Natural-Born Predator
A world drowning in runaway technological progress, reckless energy consumption, a chasm of wealth so wide it split society in two, and power gathered into fewer and fewer hands was always going to slam into some kind of wall. Environmental collapse breeding freak weather, livestock and crops dwindling before your eyes, glaciers sloughing off into a rising sea — disasters of that familiar sort.
Of course, those petty inconveniences meant nothing to the people who actually had money and connections. They owned the soaring towers that formed the skylines of the cutting-edge cities of the 2040s, and they ate fresh produce and livestock raised on smart farms. Trivial diseases had been conquered by state-of-the-art medicine a long time ago.
Which left one question hanging in the air.
What, exactly, were they still chasing money and power for?
"Instinct. Stamped into the DNA."
A man standing at the heart of a cavernous monitor room — a wall of CCTV feeds so numerous they defied counting — muttered the words in a voice drained of all color.
This was a vast underground space beneath the General Store he ran, a place he had never opened to a single customer. Down here, a man named Vladimir Borshch was another kind of power entirely — one that reached into every corner of Seoul Southern Prison.
"Boss. Just like you ordered — we baited the Gwangsu Family into storming the main shop."
"I can see that. The moths, flying straight into the flame."
Faint wrinkles creased a face mapped with old scars, but beneath them sat the kind of dense, hard muscle even a man in his prime would have envied. One eye — a cybernetic implant — flicked rapidly across the bank of CCTV screens. The other drifted, unhurried, through a volume of classical literature.
The great Russian masterpieces, the ones that were always said to surface whenever an age of hardship and adversity, despair and regret, ruin and chaos came crashing down. That kind of age had arrived again. It was about time a new masterpiece showed itself.
"The rumors weren't lies after all."
The Super Rookie. An Orange — a death-row inmate — who had streaked across the prison like a comet roughly two weeks ago. He was still a kid who hadn't even hit thirty, and yet everything he did was one astonishment after another.
True to the lucky inmate number stamped on him — 77777 — he had hauled in a fortune on his first Special Duty. On the second, he had shaken off a Stalker the Gwangsu Family sent after him and smashed the profit record all over again.
If that had been the end of it, Vladimir might have written it off as beginner's luck. But when word reached him that the kid had started paying protection money to the prison administration — the first real step toward expanding his own cell, his own faction — Vladimir Borshch knew, in his gut, that this was no ordinary convict.
An ordinary prisoner, locked inside the closed, crushing machinery of a prison, learned compliance first. He started watching the people around him, desperate to survive, and eventually crawled into a group of his own free will — trading one set of chains for another, just to be shielded from threats no single man could ever face alone.
Vladimir Borshch had seen too many of those dull, forgettable types. Far too many.
And then this Super Rookie had appeared out of nowhere, and that was more than enough to set a long-cold passion burning again.
"Boss, the merchandise on the first floor is taking a beating. Shouldn't we put a stop to this soon?"
"A few trinkets get smashed. Does that throw my shop into chaos?"
"...I misspoke."
"People say the world is all about results. What actually matters is the process. So watch that kid fight. Watch how one man takes on a pack. Watch how little the word prisoner really means. Burn it into your eyes."
Fools looked only at the outcome, then congratulated or disappointed themselves on a whim, and learned nothing. A man who had truly understood took his lessons from the process. Learn the lesson, and you stop making the same mistake. Stop making mistakes, and you stop failing.
And if you never fail?
Nothing waits for you but brilliant success.
Just like that.
KA-BOOM!
In a move that still managed to surprise, the Super Rookie detonated a portable oxygen tank, kicking off a tight, vicious little explosion. The instant the Gwangsu Family reeled from the shrapnel, he charged straight into them.
Then he put them down with a homemade Steelshot, putting every flechette through an eye or the nape of a neck — the kind of vital points that ended a fight on contact. Even that had a limit. He tossed the Steelshot aside soon enough. It hardly mattered. The floor was littered with things to grab and swing: weapons his opponents had dropped, merchandise of Vladimir's own scattered everywhere.
Vladimir Borshch clicked his tongue in something close to awe. The Super Rookie's fighting style was savage and polished at once, the kind of thing that called a veteran mercenary to mind. Vladimir's eyes caught it clearly: the kid moved on instinct, and thought with cold reason the entire time.
You usually only saw movement like that from veteran soldiers and mercs who had cut their teeth in wars between nations and global megacorps. And according to every scrap of intel Vladimir had, the Super Rookie on those screens was a pure human — no implants, no Smartlink, no booster drugs on a regular cycle.
The Purists, those rare relics in an age like this, lived lives that looked something like that, didn't they?
But this one is in a completely different league from those backward idiots.
Every motion said he knew, better than anyone, how to put a human being down with maximum efficiency — and exactly how far his own body could be pushed. Vladimir had heard rumors of a certain corporation that secretly gathered orphans, locked them in a special facility, and raised them from childhood into living weapons. There was none of that manufactured quality in the Super Rookie. None at all.
A natural-born predator, through and through.
My eye never lies.
Whirr. Whiiirr.
