Silence in the Dark Zone
Choi Young-man, who held the code name A1 on the exploration team he had founded himself, felt a faint breeze slipping in through the shattered outer window.
This extradimensional space — a city drowned in fog — felt different from every other Special Duty zone he had ever walked. No traces of people to begin with, and quiet in a way that crawled under the skin. Almost no natural ambient sound at all. Even in caves he could remember hearing dripping water or a stone rolling now and then, but this city felt as though every noise had been swallowed whole by the fog.
"Damn thing just won't open!"
Bang. Bang.
If his idiot teammates weren't making all this racket right now, he might have thought he'd gone deaf.
"That's enough, A3. Stop obsessing over a door that won't open and just check the spaces that are already accessible. There are more than enough buildings around here."
"...Shit."
Only after the warning did A3 peel himself off the locked door, muttering. After enough Special Duty runs you learned that locked doors and chests often hid the good stuff, but clinging to them with that kind of stubbornness wasn't the right call either.
The key was speed. Loot fast, get out fast. That was how you stayed alive. Whether something looked valuable or worthless, you stuffed it in the pack if it would fit, then put everything you had into reaching the exit. Do just that and the daily take was tens of units at minimum — hundreds on a good day. Compare that to General Duty, where you slaved from dawn to dusk for a measly ten to twenty, and this was a far better deal.
Backpack's about full. Time to start looking for the exit.
The clatter of junk in the heavy pack felt good. None of it was useful to them, but haul it outside and it turned into money — like picking gold bars up off the street.
"A2, A3. We need to move. If your packs are reasonably full, get ready to leave."
"Why not poke around a little more, Leader? We haven't even made it to the upper floors."
Choi Young-man shook his head, firm.
"We can't use the elevators. Keep climbing and the losses just pile up. We have to think about the stamina and time we'd be wasting."
If they lucked into something of enormous value, a little risk might be worth swallowing — but that was only if fortune actually smiled. And Choi Young-man knew their luck was nowhere near that good.
If we'd been lucky, we never would have ended up in this prison in the first place.
The two men trudged out under his unyielding stance, regret dripping off them with every step. But one of them was missing.
"Where's A4?"
"Hasn't that bastard been gone for a while?"
"Think he's holed up somewhere having a happy time?"
"Even a washout like him wouldn't do that in a place like this, would he?"
"It's because he's that kind of washout that he might."
While speculation about A4 ran wild, Choi Young-man narrowed his eyes and scanned the surroundings. Something was off.
"Hold it. Both of you, shut up."
At their leader's sharp warning the two men clamped their mouths shut almost in unison and started rolling their eyes. The gas mask hid his expression, but it wasn't hard to tell that Choi Young-man's entire bearing had changed.
"...There's no noise."
No noise. In other words, besides the three of them standing here, there was no sign of anyone else. The instant he registered that, Choi Young-man drew his compound bow and went on alert.
Before landing in this prison, he had belonged to a fairly well-known crime syndicate in the Seoul area and made his living as a contract killer. He was extremely sensitive to shifts in atmosphere and presence.
A tracker? But when did they latch on?
Kill enough people and you developed a sense for it — the instinct you acquired naturally from stalking a target with patience, and from being the one stalked in turn. Choi Young-man's honed intuition was screaming at him now.
"A4's been hit."
"What? When?!"
"Shh. Shut it. If the leader says so, that guy's already dead. Quit yapping and get your weapon out."
When A3 made another loud noise, A2 warned him off while slipping into a ready stance himself. A2 had been the first person to team up with Choi Young-man, so the two of them had a decent working rhythm — and a teammate who meshed well was exactly what you wanted in a situation like this.
"What's the play, Leader? Want me to take point? Or do we stick together and search?"
A2's suggested tactics weren't bad, but this time they felt like reckless courage.
"No. We all leave the building together. Right now."
"...You want to run?"
"If you want to live, that's what we do."
Even A2 looked startled this time, but Choi Young-man didn't care. Among people of the underworld, the rule was simple: if it kept you alive, you used whatever means were necessary. Whether you rolled in the dirt, clung to someone's pant leg, or even ran away looking pathetic — as long as you lived to fight another day, you won.
"But it's just A4 who got hit. All of us running... the numbers don't add up, do they?"
"This isn't the time to talk numbers. When you or I thought A4 was just staying out of sight like usual, did either of you notice anything off?"
"No."
"That's the problem. The other side slipped into our gaps before we even noticed."
Of course, this could also be overthinking it. But it was also a fact that they hadn't noticed A4's disappearance until now.
"After all this fuss, if that bastard's just taking a nap somewhere..."
"Shut your mouth, A3."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm the only one worth killing. Anyway, if we're running, stop dawdling and let's get out of here."
Better not to use the exposed central staircase. A3 had at least that much sense — he moved a step ahead of them toward the emergency stairs. The moment he grabbed the handle of the tightly shut stairwell door at the end of the corridor and twisted, something snapped with a dry little crack.
"Wai—!"
Before Choi Young-man could stop him, A3 yanked the emergency stairwell door open, and something appeared in the gap. A building fire extinguisher, hung in midair, bound by thread and aimed with exquisite precision.
