I handed the vibroblade and a spare vest to the prisoner, who'd been standing there just watching.
"You wear one too."
"Are you sure?"
"Your job is to protect my backpack with that body of yours."
"Ah."
And besides, I had a bad feeling. The Native Species currently turning this entire facility into a slaughterhouse were a serious threat, no question. But that didn't mean other humans weren't a threat too. Especially not when I'd already watched traitor prisoners who'd gotten a taste of their own kind's blood.
No way there aren't people in here treating this riot as an opportunity to hunt other prisoners and cash in.
Even ordinary people turn into opportunists the moment a chance presents itself. That's human society for you. Criminals? Even more dangerous.
I wired the old battery I'd grabbed from the office to a small flashlight, wrapped the whole contraption around my sleeve, loaded the pistol, and walked out of the armory.
That was when it happened.
Crack!
A faint whistle of displaced air punched through the darkness, and a crack spiderwebbed across the goggles of my special gas mask as a solid jolt slammed into my face.