Keep Quiet in the Darkzone
The Stalker sprinted down the wide corridor, breath tearing raggedly through his chest, one hand clamped over a shoulder that burned like fire. A Stalker of proven skill did not rattle this easily. Right now, though, he was unmistakably rattled.
It was not a problem with his own ability. The problem was the target — a man who had been inside Seoul Southern Prison for barely a week.
What the hell kind of monster is that guy?
He hadn't taken the man seriously at first. The target hadn't even noticed he was being followed, and the ambush had landed far too easily. And yet the man had started responding with startling speed and precision for someone who'd just been jumped. He'd peeled his fellow inmate off first — the Stalker hadn't even been briefed that the target had a companion — apparently deciding the other man would only get in the way, then launched a counterattack of his own.
A counterattack. Of all things.
Ordinary men, the moment they realized someone was after their life — let alone after they'd already eaten an ambush — never even considered turning the tables.
His read on the situation was unnaturally fast, too.
A chill had run down the Stalker's spine when the man charged him using a thick cabinet door as a shield, as if he'd already figured out the weapon was a Steelshot. Worse, the bastard had counted every last round until the magazine ran dry, and the instant it did, he'd hurled that cabinet door with everything he had. If the Stalker had turned his head even a fraction of a second later, the door would have punched through the dark and caved his face in.
Hiss. Hissss.
A wide lounge. Hidden among the plush sofas meant for staff mental-health breaks and the bookshelves packed with every kind of volume, he treated the wound in his shoulder. The atmosphere here was fundamentally hostile to human life. Bare skin wasn't a problem, but exposing the inside of the body was extremely dangerous.
All this racket makes it hard to track his movement.
In a space like this, even the rustle of clothing should have carried loud and clear. Right now, though, the entire facility was a madhouse, so that advantage was off the table. The Stalker slathered regenerative ointment over the wound, then reloaded the Steelshot with slightly clumsy hands. The injured shoulder meant one arm wouldn't take a proper load.
"Tsssss."
A low hiss of pain as he surveyed the situation. A Stalker — a man whose entire job was to hunt a target down and erase them — being hunted by that same target. Any inmate walking by would have laughed himself sick.
But positions like that could always be flipped. Even if the man's situational judgment was extraordinary, even if he responded better than expected, even if he packed monstrous strength — he still hadn't stolen the qualitative edge that came from superior gear and experience. Fortunately the surrounding noise cut both ways. If he used the dark as a veil and struck from ambush one more time...
"Shit!"
Thud!
A prickling sensation raced down his spine. He threw himself aside on instinct, and the bookshelf he'd been leaning against shattered as a sharp blade punched through. A standard-issue throwing dagger, the kind issued to inmates.
"You figured you'd just hide in the dark again and wait for your opening, didn't you."
"......!"
The voice seemed to drift in through the wide glass entrance, sinking into the Stalker's ear. No need to answer. He eased the muzzle through a gap in the sofa and squeezed the trigger in rapid succession toward the source of the sound.
Pfft! Pfft!
But the familiar kick wasn't there. His projectiles sailed through empty air and buried themselves in a blank wall. He'd fired right at the voice. And the man had actually thrown a knife from that direction, hadn't he?
"What's the most common piece of electronics you'll find in a research facility?"
Another voice, this one from the opposite entrance of the lounge. The Stalker spun around in a panic.
Too late.
Shunk!
"Ghk?!"
"The answer is recorders and radios."
The throwing dagger punched dead-center into the good hand gripping the Steelshot, shredding tendon and nerve without mercy. The Stalker rolled backward in a hurry and yanked the blade free — and paid for it by dropping the Steelshot.
The other man couldn't have cared less. He strolled in at his leisure, launching into a lecture on Darkzone trivia that nobody had asked for.
"The geniuses who find even taking notes too much of a chore mutter into recorders day and night like lunatics, narrating their research results and experimental progress, while the security guards — all of them suffering from pathological security paranoia — never let go of their radios and chatter with their colleagues nonstop. If you want to understand the countless elements that spawn in a Darkzone, you have to start by grasping the Darkzone's background."
"You crazy son of a bitch!"
He hurled the blade he'd barely managed to pull free, putting everything he had into the throw — but the man somehow tracked it through the dark and knocked it aside. For a split second the Stalker thought he'd injected some kind of neural-acceleration booster, or maybe he was running a high-end Smartlink implant. The man's reflexes were that good.
The target glanced down at the Steelshot lying on the floor. If he picked it up and came at him with it—
"Who do you take me for, an idiot?"
Contrary to the Stalker's expectations, the man snorted a laugh and kicked the Steelshot aside.
"The Steelshot isn't a weapon that naturally spawns in the Darkzone. It's a purpose-built Stalker weapon manufactured on the outside. If someone whose biometrics don't match grabs it without thinking, the high-pressure gas detonates on the spot."
"...How did you know that?"
"Spent ten years cracking my skull open studying."
"......"
The Stalker had no idea what kind of insane nonsense that was supposed to be, but one thing was certain. That man was not normal. Not that any of the criminals locked up in this prison were — but this one looked infinitely closer to abnormal than any inmate he had ever seen.
Crrrk.
Hidden on the far side of a bookshelf, the Stalker bound his freely bleeding wrist tight with a bandage and prepared his last resort — the card he kept for when a target resisted violently, or for when, like now, the Stalker himself had been driven into a corner.
"Gonna pop a booster? Don't. Those things are expensive. Just leave it in there so it can pad my wallet."
"You son of a bitch, you've been—!"
Shhhunk.
