The Ship That Finds You
All hell broke loose.
In truth, this chaos had probably been locked in from the moment we—and every other prisoner—started eyeing the harbor's logistics warehouse. Which meant it wasn't the kind of mess you could stop just by snipping whatever had pulled the aggro.
A container went up with a deafening blast, and the ones stacked neatly above it came down in a roaring, grinding cascade. The unlucky box had been black. Some idiot prisoner had clearly touched the wrong one.
"So that's why you're not supposed to open the black containers?!"
"Yeah! Open them wrong and they either blow or something nasty comes pouring out!"
We tore along the outer edge of the docks, ears still cocked toward the fresh commotion erupting deeper inside the warehouse.
The harbor had two problems, broadly speaking. One: far too many prisoners had piled in. Two: the things crawling up out of the sea, drawn by the scent of all those prisoners. And what really pissed me off was that, for Lucy and me, both problems applied twice over. The Primordials were hunting us. So were the prisoners who made a living hunting other humans.
The lighthouse sits at the farthest tip of the harbor, so just getting there is going to eat a serious chunk of time. And if we want the shortest route, we can't even duck into the warehouse to hide.
One mountain after another.
The wave-crash that had been scraping our eardrums raw was no longer merely loud—it sounded like a typhoon tearing through. The warehouse, exploding and collapsing and shrieking with noise in a continuous chain, had become a black hole sucking in every scrap of aggro this Darkzone had to offer. At this rate, even the Guard Dogs that usually just prowled the Apartment Complex would decide a neighborhood festival had kicked off and come stampeding this way.
The prisoners who'd entered the warehouse after us? Their only options now were to find another exit and run for their lives, or to come after us. Which, apparently, made the choice easy. They dismissed the "other exit" option without a second thought and locked onto us as their target.
"Found them! It's the Super Rookie!"
"Look at those packs—stuffed to bursting!"
"We hit those two and bounce, we're set for life!"
"Kill them!"
Experts always say a criminal's thought process doesn't work like a normal person's. I was feeling the truth of that in my bones.
Some of them burst out of the warehouse with weapons leveled and charged straight at us. Others caught sight of whatever was coming up behind us and froze in panic.
"F-fuck! What the hell is that?!"
"Where did those things even—"
"I suddenly feel sick… urk!"
"This is… this is wrong. Things like that… things like that shouldn't exist!"
Madness spread like a contagion. The prisoners' Sanity Gauges had already been ticking steadily downward under the Call of the Sea debuff, and the instant they laid eyes on those things, they either plunged into confusion or started shaking with terror.
Someone ripped off their gas mask, unable to hold it in, and retched violently—then clutched their own throat and staggered. The ones who pissed themselves, or went limp and trembling, almost looked like the lucky ones.
Even so, a handful of genuine psychos were still grinding their teeth and holding on.
"Don't you dare fold, you bastards! Those things die if you cut 'em, tear 'em, and blow 'em apart just like anything else!"
"Forget them—it's the Super Rookie's pack that matters! That thing's stuffed with every rare treasure you can imagine!"
"You don't wanna make money?! We're already the kind of people who don't mean a damn thing if we aren't making money!"
"Money! Women! Money! Women!"
That last one was already half-eaten by the madness. Nobody particularly cared.
Lucy and I were too busy sprinting ourselves ragged toward the lighthouse, whose silhouette was just beginning to take shape. Behind us, the Primordials and the prisoners slammed into each other and cheerfully walked themselves down the path of mutual annihilation.
The important part came next.
The commotion at the harbor had been so enormous it was like shouting Hey, neighborhood! Over here! in every direction at once. There was no chance the other prisoner teams—or the Primordials—wouldn't take the bait.
Before long I spotted several amber lights flickering to life deeper in the warehouse, and I heard, clear as day, the occasional gunshot from someone too stupid to be afraid. Faint curses. Savage howls. The sickening wet rip of someone's limbs being torn off, and the sound of a blade punching into a Primordial's body.
A Darkzone that had been dead silent transformed, in a heartbeat, into the venue for a summer festival of slaughter and chaos.
This is bad.
Really, genuinely bad. Someone would argue that the bigger the ruckus, the bigger my indirect profits, so more is always merrier. I would cut that someone off and say the opposite: too much of a good thing will kill you.
Sure enough. The instant the entire harbor collapsed into a free-for-all with no room to so much as blink, the sound I'd been dreading rolled in from across the water.
…BWOOOOOOOOOORN.
A ship's horn.
There wasn't a vessel of any kind visible on that dark-blue surface. And yet the foghorn rolled out into every last corner of the Darkzone.
A moment later, something happened that dragged our eyes toward the sea no matter how hard Lucy and I tried not to look. In the empty middle of the water, a colossal waterspout erupted—and something appeared with it.
It was a ship.
It was absolutely not any kind of ship a sane person would picture. But a ship was what it was.
"Shit. Shit."
I spat a curse I almost never used, twice, and finally powered on the exo-suit I'd been hoarding battery for. Then I scooped Lucy up off the ground beside me.
"L-Leader?!"
"Shut your mouth! You'll bite your tongue!"
