The Walking Lighthouse

The fog lay thick over the modern cityscape, so much like the smog that smothered the world outside that the two might almost have been the same thing.

The difference, such as it was, came down to this: a single lungful of the outside smog would tear your bronchi apart. The fog in here didn't have a toxin in it.

Temperature's... a little low. About the same as the last Darkzone.

The oxygen filter on my special-issue gas mask was working, and so was the Blind Feature built into the goggles.

All things considered, it wasn't a bad start.

The visibility was garbage, which was the biggest mark against the place, but wandering through fog isn't all that different from wandering through a pitch-black cave.

Better this than a cave with nothing worth remembering. At least buildings and street furniture give you landmarks.

When you're dropped into a city you don't recognize, the first way to figure out where you are is to look at what's under your feet.

Ordinary roadway.

It wasn't a four-lane thoroughfare or anything wider. That meant I'd been dropped somewhere the streets ran narrow — either a dense crush of buildings, or well off the main drag.

I've seen this style of sidewalk tile before.

I stepped off the road onto the sidewalk, and a familiar pattern of paving blocks was waiting for me. Those crooked, cereal-shaped tiles had been everywhere around the turn of the millennium. Anything laid after the 2020s tended to be smooth rectangles.

So the theme's set a little further in the past than the era I actually lived in?

Darkzones come in every theme you can name. Near-future, contemporary, historical, fantasy, sci-fi, and on down the list.

In EFD, each theme of Darkzone had its own unique items you could farm, and of course the drop rates on every last one of them varied wildly, which made the whole thing its own content loop. If my memory served, this was an urban map sitting somewhere between historical and contemporary.

The buildings lining the street... mostly shuttered storefronts and residential houses.

They called it a city. Really, it felt like some quiet outskirts neighborhood. Still, that was already a decent handful of clues.

I ducked into a storefront with its windows smashed out and kicked through the junk scattered across the floor. Most of it was soaked through, swollen with moisture — no surprise, given the fog.

I vaulted the counter. A familiar POS register sat there, and cigarette packs were spilled across the floor. This had been a convenience store, then.

Can't read the cigarette brands, of course.

Even a brand name counted as "information," so the Blind Feature on the gas mask goggles blacked it out without mercy. But the automatic censorship couldn't stop me from looking at what was actually inside the pack.

Tssssk.

I tore one open. Twenty cigarettes, still perfectly intact despite sitting here for who knew how long. Leave tobacco sitting too long and it ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠usually browns out, but even wrapped in plastic, I hadn't expected them to look this clean.

Something special in the filler, no question.

In EFD, players could use farmed items on the spot. Hit an event that started chewing through your Sanity Gauge, and you could light up a cigarette you'd farmed yourself, or knock back some liquor — even knowing it would contaminate your airways. Or you could mix your own cocktail of drugs, or try a temporary hormone boost through a Smartlink jacked straight into your brain.

But the real prize was always the variety of effects you got from using items farmed in a Darkzone.

A cigarette like this, for instance — smoke it and your vision brightens for a while, and your Sanity Gauge stops dropping. A stimulant effect.

Sure, there was a minor side effect of respiratory contamination — stamina drain — but a hit of inhaled bronchial rinse took care of that easy enough.

And if it makes money, I don't really care either way.

Yeah. In the end, it always came down to money.

I scooped every cigarette pack off the floor, dumped them into my backpack, and got out of the convenience store in a hurry. No time to check the shelves or the walk-in freezer in back. The windows and the merchandise were already smashed to hell — this place had been a ruin for a long time.

What mattered now was picking a direction...

I advanced based on the direction I'd been dropped in. Prisoners spawned in a ring around the outer edge of the map, and the way you were facing the moment you landed always led toward the center.

So I hugged the buildings and followed the sidewalk, and that was when I ran into a yellow road barrier that suddenly materialized out of the fog in front of the curb. I couldn't read the lettering, but I knew those yellow barriers. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠School zone. I'd spawned pretty close to a school, then.

Sure enough, another ten meters or so and a high wall enclosing a school came into view. It wasn't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the bright, cheerful school wall you'd see in the real world. This one was a nasty mess of ivy and withered trees jutting out like spikes.

From here, it was time to pick and commit. Use the exo-suit to force my way over the wall and search the school — or blow past it and head for the center of the map.

Option one: start farming right at the spawn point and aim for a faster extract. Option two: take on a little more risk for the really good loot, then get out.

I was the kind of unhinged bastard who did both.

My backpack is starving. That's reason enough.

Why sit there agonizing over whether to drink chocolate milk or stir Nesquik into regular milk? Just dump the Nesquik into the chocolate milk.

I borrowed the exo-suit's power, scaled the three-meter wall in one go, hacked through the clinging vines and branches, and landed clean on the other side.

I could have just used the front or back gate like a normal person, but you never take the obvious at face value in a Darkzone. The way a hunter sets traps on the trails the animals always use, Darkzones hide surprise risks inside the things prisoners take for granted.

Like the Tripwire sitting silently in front of me right now, using the fog as camouflage.

"Yeah. Figured they'd at least plan for someone coming over the wall."

