One-Stop Shopping
The concept of shopping existed long before capitalist systems ever took root in human society. But like most members of the male species, I had absolutely no desire to wander a store for hours, browsing for the sheer pleasure of it.
What did I care what ingredients were in the shampoo I grabbed, or what miraculous effects it claimed to have? Cheap and plentiful—that was a man's shopping philosophy. Toss it in the basket and move on. And if you happened to possess the ability to tell every bait product from the real thing, you could just pluck exactly what you wanted and be done, without a moment's hesitation.
As it happened, I had that ability.
First I need to craft the consumables I'll need for Dark Zone exploration. Anything you requisition through the prison is overpriced, and the stuff they sell isn't even that effective.
I pushed my cart through aisles stacked high with every kind of merchandise. And let me say it again: this was a prison.
"This goes in. Not time to buy this yet. This one too."
"That's a pretty niche selection. For adhesive skin patches, Medician Corp's products are better than Control Corp's."
"Medician products are more stable, sure, but their absorption efficiency is worse. More importantly, stop putting weird stuff in other people's carts. Want me to call security?"
"I'm a VIP at this store, so I don't really care if you call security."
"Then I'll report you for sexual harassment."
"Why?"
"You just groped my cart."
I slapped the back of Lee Sena's hand—she had, after all, followed me all the way into the shop—and peeled her off, then put the Medician adhesive patch she'd dropped in my cart right back on the shelf.
She didn't seem to mind in the slightest. Rubbing the back of her hand, she inspected every last item I'd piled into the cart, one by one.
"You're buying adhesive patches to make emergency regen patches, aren't you?"
"You know your stuff."
"For someone who talks about efficiency, that's not a particularly impressive thing to be making. You're trying to put together a skin-regen patch, right? But that's just a substitute for regen ointment and a compression bandage. The limitations are painfully obvious."
The cost-effectiveness was worse than you'd expect, too, she added. She was definitely a STEM type—she knew a surprising amount about this kind of thing.
The problem was that she knew one thing and not the second.
"Adhesive patches you can stick on any part of the body have all kinds of uses. Depending on the situation, they can even save you at a critical moment."
"For example?"
"The whole point is that you can deliver chemicals into the body through the skin instead of through fragile mucous membranes. Doesn't that open up endless possibilities?"
"…Ah."
Drugs administered through mucous membranes tend to be fast and decisive—but a lot of them are just as dangerous. You only had to look at what happened to junkies who snorted white powder up their noses and then fell apart later. The human mucous membrane was never meant to be used that way.
"If it's an adhesive patch designed to go on skin, that already means it's passed a minimum safety check. In that case, you might as well go with the higher-efficiency option."
"That's a fair point. But how do you know all this, Inmate? That's not the kind of knowledge a regular prisoner would have."
So she was calling me Inmate now, since I wasn't currently her customer. Her mood swung so wildly I could never quite get a handle on it.
I couldn't exactly tell her I'd spent ten years chewing through, tearing apart, tasting, and thoroughly enjoying every last system in this game, so I deflected.
"This much knowledge is the bare minimum if you want to survive on the outside. In a world that'll steal your nose right off your face, 'I don't know' isn't just ignorance—it's practically a crime. You were probably the same before you ended up in here, weren't you?"
"That's not wrong. Even so, your knowledge is clearly… off. Were you a pharmacist in a past life? Or did you work at a defense contractor's lab?"
"Do you really think the kind of nerds who spend all day in a lab could end up with a body like mine without implant assistance?"
I flexed my forearm without thinking, and Sena leaned in with glittering eyes to study the muscle in unnerving detail. I got self-conscious and hurried us along.
This wasn't even really my body, if you wanted to get technical about it. Showing off felt a little ridiculous.
Besides, I still had a lot to buy. Working my way through the store was a job in itself.
The real shock is that this is only the first floor.
Vladimir's General Store sold the most basic sundries, tools, and raw materials on the first floor, and bought whatever you were looking to offload. The genuinely dangerous finished products lived on the second floor, where you could place custom orders or pick them out yourself.
In other words, the first floor was still the section where Borscht treated you like a greenhorn.
Sena, chattering away at my side without a pause, was a VIP—and even she was only cleared as far as the second floor.
VVIP rank was the third floor, and the Prison Breaker rank was access to the fourth, wasn't it?
I swept items into the cart with one hand while that thought rolled through my head. The goods I'd already piled up were worth a good two million won, and it still wasn't enough.
Once I unlock the chemistry lab and bring in a fridge and a freezer, I'll be burning through money like water and still coming up short.
EFD promised its users the maximum possible freedom (PVP competition notwithstanding). You could gear up with every broken item and stat in the game and dive into the Dark Zone, or you could go in broke on a naked axe-run. It was a game that actively encouraged you to use any means necessary in the name of having a good time, and you could see how much blood, sweat, and tears had gone into the crafting system in particular.
So all I was doing was unlocking the content a little faster than everyone else.
"Wow, you really loaded up. Are you actually buying all of this? If you were going to spend this much, you should've just dropped some money at my shop."
"Buying materials and making what I need is a lot more cost-effective than buying finished products. You make most of what you need yourself, don't you?"
"Every product in here can ultimately be replaced by one of my Cuties. Cuties can do anything."
"I'm sure they can."
Then maybe she should have charged the exo-suit Cutie properly from the start. Of course, if I pointed that out she'd latch on and refuse to let go, so I zipped my mouth shut and headed for the register.
The surest way to keep a shopping trip from dragging on is to not pick a fight with the woman who came shopping with you.
More to the point—why had this woman followed me here in the first place?
"Let's check out. Apply the coupons."