It wasn't a perfect exo-suit—not the kind that could replace every muscle and bone in a body—but it had enough strength-assist to let me run while carrying one Lucy, more or less.
As for why I'd fired up the exo-suit I'd been so carefully conserving? The reason was almost insultingly simple.
Because the ship had appeared.
Yeah. That was really all there was to it. And that one reason alone was more than enough to send a cold line of ice down the spine of a ten-year veteran like me.
"Leader! Do you know what that is?"
"I told you to shut up! And don't look that way!"
Of course I knew. What kind of ten-year veteran would I be if I didn't?
That was a ship. A very, very large ship.
Ah—put like that, it probably doesn't land. Fine. Let me explain it so it does.
On any coastal map, regardless of era or theme, there exists a Darkzone-within-a-Darkzone that can spawn either when certain conditions are met, or on an astronomically slim random roll.
A Mini Dark Zone.
If you mapped it onto an RPG, it was closest to an instanced dungeon—except it wasn't quite that, either. Because prisoners didn't go in to explore it. It came looking for the prisoners.
As I'd said before, EFD had never implemented a feature that let players actually go underwater. There was no sailing mechanic, either. So the ship came to you.
BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOORN.
Another colossal blast of the horn, loud enough that my eardrums felt ready to rupture. Lucy, still slung in my grip, clapped both hands over her ears in pain. And if it was this bad for us, I didn't want to imagine what it was doing to the others.
"Aaaaaagh! My ears! My eaaaars—!"
"It's coming! It's coming! It's coming! It's coming! It's coming! It's coming!"
"Take me… take me… take me……"
A tsunami of madness that even the genuine psychos couldn't ride out. The ones still inside the warehouse, who hadn't seen the sea, were probably fine. The ones who'd chased us far enough to come face-to-face with the water mostly folded on the spot.
And as they folded, the things that had crawled out of the sea snatched them up one by one and injected them with something. I didn't look. I didn't need to. The sounds were enough.
"Ghk—gaaahk?!"
"Glrrrk… ghhk!"
The prisoners seized by the things from the sea had even their last line of defense—their gas masks—stripped of any meaning, and in short order they became the same kind of creature as their captors.
That was when I finally understood what had happened in this city. What memory the Darkzone was keeping. This city didn't exist in the real world. The Darkzone had made it, had made those things, and was replaying the phenomenon all over again. That was what a Darkzone was.
BWOOOOOOOOOORN.
The ship's vigorous horn—first to announce its appearance, second to announce it was setting out, and last to announce its arrival. Before I knew it I could hear the cargo hold of the thing that had docked at the pier beginning to open.
I could have missed any other sound. Not that one. It was the absolute peak of unpleasantness, like dragging a sharp awl across a rusted chalkboard.
Lucy, still hanging from my arm, started trembling hard enough that I could feel it through the suit. She'd hit Confusion before I had—her Sanity Gauge had dropped that much faster. I didn't hesitate. I pulled a disposable smart syringe from inside my coat and drove it into her plump thigh.
She let out a cute little "Eek?!", and the shaking subsided almost at once.
"W-what did you just inject me with, Leader?!"
"Nothing special. A homemade stimulant I cooked up as a cocktail?"
"That isn't an illegal substance, is it?!"
A convicted felon sitting in prison, lecturing me about legality. I couldn't help a dry little laugh.
"From the prison's point of view—or a corp's, or the government's—yeah, it's illegal. From ours, it isn't."
"That's the same thing!"
"It's not bad for you, so don't worry. There's nothing in this world safer than something I make. I can guarantee that."
That wasn't a boast. I had every crafting recipe in EFD and every item effect memorized cold. Sure, some items came with side effects—but the cocktail stimulant I'd just given Lucy didn't have any worth mentioning.
Game and reality aren't the same, so she might have trouble sleeping, or her heart might race for a bit. That's about it.
Still a lot better than foaming at the mouth and going limp in my arms, or pissing herself mid-carry.
"More importantly, get ready to fight. We're almost there."
Maybe sprinting without a single glance back at the prisoners and Primordials on our tail had actually paid off. We were the first ones to reach the enormous lighthouse.
I set Lucy down and immediately ran for the entrance, which was sealed behind an iron door. The lighthouse was a secured building, which meant a dual security system: a manual lock that needed a key, and a keypad that needed a password after that.
The password for this particular exit was always fixed, so luckily it was still sitting in my memory. The key, on the other hand, I had no way of getting. Originally the plan had been to ransack the management office near the docks and grab it there—but with those things crawling out of the sea, there hadn't been time.
"They really have a gift for making life difficult. Lucy, cover me while I get this door open."
"Please don't worry! For some reason my head is incredibly clear right now! It must be that stimulant, right?!"
Lucy, who usually gave off the energy of a small animal, suddenly looked enormously reliable—in that distinctly Slavic way. The drugs seemed to hit her constitution absurdly well. Next time, maybe I'd shoot her up with a boost compound and turn her into a Siberian brown bear.
While I wrecked the lock, packs of Primordials and packs of prisoners began pouring toward the lighthouse.
It was, quite literally, a crucible of slaughter and chaos.