Clearly Anomalous
The situation resolved itself in an instant. In the space of a blink, an "unfortunate accident" had swept Gwangsu and every last member of his organization clean off the map.
This was no prosperous man's funeral, the deceased resting easy behind a folding screen while incense drifted through the air. The Gwangsu Family had been reduced to a handful of meat scraps in a haze of gunpowder — a fate so wretched it circled all the way around to pitiable.
There was nothing I could have done about it. Nobody had gotten down on their knees and begged them to play tough in Vladimir Borshch's sovereign territory. They'd brought this on themselves. People who know their place receive treatment to match. People who don't pay a price to match.
So his boys had been standing by after all.
The autocannons had barely finished mowing down the Gwangsu Family when Slavic gangsters poured out of the shop and in from the street. I clicked my tongue. They set about cleaning the slaughterhouse without so much as a flicker of expression, as if this weren't the first time, or the tenth. The whole spectacle was so grotesque, so unreal, that my craving for a bowl of jjajangmyeon took about a fifty-percent hit.
I pulled out my earplugs, walked back to the counter, and stood in front of the clerk, who was still frozen solid.
"So how far does that discount go?"
"Uh, well..."
"Give it to him for free."
The deep, resonant voice from the back nearly put a smile on my face. I fought it down with everything I had.
"The merchandise I wrecked has to be worth a small fortune all by itself. And you're still giving it to me free?"
"You handed me a pretext to peel off a troublesome leech. At that price, I consider it a bargain."
I turned my head slowly. A man stood there, flanked by underlings armed as heavily as any prison guard.
Vladimir Borshch.
The classic old lion — a born merchant who had survived every dirty trick in the book and then jumped into this filthy trade of his own free will. In EFD, you needed a General Store access permit plus a handful of finicky quests just to see him in the flesh. This time, though, the rather memorable performance I'd put on seemed to have been the trigger. He'd come down in person, the cleanup included.
"Well, I won't pretend I liked them either, so I'm not looking to take much credit. If anything, you got tangled up in my personal business. Appreciate you putting it so generously."
"Modest. But there's no need to sell yourself short. We'll be seeing a great deal of each other from here on, won't we?"
"That's true enough. And if you're offering it free, I won't refuse."
None of the goods carried a legal certification stamp — nothing that could circulate above-board in this country. I had no interest in becoming the kind of pain-in-the-ass who nitpicked that sort of thing. Least of all in a prison.
"That's quite a pile of merchandise. I'll have someone deliver it separately to Cell Block H-050."
"This place really is the after-sales king. You running a review event too?"
"We're in a line of work that tiptoes the line between legal and not, so unfortunately, no. Come by often, though, and I'll throw in a little extra."
I gave a low whistle — a sideways compliment to the man's open-handedness. I'd have loved it if he'd unlocked second-floor access for me while he was at it, but asking for that much felt like a cheap hustle, so I kept my mouth shut. For now, I could be satisfied with having left a good impression on the man who was, for all intents and purposes, the godfather of every Slav in this place.
"Incidentally — what do you plan to do from here?"
The gathering had been winding down, and I'd been about to head back to my own cell block when he tossed out the extra question with no warning at all. He'd already paid a surcharge, in a manner of speaking. I couldn't very well refuse to answer.
"Nothing much different from what I've been doing. I'll do my job."
"And that job would be?"
"As you already know, my goal is to take part in the Dark— in Special Duty. Pretty much every convict who wants to keep his lifeline plugged in is after the same thing."
The academic term hadn't been established yet, so I used Special Duty. Before long, though, corporate scientists and government-hired scholars would officially name the extradimensional space connected beneath our feet the Darkzone.
"Most convicts are so afraid of dying they hesitate to even apply for Special Duty. You, on the other hand, signed up the moment you were processed. Any particular reason?"
"I figured out how this place works on day one. For a death-row inmate like me, Special Duty is the only way to survive here."
Of course, there was another path — build your own faction, fleece fellow convicts, live off "tribute," and stretch your lifespan that way. But I didn't have the foundation for an independent faction, and I sure as hell didn't have a powerful backer. All I knew how to do was run the Darkzone on an infinite grind. Faction? What faction.
With a body this high-spec, I'd be better off looping the Darkzone even harder. Spending my days brawling with other inmates was just inefficient. I'd cleared out the Gwangsu Family because they'd been in my way. I had not the faintest, greasiest scrap of intention of taking over this district.
Manage every entertainment joint on the block, keep a small army of underlings, check rival factions, and still have to watch the prison administration's face?
I'd rather just go into the Darkzone.
Maybe he'd read the intent in my tone. Vladimir Borshch didn't press any further. If I'd used his organization from the start as a tool to wipe out the Gwangsu Family and then swallow their vacant turf as a lucky fisherman's prize, he would have disposed of me on the spot. I knew the man well. Too well, if anything.