Who'd set these? A prisoner who'd gotten here before me? Something that used to live here? Or maybe just an environmental feature the Darkzone spawned when it generated the map.

I carefully snipped the Tripwires strung irregularly between the trees and the fence with a portable cutter. The taut wire snapped, and a thin ping flicked through the air.

If they'd hung cans or glass bottles on the line, I would have aborted the whole intrusion and backed out immediately. Luckily, they weren't that vicious.

The interior of the school, now that I'd properly broken in, could be summed up in one line.

Gloomy as hell.

Not that any building in this kind of setting wouldn't be gloomy — but a school drowned in this fog took it to another level. The closer I got to the main building, the more I could see: classroom windows smashed into ugly jagged holes, ruined flower beds.

I swept the glass shards off a first-floor windowsill and climbed through, and the mess inside was exactly what I'd expected. For some reason a mountain of wrecked desks and chairs was piled in the corner, and the center of the classroom was covered in dark, grimy stains.

But even a place like ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this spawned items properly. This was a Darkzone, after all.

I started popping open lockers and cabinets that hadn't been crushed yet, and every so often various material items would tumble out. The odds were vanishingly low, but sometimes something would appear that had no business being in a student's locker.

From among the low-value junk I picked out a medal and some coins, neither of which I could identify a use for. The medal had clearly been made to hang around the neck of someone with outstanding grades, but I couldn't tell what metal it was even looking at it. Not gold, silver, or bronze — the colors you'd expect. It was a near-black metallic medal.

The coins were equally unclear in purpose and material, but I found a lot more of those than medals. Whether they'd been a fad among the students here, or something used all over this school or this whole city, I had no idea. All I knew was that EFD classified items like these as exchange items.

I already found out that high-value items from recent Darkzone runs sell for way more than I expected — but I still haven't located an NPC who'll actually trade these exchange items.

In EFD, from year three onward, Vladimir Borshch and the prison management AI handled most of those trades. Which meant that until year three, every player had to dump this stuff as miscellaneous junk without ever knowing what it was.

I wanted to just throw it away. You never know, though. I decided to take it with me.

I was about to keep searching when—

Zzzt...

My sensitive hearing picked up noise leaking from a speaker mounted on the classroom ceiling. Hadn't the power been cut a long time ago?

A voice that sounded like Korean and also didn't — something distinctly uncanny about it.

Something was happening.

Something was there.

Something was coming.

...Thud. Thud. Thud.

Through a window smashed down to the last shard, I locked onto a massive light source cutting through the fog, closing in on this place step by step.

"......"

I'd seen that light somewhere before. Where was it.

...A lighthouse?

Yeah. A lighthouse. That precious beacon on a fog-choked coast, guiding ships so they wouldn't lose their way, so they wouldn't wreck. The enormous light source hanging in the air, thudding closer, looked exactly like a lighthouse that had learned to walk.

"Shit!"

At Crazy Clock's warning — like a needle jabbed straight into my brain — I bolted out into the hallway and took cover. Was this how those old wuxia swordsmen felt, hurling themselves to the dirt in a sloppy falling-leaf roll? No. It couldn't possibly get more humiliating than this.

I clutched my chest and forced my breathing steady, trying to bring down a pulse that had spiked like crazy in a split second. Yeah. Now I remembered properly.

Lightman...!

Thud. Thud.

It stood maybe ten meters tall, with a frame far too thin for that height — and of course it was a primordial that roamed the Darkzone. The thing showed up a lot in modern-city-themed Darkzones, but most of them clustered in the downtown core at the center of the map. You almost never ran into one on the outskirts.

Which is why I'd forgotten about it, even if only for a moment. Who the hell would expect one to make a beeline straight for this place?

If it spots me, I'm fucked.

It was one of the more infamous primordials in the Darkzone. A Screamer at least had a counterplay — it reached out with tentacles to lock onto a prisoner, then screamed loud enough to pull every primordial in the area. Brutal, but you could work around it.

This goddamn telephone pole of a thing, though — the second its searchlight locked onto a user, it would close the distance at insane speed, snatch them up in those long, thin hands, and tear them apart on the spot. That was Pattern A.

If it failed to grab you, it immediately switched to Pattern B and pointed the searchlight at the sky. Other primordials, seeing that warning flare, would come flooding in by the dozens. Objectively more dangerous than a Screamer.

Whoooom.

"......!"

The searchlight's bright beam swept past the classroom windows and through the open door. Pressed against the wall in the dark hallway, I forgot how to breathe and just rolled my eyes left and right.

Unlike a Screamer, this thing actually had functional hearing. No sense of smell, which was about the only mercy.

Crack. Zzzt.

Then a long, thin arm reached into the classroom I'd just been ransacking. A skeletal arm like a rotten tree branch rummaged around inside, then poked through the gap of the door I'd come out of.

But those sickening fingers never snatched me. However long its limbs were, they couldn't sweep all the way from the outer windows into the inner hallway.

Watching the hand slither back out empty-handed, I suddenly thought of the wall I'd just come over. The Tripwires strung haphazardly around that wall. Maybe they hadn't been meant to stop intruders at all.