Trolling for Trolling
What kind of intent had driven the idiots who'd juiced a bunker with power and set off the siren to push into the city center in the first place?
I was working from two main possibilities.
The first: a smash-and-extract, same as the crew I'd just cleaned up in that building — punch straight into the heart of the map, farm everything that wasn't nailed down, and get the hell out.
The second: genuine veterans. The kind who wanted to take a theory, or intel they'd already collected, and put it to the test.
Personally, I'd really prefer they were the first type. Just some clowns who happened to flip the bunker's power on by accident.
If that were the case, the counterplay was simple. Guess their route the way I already was, get one step ahead, set the ambush, and jump them.
But if it was the second type?
Then things got genuinely annoying.
Anyone who's spent real time in games knows the type. The ones who've just shed their newbie skin and are brushing up against veteran status — or the ones who've already settled into full, ripe competence — those are the ones whose challenge-seeking itch burns hottest. They will pull every stunt and every troll in the book to scratch that itch and feed their curiosity, and they do not give a single damn whether their own teammates suffer for it. It is the kind of behavior that turns a person's insides inside out.
In a PvP game you just kill them and move on. In a cooperative PvE game, merely sharing the same air as them is enough to make everyone miserable.
So I was hoping they were idiots. No — if they weren't idiots, we had a problem.
The siren's kicked every Native Species on the map into active mode. Outside, inside a building — it's equally dangerous either way now.
If I had to pick which was worse, though, I'd say sitting still inside a building was the more dangerous option. Hole up and wait for the storm to pass, and it wouldn't be long before things that had followed the smell of a human body and the whisper of small noises boxed you in from the inside. Hesitate for even a moment and escape stopped being the question — survival itself went opaque.
Which is why I didn't stop running for a single second. In a full-scale Wave, hesitation, mistakes, and fear were all just different words for dying.
There it is.
After a long, grinding circuit of the commercial district, I finally spotted the underground mall entrance that connected to the big department store. The only way through to the hidden underground bunker — or the subway station — was a specific route inside that mall.
Kieeek!
"Oh, come on."
A Smoker burst sideways out of the fog, that hole that might have been a mouth or might have been a breathing pore yawned wide, and it came down on me. Too close to get an arrow off. I trusted the compound bow's durability, drove the riser up into its jaw, then ripped a throwing dagger off my belt and punched it through the thing's brow. There was already a generous hole there, so scrambling the brain wasn't hard.
The problem with Native Species is they travel in packs, and aggro jumps like a disease.
Kieeeeee!
Aaaaaaah!
Whether they'd locked onto the noise, or whether I secretly had x-ray vision through fog, I couldn't say. What I could say was that at least a dozen Smokers were stampeding in from not far off.
"Emergency evac!"
I used the handrail of a dead escalator like a slide and shot down it. The Smokers piled onto the escalator and the stairs in a thrashing heap and went over like bowling pins. Whether their limbs snapped or their soft bodies burst open, I didn't have time to look back. I ran straight into the underground mall.
Someone had already been through. Obviously. Even if the bunker or the subway extract wasn't the goal, an underground mall like this was a farming goldmine — take your eyes off it for a second and somebody would already be tearing through it.
Electronics shops and pharmacies cleaned out first. These guys know how to farm.
Nothing up there was a true high-value jackpot, but most consumer electronics and pharmaceuticals were still worth grabbing. If they'd internalized that and farmed with actual field sense, then the people who'd passed through here were veterans.
Of course the bad hunch is the one that lands.
I tore through the underground mall — the fog so thick it looked like the place was on fire — and headed for the department store.
To extract through the underground bunker, you first had to reach the department store's mechanical room and fire up the generator, then climb to the upper floors and work the security office console. Divert the generator's power toward the bunker and you could crack the blast door for a short window. The important catch: you needed at least two people cooperating to get power flowing and the bunker door open in anything like a reasonable time.
They'd have known that much and planned around it. What they'd missed was a hidden wrinkle. If you opened the security office by smashing the door instead of using the dedicated keycard, the siren went off.
If they don't know the keycard exists, this is probably their first attempt. They came in today meaning to test whether the bunker door can actually be opened and used as an extract.
And if they farmed the department store to the bone on the way out, that was a jackpot on top of a jackpot. It would have been weirder if they hadn't tried.
Bang!
"Well now."
Gunfire the instant I hit the first floor. Fortunately it wasn't aimed at me. Unfortunately, that wasn't something to celebrate. This was the kind of situation where you ran for an extract like your tail was on fire, and these people were taking their time shooting things. They were even more unhinged than I'd given them credit for.
