A City at Night
A Darkzone with a similar theme to last time.
A modern cityscape. Unlike the previous one, though, no dense fog coiled through every street. Instead, a crescent moon peeked between the clouds and scattered a pale wash of moonlight across the ruins.
In other words, the theme of this Darkzone was a city at night.
"It's rather unsettling."
Lucy, who had followed me in, gave a little shiver and offered that brief review.
"There's something you check first the moment you enter a Darkzone. Number one is the current temperature and the oxygen-filter warning on your special gas mask's goggle HUD. It's basic information-gathering, sure — but it's also how you confirm that your mask and your teammate's mask are responding to the same environment."
"I see. The temperature on my goggles reads seventeen degrees Celsius, and there's no oxygen-filter warning."
"Same on mine. Next, you check your surroundings. We don't get to pick the exact drop point when we're deployed, so the first priority once you're in is figuring out where you actually are."
"It's dark, so dark-adaptation will take a little time, but we seem to be inside a half-collapsed ruin. I can see rebar jutting out everywhere, and broken concrete walls."
I nodded at Lucy's report and bent a Glow Stick. A soft fluorescent glow bled out — every bit as gentle as the moonlight — and lit the area in an instant. Inside a Darkzone, almost nothing except another human being reacts to that kind of light.
"Flashlights, lanterns, laser pointers — those all count as artificial light, so you want to avoid them whenever you can. Native species tend to respond to them."
"They don't respond to these Glow Sticks, then?"
"Right. Campfires, torches, and light from an actual fire won't jack their alert status straight up — but they will draw the things in to search the area. So when you use fire, you treat it with extra care."
Of the attack, alert, and search stages that native species operate on, the lowest-tier gimmick for inducing a search is curiosity. The things that nudge a native species' curiosity level upward come in three classic flavors: noise, smell, and light sources.
Not every native species reacts to those, of course. A Screamer, for instance, just spreads its tentacles wide and goes after any prisoner who trips its tactile detection. Still, being careful never hurt anyone, which was why I was drilling Lucy on priorities and precautions first.
"We've got a rough read on the starting point. Let's move."
Relying on the Glow Stick's fluorescence, we picked our way out of the dark ruin and had no real trouble taking in the surrounding terrain.
"How to put this… there are an awful lot of apartments."
Well, yeah. Most of the modern-city-themed Darkzones that showed up in EFD were set in Korea.
Lucy had no way of knowing that. She just stared, openly curious, at the apartment complex not far from the ruin. Even I had to admit there were a lot of apartments. Korea might be an apartment paradise, but what kind of complex packed its towers in as tight as the high-rises in the middle of Gangnam?
Last time the main stage was a downtown commercial district. This time it's a residential complex?
Darkzone themes and map layouts were always different, so that in itself wasn't a problem. Still, something about that towering apartment citadel put a bad taste in my mouth.
If the apartments are concentrated that hard, it means that's the core farming ground. For a core farming ground, though… isn't it a little too close to the drop?
In raw distance it looked like a five-hundred-meter walk. A civilian who hit the gym now and then could sprint it in under ten minutes.
I turned it over for a moment and came up with nothing clever. If we wanted to farm, we had to go in. If the place felt too cursed to touch, we could hug the map's outer edge and peel off toward another sector. Simple is best — shut your eyes and pick one. For all I knew, this Darkzone's map was just small.
What smashed that line of thought to pieces were the rusted metal objects all around us.
Metal left out in the open rusts fast — that's obvious. But rusted this badly, while that apartment complex still looks intact? That's a little strange, isn't it?
More than that, the asphalt roads were fine. If years of weather had hit this place head-on, the pavement wouldn't still look serviceable. So why was it only the metal that had rusted to hell?
"The sea."
"What?"
"There's an ocean nearby. Meaning this is a coastal city."
"Ah — that would certainly explain it."
Lucy caught on from what I'd said. She brushed a rusted railing with her fingertips and checked what came off.
"It's faint, but there's salt. If we could take the gas masks off, the salt on the wind would have given it away immediately. We can't, so we noticed late."
"Can't be helped. Never taking off the gas mask is an absolute rule in the Darkzone."
Unless you were a veteran who knew how to exploit specific gimmicks the way I did, you kept the mask on even if it killed you.
Either way, the objective was clear now. This was a coastal city that called Incheon or Busan to mind. There would be a port or a beach somewhere close.
Given the scale of a Darkzone, the ocean is going to eat a serious share of the map. Which means the real center isn't that apartment complex — it's the harbor.
I waved Lucy over and pointed at the towers.
"Thinking about the size of the map, the harbor on the far side of that complex — or the logistics warehouses around it — is probably the center. We can burn some time and go the long way around, or we can punch straight through. Which do you want?"
"…If we were thinking of safety, wouldn't going around be better?"
"Wrong. Then your rate of return isn't safe. We're going through that apartment complex."
I caught the head of a still-gaping Lucy and taught her the Darkzone's hard rules.
"There are exactly two ways you get out of a Darkzone. One: you leave with your pack stuffed full. Two: you complete a primary objective and leave."
"I understand the former, but what is the latter?"
"That depends on what the government, the military, and the corporations want once they start tossing jobs at us through the prison as their middleman. If they decide they want something from us directly, they'll issue a request — and carrying that out becomes one of the primary objectives."
Except there aren't any requests yet.
"Meaning right now, with no request on the board, the only way you're walking out of here is by filling your backpack."
"That… does make a fair amount of sense."