I waved the bundle of coupons I'd taken as spoils after wrecking the buzz-cut thug from the Gwangsu Family who'd blocked my path last time. The clerk behind the counter—a prisoner, naturally—seemed to recognize where the coupons had come from. He offered an awkward, tight-eyed smile and started working the register.
That was when a racket erupted outside the entrance.
"Out of the way, you fat bastards!"
"Don't you know who we are? We're the Gwangsu Family, you sons of bitches!"
"We've been nice about it because you paid your protection fees on time—and you dare get in our way?"
"You really wanna die?!"
The greatest advantage of a prison is that you can eavesdrop on just about any information without much effort. The greatest disadvantage is that even if the noise from the other floors drives you into a nervous breakdown, nobody's going to prescribe you antidepressants.
I was starting to think the reason even this fictional dystopian Korea hadn't legalized firearms was the fear that SCVs would start slaughtering each other without a shred of lingering resentment. That was exactly how I felt right now.
"Any chance of an extra discount if I quiet things down outside? I'll write you a great review."
"…Ah, I'm sorry, but I don't think that's going to be possible."
"I think you're going to want to make it possible. A pack of puppies who don't know their place are about to come charging into a tiger's den."
I put a little pressure on the clerk, but even as the cold sweat beaded on his forehead, he didn't call anyone. He just kept sneaking glances at the CCTV mounted in the ceiling above the counter.
At that point, even I could take a hint.
"Haa. What a stickler, I swear."
"What are you going to do? This time they look like they came ready for a fight, unlike last time."
"They say you avoid shit because it's dirty—but idiots don't go away just because you avoid them."
The old saying went that a beating was the only medicine that worked on two-legged animals. And judging by the fact that the guards hadn't issued a riot-suppression order, they seemed to think this was just a simple inmate scuffle.
Which meant nobody was going to give me grief for roughing them up a little.
"I'm taking out the trash for you, so this is on the house, right?"
"……"
I offered the speechless clerk that purely perfunctory, liability-dodging remark, then started grabbing merchandise off the shelves.
I didn't have Sena's formidable engineering knowledge or her gifted hands, but I knew exactly which combinations produced which crafted items. Sena, for her part, didn't seem inclined to help. She just folded her arms and watched what I was making with bright, curious eyes.
Doing this, I almost feel like MacGyver.
Back in the real world I wasn't a prodigy. Hell, I wasn't even a competent hobbyist—just a garden-variety nobody. In this world, though, some strange force let me take the knowledge and experience I already had and turn whatever I pictured into reality.
The result: in a matter of minutes, I had a handmade Steelshot—the kind Stalkers favored—ready to go.
Its performance was far worse than the mass-produced models the Stalkers used, of course, but it was more than enough for now. All that was left was to rig a box packed with awls the size of railroad spikes onto it as a makeshift magazine.
No status window flickered into view in front of my eyes. But if one had, I imagined it would have read something like this:
You have successfully crafted a Steelshot (R+)!
BOOM!
Right on cue, the idiots who'd bullied their way past two brown bears on nothing but sheer numbers came crashing in—and ran straight into me.
There had to be dozens of them, and every last one was clutching something ugly: blades, hand axes, the works. A handful of them, the ones who looked like officers, were even carrying handmade pipe pistols—probably meant for intimidation, or as a last-ditch act of desperation.
I'd heard that in prison, if you just had the right materials, you could make just about anything. I just hadn't expected them to already be manufacturing firearms in secret.
What a shame.
"You guys can't pull a trigger, can you?"
I can.
PANG! PANG! PANG! PANG!
"Gyaaaaaaah!"
"The fuck is that?!"
"D-don't push me!"
"Holy shit! That bastard's got a g—!"
At its most generous, the homemade Steelshot had about as much punch as a shop tool driving a spike clean through plywood. That was more than enough to punch through a human body. The thick awls I poured into the first wave of thugs charging in so full of themselves punched neatly through skin that wasn't protected by implants or cheap armor.
Punching through a sturdy skull still looked like a tall order, so I aimed for the weak points that were most lethal on a prisoner. The eyes. The nape of the neck. And the groin.
Wherever they landed, they guaranteed a critical wound. In some cases, a single hit was enough to take someone out of the fight entirely.
Hissss!
I tossed aside the portable high-compression oxygen tank as its contents ran dry and slotted a fresh one into the tube. It wasn't as fast as reloading a gun, but with them stumbling over each other in confusion, I had more than enough time.
"Hey! Just push through! We only gotta ice that one bastard!"
"Uwaaaaaaah!"
Of course, I couldn't stop them from using their own people as meat shields and shoving forward anyway. I kept squeezing the Steelshot's trigger at a measured pace and, with my foot, kicked over a display piled high with crafting materials.
Bolts, nuts, nails, and thumbtacks cascaded across the floor, scattering in every direction and turning the aisle into a minefield in seconds. Those adorable little mines, spilled across the smooth tile, sent the ones charging in mindlessly staggering off-balance—or writhing in pain.
"Ghk— hhnnngh…!"
"Wait! There's weird shit all over the floor!"
"Shut up and push through!"
How had idiots like this been running Cell Block H-088?
Had they really just piled in with raw numbers and seized the local rackets that way? Or were H-088's concessions smaller than I'd thought, and the other factions simply hadn't been interested?
Either way, it didn't suit them. They say great power comes with great responsibility. If the best method Gwangsu had managed to wring out of that tiny skull of his was this, then for everyone's sake, it was only fair I take even that meager responsibility off his hands.
Separately, and purely to register a small complaint with the stubborn old bastard who was no doubt watching this entire spectacle on the CCTV, I went down the aisles and furiously overturned every last display shelf in reach.
I'm not as patient a man as I like to think.