The Apartments Were Never Homes
Honestly, it had been a little too close for comfort.
I hadn't expected to run into a Guard Dog the moment we stepped into the building, and who could have guessed that another pack of pursuers would latch onto us while the thing was already on high alert because of our presence? Then again, looking at the results, those same pursuers had drawn the Guard Dog straight into the booby trap I'd laid, which let us wipe the whole lot of them out in one stroke. So it didn't really matter anymore.
"Are you sure it's all right to just leave them like that?"
"Like I said before, those things have a hell of a nose. Even in a coastal city thick with the briny stink of salt, they can pick out a human scent without much trouble. And if that human is bleeding all over the place?"
"Then they're guaranteed to take the bait."
"Think of it as bait in a fish trap. They were going to stab us in the back anyway. They've got it coming."
I left the ones who'd tried to ambush us trussed up on the central walkway between the towers and wove Tripwire through the surrounding space like a spider's web. The man Lucy had killed outright with a thrown dagger got extra knife work, enough to make the corpse bleed freely; the one who'd been carrying the shotgun I left a paraplegic, his spine ruined. A body already cooling on the ground and a half-cripple still vividly, helplessly alive. As bait went, I couldn't have asked for better.
Lucy glanced once at the scene visible below the corridor windows, then turned her eyes away and went back to her job. It wasn't long before pale amber lights began to bloom one by one down there, and the terrified screaming that followed wasn't worth a single glance.
"Most of the apartment doors are locked. How should we open them? We didn't bring a crowbar or anything."
"Skip any unit with a manual key lock. We only hit the ones with electronic door locks."
"Isn't it usually the other way around? You can lockpick a door that opens with a key."
"Takes too long. This place is crawling with Primordials and rival inmates who want us dead. You really want to sit there picking every lock one by one?"
Koreans tended to assume that a front door with an electronic lock was the more secure option, but overseas the opposite view was surprisingly common: a manual key lock was considered safer. The reason was almost insultingly simple. Run a little current through an electronic lock and the security folded. State-of-the-art models had countermeasures for that? Sure. The Dark Zone we'd been dropped into didn't have a "state of the art" anything. One look at the scenery was enough—this was a world sitting a little further in the past than the 2020s I'd lived in.
I cobbled together a crude shorting device from copper wire and an old battery we'd farmed nearby and touched it to a dust-caked electronic lock. A sharp crackle of current jumped through the panel, and the long-dead lock flickered back to life. A factory-reset electronic lock almost always defaulted to 0000. The Blind Feature smeared the numbers on the touch panel into unreadability, but zero usually sat along the bottom row, so I just mashed it.
A cheerful electronic chime answered.
"It actually opened?"
"If you can't even do this much in a prison packed with criminals, you don't belong here."
"My family just hacks them or smashes them to pieces..."
What a pack of savages. You really did have it rough. I gave Lucy a light pat on the head—she was the youngest, after all, and clearly drawing the short straw—and stepped into a unit that already smelled like it would be thick with stale dust and mold.
For a complex thrown up as densely as possible to cram in the maximum number of bodies, each unit had a surprisingly generous floor plan. A conservative estimate put it around eight hundred square feet. If I was being generous, maybe closer to a thousand. Back in the real world I hadn't even cracked three hundred and thirty—a so-called 1.5-room that was really just a bathroom, a bedroom, and a kitchenette pretending to be separate spaces. I could feel, in my bones, just how ferocious the Korean hunger for an apartment really was.
"The furnishings are intact. No real damage, and no sign anyone got here before us."
Lucy headed for the kitchen first as she said it. I did the obvious thing and started with the master bedroom off the living room. She was right. There was no trace of a prior break-in, and no sign the people who'd lived here had grabbed anything in a hurry and fled. It was as if the occupants had simply evaporated, leaving the lived-in scene behind exactly as it was.
Tracking dirt through someone else's home and rummaging through their things. I feel exactly like a petty thief. The same man who'd once told his old cellmates, on their last shot at release, not to stoop to petty theft was now pawing through a stranger's bedroom drawers. Life really was a mystery.
"This is..."
Something like a jewelry box, the kind meant for keeping valuables, turned up in a drawer. I yanked it open in a hurry—and what came out was, to my surprise, something I had seen before.
"It's a medal?"
Lucy materialized behind me and murmured it against my ear. I came within a hair of throwing a punch on reflex and crushed the impulse with superhuman patience.
"I've seen this medal before. It tends to turn up a lot in modern-city-themed Dark Zones, but even I still can't figure out what it's actually for."
The exact purpose eluded even a ten-year veteran like me, but related breadcrumbs and private theories were another matter. It was probably something issued by a religious organization—or by a fictional state agency that filled more or less the same role. Either way, it was an unwholesome object. That much was certain.
"It's expensive, so hang onto it for now."
"The Blind Feature didn't activate, though?"
"If the Blind Feature didn't kick in, that means the researchers who feed data into it still haven't figured this thing out. So shouldn't we keep supplying them with samples so they can study it properly?"
"Ah, that does make sense when you put it that way. But how do you know all of this, Leader?"
Lucy dropped a sensitive question on me out of nowhere. I answered without hesitation.
"Spend ten years doing this crap and you'll pick it up naturally too."
"...Hmph."
Lucy stared at me with a briefly vacant expression, then nodded. Whether my words were credible didn't particularly matter to her. What mattered was that I had answered her question without hedging.
"More importantly, did you check the rest of the place?"
