The Forest That Hungers
Something was wrong.
That was the first thought that crossed the minds of the convicts who had just set foot in the Darkzone.
"Hey — wasn't the Darkzone supposed to be pitch-black and gloomy? Why's it so bright?"
"There's a blue sky up there. Hell, there's even sunlight coming down. This is... this is the kind of scenery we only ever saw in those educational videos as kids."
"Holy shit. Then this is the 'outside'?"
"Like hell it is, you idiots. This is the Darkzone. You just walked through the insertion gate yourselves. What kind of garbage are you spouting?"
A veteran with a little more experience than the rest managed, barely, to snap them back to their senses — though the man doing the snapping was every bit as lost as they were.
And how could he not be? Above them stretched a blue sky. Around them stood a forest of living green. Over every leaf, sunlight licked in sharp, almost painful clarity. For men who had not seen a blue sky — let alone actual sunlight — in decades of toxic smog and climate collapse, the scene before them was a paradise out of myth.
"A sky this blue... and look, the plants aren't even withered. They're thriving! I never saw anything like this even before I got locked up."
"I get that you're excited, but settle down. This is the Darkzone. I don't know why it looks like this, but we didn't break out of prison. We just went deeper. Don't forget that."
"Damn. I know that. Still a pretty vicious reality."
"First we figure out where we are, then we move. Looks to me like the prime farming grounds are sitting at the center of this Darkzone. Super Rookie's crew will be heading there for sure."
The team nodded in silence at their leader's order.
Whatever the reason, this was the Darkzone. They were here to claw together as much money as they could, to survive one more day, and anyone who got in the way of that — Super Rookie, mainly — had to be dealt with on the spot.
"According to the intel every clan's been gathering, Super Rookie's yield rate in the Darkzone is insanely high, which means he'll be hitting the prime farming spots. We can get there first and lie in wait, or we can tail him while he farms and jump him at the end. What matters is that he doesn't walk away with a single credit."
"We're not killing him?"
"Don't be stupid. If we kill him, we can't make an example out of him. We need everyone to see that even a guy that famous can't scrape together a single coin if clans like ours decide to dog him. That's how we get more convicts to join us."
"But Super Rookie might try to kill us instead."
"What's he going to do with two people? Add up every clan member dropped into this Darkzone and you've got a hundred easy. We bury him in numbers and firepower, force him into an early extraction — or, if we have to, we blow off an arm or a leg."
Show the whole prison a Super Rookie who extracted empty-handed, or who barely crawled out a cripple with a missing limb?
See? No matter how strong one person is, they're nothing in front of a group. That rumor would spread like wildfire.
And that would be game over. More convicts would flock to the clans, and the clans would shove aside the old guard — the Families — and rise as the new power. Stable profit. Stable power. A stable extension of their own lives.
If they were never getting out of Seoul Southern Prison anyway, the only sane play was maximum return at minimum risk.
"If you really want Super Rookie finished for good, wait until after this plan works. That's when a fat bounty goes on his head. You don't want to throw away a chance to play with a half-cripple and then collect the bounty for free, do you?"
"Fair enough."
"Then let's move. He'll know we followed him into the same Darkzone, so he'll be hauling ass."
"Heh. Bet he's shitting himself knowing this many people are after him."
Human beings were social animals, and they folded to herd instinct at the slightest push. They knew it in their bones: surviving alone was hard enough, and solving everything alone was simply more than two hands and one head could manage. That was why the strong stood over the weak and built a faction of their own, and why the weak clung to the strong and borrowed a faction's weight. Anyone who insisted on staying an individual to the end was neither strong nor weak. They were just an antisocial idiot.
Or they were so overwhelmingly strong that none of it applied.
The thought brushed the leader's mind and evaporated just as fast. Super Rookie was strong, yes — but not on that level. If he were, he would already have chewed through everyone in his path and gone straight to the Ground Floor. The man was just stupid, and arrogant.
A rustle in the undergrowth. Then a soft, leaking hiss...
"Huh?"
The leader, pushing through the brush at the front of the line, frowned at a strange sensation under the soles of his boots, and at the noise that came with it. He glanced down. Small pale-green lumps, like little balloons, lay crushed beneath his tread, already shriveled flat. From a hole at the center of each one, something like spores was seeping out.
REMAINING: 100% … 91% … 82% … 73% …
"Oh, fuck!"
The goggle HUD of his specialized gas mask flushed red and a thin warning tone cut through the quiet. He scrambled backward. The oxygen filter had been sitting at a clean one hundred percent when they first came in. In a matter of seconds it had been carved down to almost nothing.
"What's wrong?"
"What happened?!"
"N-no! Nobody come any closer! There's something here... it's not a monster!"
He waved the others back hard, and only then saw what waited beyond the brush: pale-green spore sacs, scattered across the ground as far as the eye could reach. He had been shoving through the undergrowth by hand, barely looking. If he hadn't noticed — if they had just walked straight in...
He swallowed.
I don't know what those are, but they're chewing through the filter canister on the mask. Some kind of toxin, most likely.