"I'll be heading out, then. I need to get ready for the next Special Duty."
"If you bring back anything from Special Duty that's cleared for prison import, I'll handle it here. I'll give you a fair price. More than fair."
"Works for me. Oh — I didn't use the coupon, so I'll take that back."
I reclaimed the discount coupon I'd handed the clerk and hurried out of Cell Block H-088 before anyone could grab me. Lee Sena, in particular, had looked ready to latch on more than once. I picked up the pace.
The instant the man responsible for the mess disappeared, Vladimir Borshch tossed a casual question at the woman standing beside him.
"So. What's your take, Miss Eccentric Inventor?"
"Don't call me eccentric. I have a perfectly good name my parents gave me."
"That... Cutie of yours? The one you build from the materials you regularly buy at our shop? Everyone who buys one calls you that."
"That's because those idiots don't understand the true value of our Cuties. I barely even take a margin when I sell them...!"
"Setting that aside — back to the point. What's your assessment?"
When Vladimir Borshch analyzed someone, he tended to be ruthlessly objective — marketability and utility, nothing else. From an entertainer's standpoint, he judged how well they'd sell: star power. From a merchant's standpoint, he calculated how thoroughly he could wring them dry: profitability.
Lee Sena used a different lens. She analyzed only the data in front of her. With those eyes of hers — better than anyone's.
"Oho. I didn't expect the young man to earn that kind of evaluation from you."
"You felt it too, didn't you? A normal convict would never act like that. Couldn't act like that."
"It's already been established he isn't a normal convict, so that statement has a flaw."
"No — he is ordinary. Just a little stronger than most, a little quicker upstairs. He doesn't have some special bloodline, and he hasn't put a knife to his own body the way we have. So I looked into whether he belonged to some special organization before he got here. He didn't. It's like he just dropped out of the sky one day."
"A man like that wouldn't have been sentenced to death and locked up in this place."
"That's exactly why he's anomalous."
Lee Sena chewed on a grease-blackened fingertip, her expression one of genuine frustration.
"What's most anomalous, honestly, is his attitude."
"Attitude? I'll grant you, it wasn't the attitude a convict usually shows people like us."
It was a little awkward to say out loud, but the clients who came to Ted Chan, Lee Sena, and Vladimir Borshch were all heavyweights. Lesser customers did drop by now and then when they'd lucked into a decent payday, but anyone who wasn't in their league usually wilted in front of them.
"From the first time he set foot in this district, he acted like he already knew everything. Like a walking lump of confidence, one hundred percent certain of every word and every move. He's not just some screw-loose lunatic."
"An interesting perspective. And that's why a man like that is so obsessed with a mad enterprise like Special Duty?"
"That's a little different too. He says he does Special Duty to survive, but the way I read it, there's something he actually wants."
If it was money he wanted, building a faction of his own would have gotten him that easily enough. The hunks of meat that had just been hauled off to the incinerator were proof — once they'd started making real money off the entertainment trade, they'd stopped bothering with Duty altogether. And yet he insisted on Special Duty? Solo, with no faction backing him? Just as Lee Sena said, the odds were high that he was after something you could only get by doing Special Duty.
"And the goods he just bought — I watched from the side. Most of it was raw materials for equipment and consumables he can fabricate himself."
"Now that you mention it, his engineering literacy was astonishing."
Who would have predicted that a man in the middle of a fight would start cobbling weapons out of whatever junk was lying around? The only person who could actually pull that off was probably Lee Sena, standing right there.
"It's not just engineering. He seemed to know his chemistry too."
"That's another surprise. So that's why he bulk-ordered all those chemical reagents and disposable smart syringes?"
"He's going to build his own gear and consumables for Special Duty. I'm certain of it."
Something stirred inside Vladimir Borshch at Lee Sena's words. Star power. Profitability. And now, on top of both, scarcity.
That Super Rookie was tailor-made to satisfy the clients outside who were waiting, breathless, for his "product." The Warden had already floated a quiet suggestion — new directives were coming down from the Korean government soon, so why not expand the business while they were at it?
Push more convicts into Special Duty. Monopolize the rare extradimensional goods they brought back. And stockpile enough "product" capturing every varied highlight of those convicts drawing their last breath...
His enterprise would explode on a scale that made the current operation look like a lemonade stand. Overflowing wealth. Power he couldn't even hold in both hands. Just imagining it sent a shiver through him.
"Then we'll watch him for a while and verify. If that young man is the kind of person you've analyzed him to be, he'll end up tangled up with people like us more often anyway."
"Eccentrics recognize their own, after all."
With that, Vladimir Borshch settled in to wait, unhurried, for the blood wind that would soon sweep through this prison. In a hell you could never escape, the more death and suffering piled up, the more byproduct there was to collect.
As the old Korean saying went — they just needed to watch the ritual and eat the rice cakes.