Happiness Farming
"Finally, some peace and quiet."
I flicked the blood from my gloves. Two corpses lay at my feet; two more were elsewhere. Four dead in all. At last, a hush had settled over the place.
Had I really needed to kill them, though? Couldn't I have just pretended I hadn't seen them and walked on by? Or, failing that, shouldn't I at least have offered to cooperate first?
Ordinary people would have asked themselves those questions and failed to understand a wordless first strike. My reason for killing them was painfully simple.
Anyone who doesn't even understand how a Darkzone works will, sooner or later, become a problem for me.
In a Darkzone, you keep quiet. These men had experience enough to pass for veterans, and they still couldn't follow that one elementary rule — they'd been broadcasting their position like amateurs. Was there any guarantee that people like that wouldn't become a genuine threat to another convict team, or to me? None whatsoever. They would. So I pinched off the rotten sprouts before they could spread.
"And their farming was garbage, too. I could've dragged the Beggars' Sect out of a wuxia novel and they'd have looted this place better."
A4, the one I'd first stashed up in the ceiling plywood, had been wandering around alone like an idiot and was flat broke aside from the gear on his back. A3, who'd been gambling his life on high-value items he couldn't even confirm were there, I dragged out by the nape with a blade the instant the fire-extinguisher booby trap went off — another dry well. A2, the one I'd actually expected to have farmed something decent, I yanked out a window with a Tripwire around his throat and shook down. Bust. And A1, the last insurance policy I'd left standing, was no better.
Everything that came out of A1's pack was the same junk the others had been carrying. The only things worth taking were the personal equipment and consumables this crew actually used.
Fine. Better than walking away empty-handed.
I already hated spending money on the prison's standard-issue kit and consumables, so topping up my shortages from these four wasn't a losing trade. I sorted through the gear, tools, and supplies I'd stripped off them, packed what I wanted, and as a last souvenir picked up the compound bow A1 had been using with a certain amount of flair.
Exactly seven arrows left in the quiver. He'd loosed three at me, which meant he'd been walking around with ten from the start.
The whole squad was set up for light armor — in fast, out faster. A super-coward team.
It was the kind of ancient loadout only EFD beginners used to run, back in the day. If you're going to go in light and hit fast, at least swing for something big the way I do. Instead they'd stuffed whatever they found into their packs and bailed immediately, which is exactly why they'd never built any real experience and had wiped in such an ugly fashion.
The bodies left behind would dissolve on their own once every convict had extracted from this Darkzone. I hoped they'd make excellent fertilizer and come back as something tasty.
I'd taken what there was to take, so I left the building without a backward glance and headed straight for the heart of the commercial district.
In a modern-city Darkzone, the juiciest farming spots are more or less fixed at three: a big-box mart or department store, a general hospital — a university hospital if you can get one — and a state-owned public building. Hypermarkets are dense with crafting materials and consumables. Hospitals yield pharmaceuticals and medical tools. Government facilities drop classified documents tied to whatever the building used to be.
The payout is generous, and the danger matches it. But I'm not in a position to be picky about cold rice or hot.
More to the point, I had already invested in the Sixth Sense stat, which has a direct and indirect effect on high-value farming. Choosing coward farming after that? That was a sin I couldn't forgive in myself.
I'd already removed one convict team that had been in the way. I'd already upgraded the gear I'd been short on. All that remained was pure, blissful happiness farming.
But misfortune has a nasty habit of shoving its face in right when a person is about to be happy.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAIL—
An ominous siren began to pour across the entire city. It had none of the hurried, life-saving urgency of a fire truck or an ambulance. If I had to put a name to it, it sounded like the civil-defense drills they used to run nationwide.
Of course I knew this gimmick.
Some idiot just opened an extraction point with zero preparation.
The same way I'd once tried to use the elevator exit inside the research facility, this map had extraction points so you wouldn't get stranded in the center — a subway line and a bunker exit, both sitting under the asphalt. The subway was the magical-train type: after a set amount of time it simply appeared, no one having to lift a finger, and carried prisoner-passengers out. The bunker exit, like an elevator, required you to restore power first and then open the blast doors before you could leave.
The subway only made a clanking racket when it arrived. No other tricks, and it sat deep enough underground that it didn't stir the native species on the surface.
Opening the bunker, though, aggroes every native species on the map.
That was exactly why I'd pinched off those rotten sprouts a few minutes ago. They were no help to me. They were nothing but harm.
I don't know who you are, but I do not forgive griefers who interrupt my happiness farming.
I gave up on creeping and put the exo-suit into a full sprint. Once the siren was going, stealth play meant nothing. The native species that had been sleeping quietly, the ones whose aggro had been pointed somewhere else — all of them would now share a single heart and a single purpose, and they would all pour into downtown.
The siren runs for roughly ten minutes. Fail to open the bunker's blast doors in that window and the power cuts automatically, and you start the whole process over from scratch.
