A Veteran's Exploit
What was this supposed to mean?
I stood frozen in place for a good five seconds, turning it over in my mind. It was only speculation based on the information I had — but it was also a method that had never failed me.
A psychological attack meant to drop a prisoner's Sanity Gauge?
The possibility was there. At the same time, it wasn't realistic. Most of the electronics in this place had long since decayed from exposure to a severely contaminated environment; there was no chance anything was still functioning properly.
Maybe the light that had exploded right in front of us had actually been broken from the start, and a hallucination had just made it feel like it had gone off this instant — the kind of jump scare you see in every horror game.
But the glass shards stuck to my body, and Lucy standing there just as startled and wound tight as I was, argued otherwise. To hallucinate in the first place, you had to inhale something through a respirator from the start, or take in information you were never supposed to know through your own eyes.
I swapped the gas mask's filter cartridge on time. I washed the spores off my body well enough. I wasn't injured, and I have no memory of seeing, hearing, or reading anything I shouldn't have.
So this was not a Sanity Gauge drop triggered by hallucination or phantom sound. No matter who argued otherwise, this was unmistakably real.
Which means this was originally an "event" with this kind of mechanism.
The conclusion clicked into place.
The area we had entered was a main-objective zone whose story hadn't been prepared yet. In EFD, you only got dropped into maps with this kind of theme around the mid-game. Somehow we had visited this place far too early, and a story that wasn't ready had come bursting out of nowhere.
In the whole beginning-middle-climax-end buildup, we had just kicked in the door of the "beginning" and walked right through.
Which meant—
"Run, Lucy!"
"Wh-what? What?!"
"Up! We have to go up! 'That thing' is up there!"
I burst out of the infirmary at a dead sprint, and Lucy scrambled after me. Normally we moved strictly according to our assigned positions, but right now there was neither the need nor the luxury for that.
This was a place we were originally supposed to visit much later, after receiving a quest — read: a threat — from prison-side NPCs or Mega Corp NPCs. Since we had gotten here first, we had to catch this current and ride it, even now.
"Wh-what's going on, Leader? What on earth is happening?!"
"No time for a long explanation! Just run! You'll understand once you see it anyway!"
Yeah. She'd understand once she saw it. Even a newbie who had just picked up EFD would grasp the meaning of the main objective the instant they laid eyes on it.
Thinking about it, something had been off.
In EFD, visiting this place meant the command center doors stood wide open, and the entire base camp was configured as one enormous contamination zone. It hadn't felt like that this time, so I had figured maybe the tenth-anniversary update had changed a lot and let it slide — only to find out that "that incident" simply hadn't happened yet.
Just remembering the groveling circus I put on trying to clear that quest still gives me phantom pain in my ass. And you want me to pass this up?
I, Han Seungho, whatever else I might be, did not have the hobby of being the kind of idiot who kicked away opportunities that rolled in on their own.
KWAANG!
I slammed my shoulder into the door leading to the second-floor corridor and forced it open, and another massive burst of spores came pouring out.
Remaining: 67%
This kind of dense spore smoke was originally supposed to blanket the entire base camp. The story content had prisoners who had grown to a certain degree smash their heads against this place with items and raw stats to complete the main objective.
There it is.
But right now, we didn't need to do any of that.
At the end of the corridor, in the center of the command room that occupied most of the second floor, sat a pale-green mass that looked suspicious at a glance. It was too large to call a spore cluster, and it displayed far too many biological features to dismiss as one. The most accurate description was a newborn sealed inside a translucent placenta.
"Is that… a Primordial?"
"I don't know."
I did know. I lied for Lucy's mental health. If a fresh newbie found out what that thing became when it finished growing, they might be so shocked they'd quit the game on the spot.
So the mission assigned to prisoners was simple: take that newborn-like something inside the mass — or the mass itself — seal it in a special sample storage container, and get out.
And it's not like there's only one of those things, either.