Stung by the blatant mockery, the Stalker jammed the smart-syringe from his small pouch straight into his forearm. His field of vision narrowed slightly. Blood flow accelerated. His heartbeat thundered. Muscle swelled, naturally clamping down on the bleeding sites, and the burning pain dropped to the level of a feather's tickle.
That was the moment. Instead of stepping out in front of his opponent like some amateur, the Stalker threw his full weight into the bookshelf and toppled it. He surged through the suddenly collapsing shelves and the billowing dust — and the man was gone.
Don't tell me he didn't dodge the falling bookshelf?
A man that suspiciously thorough would never do something that stupid. The thought had barely formed when the target erupted from the exact gap in the shelf that the earlier blade had split open — a space so tight you'd have to force an adult man's body through it, smashing through cascading books and still-intact plywood on the way out. The man had calmly accepted that risk with an ordinary human body and used it as a foothold for his counterattack.
"This is why gear advantage is such a beautiful thing."
By the time the Stalker turned around a beat too late, the man was brushing wood splinters off what looked like a homemade exo-suit's metal gauntlets and drawing a machete.
One more second. That was all he needed. Just that much time, and he could make up for his carelessness and his mistakes.
"Guess that's why everyone goes on and on about money."
A span of time too short to even feel.
Shunk.
By a margin of 0.n seconds — barely the blink of an eye — the blade the man thrust punched indifferently through the Stalker's nape. It was the one vital point that neither his protective gear nor the muscles he'd temporarily pumped with the booster could cover.
"Ghk— krrk!"
A blade driven precisely through the place where the most vital vessels, nerves, and bone all passed was more than enough to take everything a human being had. All that remained was a filthy, clinging attachment to life. He couldn't even scream with everything he had to get one last shot in. He couldn't spit a curse loaded with rage and resentment.
Because there was a blade in his throat.
The man walked over quietly and held up an index finger in front of him.
The dead don't talk in the Darkzone. Just as the countless inmates the Stalker had erased had observed the virtue of silence, no questions asked, now it was simply his turn — fair and even.
Through a steadily narrowing field of vision, the Darkzone's darkness rolled in. And when at last the Stalker resigned himself to everything, that darkness gathered him up, gently.
The way it did for everyone.
"Hah! Hah! Fuck! I'm alive! I'm alive!"
Boom! Baaaam!
Inmate number 65522, Kim Pilsang, sprinted with every ounce of strength he had left, paying no mind to the sounds of the facility being torn apart in the distance. As befit a man in the sixty-thousands, he had little Darkzone experience — and yet, even after some unidentified guy had used him as a guide and a meat shield, he'd somehow survived and was now on the verge of escape.
There was jack shit in his backpack, so walking out like this was a guaranteed loss, but he didn't care. Honestly, going back empty-handed was disappointing enough to kill him, but Special Duty was something anyone could apply for, anytime, as often as they wanted. He'd just try again next time.
Yeah. Just try again next time. Hell, with this survival experience under my belt, I might even land better teammates.
It was a hopeless situation, but he ran hard with the most positive mindset he could muster — and at the end of it, Kim Pilsang found an extraction point littered with Glow Sticks.
He remembered this type of exit.
A VIP Extraction Point.
A special exit that inmates with real money in Prison Banking were supposed to use separately. He was pretty sure you had to pay a set amount first via biometric authentication, which, as a broke man, didn't apply to him.
But if someone was already there?
If I'm lucky, I can ride out with them.
And if that first passenger refused to share the ride, well, that was a shame — he'd just use force, roll the guy, and extract in his place.
In that respect, Kim Pilsang was a fairly lucky man. In a situation like this, the only person using the VIP Extraction Point was, astonishingly, a single scrawny inmate he didn't recognize. Even better, the backpack slung over their shoulders was stuffed full of items. A walking gold bar, basically.
And it didn't stop there. Even more astonishing — the extraction point was already open. The other person hadn't extracted yet. They were just standing there blankly, as if waiting for someone.
This is my chance.
If he ambushed that weak-looking punk, took them out, grabbed the fat backpack, and extracted alone? A perfect crime was in the bag, and he couldn't even guess how much the net profit would be.
First, though, he had to put them off their guard.
"H-hey! Hah! Hah! Wait up a second! Let me extract with you!"
Conveniently, his clothes still had bloodstains from when his teammates had been killed, so he played the part of a man who'd just been attacked and closed the distance fast. Just as he'd expected, the other person didn't go on guard. They waited for him, completely exposed, looking almost worried.
Kim Pilsang wasn't about to miss that opening. He was a professional criminal with a shining résumé — special robbery and fatal assault, ten years, officially certified by the Republic of Korea. Granted, his targets had all been women or old people.
Anyway, his signature move seemed to be working this time too.
"Yeah, thanks for waiti— ghk?!"
The instant Kim Pilsang pretended to clutch his shoulder and went to draw the dagger hidden in his sleeve, something punched in under his right ribcage.
"Kids these days work that sloppy, huh?"
"...Huh?"
Crrrk.
The blade sank deeper. Lung and liver tore together, and a hideous pain bloomed. A scream tried to rip out of him on reflex, but the other person seized his Adam's apple in a small hand as he dropped to his knees.
"In Russia, if you'd pulled a job like that, you'd already have been taken apart alive in some back alley."
"Ah— uh— uhhh..."
"If you'd at least come with my partner, I might've brought you along depending on the vibe. Honestly, though — you'd agree this one's on you, right?"
"W-wait—!"
Click.
The moment the person — man or woman, he couldn't tell — pressed the button on the handle of the blade buried in Kim Pilsang's body, ultrasonic vibration spilled from the edge and slowly disassembled him from the inside.
A short while later, the VIP Extraction Point closed. All that remained in front of it was a lump of meat too ruined to recognize as a human shape.