And then they blew past my expectations all over again.
"Hey! Do it right!"
"Hold the fucking line! You don't want to extract together?!"
"Jesus, worry about your own side!"
A surprising number of inmates were already fighting Native Species in the department store's central hall. Twenty, give or take. If a proper team was four people, that was at least five teams occupying the same floor.
Teaming. You've got to be kidding me.
In PvE it doesn't mean anything — every player is an ally by default. In a PvP game, where hostility is the baseline, it's a rare sight. Same energy as yelling Wo shi Zhongguoren~ at our beloved mainland big brothers and watching them instantly treat you like a sworn sibling.
"Team One's almost done farming! Hold a little longer!"
"Fuck, why don't we just extract now? These things aren't going to stop coming!"
"You want out, go alone! And don't come crying if they surround you halfway!"
"Aish! I'm only putting up with this because it's disgusting!"
So that was why the Wave's aggro had felt so concentrated on me. Most of the other inmates had either been holed up in a building from the start or had already extracted. I'd been wandering around solo, so I'd eaten the whole tab.
Something black and ugly surged up in my chest. What fortune was I supposed to be enjoying that I had to wear the shit these people had taken? I was just a regular guy whose goal was a happy little farm-and-extract. And these electric-chair-worthy criminals kept stepping on my happy farm.
Should I just wipe them all? Butcher them so thoroughly they can't even open their mouths?
No. Hold it. Han Seungho on the inside. You're a ten-year EFD veteran. Be a gentleman.
So when the Smokers surged toward them, I used the gap, rolled out of the fog from an angle their eyes couldn't reach, and popped into view.
"Kh—!"
"Hey! You okay?!"
"I'm fine. More importantly, these monster bastards are everywhere! Farming's a wash at this point!"
One extra body slipping into a crowd of twenty, using the fog as a camouflage screen, and nobody clocked who I was. They probably just assumed I belonged to some other team.
Which told me two useful things: they were not a tight-knit family, and they were not some well-oiled club that actually communicated.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth — and trolling for trolling.
I picked up a hand axe so I wouldn't stand out and started peering around with a convincingly clumsy posture. Most of the Native Species aggro was locked on the handful of inmates actually using guns, so the acting wasn't hard.
That said, the situation really was going to hell. I started needling the tense guys next to me, just enough to get them going.
"Hey! How long are we supposed to sit here doing this?! We're not meat shields. We have to put our lives on the line so other people can farm?"
"Y-yeah! This is enough already! The gunfire's going to pull even more of them, we can't keep holding here!"
"Whoever's got a radio, call Team One! We can't hold any longer!"
"Damn it, just hang on a little longer, you whiny pieces of—"
"Easy for you assholes with guns! We don't have any!"
"Or we all pull out right now and collapse the line. How about that?"
"Fine! Fine! I'll call them, okay?!"
Human beings will run from hardship even when a sure reward is sitting right in front of them. I leaned on that and poured out complaints in a sour, put-upon voice, and the inmates who'd already been getting chewed on by Native Species before I arrived jumped on it like they'd been waiting.
The ones with guns were almost certainly the crew looting this department store and planning to use the bunker extract — or they were in a tight working relationship with that crew. If the other inmate teams peeled off in a mass now, the whole operation went up in smoke, so they had no choice. They got on the radio.
"What?! Just hold a little longer, for fuck's sake! We haven't even farmed properly yet!"
"These bastards won't cooperate, so what the hell do you want me to do?!"
"Fuck, you're useless. We're coming, just wait!"
"...Piece of shit."
Even in the middle of a live fight, I listened in on the radio and mapped their relationship. The voice on the other end looked like the boss and this side looked like the hired help — but this side wasn't exactly clinging, either, so it wasn't a clean top-down chain.
So they're cooperating temporarily because their interests happen to line up?
One side was here to farm. The other was probably here to find out whether the bunker extract actually worked.
They even brought guns, which you almost never use in a Dark Zone. That alone tells you farming isn't the point.
Verifying an extract nobody had ever successfully used, or even confirmed? Walk that intel out of here and you could expect a serious payout from the prison. Or sell it to other inmates. Or to a merchant NPC.
Either way, a situation like this was something I could use. Nobody was easier to handle than people with a clear objective.
I tapped a finger against Crazy Clock, which had been sitting in silence for quite a while, and woke it up.
The good stuff is meant to be shared. Fun is meant to be enjoyed together.