The Dark Zone was full of them. Things that didn't look particularly threatening on the surface, yet seemed to hide some enormous secret — and instead of ever giving a clear answer, they kept dripping mysterious plot hooks, bit by bit. Things that, when you finally reached the end and faced the truth, made you curse and marvel in the same breath. Things that drove fans and haters alike completely insane.
Honestly, I didn't think we'd be able to get this close this easily at this point in time. Lucky us.
Instead of the special sample storage container meant for this quest, I pulled out the biological sample container I had brought myself. It was built to collect a variety of samples, so the specs were a little different — but not so different that it couldn't hold that newborn-shaped something.
"We're taking that on this Dark Zone run. Mega Corps with more money than they know what to do with, government research labs desperate for groundbreaking material, collectors who hoard mysterious things — they'll all lose their minds over it."
"Won't it be dangerous?"
"Of course it's dangerous. The ironic part is that right now is the safest window we'll ever get to make contact with it."
If more time passed here, and the spores spreading from this place swallowed the surrounding areas whole, we would be in real trouble. The Spore colony would take complete control, and at that point the two of us could die and come back to life and still never clear this place.
And if you wanted to argue that the Dark Zone constantly regenerated even after you finished exploring it, so we could just keep retrying? That only worked when your life was made of data fragments.
Right now, every last one of us was on a one-coin run. Me. Lucy. Even the legendary prisoner group that had only ever existed in EFD's lore — the Suicide Squad.
"To survive in the Dark Zone, you have to bet your life every single moment. Even if we get through today safely, is there a guarantee it'll be safe next time? Even if we luck out and skip the danger today, how are you going to handle it when the same danger is staring you in the face next time?"
"That's…"
If you hid every time, evaded every time, and gave up every time, you would never last long in the Dark Zone. People like that failed to accumulate real experience, fell behind in growth, and got weeded out before anyone else.
"We aren't here to pursue maximum safety. We explore the Dark Zone in pursuit of the minimum acceptable risk. If you can't endure that, you don't get money, and you don't get power."
And in the end, not even your life.
At my calm warning, Lucy seemed to set her resolve. She nodded.
"…I understand. Given that we've already been converted to death-row status, being overly cautious at this point would be even stranger. I'll follow your lead, Leader."
This was why I liked newbies who actually listened. Their potential was so damn green.
"So what should I do?"
"You don't need to do anything right now. But the moment I start working, enemies are going to swarm this place in enormous numbers."
"Should I secure an escape route? But with our current firepower…"
"You don't need to personally secure an escape route. Take it easy until I give you a separate signal."
Because from here on out, I was going to show her the exploit that was a veteran player's exclusive trademark.
With that, I walked up to the mucous mass containing the newborn-shaped something and drove my military combat knife into it in a single stroke.
The thin membrane tore, and pale-green amniotic fluid gushed out in a rush. This was essentially the culture medium that originated the spore smoke, so the volume was enormous.
The texture is seriously disgusting.
Even so, I forced my hand inside, grabbed the lifeform that seemed to be strangely struggling in there, and pulled it out. Then I packed the creature into the biological sample container along with the culture fluid. The container went heavy in an instant. Whether it had already oxidized from contact with air, the vessel filled with a slightly cloudy green fluid.
Right then, from far away, a vibration rolled through the ground — faint, but heavy enough to make the floor rumble.
"It's started."
In EFD, the moment one member of a squad collected this thing, they were designated as a target and hunted by the colony. It wasn't that they had been exposed to the Spores' warning pheromones. Like bees or ants instinctively following their queen, the colony simply came.
From that point on, only the person in the squad carrying the newborn collection container took all the aggro. The most popular strategy was for the remaining three to comfortably deal with the Primordials swarming the carrier while escorting them to the exit. Parties with serious firepower just ground everything down, farmed at a leisurely pace, and strolled to the extraction point. Parties a little short on firepower had the aggro carrier toss the collection container to a teammate whenever things got hairy, playing aggro ping-pong all the way out.