FWOOOOSH!
"Kh?!"
"Oh, fuck!"
In an instant the narrow corridor filled with extinguisher powder, wrecking their vision. The special gas masks meant they didn't have to worry about their lungs, but powder had already coated everything — goggles included — from head to toe.
"Get away from there, A2, A3!"
Choi Young-man put as much distance behind him as he could while drawing a bead with the compound bow, but the only one who emerged from that white space of powder was A2. Even if he'd taken a faceful at point-blank range, there was no way he hadn't heard the shout. Which meant...
Thwip!
He loosed an arrow on instinct. A sharp bolt punched into the metal fire door. If A3 or anyone else had been standing there, it wouldn't have been the sound of a fire door being pierced — it would have been the dull thud of an arrow punching through human flesh.
He took out A3 and slipped away in that tiny window?
From the moment the fire-extinguisher trap — whoever had set it — went off, to the moment he loosed the arrow, maybe ten seconds had passed. Far too tight a window to silently neutralize a grown man and vanish. Unless you were a combat specialist juiced on illegal implants or the boosting effects of body-enhancement drugs, no ordinary convict could move like that. And there was no way the bizarre monsters lurking throughout this extradimensional space would have set a trap that clever and sat waiting for them.
"L-Leader... where's A3?"
"He got hit too. The shot didn't bite. No flesh."
"Damn it."
If A3 and someone else had been standing there together, the powerful compound bow would have punched through both of them. The fact that the arrow had only buried itself in the fire door meant the opponent was extremely agile and stealthy. Choi Young-man felt cold sweat running down his back, but he analyzed the situation with a cool head.
By this point it was clear the other party had no friendly intentions toward them. So what was the goal? To steal the items they'd farmed and silence them? Or just for fun?
More likely the latter.
Look around — this city was nothing but buildings. Walk into any of them and you'd pick up a few pieces of junk, and the place was so vast you barely ever ran into another team. To specifically hunt them down and start assassinating them in the open was the kind of thing only serial killers starving for the taste of blood would do.
Come to think of it, the number of Special Duty applicants jumped massively starting today. Bad timing.
Among those applicants, were there really no Oranges locked up for serial murder? If anything, those types were a dime a dozen. They'd simply drawn the short straw this time — not the hunters, but the hunted.
Right then.
Above!
At a faint noise leaking from overhead, Choi Young-man rolled across the floor with the reflexes of a wild animal and shot an arrow upward. The shaft punched easily through the ceiling panel, savagely snapping internal wiring as it buried itself deep — but the human blood he'd been hoping for didn't flow. Still, he judged instinctively that their opponent was not moving on the same floor they were. That would explain why they hadn't heard footsteps, and how A4 and A3 had been taken out so quickly.
Moving through the ceiling like a damn rat?
Cunning enough to plant a booby trap in advance. High chance they'd been using the hollow space above the ceiling to move unseen. Trusting A2 to keep a sharp watch on the surroundings, Choi Young-man counted the arrows left in his quiver and moved slowly. He wanted to check whether dust was falling through the gaps in the ceiling panels, but that was too much to ask. This Special Duty zone had fog wrapping both the interior and exterior of every building. Better to rely on hearing than sight.
...Creak.
Thwip!
When another faint noise leaked from beyond the ceiling panels and he released the bowstring he'd been drawing taut, Choi Young-man thought he'd finally got him.
Drip. Drip.
Sure enough, this time vivid red blood flowed clearly through the gaps in the ceiling panels. That much bleeding, and no scream — the target must have taken a vital hit and died instantly. Only then did Choi Young-man let out an inward sigh of relief and turn around.
Which is why he was a step too late in noticing that A2, who had been standing behind him, was gone without a trace.
"...Huh?"
Creak.
Another noise. But this one felt different. No — it had been different from the start. Not the sound of someone moving. The sound of something operating.
CREEEAAAK!
A noise of something being pulled taut, and at the same time the ceiling panels came crashing down. What fell in the next instant, mixed with dust and debris and blood, was a massive lump that was unmistakably human-shaped.
"A4...!"
Amazingly, what had come down with the collapsing ceiling panels was the corpse of the missing A4. Choi Young-man's arrow from a moment ago was buried deep in the body. The opponent must have hidden it in the ceiling from the start.
Which meant the most important question — where was the opponent?
Thwack!
A sudden tearing pain in his forearm made Choi Young-man grimace and stumble backward. The blade had come from, of all places, one of the outer windows installed at intervals along the corridor.
But how?!
Beyond the shattered outer window was nothing but thick fog and empty air, dozens of meters above the ground, with nowhere to stand. Impossible. But the moment he locked onto a man swinging in hard, a rope bound around his own body, Choi Young-man shoved everything else aside, clenched his teeth, and raised the compound bow. His forearm was shredded, but he would do whatever it took to survive.
"You son of a—!"
The stray arrow grazed the stranger's head by a hair's breadth, and the hand axe A2 had been using until moments ago buried itself in Choi Young-man's chest.