The specialized cybernetic eye Ted Chan had fitted him with worked overtime, breaking the Super Rookie's rampage across a dozen screens down to the frame. When that kid of unknown origin, unknown identity, unknown purpose had first sent word that he could meet your customers' needs, Vladimir had found it almost laughable.
Now he was grateful he hadn't laughed him out the door. If he had written the boy off as a lunatic and barred him from the shop, he would never have gotten to watch a spectacle like this.
"It's over."
Before he quite realized it, the champion stood alone in a colosseum smeared with blood and scraps of flesh. And now it was time for the emperor of this place — which was to say, himself — to offer his congratulations.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
Maybe this was what happened when you made a body do things it hadn't done in a while. I dragged my breathing back under control, feeling every muscle that a stretch of rest had left slack now pulled taut to the breaking point.
Bodies lay all around me — some moaning, some that would never open their eyes again. I tossed the dripping blade aside without looking. It punched neatly into the gut of the man lying right where it landed. A single choked groan, and another life went out.
Whatever. This was Vladimir Borshch's sovereign territory. The guards' eyes didn't reach here anyway.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
I turned toward the dry, measured applause and found Lee Sena standing there, eyes shining the way they always did.
"I saw you last time, but you really do fight well. Is that why you turned down the self-defense gear?"
"Your self-defense gear just isn't my style. More importantly — you're still here?"
"I had to confirm just how outstanding the engineering knowledge of our shop's future VIP customer really is."
That's just a mountain of playtime talking, but sure.
I flicked the homemade weapon out of my hand. Whenever I'd had a spare second in the middle of the fight, I had grabbed whatever was in reach and cobbled it into something that could pass for a weapon. Apparently that had left quite an impression on Lee Sena.
Whether the eccentric inventor's affection meter for me had gone up or not was beside the point. What I actually wanted was to get back to my cell, finish the crafting I'd left hanging, and eat a bowl of jajangmyeon.
If only some idiot hadn't come crashing through the shop entrance I had already wrecked once.
BANG!
You've got to be kidding me.
One look told me everything. A swaggering thug type, pissed off to the point of combustion, came in with a pistol in his hand and a fresh mob of goons at his back. He had already thrown that many men at me, and he still had this many left to call up. Claiming Cell Block H-088 as his turf apparently hadn't been empty bragging after all.
"You Gwangsu?"
"Yeah. I'm Gwangsu, you son of a bitch."
"If you were coming anyway, why not bring everyone at once? Why drip-feed them in and waste my time? Even Sun Tzu wrote that feeding troops in piecemeal is a waste of a campaign."
"Sun Tzu, Sun whatever — don't you even think you're walking out of here in one piece today."
Gwangsu snarled and leveled his gun at me. The men flanking him drew real firearms — actual, proper guns — and aimed them my way. The ones I had already wrecked had been packing cheap homemade pistols at best, and they hadn't even been able to shoot straight.
The ones who had come in with Gwangsu were a different breed. Elite officers, high enough in the syndicate that their eyes and their body language didn't so much as flicker. They knew what it meant to fire live rounds inside a prison, and they had brought real guns anyway. That meant they were itching to put me in the ground.
Not that I can blame them. The losses I've put them through must be astronomical.
A lot of their men were down. The syndicate's reputation was in tatters. On top of that, the fee they had paid to hire a Stalker had gone up in smoke. From the Gwangsu Family's point of view, there was no road back.
The fact that a whole organization had been driven this far by a single person almost made me snort. Separate from that, though, I was ready to wrap up this tedious little farce.
"Idiot."
"The fuck did you just— you have any idea what kind of situation you're in right now—"
"If you were planning to go all-out from the start, you should have stopped me from walking into this shop."
He seemed to be under some kind of delusion just because Cell Block H-088 was his turf. This place was extraterritorial ground — even that vicious Warden acknowledged it.
Did he seriously not understand why Vladimir Borshch only took prisoners he had personally approved as customers?
At his core, that man is an entertainer. A Merchant of Death who sells gear so he can wring content out of convicts who will all, sooner or later, get thrown into the Darkzone whether they like it or not.
And who bought the content he wrung out of them? Painfully obvious. The rulers of the outside world — people drowning in money, power, and time, while new stimulation grew scarcer by the day.
The owners of those soaring skyscrapers. Absolute powers who could decide a nation's rise or fall with a flick of the wrist. Spectators drawn to the new show called the Darkzone, happily tossing bait that happened to be named prisoner.
We had just raised hell in the establishment of the man who brokered all of that. Which meant it was about time the shopkeeper exercised his lawful rights.
Like so.
Vrrrrrrrrm.
"Wh— what...?"
"Boss! That thing—!"
"Holy shit! Why the hell is something like that in here?!"
Above my head, a ceiling panel slid open, and what descended was an automated turret mounted with a twenty-millimeter autocannon.
"Ah. Almost forgot the earplugs."
My eardrums are precious, after all.
A heartbeat later, a terrifying roar of gunfire, a bone-deep shudder, and the savage heat of burning powder crashed down over a pack of puppies who had charged into a tiger's den on nothing but numbers.