The Pack Mule
If I'd been even a fraction slower just now, I'd be dead for real.
The reason my body had locked up and my mind had gone blank was probably that this flesh was facing a Lightman for the first time. That must have sent my Sanity Gauge plunging and dragged my physical reactions down to a crawl. Without Crazy Clock's timely help, I really would have been in trouble.
Times like this, I genuinely miss not having a status window.
If transmigrators got something like that as a perk, life would have been so much easier. I could have sat there milking the system in real time, watching every buff, every debuff, every exact stat number tick over. The Sanity Gauge was especially infuriating — take your eyes off the number for one second and you'd tumble into a debuff before you even realized it.
There were three major debuffs that kicked in as the gauge dropped. First came Confusion, then Seizure, and finally Loss of Will.
What I'd just gone through had to have been the Confusion Tier. If the gauge had dropped even a little further, I would have gone into Seizure.
Confusion only left you mentally fogged and physically sluggish. Seizure was when you started getting genuinely close to dying. Your field of vision collapsed into a tunnel, your max stamina took a temporary hit, and every weapon's point of aim started drifting all over the place. Get surrounded at that point and even a hardcore veteran would get butchered without mercy.
The final stage, the Loss of Will Tier, slashed your max HP and movement speed so hard you became a helpless grub — nothing but a walking target until you clawed the Sanity Gauge back. That was why most EFD players, myself included, tried to honor the unspoken rule: Silence in the Dark Zone. Every now and then, though, something would catch you completely off guard.
Skritch. Skritch-skritch. The sound of long, thin, impossibly skeletal arms thrashing through the classroom filled the air. Knowing that thing was rummaging through its feeding trough with nothing but a single wall between us made every hair on my body stand on end.
So this school hadn't been wrecked by human hands after all.
I'd dug obsessively through every scrap of EFD's background lore and every stray plot hook, but this was the first time I had come face-to-face with the real thing.
Bang!
Enraged, perhaps, that none of the prey it was hunting was here, the Lightman slammed a fist down into the classroom. Thank God we were on the first floor. Any higher and the floor would have caved in outright.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It was leaving. The thing was moving on, scattering that seductive light through the city's fog in search of some other poor meal wandering lost out there.
"...Hahh."
Only then did I let out the breath I'd been holding. In that brief span, cold sweat had soaked my back, mixing with the fog in the air into something clammy and deeply unpleasant. The cigarettes stashed in my backpack flickered through my mind again. Instead of peeling off the gas mask to light up a Made-in-Dark-Zone cigarette, I shook my head hard and drove the temptation out.
I couldn't say why, but my sixth sense was screaming that I must not take the mask off — not under any circumstances. I checked the oxygen filter again. No airborne contaminants registered at all. I decided to trust a warning from a sixth sense that Alpha Fluid had already enhanced. Besides, this was no time to sit around smoking.
Time to farm.
I could die tomorrow. I still needed to make money. A life spent stuffing my pants and backpack full of loot and strolling out the exit with a dozen threats at my back was a hell of a lot more productive than rotting away as some nobody on death row.
Once I'd shaken the Confusion off completely, I tore through the surrounding classrooms and the faculty-only areas, picking up the pace. High-value stuff — serious gear, classified documents — barely turned up at all. What I did find, oddly enough, were piles of those dark-gleaming medals and little coins I'd already spotted in several classroom lockers. A haul this large meant they had to have an original purpose. Whatever that purpose was, it clearly wasn't functioning now. But if I could find the place they belonged, I might uncover one of this Dark Zone's secrets.
And that secret might just be high-value classified intel.
By the time I'd scoured the fairly sprawling main school building, my backpack was about half full. When I left, I skipped the front and rear gates the same way I'd come in — pulled the Tripwire and climbed the wall. A school crazy enough to string Tripwire along every courtyard wall wasn't about to leave its front and back gates sitting wide open.
Shame I couldn't smell the air here through the gas mask.
What kind of smell filled this clammy, unpleasant fog? The metallic earth-scent after rain? Or something that punched you in the nose? Either way, this was no place for a normal human being to live a normal life.
Come to think of it — not a single vehicle on the road.
In a Dark Zone with this kind of backdrop, you'd expect at least a wreck or two abandoned along the curb. Strangely, the streets were immaculate, as if a sanitation crew had scrubbed every last thing off the asphalt and refused to leave anything behind. The phenomenon only got worse the closer I got to the city center. The little storefronts and houses that occupied the outskirts gradually gave way to taller and taller high-rises. And still the middle of the road was empty — not so much as a scrap of trash or a torn flyer.
If I remembered right, there used to be a decent line of wrecked streetcars and vehicles along these streets.