And I, as a self-proclaimed veteran, had cleared it a little differently. It was an exploit — a bug that abused a gimmick. It would probably still work just fine.
"Spores approaching!"
Lucy, who had gone down to the first floor ahead of me to cover my descent, pointed at a pack of Spores pouring in from the outskirts of the base. Pistol in one hand, club in the other, she waited for my attack signal.
Instead of giving one, I held out the collection container, still sticky with fluid.
"Hold this."
"…Huh?"
Maybe the sudden turn of events had short-circuited her brain. Didn't matter. I stepped past Lucy as she dazedly received the container, hugging it in both arms, and charged the Spore pack.
I dropped one of them in a heartbeat and locked in a full-power headlock.
"Urgh! Urgh! Spit out all that rich, viscous pheromone piled up inside you!"
The Spore's head — a particular part of it already swollen to an enormous size — began to inflate like a balloon under the pressure. Sure enough, the trait kicked in: if you didn't drop them in a single strike, they instinctively dumped pheromones first.
PSSSSHHHHH!
The spore bulb of the one writhing in my grip blasted out a dark, filthy cloud of spore smoke. The Spores that had been charging past me toward Lucy suddenly checked, then snapped their heads this way.
Wavering. Unable to decide what took priority, they became unable to attack either side. That maddening choice paralysis slammed into brains that were already simple as hell — brains they didn't even have.
But this brief gimmick tangle unraveled on its own if either the person holding the storage container or the person exposed to pheromones pulled more than a certain distance away. With two priority targets, the AI calculated distance to each entity and automatically ran a priority-target reselection.
I could think of that much. As if veteran game developers wouldn't.
But what if I tangle it one more time?
I immediately cut past the dazed Spores and snatched the storage container back out of Lucy's arms. The Spores simply re-designated me as the priority target and came charging again like they'd been shot out of a cannon.
No need to worry.
"Now it's your turn."
"Ah — I understand!"
Lucy, catching on a beat late to what I was doing, moved fast and closed on the Spores. What she did wasn't much different from what I had done. Same as me, she subdued one of them without killing it outright and forced it to dump pheromones.
Now two people were pheromone-tagged.
Was that the end of it?
Of course not. The developers who had built EFD — the all-time GOAT, the ultimate god-tier game that had patched out pretty much every bug in existence — were not going to miss a problem this small. An entire squad would get exposed to pheromones during combat whether they meant to or not. Preparing the code so it didn't tangle was common sense.
So the priority target got re-designated one more time. This round, among the pheromone-tagged targets, the person holding the storage container became top priority.
Normally, the code-tangle problem ended there.
Normally.
"From today, this is your head."
CRUNCH!
Without a second of delay, I slammed the storage container down onto the skull of the Spore that had charged in first. The spore cluster occupying its cranium burst, and the thing went silent.
The storage container had just left my hands. Now it was embedded in a Spore's corpse.
And — amazingly — EFD treated Primordial corpses as a type of biological sample too. As long as your backpack was big enough, the structure let you farm them.
"So. Who's the priority target now?"
Back when I played EFD, I used to stuff the storage container into a Spore's corpse, dump that corpse into my backpack, and walk out safely. Even if I was pheromone-tagged, I wasn't treated as personally holding the storage container — and because the entire squad was equally pheromone-exposed, the code tangled itself into a complete mess, like the inside of the head of someone who had been smacking their own skull on a twenty-four-hour cycle.
The result was a bizarre phenomenon: the Spores whose aggro had been drawn had no priority target at all.
"That's right, that's right. That's a fact. Big bro figured out a clear strategy of moving safely in a 'farmed' state instead of 'transporting' the storage container."
Did I look crazy enough to start talking about extraction already?
My backpack was still starving.
I slung an arm around the slumped Spore corpse — the one with a storage container jammed into its head in place of a spore bulb — and whispered into an ear that could no longer hear.
"Hey. Act close. Act close."
From today on, you're my bestie.