The people who'd restored power to the bunker would know that too, and they'd be moving hard. I felt the native species beginning to smash the city's silence and haul themselves upright, and I hunted for the shortest route. Faint light sources were already showing through the fog; the Lightmen would start tearing through downtown before long. I had to run these vicious griefers down first.
Gimmick exits are hard to use if you haven't done them before. The fact that they touched one this early — we've barely been dropped into the Darkzone — means they have a reason to extract as fast as possible, risk be damned.
Two hours in, maybe less, and they were already trying a gimmick extract in the middle of downtown. The intent was obvious: they did not care what happened to any other convict team. Which meant these griefers were currently too heavy to make for an outer extraction point. I rather wanted to know what expensive meal they'd swallowed to justify a stunt this grotesque.
I'm on my way.
I drove the exo-suit through a barricade of plywood boards, splintering them in a single crash, and barreled straight on. I vaulted courtyard walls. I cut through building interiors by way of shattered windows. I didn't care. My head had room for only one thought: I am not letting them walk.
I was moving so violently through the fog I couldn't have said whether I was running or swimming when I came face-to-face with a pack boiling up out of an underground parking garage.
At a glance they looked like an ordinary group of people. A closer look through the gaps in the fog told you they weren't. Human beings do not have large and small holes all over their bodies that suck fog in and breathe it back out.
Goddamn Smokers.
Smokers are a native species that show up often on maps where the fog is so thick you can barely see. Despite the name, they don't exhale contaminated fog — they're closer to addicts, the kind who inhale this stuff the way a chain-smoker hits a cigarette and burn it as fuel. Metabolism runs on drawing fog in through the holes pocking their bodies and breathing it out again, and inside the fog that gives them monstrous physical ability.
Like so.
The lead Smoker locked onto me and, in a single bound, covered several meters and slammed down onto the asphalt with everything it had. Its body couldn't take the impact and came apart with the shattered pavement — and it still felt no pain at all, because it gathered itself and came at me again.
"Didn't your parents ever teach you that doping is a violation of gentlemanly sportsmanship?"
Part of me wanted to rip the gas mask off, suck down a lungful of the fog lying around everywhere, and enjoy that same outrageous physicality. I wasn't about to wreck my bronchial tubes for it. I put an arrow through the Smoker's skull instead.
The thing had been wearing a shredded business suit — a former office worker, apparently — and it dropped the instant the shaft punched through its head. Their physical durability is as pathetic as most native species; smash the skull and the majority of them go quiet. The problem is always the numbers.
Glurk. Glooorrk. I'd only dropped one, and already dozens of addicts were charging me, dragging fog in and blasting it out in ragged bursts.
This is genuinely infuriating.
They looked like the kind of ordinary people you'd pass on any street, and every time they came at me with those trypophobia-triggering, hole-riddled bodies the pressure was absurd. I was sincerely tempted to ask whether throwing a ball into one of those holes was worth bonus points.
I twisted aside from a punch that would have caved me in without the exo-suit and tried to think of a way to shake them. Unlike other native species, these things still had a full set of human features — eyes, nose, mouth — aside from the holes, which made them hard to lose. And the surrounding fog was their energy source. They would never tire.
Wait. Human?
If a Smoker's original form was human, then in this city, specifically, I might be able to use that.
I led them — a pack vaulting several meters at a stride, chasing me at explosive speed — out onto the boulevard. Through the fog, a few familiar light sources were waiting. I glanced back and confirmed that the Smokers already aggroed on me had swollen to nearly a hundred. Every time they inhaled a mass of fog the view cleared for a moment, so counting heads wasn't difficult.
I feel like I just walked onto the set of a one-versus-a-hundred adult film.
I knew that if they caught me they would literally eat me, which made me even less interested in being caught. My virtue is precious. Still — I was almost there.
I stood in the middle of a clean four-lane road with not a single abandoned car on it and shouted at the world. Sure enough, not far off, Lightmen that had been peering through the broken windows of a high-rise swung their headlights toward me in unison.
I was already gone from the spot they lit. The instant I saw those headlights start to move, I threw myself back into the fog. The ones who received a Lightman's attention in my place were the mass of Smokers — native species that had, once, almost certainly been human.
From a Lightman's point of view, though, they probably don't look that different from me.
My prediction landed dead-on.
The Lightmen howled over one another as they came, and those gaunt hands began snatching Smokers up at random. The pack that had been chasing me froze at the sudden appearance of the Lightmen, rigid as mice in front of a cat, and didn't so much as twitch. If anything, they looked awestruck.
Whatever had happened at that school was probably not so different from this.
They offered up the children. Time the adults took some responsibility.
That's what a community is for, isn't it?
I left the Smokers to be butchered by the Lightmen and set out once more to find the people who had started this mess.