An empty road meant no cover. Crossing a single block burned through an insane amount of nerve. The fog choking my vision was the real problem — though I also figured that same fog was the only reason my position hadn't been made yet. And that went for the other convicts too.
...Crash!
Knew it.
The sound of something shattering carried from not far off. While I'd been lingering at the school, other convicts must have pushed into the city center a step ahead of me. How many convicts like me were crawling through these buildings and storefronts — and how many threats were crouched in the fog — I didn't even want to guess.
Not that I was about to quit now.
Bailing early would leave my backpack too light, and sitting back to watch meant some other bastard might vacuum up all the expensive loot. What I really couldn't stand, though, was that they weren't even bothering to follow the unspoken rule. Silence in the Dark Zone.
I hugged the wall of the building the noise was coming from and checked the surroundings. Unlike the spotless streets, the area around the entrance was a mess. The convicts had clearly forced their way in, and the fixtures had paid for it.
The Lightman that should have been prowling the city center had somehow pulled aggro onto me out on the outskirts. That was the only reason these idiots had gotten lucky enough to slip in.
Time to collect on those extra lives they'd lucked into.
I stepped into the building they'd so sloppily infiltrated — the kind of place that looked like it should have a name like XX Plaza — and the noise from inside got louder. The rustle of people rummaging hard, the thud of careless footsteps, doors slamming shut and being thrown open. The building's own soundproofing had muffled almost all of it from outside. In here, you barely had to listen to catch every bit of it, amplified.
That was another one of EFD's little charms.
EFD treated outdoor and indoor sound as two different systems. Simple: people inside could barely hear what was happening outside, and people outside could barely hear what was happening inside. It applied to Native Species too, which was exactly why morons like these got the idea that a "safe interior" meant they could afford to get sloppy — when the thing they actually needed to watch for wasn't a Native Species at all. It was a human who'd followed their trail. Someone like me.
Sloppy as they were, there was no way they'd cracked the building's full security. They'd be farming the lower floors, fifth and below.
Which, to be fair, was also the safer play. Sweeping every floor of a high-rise or apartment block was wildly inefficient, and if you got boxed in on an upper floor, escape was a fantasy. And then there was that "security." Past, present, or future — almost every Dark Zone had it. On the small end, a locked safe or a case. On the large end, entrances, bulkheads, and elevators sealed behind elaborate security systems. Farming keys and keycards to punch through those nets was one of a prisoner's main objectives, but...
Bang!
These guys were clearly the type who, when they hit a lock, decided to try brute force first.
"You moron. You think that's gonna open it?"
"If you're not gonna help, shut up and stay out of the way."
"I'm saying don't waste the effort. You'll get a better return just hitting the unlocked areas than screwing around trying to crack one locked door."
"You don't know the expensive stuff is usually behind locked doors and safes? How long are you planning to scrape by selling junk?"
"That junk we busted our asses picking up and selling is the only reason our heads are still attached. This guy's a riot."
"Shut your mouths and get to work. A3, you keep it down too. The building's soundproofing is decent, but a lot of the exterior windows are already busted. Noise could leak."
"Yeah, be careful."
"That goes for you too, A2."
I climbed the emergency stairs carefully to the third floor, and the voices and restless movement from inside came through clearly. Another convict team, just as I'd expected — and, surprisingly, they were calling each other by internal code names.
Fair enough. Criminals weren't about to get cozy with real names, and memorizing those long inmate numbers would have been just as weird.
Making up team code names and keeping the callsigns clean was the smarter move. That, among other things, told me these were a veteran convict team with a decent amount of Dark Zone experience. A hollow laugh almost slipped out at how sloppy a bunch of so-called veterans could be. Then again, I supposed it couldn't be helped. The Dark Zones hadn't been open that long. EFD's main story had barely even started. There were always going to be more green veterans than actual experts.
I wound the Tripwire I'd snipped off at the school around both hands and pulled it taut. Gloves and the Modular Exo-Suit kept my hands from taking any damage.
"Where'd A4 go, anyway?"
"Hell if I know. That idiot wandering off alone isn't exactly new."
"We ought to kick that bastard off the team one of these days."
"Yeah. Cutting him slack only goes so far."
Poor A4. So you were already the doomed pack mule your own teammates were ready to throw away.
Guess I'd better lend a hand.
I struck.
"Ghk?! Ghk—!"
I hit the figure rummaging deep in the third-floor supply closet — A4, most likely — from behind, looped the Tripwire around his throat, and yanked. A knife would have sprayed blood and risked a scream leaking out. This was the cleaner kill. A4 thrashed hard in my arms, then went slack. Just to be sure, I hauled on the Tripwire several more times, hard enough to shatter his cervical spine completely, before I let the tension go.
Three left.