"Of course it does. You think I'd feed my party member nonsense?"
With something resembling agreement on the objective, it was time to move. I tossed the spent Glow Stick, gave myself over to the dark, and took point.
If that towering apartment complex was the target, we could not afford to advertise to the other competitors — the other convicts — that we were approaching it from the map's edge. They would have been dropped around the outskirts the same way we had. Nobody was going to sit quietly and watch us stroll over there waving a Glow Stick.
We slipped into a reed field tall enough to hide a child and advanced with care. The stalks rustled every time we brushed them, but that didn't even qualify as noise pollution. Reeds swayed in the slightest breeze; it was just environmental sound.
"More importantly — did you actually kit yourself out the way I told you?"
"Ah, yes. I stopped by the H-088 Commercial Zone and bought what I needed, as you instructed. I also received a little help from my cellmates."
"List it."
"Three throwing daggers, two bundles of Tripwire, steel-plated walker boots, stab-resistant gloves, an alloy club, and a first-aid kit. Everything else is what the prison issued."
"Good. You look like you'd fold in a stiff wind, but you're stronger than you seem — cutting and stabbing just don't look like your game. A club that can land one decisive blow is the better call. That's also why you need the throwing daggers: mid-range pressure and suppression."
Corporate first-aid kits off the auction house were a much better value than the ones the prison handed out. On the flip side, cheap consumables you could burn and toss — Glow Sticks, painkillers, sterile bandages — were worth taking as prison issue and saving the money.
"I understood everything else, but why did you tell me to purchase the Tripwire and the steel-plated walker boots?"
Rustle. Small as she was, Lucy had to shove her way through the gap I had already parted in the reeds, and she kept the questions coming as she did.
"Tripwire is a multi-tool. Assassination, suppression, alarm, deception — it does all of it. Use it a few times and you'll start feeling like it saves your life more often than medicine does."
"And the steel-plated walker boots?"
"Plain walker boots just make long hauls a little easier. The steel-plated ones are a spare life against whatever's waiting underfoot. Say one teammate takes a knife in the gut and another loses the use of their legs. In a crisis, who gets left behind first?"
"…The latter, I suppose."
Had she taken that as, if your legs go I'll have no choice but to dump you, so wear the plated boots in advance and make sure it never happens? There was a faintly deflated note in her answer. I didn't bother correcting the misunderstanding. The more she figured out for herself and the sharper her wariness got, the fewer mistakes she would make. It was a little Spartan as teaching methods went, but Lucy's weakness — her build — was obvious, so I didn't have much choice.
Of course, I had not the faintest intention of abandoning a backpack that valuable. Even if Lucy snapped both legs, I was dragging her out.
With that thought I pushed through the reeds again, and a road opened in front of us, cutting between the apartment complex and the reed field. Shops of various sizes lined the near side of it. Most of them looked no better than the ruin we had just crawled out of.
"Phew! It didn't look this hideous from a distance. Up close it's far more unsettling than I expected. Do people actually live in places like this?"
Lucy shoved the reeds aside, poked only her head out beside me, and delivered a scathing review of a K-apartment complex steeped in the very soul of Korea. If the youth-association president, the women's-association president, and the building representative of that complex had heard her just then, they would have come charging with fire in both eyes.
"A pint-sized little thing like you, running your mouth and tanking our property values? What kind of home were you raised in?!"
"Tsk, tsk. This is why people who don't know how the world works shouldn't talk. What's supposed to be wrong with our Millennium Express Gyro Drop Apartments?!"
"The way you talk, you're a barbarian. A barbarian! Your ancestors never even lived in an apartment like this!"
Ugh. I had only imagined it and it was already playing behind my eyes like a scene from a drama.
Do not, under any circumstances, provoke them.
They were basically a "property-value-sensitive" type of native species, and they inhabited the entire Korean peninsula. The one stroke of genuine luck was that they did not inhabit Darkzones.
We eased out of the reed field, entered the shopping street, and started turning the ruins inside out — light reconnaissance, with a side of economic freedom.
The first place we hit was the convenience store that supposedly did the best business in the whole apartment complex. The interior décor told me the setting sat a little further along the timeline than the last Darkzone.
Cigarettes left behind again.
The ones I had farmed last time had fetched a pretty decent price. I scooped a whole carton of smokes off the counter, tossed it to Lucy, and, just in case, started tapping along the underside of the counter and the floor with my knuckles.
Thump. Thump.
"Bingo."
I tore up a piece of plywood with a small groove in it. Inside was a safe about the size of a mini-fridge — not an old dial-or-key model, but a newer one that took a keypad password.
Stashing a safe at the counter instead of in the back warehouse usually meant the owner was the type who only relaxed if the important stuff sat somewhere they could see it. Which meant this shopkeeper was most likely on the older side, and had almost certainly picked a password they could punch in and slam shut at speed.
"1111."
Beep.
"Wow! How did you know?"
"Koreans can't stand anything slow. Mash the first number that hits your eye and you can open and close a safe in a flash."
She was a foreigner, so she probably didn't know — but whether it was 2020 or 2040, Koreans liked things fast.
Is that why the birth rate crashed fastest, too? Trying to run the country into the ground at top speed?
I felt a sudden, unseemly pride that kimchi broth still ran in my veins.
Expectation at a peak, I yanked the safe door open. What filled our vision was, astonishingly, not gold or jewels.
"……"
"……"
Inside the safe, something sat in plain view — painted over entirely in black by the automatic Blind Feature in our goggles.
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