The whole Darkzone wasn't saturated with contaminated air. If it had been, the warning would have started screaming the instant they dropped in.
"This is some real bullshit. Hey! We're going around. There's something here blocking the path."
"Go around where? It's forest in every direction. We can barely tell which way is which."
"Yeah, compasses don't even work in the Darkzone."
"Anywhere but this way. I've got a bad feeling about this direction."
A few dozen steps sideways and then straight on again. That was all it should have taken. They did not have the luxury of flinching at every little inconvenience.
"More importantly, these bushes and vines are a pain in the ass. Whoever's got a blade, get up front and clear a path."
"Are you insane? Don't dump your job on someone else. We've all got assigned positions."
"Then we take turns!"
"Forget it! I'll take point. Just give me the knife!"
The team snapped at each other out of nowhere. It should have looked strange. Nobody questioned the sudden change in anyone else's temper. They just put their heads down and kept moving.
Which is how the leader — knife in hand, setting the example, hacking a path through the brush — found something going wrong inside his own body.
What the... my body, all of a sudden—
He had swung a blade a few times and walked maybe ten or fifteen minutes without a rest. That was all. And yet he felt as heavy as a wad of waterlogged cotton. If it had only been that, he might have blamed yesterday's pre-Darkzone drinking and dancing, the fatigue still hanging on. This was nothing like that.
Is it the gas mask? My field of view feels narrower, and I can't get any strength into my limbs. Have I ever felt like this before? I can't remember.
The sudden collapse of his body, and of his thinking with it, put him on his knees in the dirt.
"Leader?!"
"What now?!"
"Shit, is it an ambush?"
"N-no. My legs just gave out... ugh!"
Every breath brought a sweet smell up out of his mouth. His body sagged, heavier and looser by the second. The urge to just lie down and spread himself on the ground swelled until it was almost a hunger. The dirt and the grass looked softer, just then, than any luxury bed he had ever imagined.
"Cough! Cough! Hah... is last night's booze finally catching up with me? No. That can't be it."
He had taken a hangover cure and an alcohol metabolizer, both. Modern booster drugs worked so well that a hangover or a little leftover fatigue barely counted as a drop in condition.
So what the hell was this weakness?
I— I should wet my throat first.
A drink from the water pouch would help. That was the thought. Still prone, he reached for it — and found himself staring into something that had just pushed through the brush in front of him.
At a glance it looked like a massive vine. Then the mouth opened. Eight ways, hideous, peeling wide, above a pair of pitch-black eyes. A pale-green caterpillar.
A wet, shrieking hiss tore the air.
"AAAAAAAGH!"
He was face-down and defenseless, halfway to a drink of water, and he never had time to react. The thing came at him with that enormous mouth flung open and swallowed him headfirst.
"Wh-what the fuck is that?!"
"Get it off the leader first!"
"The k-knife! Where's the knife?!"
"We lent it to the leader!"
"Damn it, I've only got a short spear! All I can do is stab!"
"Just smash it with a hammer!!"
"Its mouth is around the leader's head, you psycho! If you bring a hammer down on that—!"
"Then smash the body!!"
The shouts of his team rang all around him, and the leader could not give a single coherent order. How could he? His head had been forced into a terrible cave, and the powerful digestive fluid secreted from the caterpillar's inner lining was already melting him from the skull down.
"AAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAH!"
The gas mask went first — the one covering four-fifths of his head. Digestive fluid slipped through the splitting seams and began, in order, on the fragile human things underneath: skin, muscle, bone. It worked so fast that in the short, thrashing span of his screaming, most of the skin on his face had already sloughed off into a sticky jelly.
And it did not stop there. The fluid that forced its way into his mouth wrecked his vocal cords, his windpipe, his lungs, and every organ beneath them in a matter of moments. That was when the struggling ended. The hard skull that had been protecting the one thing that still mattered — his brain — melted with the brain itself, collapsing into cream, until even the line between protein and calcium ceased to mean anything at all.
"L-Leader!"
"Goddamn it! You stupid bastards!"
"Who the hell are you calling stupid? You want a knife in the gut before you shut your mouth?"
"H-hey! Beside you! Beside you, you idiot!"
"What's besi— oh, fuck!"
The sky was blue. Everything around them ran so thick with green that camouflage itself lost all meaning. Whether the things swaying in that green were ordinary branches, or vines, or brush, they had no way of knowing.
And the Darkzone was a place stuffed to bursting with cheap-shot mechanics that killed you for not knowing.
"F-fuck! Help me! The vines are wrapping me up! Cut them! Cut them off!!!"
"Wh-why is my oxygen filter this low already? I need to swap the canister— cough! Cough! BLEEEEGH!"
"Grk! Grrrk...! Khhhaaaaagh!"
Despair. Terror. And death.
The nameless forest, draped until now in a hush of perfect silence, had finally tasted the vivid screams of human beings — and the flavor of fresh blood.
Now they, too, would breathe, and hunt, and feed.