"I looked through the storage closet, the veranda, and the small bedroom. Nothing particularly impressive turned up. It's just..."
"Just?"
"This should have been a place where a happy family lived, but it was strangely barren. It had the traces of daily life, but none of the vitality, if that makes sense?"
"Yeah, that tracks."
"You already knew?"
I shrugged at her question and pointed outside.
"When we came in through the front door, were there any shoes?"
"...I don't think there were."
"Whether there are shoes left in the entryway or the shoe closet is as good a measure as any of how much the people who lived here actually cared about the place. A household with a lot of people and money to spare would have had at least a few pairs sitting out. Even a house on the opposite end of that spectrum would have had junk piled in the shoe closet instead."
This unit had none of that. Not a single pair of shoes. Not even an umbrella or a soccer ball. And that meant something very specific.
"This house never had the warmth of an ordinary family. There wasn't even a desperate will to keep living here."
The untouched furnishings made that clear enough, as did the complete lack of disturbance in the places where people usually kept anything important. Whoever had been put in this unit had lived here only briefly, and always on the assumption that they would be leaving.
"But that alone doesn't..."
"You said you checked the veranda. Then you must have noticed. What you see past that railing isn't the reed fields we crossed, or mountains, or the ocean. It's another apartment complex sitting right in your face."
"Ah."
The buildings along the outermost edge of the complex we'd seen coming through the reeds had, strangely, no windows at all. That was why we'd had to push into the interior of the complex and enter through the corridor windows on the inner face.
"From the design stage, this place never gave a damn about the comfort or happiness of the people living in it. It only wore the shape of an apartment complex. Underneath, it was something else entirely."
A prison for criminals like us. Or a livestock pen—a factory, prepared in advance to offer up human beings in bulk. Either way, it was not a place that prisoners visiting from outside the Dark Zone had any reason to linger in.
Which meant the plan was simple: grab whatever was worth money and get out fast.
"Looks like we should focus on information items here rather than hunting for high-value stuff like precious metals. Miscellaneous crafting materials are fine too. Especially electronics—rip the casings off if you have to and grab any components that might sell. That's our best play right now."
"How much time should we budget?"
"No more than five minutes per unit. Think of it as a three-minute average cut."
If we stuck to the units with electronic locks, hit them roughly, and pulled out, an hour or two would fill the backpacks. After that we'd move fast, get clear of the apartment complex, and make for the coast—the real heart of this Dark Zone, where the genuine high-value items would be sleeping in heaps. Swap the junk for the good stuff in sequence, squeeze every bit of Grid Efficiency we could out of our slots, and we could comfortably walk away with a few grand a head from this run too.
We repeated the cycle—find an electronic lock, loot, leave—a few dozen times. By the time we'd stripped an entire complex and the packs had a satisfying weight to them, the Guard Dogs that had swarmed the central walkway were gone. One had blundered through my booby trap, taken a fatal wound, and wandered until it dropped. Another had died fighting its own kind over the bait. And somewhere in the hideous wreckage, two inmates whose remains no longer even held a shape.
I made a last stop at a relatively intact Guard Dog corpse and harvested biological samples with thrifty care. A creature with a self-luminous organ like that would be a research prize for the people on the outside every bit as good as a Screamer.
Now the problem is what to do with their gear.
Just in case, I'd piled the backpacks and equipment we'd taken off them in a first-floor corridor. Most of it I could take or leave, but the shotgun was a genuine headache. Part of me wanted to dump it and walk. Our chronic firepower shortage, plus the fact that it was a free powder weapon, kept snagging my ankle. It was about the same situation as Cao Cao—the guy who loved other men's wives a little too much—agonizing over whether to eat a plate of chicken ribs or throw them out.
In the end, I picked up the shotgun and the ammo pouch.
Silence in the Dark Zone was the most basic ironclad rule, but this shotgun wasn't a completely unusable piece of junk. I'd already sold off the pistol we'd farmed from the lab last time, anyway.
"You use this."
"Ah, thank you."
I gave the remaining 12-gauge buckshot in the tubular magazine and the ammo pouch a cursory once-over, then handed the compound bow and quiver to Lucy. We were heading back outside, which meant her position flipped to support and mine to vanguard.
"Normally a support position doesn't take the first shot without a signal from the vanguard. But I'm not stupid enough to stunt a teammate's judgment and decision-making just because she's still green. If you decide you need to suppress, assassinate, or engage—don't hesitate. Shoot. I'll adapt."
"Is that really all right?"
"What matters is stacking experience until you can reliably pull your own weight. If you don't feel out, one by one, what you shouldn't do and what you have to do, even a talented person never grows. And the Dark Zone isn't soft enough to keep people like that alive forever."
As if I'd been a veteran for all ten of those years. I'd had my skull cracked more times than I could count, gotten chewed out by teammates, and even ended up screenshot-shamed as a troll on the community boards, learning it all one ugly lesson at a time. Telling a newbie do this, don't do that was worth less than putting them in situations they could actually crash into. That was how a novice turned into a proper veteran. At the very least, I had been taught that a co-op game was a co-op game because everyone cooperated.
"All right. Here's where it gets complicated..."
We slipped out of the apartment complex—the air thick with the reek of blood we couldn't actually smell—and found ourselves facing the coast, a pale smear in the dark that still managed a considerable presence. A harbor sat there, as expected: a mountain of shipping containers to rival the apartment towers, giant cranes, and a lighthouse. Every prisoner who hadn't visited the complex would have headed that way.
We followed the crash of waves in our ears toward the place where the Call of the Sea was waiting.